{"id":187114,"date":"2026-05-11T06:05:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T14:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=187114"},"modified":"2026-05-13T09:50:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T17:50:59","slug":"nathan-cofnas-cambridge-universitys-war-on-free-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=187114","title":{"rendered":"Nathan Cofnas: &#8216;Cambridge University\u2019s War on Free Speech&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">Nathan Cofnas writes May 11<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>After accepting a job at Cambridge on the promise of free speech, I was betrayed the moment the administration determined that free speech was inconvenient for them. I was effectively driven off campus with threats of violence against me brushed off as not a big deal. I was forced to resign from my paid position as undergraduate examiner. A senior administrator and two philosophy professors (including the chair of the faculty) met with student protesters to conspire about how to \u201c[get] rid of him\u201d even before they had bothered filing trumped-up charges against me. The Faculty of Philosophy adopted new policies to ensure that controversial scholars could never be hired again. I was subjected to a year-and-a-half-long investigation straight out of Idiocracy. Emmanuel College, where I held the position of College Research Associate, terminated me on the grounds that my belief in hereditarianism \u201camounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies.\u201d<br \/>\n&#8230;We now have the absurd situation where the limits of philosophical inquiry are set by the most emotionally fragile students at each university. Except for the libertarians, philosophers who publicly challenge conventional left-wing views have been virtually purged from academia.<br \/>\nI recently started a one-year, part-time postdoc at Ghent University. I\u2019m very happy to be here, except when students are <A HREF=\"https:\/\/x.com\/nathancofnas\/status\/2039840249182814303\">throwing bottles at my head<\/a> because they disagree with <A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nZsKQvaTku4\">my lecture<\/a>. However, I am hanging on to an academic career by my fingernails. I would ask my critics to think about the day after I am banished for good. Will philosophy really be more interesting or better equipped to address important problems when there is no room for someone like me?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Cofnas writes well. The doggerel opening, the line about &#8220;Cofnas&#8221; not rhyming with anything, the deadpan list of philosophers who never held a university post, his comic timing pulls you through a long piece. The <A HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Aileen_McColgan\">Aileen McColgan<\/a> section lands a clean hit. She seems to have confused &#8220;0.76% of Americans with IQ 135+ are Black&#8221; with &#8220;0.76% of Black Americans have IQ 135+.&#8221; That is an elementary base-rate mistake. Writing a long report that turns on it is bad work and embarrasses her and Cambridge University.<br \/>\nWho would hire her now? Who promoted her to a task beyond her abilities? This is damning.<br \/>\nAdministrators meeting with student protesters to plan how to &#8220;get rid of him&#8221; before any charge, then commissioning an inquiry that ran out the clock on his three-year contract, fits a pattern other targets at other universities describe. Death threats downgraded to a writing exercise while the faculty member faces a year-and-a-half investigation tells you what the institution prioritizes. The contrast he draws between the <A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/2020\/06\/25\/cambridge-defends-academic-said-white-lives-dont-matter\/\">Gopal case<\/a> (speech is allowed unless criminal) and his own (speech is allowed unless we can find an excuse to punish it) is a fair one, and the documentary record he reproduces supports it.<br \/>\nWhere the <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> strains is in his self-presentation. He casts every administrator as a coward or a fanatic and every critic as part of a mob. Some of them are. Some of them are doing their jobs. He treats his views as plain mainstream science. They are not. <A HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_Plomin\">Robert Plomin<\/a>, who appears in his supportive letter, is more cautious in his published work than Cofnas is in his blogging.