My latest for @Quillette, in which I break a lance (as Germans say) for @nathancofnas (whom I've never met or corresponded with). British outlets like the Telegraph and the Daily Mail have wrongly claimed credit for exposing Jason Arday. Jack Grove (@jgro_the) of Times Higher Education looked into Arday in 2025, but that publication let itself be bullied into submission by a letter from sinister London libel lawyers Carter-Ruck. If it hadn't been for a Substack post by Cofnas on July 21st, Arday would still be a professor. Cofnas, and nobody else, had the courage to publicly condemn Arday's plagiarism and shoddy, typo-filled work. And yet if Cofnas mentioned at all, it's to be dismissed as a "racist" or "white nationalist" because of his unfashionable hereditarian outlook. Left-wing British professors lamented that it took a "right-wing" scholar to break the news about Arday, but none of them had the courage to do it. And nobody has identified any breaches of academic standards in Cofnas' work, despite intense scrutiny. You may disagree with Cofnas' views, but, as I argue in the piece, his kind of caustic contrarianism is just what academia needs.

I laughed out loud: "The ‘lived experience’ of being a mid-career academic in the UK is not all that different from being, say, manager of a call centre on an industrial estate just outside Darlington: a lot of grappling with bits of software that don’t talk to each other, a lot of deleting irrelevant emails, a lot of meetings scheduled by people who are compensating for nonexistent social lives."