Nearly 2 Dozen B-School Profs Are Defending A Suspended ‘Race Realist’ Researcher

Ghent University has suspended a controversial academic – and hundreds of colleagues and peers have voiced their support for him

Now that Ghent University has formally suspended Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” philosopher whose hiring touched off months of protest at the Belgian school, the fight over his fate has pulled in academics from around the world – including nearly two dozen business school professors from Stanford GSB to Copenhagen. 

In a registered letter dated August 20, 2026, the Head of Legal Affairs at the Belgian university informed Cofnas that the university has opened a preliminary disciplinary investigation and imposed a preventive suspension “in the interest of the service.” The letter, published on Bluesky among other blogs and independent journalism websites, cites complaints stretching back months and points specifically to a recent podcast appearance in which Cofnas said he is continuing work on what he calls the “hereditarian revolution” while employed at Ghent. 

Swooping to his rescue: Hundreds of academics have signed an open letter defending Cofnas’s academic freedom, including 23 B-school professors, some of them retired, according to an analysis using ChatGPT. The letter had more than 700 total signatories from across global higher education as of Monday (August 24).

THE ARDAY CONNECTION

Ghent, in its letter to Cofnas, argues that his current work falls well outside what it hired him to do. Cofnas’s contract and the position he was recruited for define his research mandate as a study of “the future of liberalism,” according to the letter – not race science. Ghent has not said how long the disciplinary process will take or whether Cofnas’s suspension is paid.

Ghent’s suspension letter also cites Cofnas’s public remarks about the late Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday, who in 2023 became Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor and whom Cofnas reportedly called “mentally disabled” and a “worthless scholar.” Cofnas was not the first person to investigate Arday’s academic record but he was the one who made it public. Times Higher Education, P&Q‘s parent company, had the story nearly a year earlier but did not publish it after Arday retained the UK defamation firm Carter-Ruck and threatened legal action.

The story stayed dormant until Cofnas wrote on his Substack in July that he had been contacted by a Cambridge source with plagiarism concerns about Arday and would not name the source. Days later, on July 24, the Times of London published its own analysis of Arday’s 2015 Ph.D. thesis (paywall), identifying passages it said were “identical or near-identical” to an earlier paper by another researcher. That set off weeks of intensifying media scrutiny of Arday’s academic record and other public claims.

Arday resigned on August 5, denying the plagiarism allegations throughout. He was found dead at a London address nine days later; London’s Metropolitan Police said the death was being treated as unexpected but not suspicious, with a file prepared for the coroner. No official cause of death has been announced. Arday’s family said in a statement that “the campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man.” Cambridge academic Simon Baron-Cohen, who said he had been in touch with Arday hours before his death, told the BBC that Arday “wasn’t coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation.”

Ghent’s letter raises two distinct legal questions, and they trace back to different conduct. First, it says Cofnas’s public comments on racial and ethnic differences may implicate Belgian anti-discrimination law. Separately, and specifically in connection with his framing of the Arday episode as a “victorious act” in a self-described “hereditarian revolution” and his calls to “purge” institutions of ideological opponents, the letter says Cofnas’s conduct toward colleagues generally may amount to an intentional disturbance of the peace under the Belgian Criminal Code’s provisions on offenses against a person’s honor or reputation.

A CAREER MARKED BY CONTROVERSY

Cofnas built his reputation, and his notoriety, on the question of whether racial groups differ in average intelligence for genetic reasons. A 2024 blog post arguing that Black people “would disappear from virtually all high-ranking positions” under a pure meritocracy got him dismissed from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a decision he is now suing over. He landed at Ghent this year, working on a project examining whether liberal societies need to actively maintain enough liberal-minded citizens – led by philosophy professor Bouke de Vries.

His arrival triggered two parallel campaigns. A student-led Change.org petition accusing him of “blatant racism” gathered more than 2,000 signatures. Separately, more than 300 Ghent staff and students – including 48 members of his own department, three deans and two former deans – wrote to rector Petra De Sutter demanding an explanation. The Committee for Academic Freedom, a UK-based advocacy group, has since criticized Ghent’s suspension letter for leaning too heavily on the petitions, complaints, guest lecturer withdrawals, and boycott threats greeting Cofnas’s appointment rather than on his conduct alone.

THE COUNTER-LETTER & ITS BUSINESS SCHOOL CONTINGENT

Countering both campaigns is the open letter hosted by John Armstrong, a King’s College London mathematician, which argues Ghent’s proceedings amount at least in part to retaliation against Cofnas for exposing academic misconduct at British universities. Signatures are gathered through ORCID login to verify academic credentials, and include figures such as Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, and physicist David Deutsch.

Less expected: twenty-three signatories identify as business school faculty or business-adjacent economists, spanning some of the field’s best-known institutions. They include David de Meza and Diane Reyniers, both management professors at the London School of Economics; David Paton, chair of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School; Nicolai Foss of Copenhagen Business School; and Iván Marinovic, an accounting professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Also on the list: Siri Terjesen, associate dean at Florida Atlantic University’s College of Business; and Charles Trzcinka, a finance chair at Indiana’s Kelley School of Business. A full list of the B-school signatories and their schools is below.

A FAMILIAR NAME FROM KELLEY

Also among the signatories is Eric Rasmusen, the retired Kelley School of Business professor who was himself at the center of a bias controversy P&Q covered in 2019. Rasmusen, then a tenured professor of business economics and public policy, drew widespread condemnation after tweeting an article suggesting women were “destroying academia” and citing a passage linking male genius to low agreeableness. Then-Provost Lauren Robel said in a public statement that the tweet was only the latest in a pattern, accusing Rasmusen of believing gay men should be barred from academia and that Black students were “generally inferior academically to white students.” 

Indiana University declined to fire him, citing the First Amendment, but Kelley moved to insulate students from him – barring any student from being required to take his classes and instituting double-blind grading for his courses. Rasmusen’s ORCID-verified signature on the Cofnas letter puts a name from that earlier controversy squarely inside this one. Rasmusen retired from Kelley in 2021, two years after the controversy; he reportedly was not granted emeritus status, and has said he believes that denial was connected to the episode.

No mark: title and school as stated in the letter itself

† Confirmed independently; not fully stated in the letter

DON’T MISS INDIANA KELLEY PROF’S ‘PERNICIOUS STEREOTYPES’ SPARK CONTROVERSY

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