{"id":201266,"date":"2026-08-23T12:21:25","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T20:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201266"},"modified":"2026-08-23T13:27:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T21:27:15","slug":"x-online-talk-spotlights-autism-traits-in-cofnas-and-arday-appearances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201266","title":{"rendered":"X: &#8216;Online Talk Spotlights Autism Traits in Cofnas and Arday Appearances&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A HREF=\"https:\/\/x.com\/i\/trending\/2091552657521402252\">X says<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The discussion arose after Cofnas shared a clip from his TV appearance, where viewers noted his halting speech and deliberate phrasing amid his earlier scrutiny of Arday&#8217;s academic record. Arday, once Cambridge&#8217;s youngest Black professor, resigned following plagiarism revelations and was later found dead; Cofnas now faces suspension at Ghent University. Commenters like Carl Benjamin and Professor Abhishek Saha agreed on Cofnas&#8217;s high-functioning autistic traits from personal observations, while Cofnas himself says his social skills lag and he seems more autistic than Arday. Critics like Priyamvada Gopal warn against remote diagnoses, highlighting debates on neurodiversity and public pressures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">It\u2019s astonishing to me that more isn\u2019t made of Nathan Cofnas\u2019s distinctively autistic presentation and Jason Arday\u2019s distinctively non-autistic one <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/EH5fVOAYM7\">https:\/\/t.co\/EH5fVOAYM7<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Stella O&#39;Malley (@stellaomalley3) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/stellaomalley3\/status\/2091449308063146120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 23, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.x.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">This is a good point. Arday was clearly charming and personable, whereas Cofnas is clearly not brilliant in social situations. <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/QVYvOVKG07\">https:\/\/t.co\/QVYvOVKG07<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Carl Benjamin \ud83c\udff4\udb40\udc67\udb40\udc62\udb40\udc65\udb40\udc6e\udb40\udc67\udb40\udc7f (@Sargon_of_Akkad) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Sargon_of_Akkad\/status\/2091494098691592552?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 23, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.x.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">it&#39;s not especially astonishing to me<\/p>\n<p>the majority of non-autists who like to Celebrate Autism don&#39;t really want to celebrate real autists, they want to feel good about themselves<\/p>\n<p>in other words, they don&#39;t want intense disagreeable hyper-literal pedants, they want pets <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/eWLWlgOgW0\">https:\/\/t.co\/eWLWlgOgW0<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; N. Bourbaki, Professor of Logic at Science U (@d08890) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/d08890\/status\/2091502475509694600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 23, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.x.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Yes it is. I was reluctant to post this for this reason. But we live in a world where certain traits are typically perceived as autistic traits and it\u2019s notable that Jason Arday really didn\u2019t display any of these traits and Nathan Cofnas really does.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Stella O&#39;Malley (@stellaomalley3) <a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/stellaomalley3\/status\/2091469117714735454?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">August 23, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.x.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Autistic Person the University Wants<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Priyamvada Gopal is right that you cannot diagnose autism from a television appearance. Stella O&#8217;Malley watched a clip of Nathan Cofnas on Flemish state television, noted the pauses and the deliberate word selection and the absence of the smooth performance the medium expects, and said his presentation looked autistic while Jason Arday&#8217;s never had. Autism has no single visible presentation. People mask. Compensation varies. Social confidence varies more. A clip is not an assessment.<\/p>\n<p>So set the diagnosis question aside and keep it aside. Nothing below depends on what either man has or does not have. Arday died on August 14. Cofnas is under investigation at Ghent.<\/p>\n<p>What the thread was reacting to survives the objection, and it is a question about institutions.<\/p>\n<p>Universities have spent a decade learning to accommodate neurodiversity. They have learned to do it in one particular form. A person arrives with a diagnosis. The diagnosis enters a record. Adjustments follow: extra time, quieter rooms, written instructions, a named contact. The university writes a policy, trains staff, appoints an officer, publishes a statement. When the person succeeds, the institution tells the story, and the story has a shape everyone recognizes. Difficulty was overcome. Talent that others missed was seen here. Inclusion produced excellence.<\/p>\n<p>Notice what the whole apparatus is built to receive &#8212; a category. Categories can be written down, budgeted for, audited, reported to a funding body. An institution is a machine for processing categories.<\/p>\n<p>The difficulty comes from difference that arrives as conduct.<\/p>\n<p>Consider the faculty member who does not register that a polite suggestion was an instruction. The student who keeps asking why the rule applied in that case and not this one. The employee who corrects a senior colleague in front of a room because what the colleague said was false. The researcher who returns to a question three months after everyone agreed it was settled, because it was settled socially. The colleague who follows every written rule and cannot infer the unwritten one that says do not embarrass this person.<\/p>\n<p>There is no adjustment for that. There is no room to book and no extra time to grant. These behaviors are met in the moment, by people with their own reputations and their own irritations, and what those people experience is rudeness, obstinacy, poor judgment, an inability to read the room. The behavior and the offense are the same object seen from two sides, and the institution has no procedure that can tell them apart.<\/p>\n<p>The easiest neurodiversity to accommodate is the kind that arrives as a noun. The hardest is the kind that arrives as a verb.<\/p>\n<p>This is where the phrase you should have known that this was unacceptable does its work, because it means three separate things that get collapsed into one.<\/p>\n<p>It can mean a written rule prohibited it. It can mean ordinary social judgment should have prevented it. Or it can mean everyone in the relevant hierarchy understood there was an unwritten prohibition and you were expected to understand it too.