<br \/>\nThe word &#8220;betrayal&#8221; pings me. After reading <A HREF=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Betrayals-Unpredictability-Relations-Gabriella-Turnaturi\/dp\/0226817032\">Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations<\/a> by <A HREF=\"https:\/\/press.uchicago.edu\/ucp\/books\/author\/T\/G\/au5186397.html\">Gabriella Turnaturi<\/a>, I&#8217;ve adopted her framing of betrayal as that overwhelming pain I feel when I see that other people have different priorities from what I expected and I don&#8217;t want to say I was wrong. Instead, I must describe the other parties as diabolical.<br \/>\nI love this bit from the book: &#8220;Furthermore, if it is true that not only in every relationship but in every interaction parts of ourselves that we were unaware of come to light, we cannot even be sure that we will never betray. Betrayal, both as an act on our part and as an action we undergo, is always relational and always possible. When we enter into relations with others, a step that is necessary for the construction of our own identity, we put into play our desire to be with the other \u2014 but also our desire not to lose ourselves in the other.&#8221;<br \/>\nTurnaturi&#8217;s frame turns betrayal into a sociological event rather than a psychological wound. Betrayal is an asymmetrical rearrangement of role content, started by one party while the other does not see it coming. It requires a prior relationship with disclosure and exchange of trust. It emerges from complexity. Until the 16th century, treason against the sovereign was the paradigm case. After that, the act privatized. Today adultery and similar personal violations carry the gravitas the word once reserved for matters of state.<br \/>\nCofnas reaches for &#8220;betrayal&#8221; to describe his Cambridge experience. The word is doing more work than the situation can bear.<br \/>\nWhat relationship did he have with Cambridge as an institution? A three-year contract for a Leverhulme fellowship in the Faculty of Philosophy. An unpaid affiliation with Emmanuel College. A piece of paper, the December 2020 Statement on Freedom of Speech, approved by 87% of the governing body. None of these constituted a personal covenant. The 87% did not know him. The document did not name him. The administrators who hired him for the fellowship were not the same administrators who moved against him eighteen months later.<br \/>\nWhat Cofnas calls a betrayal is the collision of priorities that always coexisted at Cambridge. The free-speech coalition won the vote in December 2020. The DEI coalition was already present, growing, and waiting. Pro-Vice-Chancellor Vira affirmed his right to free speech on February 16, 2024, then reversed course one week later under student pressure. That looks like betrayal if you read Vira as a single moral agent with a stable commitment. It looks like coalition arithmetic if you read him as a man balancing forces that differed in strength at different moments. The first reading produces betrayal. The second reading produces information.<br \/>\nTurnaturi&#8217;s point that betrayal requires a prior relationship sharpens this. Cofnas had no relationship with Cambridge as a unified actor, because Cambridge as a unified actor does not exist. He had relationships with specific people: his hiring committee, his fellowship sponsor, the colleagues who supported him quietly. The administrators who acted against him were either different people or the same people responding to coalition pressure they had not previously revealed. The asymmetrical rearrangement Turnaturi requires for betrayal happens between parties who share a role frame. Cofnas and the Cambridge administration did not share a role frame. He read the document as a covenant. They read it as a procedural norm subject to override under enough social pressure.<br \/>\nBetrayal as a category dresses up the discovery that other people had priorities I did not anticipate. The cry of betrayal converts a failure of prediction into a moral injury. It protects the speaker from the harder conclusion: I read the situation wrong. I projected unity onto a system of competing forces. I treated procedural language as personal commitment.<br \/>\nCofnas has reasons to choose the betrayal framing. It places him in a clean moral story with a wronged party and a wrongdoer. It justifies the lawsuit. It justifies the public <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a>. It mobilizes allies who recognize the betrayal grammar from their own coalition memberships. The alternative framing, that he made a forecast about how the institution worked and the forecast failed, gives him nothing to organize a narrative around. There is no allied coalition for the man who simply made an error.<br \/>\nAnother framing is that Cofnas erred by moving into the Substack register and he would have been better served producing serious academic work and avoiding polemics.