The University of Ghent has suspended Nathan Cofnas, the scholar who revealed the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s suspected fraud. According to the scholar, he anticipates being sacked. “The manner in which you publicly presented your role in the allegations concerning the late professor Jason Arday has reinforced concerns among the university’s community that your public interventions seem to develop into targeted campaigns of professional elimination,” the university wrote in the suspension letter sent to Cofnas, according to fellow academic Maarten Boudry.
Additionally, you frequently described the late professor Jason Arday as “mentally challenged” and made other derogatory comments about him, such as calling him a “worthless scholar,” in multiple public interviews. “You have shown that your acts go beyond the acceptable parameters of scholarly debate by defining your involvement as a ‘crusade’ targeted at the systematic personal and professional destruction of peers.” The action follows Ghent University’s announcement that it will take “proper measures” against one of its own scholars for publicly exposing Arday’s significant plagiarism and biographical embellishments.
The university announced in a statement on August 19 that it was “struck” by Arday’s passing and that it was taking “extremely seriously” the postdoctoral researcher’s recent public remarks “about this situation.” At the same time, we want to be transparent about the principles that our university upholds. Ghent University opposes racism, bigotry, and prejudice and promotes respect for human dignity. It emphasized that academic freedom “is not boundless” and “goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to preserve the rights of others.” According to the statement, “Ghent University has chosen to take appropriate action within its authority and the applicable framework.”
Vice-rector Herwig Reynaert and rector Petra De Sutter, a Groen politician who served as Belgium’s deputy prime minister from 2020 to 2025, signed the declaration.
I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) August 20, 2026
The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.
In January 2026, De Sutter came under fire after it was discovered by the investigative website Apache that three quotes from her rectoral address, purportedly from prominent intellectuals, had been created using generative artificial intelligence. The researcher in question, Nathan Cofnas, an American biological philosopher who joined Ghent in 2026, was not identified. Ghent University has not said which of Cofnas’ latest remarks set off the procedure or what kind of action would be taken.
Large portions of Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis at Liverpool John Moores University were stolen almost exactly from an older dissertation, often preserving copy-editing faults from the source, according to comprehensive documentation Cofnas posted on his Substack in late July. Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a professor of education at Brunel University of London, wrote the earlier text in 2009. Along with highlighting concerns about Arday’s claims of amazing physical accomplishments and £5.5 million in charity donations, he also uncovered similar issues in published papers, such as the presenting of interview quotes that seemed to have been taken from the work of other academics.
Arday, who was hailed as a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) success story and named as Cambridge’s youngest black professor in 2023 at the age of 37, resigned on August 5, just hours after the University of Cambridge announced it will look into his appointment and career. He mentioned the “unrelenting public attention.” On August 14, at the age of 41, he was discovered dead at his London residence. Since then, Cambridge and other organizations that had hired him, such as Glasgow, have started to examine his appointments. Subsequent reporting and analysis by other outlets and plagiarism specialists classified the commonalities as considerable. An previous Liverpool John Moores inquiry had not upheld formal plagiarism claims, citing similarities to “honest and justifiable error.”
DEI Fraud and Cover-Up: https://t.co/ENXSP7I9hB
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) July 21, 2026
It’s an open secret at Cambridge University, but everyone is afraid to speak out. Newspapers backed away after getting hit with legal threats.
Here, I tell the true story of Jason Arday—DEI superstar and the youngest black…
Cofnas has referred to himself as a “race realist” and resigned from a position at Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 due to controversy surrounding his publications on racial variations in intelligence and the implications for meritocracy and DEI policies. Protests, open letters from left-wing faculty and students, and petitions claiming that his opinions were against the university’s ethical code were all sparked by his employment at Ghent. Over 2,000 signatures were on one. At the time, the institution defended the hire on the grounds of procedural correctness and academic freedom. Critics of Ghent’s most recent action point out that after big sites allegedly withdrew due to legal pressure, Cofnas exposed publicly verifiable issues with Arday’s scholarship.
Universities that had elevated Arday with little apparent investigation of his record, according to these critics, are now concentrating institutional resources on the messenger rather than their own shortcomings. They argue that investigating how a candidate with such documentary problems got to senior positions should be the top focus. The extensive evidence of plagiarism and false allegations in Arday’s record has been largely ignored by progressive Left activists, who instead depict the incident as a racist “witch hunt” or media “lynching” spearheaded by Cofnas and right-leaning sites.
Ibram X wrote in The Emancipator on August 15. Arday was pursued “like a lynch mob” by the “White-owned, mainstream media,” according to Kendi. Two days later, Al Jazeera published an editorial article referring to the death as “institutional murder.” Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, accused the media of “pernicious public humiliation.” Zack Polanski, the leader of the Green Party, and Labor MPs signed an open letter calling for formal monitoring of press decision-making. This is true even though the media didn’t start covering the subject until much later. In 22 days, 249 stories on Arday were counted by the watchdog NewsCord.
Only Jack Grove, a reporter for the Times Higher Education, had investigated it before to that. As part of his investigation into claims of plagiarism in Arday’s PhD and publications, which were supported by a 63-page dossier, he sent Arday three courteous emails with the option to respond. Arday accused him of harassment and denounced him to the Metropolitan Police. Grove was kept in the dark about the Met’s four-month investigation. An officer cautioned him not to get in touch with Arday again when they called him in February 2026 to inform him that the case was concluded since the investigations had impacted Arday’s “mental health.”
Later, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley publicly acknowledged that the force “lost the ball,” saying LBC that contacting the journalist was an error and that the allegation ought to have been rejected right away as not requiring police action. Additionally, Arday had hired the legal firm Carter-Ruck, which suggested in a letter to the Times Higher Education that the questions might be “racially motivated.” As Retraction Watch subsequently revealed, the media finally chose not to publish the results of its investigation.
Ghent University, where @nathancofnas is employed as a researcher, has announced it is investigating the academic for breaking the story about Jason Arday’s plagiarism.
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) August 20, 2026
Leftists and BLM activists have been organizing a campaign urging people to mass email the university with… pic.twitter.com/C6k43YCnkJ