<\/p>\n<p>A person can be excellent at the first and hopeless at the other two. And academic life is saturated with the third. Which questions are asked at a seminar and which are held for the corridor. Who gets challenged and who gets thanked for a stimulating contribution. When a disagreement is intellectual and when it has become personal. Which colleague you may correct in public and which you may not. Whose reputation is currently in play and whose has been placed beyond examination. None of it appears in a handbook. All of it is enforced. Someone who reads the handbook well and the room will break rules he never saw and will be told that he should have known.<\/p>\n<p>The Jason Arday plagiarism question was a written-rule question. Does this text match that text. It required two PDFs from two open repositories and the willingness to read them side by side. Dave Harris, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon, did it and wrote to both universities in 2023. Jack Grove of Times Higher Education did it and assembled a report. Anyone could have done it. Arday&#8217;s thesis and Paula Zwozdiak-Myers&#8217;s 2009 Brunel thesis share their final eleven words of title, and his limitations section reproduces hers with the substitutions visible to the naked eye. Where she writes that the results should be interpreted cautiously, he writes that they should be considered prudently. Where she writes that it is not possible to know with certainty, he writes that it is not feasible to conclude with certainty. Her sentence about the paucity of substantive research studies in initial teacher education appears in his thesis almost intact. Her sentence beginning evidence gathered to inform this study relied upon the research participants&#8217; understanding appears in his nearly word for word.<\/p>\n<p>Now look at how the institutions answered.<\/p>\n<p>Cambridge&#8217;s head of policy, governance and integrity replied that the work predated the appointment and fell outside the university&#8217;s remit. The head of the Faculty of Education replied that Arday had spoken movingly about racism and about health difficulties during the period in question, and that he had her full support. Liverpool John Moores investigated and called what it found honest and reasonable error.<\/p>\n<p>Read those three responses again. Not one of them is an answer to the question that was asked. The question was whether two documents match. The answers are about jurisdiction, about sympathy, and about a characterization of intent that the documents cannot establish either way. They are social judgments in procedural dress. Every one of them would be recognized instantly by anyone fluent in the unwritten rules as meaning the same thing: we are not going to do this.<\/p>\n<p>And they worked, for three years, against people who had the written-rule case in hand.<\/p>\n<p>The two journals that did respond responded in the same register. Social Sciences added citations to a single prior study across the abstract, the introduction, the methods, four subsections of the results, the discussion and the conclusions of a 2018 paper, then recorded that the scientific conclusions were unaffected. A correction spanning every section of a paper is a description of the paper. The editor treated it as a referencing lapse because treating it as anything else would have required doing something.<\/p>\n<p>So the case is not an illustration of institutions preferring one kind of person to another. It is an illustration of institutions running on the unwritten layer even when the written layer has an answer sitting in front of them, and of how much force the unwritten layer can absorb before it gives.<\/p>\n<p>That has a consequence for neurodiversity policy which nobody seems to have drawn.<\/p>\n<p>If the substantive difficulty for people who cannot read social cues is the unwritten layer, and if institutional accommodation operates entirely at the written layer, then the accommodation is aimed at the part of the problem that was never the problem. Extra time on an examination does not help the postdoctoral researcher who cannot tell that the head of department&#8217;s question was a warning. A quiet room does not help the lecturer who does not know that this particular colleague&#8217;s work is not to be criticized this year. The person is accommodated in the visible system and remains defenseless in the one that decides careers.<\/p>\n<p>You could design for this. You would have to make more of the unwritten layer explicit, which senior people resist for the obvious reason that its usefulness lies in its deniability. You would have to distinguish, in writing and in procedure, between three things that are constantly collapsed: an objectionable idea, misconduct, and socially atypical conduct. Universities are already bad at separating the first two. The third they barely acknowledge as a category.<\/p>\n<p>There is an obvious objection, and it should be granted rather than argued with. Some of the behavior described here is simply bad behavior. Correcting a senior colleague in front of a room can be a genuine failure of judgment and not a difference in cognition. Persisting after a question is settled can be obstinacy. A man may be socially awkward and also wrong, and the awkwardness does not license the wrongness. Nothing here suggests that a diagnosis, real or attributed, converts a bad argument into a good one or excuses cruelty. The distinction the institution needs to make is hard because the cases are hard, not because administrators are stupid.<\/p>\n<p>But the difficulty is the reason to make the distinction rather than a reason to skip it.<\/p>\n<p>Which brings back the thing O&#8217;Malley was reaching for, in the form that survives Gopal&#8217;s objection.<\/p>\n<p>A university has not shown that it values cognitive difference by celebrating a person whose difference arrives as a category and who has mastered the social codes. That case costs the institution nothing and returns a photograph for the website. The test is what it does with the person whose differences make the codes hard to obey, who is exhausting to be near, whose questions arrive at the wrong moment, and who will keep asking after everyone has agreed to stop.<\/p>\n<p>Commitments are only tested where sympathy runs out. Everything before that is preference.<\/p>\n<p>The Arday case is the reason to take this seriously rather than an example of it. For three years the unwritten rules held against a documented, checkable, written-rule question, and every institution that could have answered it found a form of words for declining. When it finally broke it broke catastrophically, in public, in the press, and a man is dead. Institutions that govern by unwritten rule have no way to release pressure gradually, because the rules cannot be cited, amended, or appealed. They can only hold or fail.<\/p>\n<p>That is the argument for writing more of it down. Not for the sake of the people who find the unwritten layer difficult, though it would help them. For the sake of what happens when the layer collapses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>X says: The discussion arose after Cofnas shared a clip from his TV appearance, where viewers noted his halting speech and deliberate phrasing amid his earlier scrutiny of Arday&#8217;s academic record. Arday, once Cambridge&#8217;s youngest Black professor, resigned following plagiarism &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201266\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[43261,43259,42838],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autism","category-jason-arday","category-nathan-cofnas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201266"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201291,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201266\/revisions\/201291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}