<br \/>\nCofnas had a choice of register. He had a peer-reviewed paper trail in Evolutionary Psychological Science, philosophical work on debunking arguments, a respectable academic position in philosophy of biology. He could have continued in that register: technical papers, careful hedging, peer review, the slow accumulation of academic credibility on a difficult topic. The academic register has a protective function. Even colleagues who disagree must defend the legitimacy of peer-reviewed work, because attacking it threatens their own claim to academic freedom. The register encodes a tacit alliance among academics across ideological lines.<br \/>\nHe chose the Substack register instead. &#8220;<A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/why-we-need-to-talk-about-the-rights\">Why We Need to Talk about the Right&#8217;s Stupidity Problem<\/a>.&#8221; &#8220;<A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/a-guide-for-the-hereditarian-revolution\">A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution<\/a>.&#8221; The titles are not academic. The word &#8220;Revolution&#8221; is a political call, not a scholarly proposal. The contents discuss what happens if affirmative action ends, what social arrangements might be needed in a colorblind system, what Sowell&#8217;s theory says in stark unhedged language. This is policy advocacy in the register of online combat.<br \/>\nThe choice of register changed what Cambridge could do to him. <A HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Aileen_McColgan\">Aileen McColgan&#8217;s<\/a> report leans heavily on the question of academic competence in the published material she was reviewing. If she had been reviewing a peer-reviewed paper in Philosophy of Biology, that line of attack might have been harder to land. The journal&#8217;s review process supplies presumptive evidence of competence. The Substack register supplies no such presumption. The polemical title alone gave her something to work with.<br \/>\nTacit knowledge about what an academic can and cannot say is encoded in register, venue, peer review, and hedging conventions. The academic register provides protective armor that the Substack register strips off. The protection is not absolute. Academics with controversial views still face attack. But the attack must work harder against academic-register publication than against Substack polemic. Cofnas chose the more direct register and lost the armor.<br \/>\nHe cannot see this. The <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> treats the Cambridge response as ideological persecution of his views. It treats his choice of venue and register as transparent or invisible. The framing is: I held heterodox views, Cambridge punished me for the views, therefore Cambridge betrayed academic freedom. The unstated middle term is the register choice that altered what Cambridge could plausibly do.<br \/>\nSeveral reasons might explain the blindness.<br \/>\nThe Substack register may feel more honest to him. Academic hedging reads as cowardice or obfuscation to many writers who break out of it. The polemical register feels like truth-telling against the academic norm of softening everything. From inside that experience, the trade-off does not register as a trade-off. It registers as moral clarity.<br \/>\nThe Substack platform supplies rewards the academy does not. Chiefly, attention. The reward structure pulled him into the register. Once in, the rewards reinforce the choice. He cannot see what he gave up because the platform he chose keeps paying him in the currency he traded for.<br \/>\nThe polemical register is a coalition signal. By writing this way, Cofnas signaled his break from the academic left and his alliance with the heterodox right. The break was the point. Acknowledging that the register cost him something means acknowledging that the break had costs, and the heroic-rebel narrative has no room for self-imposed costs.<br \/>\nThe lineage he closes the <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> with includes Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza, Hume, Nietzsche. None of them are peer-reviewed academics. The lineage is one of direct speakers who refused institutional softening. From inside his frame, the academic register reads as betrayal of the lineage he wants to inhabit. So he cannot say &#8220;I should have written more peer-reviewed papers and fewer polemical essays&#8221; because that admission shrinks him from the lineage he claims.<br \/>\nThe strongest counterargument on Cofnas&#8217;s behalf is that the academic register has narrowed. Hereditarians have trouble publishing even in technical journals. Reviewers reject manuscripts on coalition grounds. The protective function of the academic register may have eroded. The Substack reach might have been worth the institutional risk because the academic alternative was closing.