CW: Discussion of racism and death.
‘Oriel College is committed to upholding freedom of speech within the law and has a statutory duty to do so. This includes the freedom to express views that many find deeply offensive.’
Indeed, Oriel College. I suppose it is a matter of personal opinion to find the assertion that anyone non-white is biologically stupid ‘deeply offensive’. My bad.
It is as simple as remembering Jason Arday’s digital lynching in August. These aren’t views that are ‘deeply offensive’ – they’re deadly.
Jason Arday made headlines in 2023 for becoming the youngest Black person to be given a professorship at the University of Cambridge. He was lauded as an example of incredible academic achievement, speaking on his experience being mute until age 11, and illiterate until age 18. A professor of sociology, he wrote numerous articles on the experience of BAME students, mostly in higher education, and on racial inequality.
On 21 July 2026, Nathan Cofnas launched his self-described ‘exposé’ on Arday via his Substack; for one hellish month of summer, Cofnas’ accusations of plagiarism served as fodder for the unrelenting British media. Gah, what else are we to do while MPs are on their summer holidays! Across the hundreds of ‘news’ articles published on Arday between July and August, The Telegraph went so far as to publish an article asking Arday’s ‘schoolmates’ (although they remained anonymous in the article) about his alleged fabulism regarding his schooldays. It was published the same day he was found unresponsive at his home.
Cofnas also made headlines – although significantly fewer and much later than Arday – for spearheading the accusations of plagiarism against Arday in 2026. He had previously been sacked from Cambridge University in 2024 after the publication of another Substack essay in which he had declared: ‘In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0 per cent. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.’ Ah, yes, because besides the obvious racial stereotyping here – being in the sports and entertainment industries famously requires less intelligence than writing articles that espouse white supremacist talking points.
In 2019, while completing a DPhil at the University of Oxford, Cofnas published an article in the journal Philosophical Psychology entitled ‘Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry’, which argues that researchers ought to be able ‘to study all causes of group differences in intelligence, including genes’. This was met with backlash, and a petition to have the paper retracted from the journal. He is currently under a 3-month teaching ban at Ghent University, where he is being allowed to continue his research.
But the importance of this to the University is made evident by the subsequent paragraph in Oriel’s statement: ‘We are also committed to promoting inclusion and maintaining an environment that is free from all forms of discrimination and harassment, including racial discrimination.’
There it is. Always an ‘also’. Forever an afterthought. The protection of ethnic minority students is always secondary to the rights of white speakers to spout racist, pseudoscientific nonsense – silly me for not realising that sooner!
It is deeply ironic that the man who upholds the belief that EDI undermines higher education (yes, not DEI; I thought Reform was all about upholding British values, but perhaps Americanisms can slide when they’re funding your politics) only finds himself invited to the University as a result of the success of a Black academic. Yes, Cofnas, you benefit largely from EDI. It’s why you’re here in the first place – indeed, the Eventbrite description of the event noticeably spends two paragraphs discussing Cofnas in relation to Jason Arday. This is despite the fact the society had a Substack large enough to rival that of the average unemployed 18-25 year-old to highlight instead.
But where do we draw the line with ‘free’ speech? It seems quite a shallow argument to cite ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘statutory duty’ to justify an invite to a highly influential platform, without considering what ‘freedom’ in speech even means.
Then, there’s the myth of ‘free speech’ in the first place. A nostalgic reflection on my first economics lesson tells me this: there is no such thing as something ‘free’, because there’s always an opportunity cost. Speech is no exception to the rule. There is an economics of speech, of discourse; to put it simply, one person’s speech will always come at the cost of someone else’s. ‘Speech’ isn’t some neutral, abstract concept that we can cite in laws and statements as the ultimate defense against accountability. Language has, and always will, involve dynamics of power.
Cofnas’ speech led to a national witch hunt. What are the Reform Society and Oriel College trying to convince us of? That such speech has value enough to warrant platforming, despite the advice of scholars that his ‘race-realist’ philosophy was ‘more than provocative, less than scientific’. Are we censoring ourselves when branding the man who wrote that Black people biologically belong to the sports and entertainment industries as a ‘race-realist’, and not as a smuggler of blatant racism into academia? What in his philosophy on race is ‘real’? Why is the burden always on us to justify our existence in ‘higher’ places?
