WSJ: Nathan Cofnas: "The controversial academic who ignited the Jason Arday furor"...by speaking unspeakable truths

Nathan Cofnas is a pariah mainly because he speaks obvious but politically incorrect truths--commonsense propositions that are also confirmed by science but that are inconsistent with leftist ideology. Foremost among them: races are real. They are natural, biological kinds. In biology, races are such kinds that fall below the level of subspecies.

   The politically correct view--which pervades the left and academia (but I repeat myself) is that races are magical things that somehow are both fictional/fabricated and the Very Most Important Things In The World... The most important things about "social constructs" for the left is that they can be fictive when you want them to be and real when you want them to be... This is the twilight realm of the "social construct." I've discussed the conceptual trainwreck of "social construction" over and over...so I won't address it here...

   At any rate, the PC/Woketarian cult has deemed it racist to even believe that races are biological kinds/categories...although that races are such kinds is something believed by everyone else everywhere else everywhen else...something which any objective assessment of the scientific evidence supports...but, y'know...bad...

   The left has had an adversarial relationship to genetics since Lysenko and the USSR's opposition to "Mendelianism." The academic left has basically averted its gaze since the beginnings of the mapping of the human genome. Humans, you see, are blank slates upon which culture inscribes its "narrative"...

   In fact, the entire universe is a blank slate--the original and most (in)famous version of social constructionism being "reality is socially constructed"...

   At any rate, Cofnas might possibly have squeaked by as a purely theoretical race realist (a view that becomes "scientific racism" in PC Newspeak)...but he dares to take the findings of the cognitive science of intelligence seriously, too...and to apply it to DEI... Some unpleasant conclusions follow--which Cofnas admits are unpleasant. The difference between Cofnas and the PC left is that, when the evidence diverges from leftist ideology, as it so often does, Cofnas follows the evidence. Unfortunately, without DEI or affirmative action or something similar, Cofnas reckons that blacks would make up something like 0.7% of Harvard faculty. That sucks. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

   Incidentally, not that it should be relevant: Cofnas thinks that we might ought to have some kind of affirmative action quotas in order to maintain confidence in academia by "under"represented races...

   In fact, his view (last I heard him express it, anyway) is similar to mine: we may need some form of "affirmative action"...but, if so, it should take the form of straightforward quotas...rather than an all-encompassing prop for leftist ideology like DEI. Quotas are straightforward and don't constitute a catspaw for the unmaking ("reimagining") of the institution.

   Anyway...Cofnas also blew the whistle on Jason Arday. And so now he's getting fired again.

   Of course: he was right. Arday's plagiarism and lies were obvious and off the scale. Others--e.g. the Times Education Supplement--had already caught Arday out. But some scumbag law firm lawfared them into submission and they didn't publish. Other black scholars also claim to have known Arday was dirty. His students say he was shit in the classroom, basically just holding forth extemporaneously on racism every class.

   Cofnas was 100% right. His evidence is ironclad.

   But, still, he's a racist...because reasons...

   The rector of Ghent University who is the point person on trying to oust Cofnas is herself a lefty lunatic. She's former head of the Belgian Greens. She wrote her rector's acceptance speech with AI. Truth-tellers like Cofnas are anathema to such people.

   Academia today is--to a great extent anyway--revolting.

Incidentally:

Note that the left is now trying to do the same thing to sex and "gender" that it did to race: muddy up the biology and claim that the categories in question are actually social.

The left is the greatest threat to academia of my lifetime.