An open letter to Cambridge University

Dear Cambridge University,

You are currently figuring out how to minimise the damage to your reputation owing to the Jason Arday debacle. What you should not do is declare this case to be “an aberration.” Nor should you concentrate on Arday’s plagiarism and fabrication. This is not about Arday, it is about the system that appointed and promoted him.

You should not seek to excuse yourselves by the fact that Arday copied stuff and made stuff up, leading to you being duped, because, even if everything he wrote had been 100% kosher, there is still nothing there that amounts to scholarship, let alone anything good enough or insightful enough to justify an academic post. His musings on his own “lived experience” is not scholarship, nor are his ramblings about the lived experiences of some people that he interviewed (even if it is dressed up in obscurantist language), and nor does simply calling everything “racist” amount to scholarship, however much that fits with what you want to hear.

No, the central issue here is a form of diversity that you don’t value, namely diversity of opinion. Being able to dissent from dominant ideas is essential for testing whether those ideas are valid. Any truth-seeking university would welcome scholars who critique the prevailing wisdom. That’s your job. Yet, in your keenness to adopt a goal of pursuing your own conception of “social justice”, you have dispensed with the goal of seeking truth. And don’t try kidding yourselves that you are the underdogs bravely critiquing a dominant, racist and capitalist patriarchy; your ideas are the ones now dominant in places like Cambridge, and so your ideas are the ones that need to be critiqued.

And yet you have instead swallowed the ludicrous notion that encountering ideas different from their own causes a student “harm” that makes them “unsafe”. You have elevated certain left-wing values to a sanctity that cannot be questioned, and then rigorously clamped down on any dissent, with threats that the dissident gets investigated for “misconduct”. Emmanuel College terminated Nathan Cofnas because (they said) he was not in line with their DEI values. And, even if the emperor is clearly stark-bollock naked, all it takes is for there to be nobody speaking up for everyone else to conclude that they’d better not speak up either, lest they be denounced as a “racist”.

And so, when someone like Jason Arday is being considered for a prestigious chair, no-one dares examine his actual scholarship and ask whether it is up to scratch. He has all the right social-justice “progressive” attitudes, and is also black, and (bonus points!) he is disabled with a disadvantaged background. So asking about the quality of his work is sacrilege. It’s simply not done. That would be akin to an Islamic scholar asking whether Mohammed got it right when writing the Quran. Instead, in the presence of someone ticking all the right identity boxes, a true disciple can only simper “we’re so lucky to have you, you are the best in the world in terms of the research you do”.

Consider how different it would have been if you valued truth, and had invited Nathan Cofnas on to the appointment committee, a devil’s advocate as it were, and not just as a token but as someone who would be seriously listened to. Are you confident that the scholarship of your Faculty of Education could withstand such scrutiny, or are you afraid that it couldn’t?

Instead, your attitude was the opposite. You tried to shut down questioning of Arday saying that he “has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop”, and you called the media coverage a “racist feeding frenzy”. And now, Cofnas has been suspended by his own university for the sin of pointing out that a black academic had no worthwhile track record of scholarship and had clearly been a diversity hire. Summary execution of the whistleblower is necessary pour encourager les autres just in case les autres start investigating the many similar such cases.

To attempt to steel-man those of you who favour diversity hiring, it’s likely that you’ve started believing your own propaganda. That is, perhaps you really do believe that black scholars have to be three times as good as everyone else before the white males even notice them, and that, since those wicked white males are so good at tenaciously clinging to power, explicit diversity hiring is therefore necessary.

But anyone with eyes realises this isn’t true. Yes, there are some black scholars who are excellent and who fully merit their academic positions, but there aren’t nearly enough to match the population fraction. And thus, to satisfy demand, the reality is that many with track records only a third as good as that expected of whites get appointed — and this obviously needs to be accompanied by draconian taboos on any questioning of the process or the hires. If you really think that I’m wrong here, please do the world a favour and put a list of these worthy black scholars on the internet somewhere where appointment committees can see it; they will utterly love you!