It’s sad to see how Cofnas places more energy into researching pseudoscience than actually considering structures of society as a significant influence in the evident inequality in education worldwide. On Youtube podcast ‘TRIGGERnometory’ (they really ‘owned the libs’ with that name!), he argues on the intelligence gap between a hypothetical child from ‘the Congo’ and a child from Japan that ‘the only conclusion is that there are some mystical forces of injustice that are permeating the earth and depriving huge groups […] the opportunity to reach their full potential’. He then makes a quick shift to the obviously less mystical conclusion that ‘sometimes there are differences between groups, on average, that are no one’s fault, that are simply the result of nature, and we can learn to be okay with that’. Despite the flowery language attempting to undermine an analysis of socioeconomic disparities (the so-called ‘mystical forces of injustice’) as the reason for attainment gaps, the argument that is, essentially, ‘Mother Nature forced me to be anti-Black’, seems a lot more fanciful for anyone with common sense.
For a man that began his academic career arguing against the antisemitic rhetoric of Kevin Macdonald in a trilogy of books from the nineties, it is almost pitiful to watch him resist considering arguments for the disparities in ‘intelligence’ across race without using rhetoric that was spouted centuries ago to justify slavery, or more recently, to excuse genocide. At best, he is a man with anachronistic ideas which he enjoys presenting as censored and innovative (I’d like to tell him they’re not – one year of an English undergraduate degree provides you with plenty of resources that try and fail to explain ‘group differences in intelligence’ through biology). At worst, he is the spearhead of a digital lynching by the British media – a blood-stained badge I hope he continues to flash in order to access institutions that should really know better.
By all means, as the Higher Education Act 2023 dictates, use your freedom of speech to question EDI policy. Use it to express your pseudoscientific racism. Use it to reject the existence of BAME people in academia through the enforcement of stereotypes. In that case, I suppose I’ll get back to munching curry in a cash-and-carry and quit my next essay. Or maybe I’ll get consistent Firsts? Did I get the smart asian stereotype or the mentally-slow zero-hygiene one? Pick a side, pseudoscience!
However, speech is not just what is said, it is also where it is said.
This begs the question: where does the University and its broader community draw the line?
The Oxford University Reform Society states on Instagram that they ‘find it strange that the University of Oxford or any of its constituent colleges should receive reputational damage in respect of this event’. Thank you for clarifying you’re more racist than the University, I suppose? A high bar to reach.
But, they miss the point. Oxford is a symbol. It has been since its foundation a millennium ago, and it’s something it continues to gloat whenever it is lauded as the ‘best university in the world’ for however-many-years in a row. As a highly selective university, students worldwide can often spend years of their lives aiming to be accepted here. This goes doubly for BAME students, who make up 30% of the University’s student body (less than the national average of 36%), a statistic they tried to ease next to the 29% average of BAME students in UK Russell Group universities outside London. This, next to stories of the skull of an enslaved Caribbean woman being used as a chalice at Worcester College, or Oriel’s statue of white-supremacist Cecil Rhodes, makes it clear that Oxford’s past is mired by racism. A past they have at least attempted to atone for through a level of acknowledgement of its colonial past. Yet, when the ‘race-realists’ of today are under consideration, Oxford becomes a quivering, spineless and ‘neutral’ institution with the duty to let anyone speak. Clearly, minority people, and Black people in particular, are given ample opportunity to participate in academia – as long as they’re voiceless.
It doesn’t seem to me that Oxford’s tradition has ever been free speech. It’s an exclusionary project centuries in the making. Try as it might to atone for its racist past, its silence on platforming ideologies that embolden white supremacy does much to suggest it will have a racist future, too. Their anti-racist initiatives can only work retroactively, apparently. I cannot understate how dangerous that is.
I challenge Oriel College and the Reform Society, then, to invite me for a talk on EDI in higher education. If speech is as free as they say, am I not entitled to the same platform from which to share my voice?
Beyond the institution, Oxford’s Student Union plans to hold a CCR meeting regarding Cofnas’ invitation to the university this week, with protests to take place in Oriel Square on the day of the talk on 17 November, organised by Oxfordshire Stand Up to Racism. An open letter to the University has also been circulating. Yet, forgive me for not having much faith in an institution that continually betrays its Black and minority ethnic community – lest we forget Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – oh, sorry – Tommy Robinson’s appearance at the Oxford Union last year.
Maybe Cofnas is right on one thing: they truly do just let anyone into prestigious universities under the guise of EDI. Only, it might do him some good to look in the mirror.