<br \/>\nEven granting this counterargument, the trade-off was still a trade-off. He chose. The <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> erases the choice. A clear-thinking analyst might write: &#8220;I chose the Substack register because I wanted reach, I knew it carried risk, the risk materialized, Cambridge then punished me using the register as evidence of incompetence, I now reconsider whether the trade was worth it.&#8221; Cofnas does not write that. He writes: Cambridge promised free speech and lied. The first version is what self-examination looks like. The second is what coalition mobilization looks like.<br \/>\nCofnas cannot see his own agency in producing the situation because seeing it unwinds the narrative that sustains him.<br \/>\nCambridge is a complex institution with multiple competing coalitions, an explicit free-speech text, tacit norms of administrative response, separate college and faculty governance, and a long history of selective application of stated principles. The complexity is where his expectation diverged from reality. The complexity is where the felt betrayal lives. A simpler institution might have spared him the experience because his expectations would have matched its operation.<br \/>\nThe media handling of betrayal has shifted to an indifferent tone. As the review puts it, &#8220;what once toppled monarchies now sells mops.&#8221; Cofnas&#8217;s case plays out in Daily Mail headlines, Varsity articles, Substack essays, Twitter mockery. The gravitas the word once carried has thinned. He reaches for the strong version of &#8220;betrayal&#8221; because the cultural register no longer supplies it freely. The strain shows. The schoolyard mockery in his <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> sits alongside the lofty Spinoza-Hume lineage claim. Both are needed because neither alone can carry the weight he wants the situation to bear.<br \/>\nThe schoolyard register and the betrayal framing do the same work in different keys. They both inflate the encounter beyond what its structure can support. A man whose priorities differed from those of the institutional coalitions around him met the result. He calls it betrayal. The word does the heavy lifting the situation refuses to do for him.<br \/>\nThe Sowell passage is where Cofnas&#8217;s framing wobbles most in this <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a>. He quotes Sowell&#8217;s list, aversion to work, proneness to violence, sexual promiscuity, drunkenness, and treats McColgan&#8217;s reading of it as crude stereotyping as self-evidently ridiculous. A reader can hold both that Sowell is a serious scholar and that printing that list in a Cambridge <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> reads as a sweeping characterization of Black Americans, whatever Sowell intended. Cofnas wants the protection of &#8220;I am only describing the data&#8221; while writing prose engineered to provoke. He gets to do that. He does not get to act surprised when people react.<br \/>\nThe closing comparison to Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza, Hume, Descartes, and Hobbes is where he loses me. A three-year fellowship cut short and a part-time postdoc in Ghent is not a hemlock cup. The pose is overwritten and it cheapens the parts of the case where he has the goods.<br \/>\nWhat he does have is a real grievance about how Cambridge processed him. The bait-and-switch between the December 2020 free speech statement and the standard McColgan applied is a documentable shift. The Faculty of Philosophy&#8217;s new procedure of circulating finalists&#8217; dossiers for ideological vetting, if he describes it accurately, is a chilling thing for any institution that calls itself a university. He is more persuasive when he stays on the procedure and less when he tells you he is Diogenes.<br \/>\nThe last paragraph is a plea for mercy. &#8220;Hanging on by my fingernails.&#8221; &#8220;The day after I am banished for good.&#8221; &#8220;I would ask my critics to think about&#8230;&#8221; Strip the rhetoric and you have a man asking the people trying to destroy him to please consider that he might fully lose. That posture forfeits ground he built in the procedural sections.<br \/>\nIt signals weakness, and his enemies will read it that way. His Cambridge antagonists already believe they won. They got him off campus, ran out the clock, made hiring him a reputational risk anywhere in the Anglosphere. The fingernails line confirms their scoreboard. Worse, it broadcasts to any administrator at any future institution that hiring Cofnas is hiring a man near the end of his rope. That is the perception he most needs to fight, and he hands it to them in his own voice.