What is the balance between academic freedom and integrity? This question sits at the heart of the emerging controversy over the hiring of Nathan Cofnas by Ghent University.
It is one that Belgium, of all countries, has reason to answer carefully and honestly.
Already, over 300 staff and students at Ghent University have voiced their concerns about the appointment of Nathan Cofnas, who stands accused of propagating pseudoscientific theories about race. Rector Petra De Sutter asserted that dissenting opinions must be allowed to exist at a university, and this upholds many of the truths in academia and is not wrong in principle.
Crucially, though, it sidesteps the more pressing question: at what point does the institutional endorsement of racism become complicity in harm?
Cofnas is not doing science, he is spreading propaganda
The first thing to establish clearly is that Cofnas claims to base his arguments on rigorous scientific research while they in fact rely on false reasoning and a systematic misreading of science, history, and philosophy. He has made a habit, on and off the academic record, of misrepresenting arguments to mold them into convenient talking points for his audience.
A central claim he makes is that science is distorted by political values, but he fails to see the irony in his own presentation of political values as science. This is not research. This is propaganda.
The concept of race as a discrete biological category with meaningful, heritable cognitive consequences is false. The American Anthropological Association, the American Society of Human Genetics, and decades of peer-reviewed research in behavioural genetics have consistently held that observed group differences in cognitive outcomes are better explained by environmental, historical, and socioeconomic factors than by genetic ones.
To assert otherwise and to label that assertion "hereditarianism" as though it were a settled field is to dress up an ideological position in scientific clothing.
Belgium is not a neutral stage for debate
This issue is especially pertinent in Belgium, where pseudo-academic arguments were used to prop up King Leopold II's personal pursuits in Africa. The Belgian colonial project in the Congo Free State, which resulted in the deaths millions and the suffering of millions more between 1885 and 1908, was not presented to the world as naked exploitation.
It was justified through a carefully constructed apparatus of scientific and moral legitimacy: the language of civilisation, of racial hierarchy, of the white man's burden. Anthropologists, missionaries, and administrators provided the intellectual scaffolding that Leopold II used to build an exploitative and violent regime. It was racial pseudoscience and the people who propagated it that gave the machinery of genocide its moral permission slip.
This is not ancient history. It is the specific, local history of the institution that is now being asked to host research premised on the false claim of intellectual inferiority of non-white populations. Belgium has a particular obligation not to be naive about what happens when race hierarchies are given academic respectability because it has seen, in its own colonial record, what the endpoint of that logic looks like.
How pseudoscience legitimises hate
It is not simply that a man with objectionable views has been given an office that legitimises these views, it is that his connection to a respected research institution launders those views. It transforms fringe race ideology into something that can be cited, debated on apparently equal terms, and disseminated into public discourse under the imprimatur of peer-reviewed scholarship.
What Cofnas calls "hereditarianism" has a history that should give us pause. His newsletter itself approvingly traces the lineage of race realism, noting that eugenicists and race scientists populated respectable institutions throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He presents this not as a cautionary tale but as proof of concept, as evidence that ideas about racial hierarchy once enjoyed mainstream credibility, and can again.
To further see how his work legitimizes hate let’s look at his October 7th, 2025, newsletter in which he argues that censorship is the reason arguments of racial superiority (what he called hereditarianism) are not mainstream. Cofnas writes: “When people are exposed to information about hereditarianism, it is often from sources that they (rightly or wrongly) do not view as credible, or it is mixed with crackpottery and actually-bad-racism.”
This statement reveals Cofnas’ efforts to normalize his racist pursuits and begs the question, what makes his version of dressed-up racism not actually bad?
Academic freedom is not a shield for misinformation
Defenders of Cofnas's appointment and broader work invoke academic freedom as their central argument. This principle is worth defending, but here it is applied in bad faith. Academic freedom protects scholars from political interference in the honest pursuit of knowledge. It is not a guarantee that any claim, however lacking in scientific basis, must be given institutional endorsement and public funding.
There is a meaningful difference between a controversial finding that challenges consensus but is grounded in sound methodology, transparent data, and peer review and a predetermined conclusion dressed in the costume of science. Cofnas' work, as described by his critics and as evidenced in his own writing, belongs to the latter category.
He begins with the conclusion that racial hierarchies in intelligence are real and genetic and works backward to construct a rhetorical architecture to support it. He does this because there is no empirical, scientific architecture that can prove his argument.
This is not how science works. And no invocation of academic freedom changes that.
The question before Ghent university
The question is not whether Cofnas should be permitted to hold his views. The question is whether a public research university in Belgium should be lending institutional credibility to those views, funding their dissemination, and providing them the cover of academic legitimacy.
Cofnas would undoubtedly dismiss my opinion as the complaint of a "woke" academic attempting to cancel a brave truth-teller. That framing is itself the strategy: by pre-labeling all critics as ideologically motivated, he ensures his own ideology goes unexamined. But the inversion runs deeper than rhetoric. He claims the mantle of free inquiry while working to dismantle it to fit his own narrative.
It is not "wokism" to call pseudoscience what it is. It is the defense of academic freedom because that freedom only retains value if it protects genuine inquiry, not baseless conclusions dressed in its clothing. The 300 staff and students at Ghent University who signed that letter are doing exactly what a university is supposed to produce: people willing to think critically about power, knowledge, and the uses to which both are put.
Belgium has statues, streets, and a royal legacy that testify to what happens when pseudo-academic racism is allowed to do its work unchallenged. We do not need to speculate about where the road leads. We have already been down it.
