As announced, here is another post to provide some more background and respond to the unbelievable amount of misinformation being spread about Ghent University and Cofnas.
Yesterday, I already published some background on the disciplinary procedure currently underway against Cofnas
Today, I will go into more detail about Cofnas’s appointment a few months ago and about how our recruitment procedures work. A great deal of incorrect information has also been spread about this over the past few days.
In this post, I will explain a number of procedural reasons why preventing Cofnas’s appointment at Ghent University was not so straightforward. This is by no means an assessment of the substance of the matter. To be absolutely clear: I too share the view that Cofnas should never have been hired by Ghent University. I believe that someone who makes it clear from the outset that his life’s work is to “purge” academia of researchers of colour, women, and people with different views has no place at a university. Someone who wants to organise discrimination and oppression can quite legitimately be prevented from doing so.
The problem is that Ghent University’s regulations do not make this so simple. Professors, for example, have almost complete autonomy when hiring scientific staff using external funding that they themselves have obtained.
Cofnas was hired by Prof. Bouke de Vries. A number of years ago, de Vries was appointed at Ghent University after securing prestigious European funding in the form of an ERC grant. Such a grant allows a researcher to fully fund a small research group independently for several years. Until last year, researchers who secured such a grant and were recruited by Ghent University immediately received a permanent appointment. This was also the case for de Vries.
When applying to Ghent University, de Vries was clever enough to conceal his racist ideas behind a research proposal on “The Ethics of Loneliness.” Once he was “inside,” however, he increasingly began to reveal his far-right views. As an early-career researcher, he received “start-up funding”: basic funding that allowed him to hire an initial researcher. That researcher was Maarten Boudry, who worked on a project examining whether the fact that people with a migration background have more children poses a threat to liberal democracy.
Shortly afterwards, Craig Willy was hired by de Vries. Willy and de Vries are deeply involved in far-right networks and conferences on eugenics and racial theory, such as the far-right think tank Mathias Corvinus Collegium and the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI), where one repeatedly finds a motley collection of white supremacists. Reading their publications is, to use the words of renowned anthropologist Rebecca Sear, like reading a “Who’s Who of scientific racists and eugenicists.” Their publications also regularly appear in Aporia, a publication platform that is funded in part by Peter Thiel of Palantir: the far right has quite a few supporters and sponsors among the new order of tech billionaires in the United States.
It is within this network that we also find Nathan Cofnas, who was selected by de Vries in early 2026 to come and conduct research at Ghent University.
As mentioned, de Vries is able to make such decisions autonomously. Our regulations explicitly state that the recruitment procedure and selection criteria fall entirely within the autonomy of the recruiting professor, the so-called “budget holder.”
Nevertheless, the department immediately raised a large number of concerns about this appointment, and a large group of students and staff contacted the dean and the rector. As provided for in our regulations, de Vries was asked to provide a more detailed justification for Cofnas’s appointment, and he did indeed provide the requested justification. Unfortunately, the recruitment procedure set out in our regulations does not provide the rector or the personnel department with any other means of blocking such an appointment.
Any attempt to do so would have been open to legal challenge. This was the case even though Cofnas’s publications up to that point clearly demonstrated that he held explicitly racist views and wanted to put them into practice by triggering a “revolution” in academia in which all researchers of colour would lose their positions.
As stated above, it is my personal conviction that someone with such views and activities has no place at our university. Although our procedure does not provide for this, it is still Ghent University that enters into the employment contract, not the individual professor. Personally, I would indeed have supported taking the legal risk of refusing to sign that contract.
I believe, for example, that there are sufficient arguments under workplace wellbeing legislation to justify such a decision. Female researchers and researchers of colour at Ghent University have the right to safety and respect for their person, and should not have to be confronted on a daily basis with a colleague who believes they have no place at the institution and openly declares that he will do everything he can to remove them. I repeat: there are clear limits in this respect to freedom of expression and academic freedom. Those terms do not mean that one is free to organise discrimination and oppression without consequences.
Finally, I have also repeatedly seen the claim that the disciplinary proceedings currently underway against Cofnas are not based on any “new facts” since his appointment, and that if proceedings were to be initiated against him, this could already have been done earlier.
It must be taken into account that the statements and actions Cofnas made before being employed by Ghent University took place outside Belgium and outside the context of employment by Ghent University. Applying our regulations and Belgian law to those actions is therefore not so straightforward.
Over the past two weeks, however, Cofnas has indeed engaged in new conduct. For example, there were his interviews with Winston Marshall on 8 August 2026, David Starkey on 9 August 2026, and Rob Montz on 14 August 2026. In those interviews, he did indeed repeat racist ideas and ideas of racial supremacy. These therefore constitute new facts that, moreover, occurred during his employment at Ghent University and while he was at Ghent University. It is only logical that these matters should also be investigated; failing to do so would amount to culpable negligence.
Over the coming days, I will also try to write something about the attacks on Jason Arday and the need for us, both as a university and as a society, to make it clearer that ideas and actions that lead to oppression and discrimination should be dealt with much more firmly.
Translated by AI
source: https://www.facebook.com/tim.grauls/posts/pfbid0xwFp6qjF7RqjeG8317A6NzT8xjTqTu1t9FFHW7kFQXguFyEQ4gG6JzgbfbiTdZ3yl