Ghent University’s Disgrace

Nathan Cofnas is the man who uncovered the Arday scandal. Well, it was discovered before Cofnas, but after Arday pursued legal threats against the people who uncovered his misconduct, the stories were strangled in the crib. So it was left to Cofnas to expose Arday’s misconduct to the world.

His reward for uncovering one of the major academic scandals of the last several years has been to face suspension and likely firing from Ghent University. The prediction markets say there’s about a 67% chance that he’ll be fired. This is outrageous and should be totally unacceptable to anyone who cares at all about free speech.

Cofnas is a controversial figure who sometimes writes offensive things on the internet. But all of those things were known at the time he was hired by Ghent. If they fire him now, it will be because he exposed a major plagiarist and fabulist. Some precedent to set—that if you expose someone for plagiarism, your career will be in serious jeopardy. Who in their right mind could favor this?

The university has been explicit that the reason they’re investigating Cofnas is because of “the recent public statements” made by Cofnas. So every other controversial statement made by Cofnas is irrelevant. It’s not why he is being suspended. The reason he is being suspended is because he uncovered Arday’s plagiarism and wrote about it in a Substack post. This is an offense so serious, apparently, that it merits suspension and likely firing.

Edit 8/22: Richard points out that this might reference other controversial statements Cofnas made recently. E.g. he made a joke about being “head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard.” You should also not be fired for jokes! It is also clear that given that he has made lots of controversial statements before, the backlash Ghent is facing is at least counterfactually responsible for his likely firing.

Now, even if Cofnas’s recent remarks had been immoral or outrageous, it would still be wrong to fire him. Free speech permits academics to say outrageous things on their own time. It would be very bad if universities fired academics whenever they made statements outside their job that the university doesn’t like.

Anyone who bothers to think for themselves will end up holding some beliefs that are widely regarded as offensive. For example, I think that factory farming is worse than any crime ever inflicted on humans. Should I be fired for that? Should I be permanently unhirable? Should we leave determining what utterances are beyond the pale to a group of unaccountable and largely unimpressive administrators?

Of course, doing so is likely to lead to an extremely politically biased academia. Insofar as left-wing academics decide which items of political speech are beyond the pale, one is far likelier to be punished for offensive right-wing speech than offensive left-wing speech. This is why defenses of free speech must be content neutral. If we take free speech at all seriously, we must defend even speech that we don’t like. If we don’t want academics to live in constant fear of being sacked for unpopular speech, we need to be extremely permissive in the speech we allow. This is why I don’t think academics should be fired for being holocaust deniers, defending Hamas’s activities on October 7th, defending factory farming, supporting violent communist revolution, or having almost any other view, however offensive.

But it’s all the more outrageous because Cofnas’s recent speech, for which he’s come under fire, hasn’t even been outrageous. His article exposing Arday’s fabrication and plagiarism is unusually understated for him. What he wrote is both objectively correct and important. Should we fire all people who expose plagiarism?

What, in the view of Ghent University, should Cofnas have done? Cambridge had already been contacted about Arday’s plagiarism. They did nothing. Should he have remained silent? Is the general rule that one should shut up about plagiarism and fabulism? Insofar as we take academic misconduct remotely seriously, we cannot persecute the people who expose it. It’s embarrassing that this even needs to be said.

Had Arday not died, would Cofnas still have been investigated and fired? Surely the standard cannot be that whether or not you are fired for speech depends on its downstream causal effects—even ones that you didn’t predict. Your culpability depends on what was known to you at the time you acted, not later effects of your actions. And it is very very dangerous, if our aim is to stop suicide, to posthumously exalt those who engaged in serious misconduct, but only if they die.

This case will set an alarming precedent. If you find out that another academic plagiarized or made things up, the best approach is to keep quiet about it. If you speak up, you might be fired. Who can trust the reliability of academic publications in such an environment? In this way, we are all Cofnas. If Cofnas is fired, it will do serious violence to the already frayed liberal norms that academia purports to champion.

This is not the only effort to restrict free speech in light of Arday’s tragic death. A major petition has sprung up in support of a law restricting the number of news articles that can be written in any specific period of time about one person. This would be a terrible law. It would mean that people were unfree to discuss major scandals without legal jeopardy so long as they’d already been majorly covered.

And, of course, when the pendulum swings, those who worked to erode freedom of speech will be the victims of their own actions. Those who live by the sword will die by it when the next witch hunt comes along. Erosion of liberal norms is a flamethrower: you try to direct it at your enemies, and it ends up getting turned back on you. Just ask the people fired from elite institutions for their statements about Israel. Or the people thrown into detention centers.

It’s been an elementary liberal principle recognized for centuries that being serious about free speech means defending speech one hates. The old-school leftists recognized this. Few defended free speech more staunchly than Noam Chomsky. He recognized, correctly, that insofar as the general policy is to shut down radicals, that is good news for conformists and bad news for anyone with any radical view. If today’s universities have sunk so low that those who say true and important things—exposing lies, plagiarism, and fraud—get fired for their speech, then lady liberty lies bleeding indeed.

You cannot claim to represent free speech in the abstract and then favor every particular case where a person who you disagree with is punished for his free speech. Free speech means little if it doesn’t permit Cofnas’s offensive remarks, and it means nothing if it doesn’t permit Cofnas’s unoffensive and true ones. Ghent University has disgraced itself completely.