0:00 David Starkey (b. 1945) opens by calling Nathan Cofnas (b. 1987) the David who brought down the monster of DEI at Cambridge.
0:32 Both men name their motive as vengeance. Cambridge expelled Cofnas after two years, Starkey after fifty-six.
1:20 Starkey credits X and social media, and says the BBC and the mainstream press would have buried the story.
2:54 Cofnas gives his history: MPhil at Cambridge in 2015, DPhil at Oxford, return in 2022 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow on a three-year contract, plus a research associateship at Emmanuel College.
3:31 He describes his field as philosophy of biology and divergence between ancestral populations. Starkey translates: race differences in intelligence.
4:17 January 2024, he launches a Substack. The first essay argues the right has a stupidity problem.
4:43 He cites the General Social Survey: respondents who attribute racial disparities to genetics score lowest on the abbreviated vocabulary and logic tests.
6:20 Stereotype accuracy. He offers Jews and wealth, Jamaicans and sprinting.
7:33 Nobody at Cambridge objected to that essay. No complaint about grading conservative students.
8:29 The follow-up argues a coherent right requires hereditarianism.
9:08 February 2024, “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution,” including the American case.
10:15 Starkey presses on provenance. The Harvard number was not Cofnas’s own.
11:26 The figure: Black enrollment around 12.5 percent, falling under grades and scores alone to under 0.7 percent.
12:34 Cofnas says the White share would rise a couple of points and Asians would take most of the displaced places.
13:08 He turned down an offer from an Asian university because Cambridge had adopted a strong free speech policy in 2020 after the Noah Carl firing.
14:18 Starkey on the Regent House revolt: tolerant instead of respectful, the Chicago principles, the fall of Stephen Toope (b. 1958).
16:20 Student protests, chants, the student paper, the Daily Mail chasing clicks.
17:45 Bhaskar Vira named. Cofnas alleges administrators and the head of faculty met student protesters, then opened an investigation.
19:04 The university hires a lawyer to decide whether hereditarianism is a protected philosophical belief under the Grainger test.
21:46 Cofnas describes a three-hour interrogation and a hostile investigator.
22:25 The report finds his belief fails Grainger and falls outside academic freedom for want of scholarly competence.
23:02 He alleges the report treats 0.67 as larger than 0.7 and misses the count of Black Americans above IQ 135 by two orders of magnitude.
24:14 Not sacked. Quarantined. Emmanuel later terminated the associateship.
24:38 Support came privately. A letter to the Times, signed by a few, including Matthew Kramer (b. 1959), who called Cofnas an idiot while defending his speech.
26:17 Starkey proposes revenge as the motive for the Arday audit. Cofnas denies it, then concedes the sequel appealed to him.
27:13 A Cambridge whistleblower contacted him on June 13.
27:39 He left Cambridge in September 2025, before the rumors became an open secret.
28:10 Journalists had been deterred by legal threats.
29:13 The dissertation: alleged copying from a then graduate student at Brunel.
29:31 The biography as presented: autistic, nonverbal to eleven, unable to spell his name to eighteen, 600 miles in six days, thirty marathons in thirty-five days, over five million pounds raised, PhD to Cambridge chair by thirty-seven.
31:03 Cofnas says recovery of normal speech after being nonverbal to eleven has no precedent he can find, and that two GCSEs still require writing your name.
32:01 He feared a vexatious suit and confined himself to the published record.
32:42 Copyleaks output, retained copyediting errors, a stray comma in the dissertation title.
33:48 The heart of the piece is not the thesis. It is the ten items Arday lists on his own faculty page as principal publications, 2018 to 2023.
34:43 His three tests for each: plagiarized, substantive, and actually his.
35:27 Allegations of invented data, a “data analysis” section without statistics, and a convenience sample consisting of three friends.
37:21 Starkey turns to the institution and says Cambridge swapped him out for Jason Arday.
38:03 The appointment board was chaired by Sally Morgan (b. 1959), Blair’s former political director and Master of Fitzwilliam, the college that removed Starkey in five minutes.
39:31 Labour threads: David Sainsbury (b. 1940) as former chancellor, Chris Smith (b. 1951) as current one.
40:31 Cofnas names Simon Baron-Cohen (b. 1958) among Arday’s defenders.
41:10 His thesis: wokeism rests on an empirical premise of identical innate group distributions, and everything follows from that premise plus Christian moral sentiment.
44:24 Starkey pushes back. There are second-order causes, cultural and legal.
45:16 His evidence for the shift: in 2009 he shared the Cambridge 800th anniversary American launch with Stephen Hawking and fronted the Open Day for free.
