Nathan Cofnas told Brussels Signal in an interview that he received ‘many death threads and a tremendous amount of hate’, without much pushback from institutions, after exposing fraud in the academic world.
He said he did not set out to become the face of the Jason Arday scandal. He explained that a Cambridge colleague asked him to look into a case of probable plagiarism and published what he found, leading to the resignation of Arday.
Arday was appointed in 2023 as Cambridge’s youngest black professor, aged 37. The university presented a steep rise from late literacy and autism through Roehampton, Durham and Glasgow to a chair. Cofnas, who taught philosophy at Cambridge from 2022 to 2025 and says he never met Arday, was told after he left that the life story was false and the doctorate copied.
Cofnas checked the dissertation and the ten papers Arday listed as his most important. A large share of the thesis, Cofnas said, was paste-in text, including a punctuation error in the title taken from someone else. Several of the papers were heavily plagiarised; others were, in his view, not university-level work.
He published on July 21. UK papers followed. Cambridge opened an investigation. Arday resigned on August 5 and was found dead in his home 9 days later.
Cofnas said the faculty had known about the plagiarism for about a year and stayed quiet; journalists had been intimidated by lawyers. They only started to move after Cofnas’ publication.
Despite the resignation of Arday, the coverage did not stop. Two-thirds of the articles were written after Arday was out of Cambridge, he pointed out.
Cofnas wanted Arday kept in post as “the face of DEI”. Instead Arday died from an apparent suicide.
While left-wing activists accused Cofnas of organising a witch hunt against Arday, Cofnas said he had only documented plagiarism and fabrications that were already an open secret.
He argued that he was the one being piled on and condemned, that he had received a stream of death threats since the controversy began, far exceeding the hostility directed at Arday.
Cofnas had already been marked as a problem at Cambridge for writing that groups need not have the same average mix of traits such as intelligence.
DEI, he said, assumes they do.
He went on to explain this, together with his views on race, intelligence and other issues, in the interview.