Seriously, the main problem such committees face (at least in the STEM areas that I’m familiar with) is finding even one candidate who ticks the desired identity boxes who isn’t an obvious non-starter when it comes to research track record, coupled with the fact that the rare candidate who is suitable gets immediately snapped up by a more-prestigious university.

Then, especially for non-STEM areas, there’s the additional problem that the black scholars who are genuinely good don’t always have the right woke views, since, being intellectually capable, they tend to think for themselves. Whereas the diversity hires can be relied upon to toe the line.

So what is so heinous about Cofnas? Well, he believes in a meritocracy. That is, in treating people equally and fairly on their individual merits (rather than according to their identity group). But then so did Martin Luther King, so that itself cannot be so monstrous. But “progressive” thought has largely given up on that idea. Fifty years of trying equal opportunities has not led to equal outcomes, so nowadays the left wants to socially engineer those outcomes.

And one way of doing that is Affirmative Action. When brought before the US Supreme Court to justify its policy of “adjusting” admissions of black Americans to match their 13% population fraction, Harvard University declared that, if its admissions were done purely on academic merit, then the fraction of black students would fall to about 0.7% — with obvious knock-on consequences for representation of black Americans in roles requiring academic credentials — and that’s why they needed to continue Affirmative Action.

Naive Nathan Cofnas comes along and pretty much just quotes Harvard about the fraction of black students in a meritocracy, but without adding the “... and that’s why we need AA”, and everyone denounces his heresy, declares themselves shocked, and ostracises him.

But Harvard is right (as you’d expect them to be, given that they have the data), that is indeed the outcome of school exams and tests. Whether it’s exams, SATs, or IQ tests, there are always big gaps in the mean scores of different races, up to one standard deviation, and it’s pretty much always the same gaps, in the same direction, and of much the same size, across different times and places.

Of course the woke will attribute the gaps to “systemic racism”. And that might have been plausible 60 years ago, but the gaps have stubbornly refused to close since then and that explanation is wearing thin, given that there is little evidence for anything such these days, and given that we don’t even know what form “systemic racism” is supposed to take in the 2020s. We know that it’s nothing to do with school quality or spending, since America now spends more per black pupil than per white pupil; and we know that it’s not caused by family socio-economic status, since that’s an easy thing to control for in studies (too many get this wrong because they never ask which way causation runs; low academic achievement leads to low SES, not the other way round; and a less-able intake of kids leads to the school being “poor”, not the other way round).

So there are those who turn to the g-word, a word even more taboo in woke circles than the n-word. But many regard any reference to genes as a moral issue. Thus “at least part of the IQ gap is down to genes” is taken to be saying “I want these people to have a lower IQ”.

Now, if such as Cofnas were gods, deliberately designing the world that way, then one could legitimately doubt their morals. But a physician who says “I’m sorry Mrs Richards, but the scan shows that your son has a brain tumour” is not saying “I hate the boy so much that I want him to die of a brain tumour”, and denying the reality of the situation is unlikely to help anyone. (Or maybe the woke, so fond of reality being a social construction, really do think that the words make it so, and that’s why such utterances, like magic spells, do cause actual “harm”?)

Now, if you’re thinking that no good-faith evaluation of the evidence could arrive at the conclusion that genes play a role in IQ gaps, so it must be prejudice, then I suggest that you’ve not acquainted yourself with the evidence. A majority of those working in that area of science do think that genes are a significant part of the black–white IQ gap, though such are the taboos that this opinion is fire-walled off from the rest of academia.

As an aside, Stephen J. Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man was one of the most successful propaganda works of all time, convincing a generation that he, Gould, was the objective and dispassionate scientist, sorrowfully recounting how everyone with that opinion was a pseudoscientist motivated by ideological prejudice, when the truth was pretty much the reverse. Anyhow, knowledge of genetics has advanced hugely since then.

Recently, for example, Akbari et al showed that natural selection is strong enough to drive shifts in genes related to cognitive ability that amount to one-standard-deviation changes in a population on a timescale of 10,000 years. Thus, by default, we should expect differences of that size between different populations in the world today.