<br \/>\nThe closing also clashes with what comes right before it. He compares himself to Socrates and Diogenes and Spinoza, men who refused to flinch in front of power. Then he flinches. The reader feels the gear change. Either you are the heir to Diogenes, telling Alexander to stop blocking your sunlight, or you are the postdoc on year-to-year contracts asking critics for clemency. You cannot hold both poses in the same paragraph without one collapsing the other. The Diogenes pose collapses first.<br \/>\nThere is a counter-case. He runs a Substack and the post is also a fundraising vehicle. Vulnerability sells subscriptions. The Free Speech Union case needs public sympathy, donors, witnesses willing to come forward. For those readers the fingernails line works. So there is a tension. The plea helps with money and helps with sympathy. It hurts with hiring committees, hostile press, and the activists looking for proof they broke him.<br \/>\nA stronger ending might have closed on the lawsuit. He has a live legal argument that hereditarianism is a protected belief, the judge in Cambridge County Court accepted that point, and <A HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Maya_Forstater\">Maya Forstater<\/a> also lost in round one before winning on appeal. That is the threatening note. The opposition does not fear his sadness. It might fear his persistence and his lawyer.<br \/>\n<A HREF=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@penbroke\/note\/c-257699523?r=2vjudm\">Alistair Penbroke writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Nathan Cofnas is such a curious guy. I am fascinated by his mindset.<br \/>\nAfter years of writing about how smart and brilliant leftists must be because there are no right wing academics, he pens a giant <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> in which he admits he was completely duped by a single document in which Cambridge claimed to care about free speech and intellectual freedom. So he went to work there and discovered the reality was one of violent mobs texting each other stuff like, \u201ccan we just all order ski masks and turn up on a voi and beat the shit out of him.\u201d<br \/>\nHe even describes the entire situation there as \u201c<A HREF=\"https:\/\/x.com\/nathancofnas\/status\/2053986985497305195\">retarded<\/a>,\u201d says the leadership \u201cpour[ed] gasoline on the fire\u201d&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Cofnas writes that he made the &#8220;fateful decision&#8221; to go to Cambridge because of the December 2020 Statement on Freedom of Speech, approved by 87% of the governing body, no escape clause. He took the written document at face value. He read the institutional self-description as binding reality.<br \/>\nThis is the move he had spent years diagnosing in others. The credentialed liberal reads the university mission statement and believes it. He reads the official line on diversity and believes that. The gap between the formal text and the operative practice is where Cofnas&#8217;s analysis used to live. Then he stood in front of the most consequential text of his career and treated it as truth.<br \/>\nThe warning signs were present. His friends told him not to accept. He had an offer from a top university in Asia where, he writes, the students do not care about Western political correctness. The Noah Carl precedent sat right there: Cambridge had fired a researcher in 2019 for almost exactly the kind of work Cofnas does. The document overrode the priors. A man trained to spot the move fell for the move.<br \/>\nThat sentence might be the most useful one in the essay if he chose to write it. He has not chosen to write it.<br \/>\nThe language problem is smaller but real. The piece shifts register as the stakes get personal. Section titles like &#8220;Cambridge University: Cofnas Is a Gay Nazi, LOL&#8221; and &#8220;Emmanuel&#8217;s Kangaroo Court&#8221; sit alongside careful statistical reconstructions of McColgan&#8217;s errors. He calls the investigation &#8220;straight out of Idiocracy.&#8221; He describes Chalmers &#8220;pouring gasoline on the fire.&#8221; He cracks wise about the Daily Mail journalist becoming his &#8220;old friend.&#8221; None of this is wrong. It might even make the piece more readable. But it represents a different Cofnas from the man who wrote in measured cognitive-science prose about between-group IQ differences.<br \/>\nThe measured prose came easier when the question concerned other people&#8217;s groups. When the question concerns his own livelihood, the measured prose breaks down and the schoolyard voice emerges. That shift carries information. It suggests the prior dispassion was a posture enabled by his standing on the safe side of the inquiry, treating other men&#8217;s coalition positions as objects of study while his own sat secure. Once his own coalition position came under attack, the detachment evaporated. He started to write the way the people he had previously dismissed write.