Philosopher of science Dr Nathan Cofnas suffered a concussion last month after a protester allegedly threw a glass projectile at him following a talk to a student group at Ghent University. Although the attacker has reportedly been identified, Cofnas says prosecutors declined to bring charges. The university is now more than five weeks into an investigation into the incident.
The assault comes amid an escalating campaign over Cofnas’s appointment as a researcher in Ghent’s Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences, where his work on race, heredity and intelligence has triggered fierce opposition. Earlier this year, the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) joined several other free speech organisations in writing to Ghent’s rector, Petra De Sutter, urging her to resist calls to rescind the appointment.
One petition, launched by social science students at Ghent and signed by over 2,000 people, describes Cofnas’s views as “blatant racism” and demands that “Mr Cofnas [sic] hiring is to be stopped”. A separate open letter, signed by more than 300 staff and students – including dozens of department members and several deans – argues that his comments are incompatible with the university’s code of ethics and urges the rector and board to act accordingly.
This is not the first time Cofnas has faced an organised campaign over an academic appointment – nor, indeed, threats of violence.
This week, Cofnas published an account of his time at the University of Cambridge, where he previously held a postdoctoral position in the Faculty of Philosophy and a research associateship at Emmanuel College. In 2024, he provoked controversy with a blog post titled A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution, in which he argued that “any realistic path to victory over wokeism requires widespread acceptance of hereditarianism among the elites”.
The argument, in essence, was that many disparities in socioeconomic outcomes between racial groups are wrongly attributed by progressives to racism or structural discrimination, when at least some may reflect underlying genetic variation between populations. Cofnas then drew out the implications as he saw them, claiming that under a colour-blind admissions system based solely on academic qualifications, “blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students”, while the number of black professors “would approach 0%”.
The post triggered an immediate backlash within and beyond Emmanuel, particularly among black students, many of whom said it made them feel belittled, unwelcome, and as though their place at Cambridge would be seen as unmerited.
In the same account, Cofnas describes what he says was a sustained campaign of institutional and social pressure following the publication of the post. According to Cofnas, senior figures within the university discussed finding “the explicit rationale to getting rid of him”, while students and academics organised petitions demanding his removal from Cambridge.
He also describes mounting hostility within the university environment itself. Cofnas says he came under pressure to resign from his role as an undergraduate examiner after complaints from students, despite no suggestion that he had acted improperly in the role.
Most alarmingly, he reproduces WhatsApp messages in which students discussed “jump[ing] him”, driving past Emmanuel to “f**k up” this “absolute piece of sh*tc**”, and “beat[ing] the sh*t out of him”. Following an internal investigation lasting more than four months, Cambridge concluded that the messages breached student conduct rules because their wording “suggest[ed] to recipients that they carry out violent acts against Dr Cofnas”. As a sanction, they were asked to “write up a reflection of what they could do differently in future”.
Cofnas later brought a claim against Emmanuel under the Equality Act 2010, arguing that the termination of his College Research Associate status amounted to belief discrimination. Although he lost the case, the judgment was significant in one respect: the court accepted, “with some reservation”, that both hereditarianism – defined as the belief that genes play a “non-trivial role” in group differences and that this should be researched and discussed even if controversial – and his related “anti-woke” belief could qualify as protected philosophical beliefs. The latter was defined as the view that hereditarianism needed to be promoted because it undermines a core premise of “woke” ideology, namely that disparities favouring whites are to be explained by white racism rather than genetic differences between groups.
One need not agree with Cofnas’s arguments, or regard the underlying questions as beyond criticism, to recognise how corrosive this recurring undertow of threats of physical violence is to academic freedom. Universities cannot sustain open inquiry if academics risk professional ostracism, institutional sanction or even direct harm simply for advancing controversial ideas, particularly where the beliefs in question have been found capable of falling within the protection of equality law.
As CAF and others argued in their letter to Ghent’s rector, free speech and academic freedom are fundamental to the mission of any university precisely because they allow prevailing orthodoxies to be tested, challenged and debated. Without them, conventional wisdom risks hardening into what John Stuart Mill called “dead dogma”. You can read Cofnas’s full account here.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.