46:26 His date is 2012. David Willetts (b. 1956) lifts the fee cap to £9,000. The condition is access enforcement through OFFA under Les Ebdon (b. 1947). American DEI is imported wholesale onto that frame.
48:30 The enabling statute comes from a Conservative government.
49:36 Cofnas answers that law follows elite belief and that the ideology of the bureaucrat outranks the text.
50:17 His long history: race denial crystallizes in the late nineteenth century, hardens after 1945, then the civil rights prediction fails and affirmative action ratchets upward for sixty years.
53:08 Starkey adds Jonathan Haidt and the iPhone, and describes cancellation as heresy trial and execution in one motion.
54:36 They agree DEI and scholarship cannot coexist.
55:40 Starkey notes that Arday’s defenders argue the case damages the moral and practical case for DEI.
56:28 The Korea thought experiment. Cofnas concedes a bonus for North Korean applicants would be rational. Starkey supplies East and West Germany.
59:02 The claim that DEI requires assent to a proposition free speech would expose.
1:00:15 The Chicago principles as remedy. Cofnas doubts they work, citing a Chicago department’s 2020 announcement restricting admissions to Black studies.
1:02:20 Lionel Shriver (b. 1957) and Mania as the reductio.
1:03:38 The most damaging line in the hour: thousands of scholars are as weak as Arday and simply do not plagiarize. Absent the copying and the biography, there would be no story.
1:05:31 Optimism from information access. Cofnas learned of the literature at seventeen in a classroom. Zoomers found it in a search box.
1:07:43 The Free Speech Union.
Cofnas took the ten publications Arday nominated as his best work and asked three questions of each. That method needs no theory of population genetics, no view about the Grainger test, and no opinion about Cambridge. Anyone can run it against any professor, and the subject supplies the sample. That is a portable audit, and it is the part of this that will outlive the news cycle. It also worked. Arday resigned on August 5, 2026, hours after Cambridge opened a new investigation into his qualifications and honorary appointments, separate from the misconduct review already running. Jesus College opened its own. Cambridge had defended him in June, calling the campaign vile, and reversed within weeks.
The second exposé is an argument about why the first was necessary, and it runs on assertion. Cofnas says at 36 and 43 that Arday is mentally disabled, could not do addition, is mathematically illiterate. None of that is in the documents. He is entitled to think it. Putting it in the same hour as the plagiarism analysis hands the defense its best material, and the Good Law Project took it. Their petition frames the plagiarism claims as fake and racially motivated, and Arday told the Times he had made mistakes and should be held accountable while denying he is a liar and a fraud. A finding that survives independent replication is one thing. A characterization of a man’s intelligence is not replicable, and it converts an audit into a fight about the auditor.
Starkey’s date is 2012 and his causal chain runs from Willetts through the fee cap to OFFA to Ebdon to imported DEI. The chain is off. OFFA was created by the Higher Education Act 2004, under Labour, alongside the first £3,000 cap. Willetts raised the cap to £9,000 and Ebdon took the directorship in 2012, so what changed that year was the price and therefore the leverage. The weaker version of Starkey’s claim survives and is better: an access regulator with little to withhold became an access regulator with a great deal to withhold, and the compliance apparatus grew to match. That is a testable proposition about access agreements before and after 2012, and nobody in the hour tests it.
Grainger plc v Nicholson (2010) sets five criteria for a protected philosophical belief, one of which excludes an opinion based on the present state of information available. Forstater v Center for Global Development (2021) then narrowed the exclusion so that only beliefs approaching Nazism or totalitarianism fall outside protection. A university that promises to protect all lawful speech and then asks whether the speech is separately protected under employment discrimination law has changed the question. That substitution is the most institutionally significant thing in the interview and gets four minutes.
The line at 1:03:38 undoes the frame Starkey spent an hour building. If thousands of scholars produce work as thin as Arday’s and are safe because they do not copy, then plagiarism is incidental and the real charge is against a field’s standards of evidence. That charge is larger, harder, and needs different work: sampling published articles in the sociology of education, coding for method, showing what a convenience sample of three friends yields relative to what the field accepts. Cofnas gestures at it and moves on. Nobody has done it. Someone should.
What the hour never does is ask what would falsify anything. Starkey supplies the vengeance frame in the first minute and Cofnas accepts it with a grin, which means every claim that follows arrives pre-labeled with a motive. Liverpool John Moores investigated the thesis and attributed the problems to honest and reasonable error. That finding is not mentioned. Neither is any account of what Arday’s supervisors and examiners did, which is the question Cambridge cannot answer by investigating one man. Simon & Schuster still plans to publish his memoir this month.