Harvard’s laboratory head, David Reich, had already warned people to expect such findings, saying that “well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science”. Arguing that “genetic influences on behavior and cognition will differ across populations”, he continued: “ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work”.

At the very least this is a proper and valid area of science. If you’re one of those who has taken the line that, yes, it was good that Arday was exposed, but it’s a pity that someone with Cofnas’s “views” was the one to do it, then you are part of the problem, you are reinforcing the taboos that prevent free enquiry and the pursuit of the truth. Isn’t it concerning that the only ones who dared say anything about Arday were an already-retired Emeritus Professor and an already-ostracised postdoc? And yes, in case you’re wondering, I’m now retired myself, else I wouldn’t be writing this, would I? We’re in a weird situation where, we’re told, DEI hiring is utterly essential for fairness, but we may not ever suggest that any specific person is a diversity hire. Doesn’t that suggest that something is wrong?

Nor can one honestly adopt an attitude of “OK, so in principle one could explore this topic, but why would anyone want to?”. Differential outcomes between ethnic groups in the same nation has been one of the biggest and most contentious issues for Western countries over decades. To pretend that we shouldn’t be interested in the reasons for it, or should allow only woke-approved answers, is not intellectually honest. Just as one example, if admissions to medical school (after selecting the smart-enough students) don’t match population fractions, then society needs to know whether this is bias (which then needs rooting out) or whether it is expected given IQ distributions.

Yet, such are the disconnects between different areas of academia that, not only does most of academia reject any role of genes in group differences, but much of the social sciences think that genes play no role at all in human behaviour (an attitude about as scientific as that of the Biblical literalist who thinks the Earth is 6000 years old).

Bringing this back to Cambridge, the current head of the Faculty of Education, Professor Hilary Cremin (she of the “you are the best in the world in terms of the research you do”), seems not to know about genes, and thus her understanding of humans is badly wrong.

In a recent interview she said “We need to move away from the idea of high-stakes testing — the idea of a A* at 18, which will be a gateway into what you do next, but which is a completely arbitrary thing. It doesn’t signal intelligence or potential, trust me — I meet these young people in Cambridge. It’s simply a marker of schooling. And, as I was saying earlier, you can buy that. So it’s ultimately a marker of wealth”.

How can a Cambridge Professor of Education be that wrong? The existence of intelligence as a trait, the fact that people have different cognitive abilities, and the fact that this is the biggest factor in their potential and capabilities, is settled science, being as well-attested and reproducible as anything in psychology. And we know that intelligence is largely biological, where the biology is not only a matter of genetics, but also about how that genetic recipe plays out, including random differences in how the brain develops in the embryo and young child. Such biological processes cause about 2/3rds of the differences in people’s intelligence. Differences in schooling are a much smaller factor in someone’s test scores at age 18, perhaps explaining only 10% of the variance.

Professor Cremin, being oblivious to this, notices that bright kids often come from wealthy homes and leaps to the conclusion that wealth has bought success. But the same genes that produce capable and successful parents (who are thus well-off and who value education) are passed on to the children, and it’s those genes (not the family environment) that result in those kids then being capable and successful. We know this from twin studies and adoption studies. The fact that biology matters more than family environment is settled science.

It’s not that Professor Cremin has considered such studies and attempted to rebut them, it’s that she is oblivious to them. Genes? Euugghh! Eugenics! Nice people don’t sully themselves with that stuff. But such an attitude can only survive in an ideological bubble answerable only to itself.

The problem is much wider than Arday and much wider than Cambridge’s Faculty of Education. Vast swathes of academia’s humanities and social sciences have come to tolerate such a narrow range of acceptable viewpoints that they now function as ideological madrassas. The misfits, the contrarians, the people willing to accept ostracisation might not be the most likeable of characters, but they’re necessary, they’re the ones who could get you out of this hole. You need to welcome them. And if a student tells you that encountering contrary views causes them “harm” and makes them feel “unsafe” then you need to tell them to grow up.