The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) has today written to the Rector of Ghent University, Professor Petra De Sutter, raising serious concerns about the preventive suspension of Dr Nathan Cofnas and the disciplinary investigation against him.
The disciplinary context encompasses both Dr Cofnas’s public scrutiny of alleged academic misconduct by the late Dr Jason Arday, formerly a professor at the University of Cambridge, and longstanding objections to Dr Cofnas’s broader hereditarian and “race realist” scholarship.
Needless to say, the freedom to scrutinise scholarship and bring evidence of possible plagiarism or fabrication into the public domain is an aspect of academic freedom. But its intertwining here with objections to Dr Cofnas’s wider views appears to have broadened the basis for disciplinary intervention.
CAF takes no position on the merits of Dr Cofnas’s substantive views, except to note that his hereditarian and “anti-woke” beliefs were held by the County Court to qualify as protected philosophical beliefs under the Equality Act 2010. Our concern is that the rationale for his suspension risks lowering the threshold for restricting controversial academic expression.
Ghent’s Suspension Letter relies extensively not only on allegations concerning Dr Cofnas’s own conduct, but on the reactions of others to his appointment and public activity, including a student campaign opposing his presence at Ghent, a student petition, complaints from staff, more than 100 emails expressing concern, the withdrawal of a guest lecturer and discussion of a possible academic boycott.
The “scale and persistence” of those concerns, their “recent escalation” and the “volume and nature” of complaints are explicitly cited in support of his suspension. It is not always clear whether this material also bears upon the underlying disciplinary allegations, or where the boundary between the two lies. But that ambiguity does not remove our central concern, since in either case the intensity of third-party opposition is being permitted to contribute to an adverse institutional consequence for the academic whose expression generated it.
As we point out in our letter, this is perilously close to an institutionalised heckler’s veto: the greater the hostility generated by protected speech, the stronger the case for restricting the speaker. If mobilising sufficient complaints and disruption can itself become evidence that an academic’s continued employment is causing unacceptable “unrest”, an institution effectively provides a roadmap for getting controversial scholars suspended.
In our view, that reasoning sits uneasily with the protections afforded to academic freedom under Belgian and European law. But of course a process in which sufficiently intense opposition to controversial academic expression helps justify disciplinary action operates well below the level of statute or case-law and therefore risks establishing a wider institutional norm.
It was the former ACLU executive director Ira Glasser who once compared speech restrictions to poison gas: attractive when the weapon is in your hands and your opponent is in your sights, but rather less so when the political wind changes direction. The same warning applies when a heckler’s veto is allowed, almost by default, to become part of an institution’s reasoning for disciplinary intervention. Once the threshold for intervention is lowered in this way, the principle becomes available for use against academics of every political and intellectual persuasion. Tacit norms of this kind travel all too readily between universities and jurisdictions, even where the governing legal frameworks differ.
CAF therefore urges the University to observe several important safeguards as this process continues.
First, in reviewing Dr Cofnas’s preventive suspension and, thereafter, as the preliminary disciplinary investigation proceeds, the University should assess each allegation on its merits and distinguish rigorously between evidence of misconduct and evidence of opposition to his views and public activity. Outrage and reputational pressure cannot properly substitute for evidence that the conduct alleged satisfies the applicable legal or disciplinary standard.
Second, the University should preserve the distinction built into its own disciplinary rules, but which the Suspension Letter does not always clearly maintain: conduct outside an academic’s contractual university role is disciplinable only where it is both criminally punishable and has the requisite negative impact. Evidence of distress or complaint may therefore be relevant to the second limb where the first is also satisfied, but cannot establish criminal punishability in the first place.
We have copied our letter to Karla Van Lint, the Flemish Government Commissioner for Ghent University, whose statutory role includes scrutiny of the legality of university decision-making. In doing so, we invite her to consider whether the concerns raised warrant further scrutiny or action within her supervisory competence.
Read CAF’s letter in full here.