<br \/>\nMost men write differently when their own neck is on the line.<br \/>\nCofnas&#8217;s sacred values at Cambridge were the right to publish hereditarian conclusions, the legitimacy of his professional standing, and his self-image as a man who follows the data wherever it leads. The Cambridge apparatus came for all three. He responded with the moves the woke deploy when their sacred values come under attack.<br \/>\nThe list runs longer than his allies might want to count. He frames himself as the victim of mob rule. The students framed themselves as victims of his scholarship. He gathers a coalition of named allies (Singer, Pinker, Plomin, Srinivasan, the Free Speech Union) to sign letters and write public defenses. The students gathered petitions of hundreds and then more than a thousand signatures. He mocks his opponents in the register of social-media combat: McColgan as a &#8220;math expert,&#8221; section titles like &#8220;Cofnas Is a Gay Nazi, LOL,&#8221; the investigation &#8220;straight out of Idiocracy.&#8221; The students mocked him in Varsity and in ROAR. He files a lawsuit under the Equality Act. The students filed seven formal complaints. He says his career hangs by his fingernails and bottles fly at his head in Ghent. The students said his presence on campus traumatized them and threatened their educational environment. Both sides perform the same routine. The content of the sacred value differs. The shape of the defense converges.<br \/>\n<A HREF=\"https:\/\/osf.io\/preprints\/psyarxiv\/scmhe_v1\">Alliance Theory<\/a> predicts this. Moral vocabularies are coalition technologies. When the coalition is under attack, members reach for the strongest available moral words. For the woke that vocabulary runs through harm, trauma, safety, White supremacy. For Cofnas it runs through free speech, academic freedom, Socrates, Spinoza, Hume, the Enlightenment lineage. Each vocabulary feels to its user like bedrock truth and to the other side like obvious cant. Both sides are sincere. Sincerity is what makes the routine work.<br \/>\n<A HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ernest_Becker\">Becker<\/a> fits here too. Cofnas closes the <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> by placing himself in a chain of philosophers who were poor, exiled, sold into slavery, and self-publishing in obscurity. Socrates with the hemlock. Diogenes in the wine jug. Spinoza turning down Heidelberg. Hume rejected by Glasgow and Edinburgh. Nietzsche selling 250 copies. That is a hero-system claim. He is not just an academic with grievances. He is a link in the chain of truth-tellers crushed by institutions. The students at Cambridge make a parallel hero-system claim about themselves. They stand in the lineage of those who resisted scientific racism and protected vulnerable groups from dressed-up biological determinism. Two hero systems collide. Each side reads the other as a threat to the cosmic order their lineage protects.<br \/>\n<A HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robert_Trivers\">Trivers<\/a> handles the <A HREF=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Folly_of_Fools:_The_Logic_of_Deceit_and_Self-Deception_in_Human_Life\">self-deception<\/a> piece. Cofnas does not experience himself as performing a coalition defense. He experiences himself as the rational man stating obvious truths against a mob that has lost its mind. The students do not experience themselves as performing a coalition defense. They experience themselves as protecting their classmates from a dangerous bigot. Both sides feel the moral clarity. Neither side sees the structural match. Self-deception is more persuasive than conscious deception, which is why both sides come across so confident.<br \/>\nThe asymmetries should not be erased. The woke side issued threats of physical violence. Cofnas did not. The woke side built its case on emotional injury that resists external check. Cofnas built his on documented errors in McColgan&#8217;s report and on the text of Cambridge&#8217;s own free-speech statement. Cofnas was the one whose livelihood was at stake. The students lost nothing. These differences are real.<br \/>\nBut the form of the response is the same. The framing of self as victim, the recruitment of named allies, the public mockery of opponents, the resort to legal and procedural machinery, the moral lineage claim, the absolute confidence in one&#8217;s own clarity. These moves do not change when the content of the sacred value changes. That is the lesson the <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> does not draw. If Cofnas saw himself in the structural mirror, the <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">piece<\/a> might have a different ending. He might write that he had spent years studying the woke and never expected to perform their script when his own coalition position came under fire. He might treat the experience as evidence about human coalition behavior in general, not about the unique pathology of one side.