Why we should defend Nathan Cofnas’s academic freedom

After a controversial blog post he made earlier this year, the professional career of Dr Nathan Cofnas, a Leverhulme early-career research fellow at Cambridge’s philosophy faculty, is dangling by a thread. The American academic has already been defenestrated from an unpaid research associate position at Emmanuel College, and is now the subject of two investigations, one by Cambridge University and another by the Leverhulme Trust, the foundation funding him.

Dr Cofnas works in the philosophy of biology, in particular what he calls ‘evolution-informed social science’ and its attendant ethical controversies. This includes the thorny topics of race, genetics and intelligence. He’s currently being hauled over the coals for a February blog post titled ‘A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution’, where he calls for a wider understanding of population genetics in society, something he calls ‘race realism’.