Cofnas, Arday, and the Ever-Expanding ‘Discrimination’ Definition

A teacher of English told me in his class more than sixty years ago that his job was to teach discrimination: between the meritorious and the meretricious, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad. If the result of his teaching was that we emerged able to discriminate, as discriminating persons, he would have succeeded.

I suppose that it would now be as impossible to return the word discrimination to the sense in which my teacher (now long dead) used it as it would be to return the word gay to its meaning of jolly, carefree, laughing. Those who struggle against such changes of meaning, on the grounds that they often result in the impoverishment of the language, are like Don Quixote or King Canute. 

Even so, the apparent charge against Nathan Cofnas by Ghent University justifying his suspension—that he had discriminated against the late Jason Arday—is indeed odd. Cofnas was in no position of authority over Arday; no job or professional post was in his gift, nor had he the power to remove Arday from his position. He could not have discriminated against him in the modern sense of the word even if he had wanted to.

Of course, he discriminated in the sense that he chose his subject among an infinity of other possible subjects, but one might just as well accuse any journalist of such discrimination who criticizes a public figure for anything. If “discrimination” in this sense is incompatible with those most odious of desiderata invented by bureaucrats, an institution’s “core values,” all freedom within that institution would be at an end.

The truth of a statement is not dependent on the motive, however malicious, of the person who makes it. The only important question about Cofnas’ original allegations against Arday’s work was thus whether they were true. At least prima facie it seems that they were; so far, all further investigations have confirmed them, and even Arday half-admitted as much when he attributed his “mistakes” to his autism and other handicaps. 

An allegation that Cofnas was motivated by racial animus—which some might wrongly call  “discrimination”—could stick on one of two possible grounds: first, if his allegations against Arday were so groundless that no one could have made them in good faith (a possibility already excluded), or second, that the question of Arday’s plagiarism were of no importance or wider relevance. 

This, however, is implausible. The maintenance of probity in academia is of the highest public importance since, however much universities might now be despised by much of the population, they are still the forcing ground of tomorrow’s cultural, economic, and governing elite. 

If Cofnas had discovered and given wide publicity to the fact that Arday had once parked his car where he should not have done (I hasten to add that I am making this example up), and therefore was unsuited to be professor, he might with justice have been accused of discrimination in the loose sense that Cofnas believes Ghent University is employing against him—or have been guilty of harassment and persecution. 

There are, of course, various ways of muddying any waters. As distraction is a good way of treating anxiety, so it is of counteracting any serious, or potentially serious, criticism. And since Man is not so much a rational animal as a rationalizing one, infinitely capable of explaining anything away the moment it touches his interests, the means available for muddying the waters in this case are many and various. 

First, there is the question of plagiarism versus honest or inadvertent mistake. The most severe charge of plagiarism requires an act of deliberate appropriation without acknowledgment, but this requires, for proof beyond reasonable doubt, either documentary evidence of such intention, which is unlikely ever to be available, or knowledge of another person’s mind, which is metaphysically impossible. Thus, the charge of plagiarism can rarely be one sufficient to render a person unfit for a high academic post; and therefore, in making it, Cofnas was discriminating (again, in the loosest of senses) against Arday. In effect, Cofnas was accusing Arday of an unprovable misdemeanour. 

But in the alternative, as lawyers like to say, plagiarism is so widespread in the academic world that accusing Arday of it is discrimination, once more in the loosest sense of the word. Why him when there are so many others? (There is an obvious answer to this question.)

The question is akin to the tu quoque argument: You accuse me of being rude, but who are you to do so, being so rude yourself? Resort to this argument is implicitly an admission of guilt, but it is also an assertion that the guilt itself is of no or little account or moral relevance, since few people accuse themselves of anything serious. So what if Arday plagiarized? There are plenty of other plagiarizing fish in the academic sea. Therefore, plagiarism is no special reason for criticism of Arday; it is, on account of its prevalence, but a contemporary peccadillo of academic life, as bad parking is of modern driving. Therefore, Arday was held on account of his race to higher standards than anyone else, and much more harshly punished than other plagiarists for his plagiarism, subject to much more adverse publicity about it.

It follows that Arday was a martyr to racism or racist prejudice. If he was a martyr, at least one human being must have martyred him: who? And this could only be Cofnas, of course! 

An almost mirror-image reality has been created by those now attacking Cofnas. The outcome of Ghent University’s deliberations, I suspect, will be decided more by an eye to damage limitation than to truth. (While the university has lifted its temporary suspension of Cofnas, the university says the disciplinary case is still open.) Will the university lose more by upholding Cofnas’s right to his opinion (which, after all, was not founded on nothing), thereby upsetting various petitioners (who remind me of nothing as much as those German professors who petitioned against the theory of relativity on the grounds that it was a Jewish theory), or by acceding to the latter’s demands, thus in effect giving a veto of what can be said in a university to a right-thinking mob? 

Here is a wonderful subject for a bet, at least for those so inclined.

The post Cofnas, Arday, and the Ever-Expanding ‘Discrimination’ Definition appeared first on The American Conservative.

Read the full article here