<br \/>\nHe may get there. The <A HREF=\"https:\/\/ncofnas.com\/p\/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free\">essay<\/a> does not show it yet.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAFO (F&#8211; Around and Find Out)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>FAFO does specific work the academic frames cannot easily do.<br \/>\nStart with what it captures. FAFO centers the actor&#8217;s agency. Cofnas chose to take the Cambridge job after his friends warned him not to. He chose to publish &#8220;A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution&#8221; with that title on Substack. He chose to remain publicly visible during the controversy rather than withdraw and write quietly in journals. Each choice was a fuck-around move. The Cambridge response was the find-out.<br \/>\nThe frame strips moral inflation. The betrayal language Cofnas reaches for converts his choices into wounds. FAFO converts them back into choices with predictable consequences. It does not deny that Cambridge behaved badly. It refuses to treat the bad behavior as surprising or as evidence that Cambridge broke a unique covenant with Cofnas. The institution does what the institution does. He should have known. His friends told him. Noah Carl&#8217;s case sat in the public record from 2019. The Substack platform had a track record of attracting institutional pushback. He fucked around. He found out.<br \/>\nFAFO also flattens the heroic framing. Cofnas closes the essay placing himself in the lineage of Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza. FAFO says: nah, you took a job your friends warned you about and published a piece called &#8220;Hereditarian Revolution.&#8221; That deflation is brutal and might be approximately accurate.<br \/>\nThe frame is folk-vernacular Turner. The person who fucks around is the person who did not absorb the tacit norms of the institution. The person who finds out is learning the tacit norms the hard way. Stephen Turner&#8217;s academic apparatus and FAFO point at the same phenomenon. FAFO does it in three syllables.<br \/>\nIt is also folk-vernacular Pinsof. The fucking around is operating outside coalition norms. The finding out is the coalition response. Cofnas violated coalition norms on race, IQ, affirmative action, and academic register. The coalition responded. FAFO summarizes the structure without the theoretical vocabulary.<br \/>\nAnd it is folk-vernacular Trivers. Self-deception lets the actor tell himself he did not know. FAFO refuses that move. It says: you knew, or you should have known, and the universe is now informing you of what you pretended not to see. Whether this is fair depends on the case, but in Cofnas&#8217;s case the warnings were explicit, written, repeated.<br \/>\nCofnas fucked around in foreseeable ways and got the foreseeable response, AND Cambridge&#8217;s response included real failures (McColgan&#8217;s math, Vira&#8217;s reversal under pressure, Emmanuel College&#8217;s reasoning) that are evaluable on their own terms. The two frames sit in productive tension. FAFO covers his agency. The institutional analysis covers their conduct.<br \/>\nThe frame is useful as a private check on betrayal claims. When you find yourself reaching for the language of betrayal, FAFO is a useful pause: did I fuck around? Did the other party do anything I could not have predicted from prior evidence? The pause does not always resolve the question, but the question is the right one to ask.<br \/>\nFor Cofnas: he was warned, he had the Noah Carl precedent, he had the published track record of academic responses to his earlier paper, he had the Substack reward structure pulling him toward escalation. He fucked around. He found out. The find-out included some real institutional misconduct, and he is entitled to call that out. He is not entitled to frame the whole thing as betrayal of a covenant he projected onto a document. The first move is FAFO discipline. The second move is honest evaluation of institutional response. Cofnas has done the second. He has not yet done the first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nathan Cofnas writes May 11: After accepting a job at Cambridge on the promise of free speech, I was betrayed the moment the administration determined that free speech was inconvenient for them. 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