Amy Wax & Nathan Cofnas: The Parallels & Differences

Both began as careful technical scholars and ended as public polemicists treated as discredited within their original institutional homes. The shape of the trajectory is the shared fact. The substantive content of the turn, the timing, and the institutional response differ.
Both started inside disciplinary norms. The 2004 Wax stereotype threat piece looks like the work she could have continued for thirty years. Cofnas’s early work in philosophy of biology was tight, methodologically conservative, focused on narrow questions about evolutionary epistemology and the ethics of belief. Both could have sustained ordinary academic careers. Neither did.
Both moved into race and group differences as the gravitational center. Wax through cultural and family-structure framing. Cofnas through explicit hereditarianism. Both treated their respective claims as empirical matters being suppressed by coalition discipline rather than contested by reasonable people. Both came to see the suppression as the corruption to be addressed. Once you frame the situation that way, restraint becomes complicity, and the public op-ed or Substack post becomes a moral act.
Both lost institutional standing. Penn stripped Wax of her named chair in 2023. Emmanuel College sacked Cofnas in January 2024. Both invoked academic freedom in defense. Both built parallel public profiles that compensated for the institutional losses. The career math worked because the alternative coalition pays in attention, ally networks, and existential meaning. Both stepped into a market for figures willing to say what the mainstream would not.
Both produced procedural-defense pieces after the institutional sanctions. Wax’s February and March 2018 WSJ pieces. Cofnas’s various Substack posts after the Cambridge dismissal. The pattern repeats. Make the substantive claim. Take the institutional hit. Reframe the institutional hit as proof of the substantive claim. The reframing requires that the institution not release the data, refute the argument, or otherwise engage the merits. Both institutions obliged.
Where they diverge.
Career stage. Wax was a tenured chaired professor at peak career status when she made the turn. The institutional cushion was thick. She could survive Penn’s sanctions and continue receiving a salary. Cofnas was on a fixed-term junior fellowship. He had less institutional capital to spend and lost most of it in one stroke. The turn cost him more relative to his starting position.
Substantive frame. Wax’s primary register was cultural and behavioral. She named family structure, work habits, and parenting as causes of group differences. She left biology implicitly available but did not lead with it. Cofnas led with hereditarianism as the explicit position. He treats the biological hypothesis as the intellectually defensible default. The difference shapes how each is received. Cultural arguments allow more room for disagreement. Hereditarian arguments collapse the room.
Intellectual lineage. Wax draws on the legal-economic tradition, Sowell, Murray, Gary Becker (1930-2014). Cofnas draws on philosophy of science and hereditarian psychology, Lynn, Jensen, and Charles Murray. Murray runs through both lineages, which is part of how the right-wing coalition coheres across legal academia and philosophy. The lineages overlap at the Murray node and diverge from there.
Style and venue. Wax operates in television and 2017 op-ed registers. Performance. Cofnas operates in long-form Substack and academic-philosophical registers. Argument. Wax leans more rhetorical. Cofnas leans more analytic. The styles fit the audiences.
Generation and digital speed. Wax came up in pre-internet legal academia and made her name there. Her turn took thirteen years from the 2004 piece to the 2017 2017 op-ed. Cofnas was native to the Substack and podcast economy. His turn ran faster, compressed across a few years. The infrastructure shapes the trajectory.
Identity and self-positioning. Cofnas has foregrounded his Jewish identity as part of his project, writing explicitly on what he calls the Jewish question and arguing that Jews have disproportionate influence in the suppression of hereditarian arguments. Wax does not foreground her Jewishness in this way. The Cofnas move is risky and connects him to a discourse that has historically run through more dangerous territory. Wax has not gone there.
Legal outcomes. Cofnas got a partial legal vindication in March 2026. The Peterborough County Court recognized hereditarianism as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010 while upholding the college’s severance. The ruling produced a precedent of institutional value to the broader coalition. Wax has had no comparable legal moment. Penn’s processes have run through internal academic governance, which favors institutional discretion.
Cofnas has lost more standing within mainstream philosophy than Wax has lost within mainstream legal academia, because philosophy enforces tighter coalitional discipline than legal academia does. Within the alternative coalition, both function as canonical figures whose institutional sanctions confirm the coalition’s diagnosis.
The coalition pull is real. The frustration with mainstream silence on empirical questions is real. The personality profile selects for low risk-aversion, willingness to alienate colleagues, and confidence that one’s contested claims are simply true. Both Wax and Cofnas fit the profile. Many quieter scholars share their views and decline to make the turn. The turn is a choice, and the people who make it tend to share temperament more than they share intellectual position.
Both trajectories show what happens when a scholar prioritizes a substantive claim over institutional belonging. Institutions select for restraint. Public coalitions select for boldness. The two reward systems pull in opposite directions. Once a scholar moves from one reward system to the other, the trajectory tends to look like Wax’s or Cofnas’s. The personalities differ. The shape rhymes.