Nathan Cofnas is in trouble again. The racist philosopher micro-celebrity has a new job at Ghent University, and staff and students have launched a petition to have his appointment rescinded. There were similar complaints during his time at Cambridge, which led to his fellowship at Emmanuel College being cancelled, although he remained employed by the University.
It is probably best that, once appointed, academics not lose their jobs due to their public pronouncements, unless those are truly extreme. An appointment to a university job ought to signify that the institution has made an overall decision to trust the appointee to engage in intellectual activity as he sees fit. No such trust has been established if his words are to be constantly policed after he is appointed.
This however leaves open the question of whether a scholar like Cofnas ought to be appointed to a university position at all. His views on race can be summarized as “blacks are dumb”. They of course come with philosophical and statistical trimmings, but their essence is no more than a claim that some people are, on average, born smarter than others, and that blacks are particularly stupid.
Is this a view that, if publicly expressed, and particularly if it is a substantial part of a scholar’s work, ought to preclude that scholar’s employment by universities? There are two standard ways of answering this question with reference to science, neither of them very satisfactory.
On the one hand, those who believe scholars like Cofnas ought to be blackballed will often refer to claims of an intellectual hierarchies of races as “pseudo-science”. They argue that theories of scientific racism have once and for all been proven false, and that those who espouse them are therefore engaging in a form of enquiry that universities have a responsibility to exclude, since setting the boundary between functional and unusable scientific paradigms is one of the roles of the academy.
Those who believe scholars like Nathan Cofnas ought to be blackballed will often refer to claims of an intellectual hierarchies of races as “pseudo-science”.
As a purely social claim, this is true enough: the relevant scientific fields have by and large declared scientific racism to be a failed paradigm, and accordingly ceased pursuing research in it. However the problem at hand—the hierarchy of intelligence and its relationship to inheritance—is too elusive to ever be closed off once and for all. What we inherit and what constitutes intelligence, and how these two matters relate, are puzzles that can only ever be partly solved, with every partial solution framed by an anthropological understanding that comes from elsewhere. Nature and culture are simply too complex for the cold methods of scientific practice to give final confirmation or refutation to most theories of their relations.
This leads in turn to the arguments of the less rabid among those who would defend the practice of race science in universities. The hypothesis of a racial hierarchy of intelligence may, they maintain, be uncomfortable, and may very well be wrong. But its postulates and methods are well within the range of ordinary scientific enquiry, and universities have no business restricting such enquiry—on the contrary, their role is to give it a safe home in which to succeed or fail on its merits.
However, arguments on both sides which restrict themselves to appeals to scientific norms ignore that universities are not just institutions for the practice of scientific and scholarly research. They are also, just as primarily, places where students are taught. In much of the world, this means students of multiple “races”, however defined. Is it then reasonable to expect (for instance) black students to be taught by a lecturer who holds, as an explicit belief that informs his scholarly practice, that they are, or are likely to be, stupider than their white peers?
Arguments on both sides which restrict themselves to appeals to scientific norms ignore that universities are not just institutions for the practice of research.
This problem must be distinguished from all the excesses of anti-racist witch-hunting and ludicrous performances of hurt feelings which have characterized many universities in recent years. What is at stake here is not whether to countenance claims that using commas or wearing an exotic hat amount to racist violence. A promoter of a racial hierarchy of intelligence is not a moderate being called “racist” by an addled mob: he meets any ordinary definition of “racist”, and would have no good cause for rejecting the label. Moreover his specific racist position is about “intelligence”, defined here as the sort of ability that leads, inter alia, to students doing good work at university. So the way in which he maintains people are pre-ranked by race corresponds closely to the way in which it is his job to rank his own students.
An apt analogy would be the appointment to the management of a multi-racial football team of a man who had an extensive public record of declaring his belief that players of a certain race were poorer footballers than those of other races. Of course, no such appointment would ever be made, because the footballers of the disfavoured race could hardly be expected to play at their best for such a man.
This line of argument is not necessarily dispositive. One may respond that the racist lecturer could still be relied upon to treat each individual student on her merits; or that students will benefit intellectually from exposure to a scientific formulation of a belief they find personally offensive; or that the question of racial hierarchies of intelligence is so fertile and thrilling that any harm to students is an acceptable price to pay. I find such arguments unconvincing, but they at least get to the heart of the matter, in a way that neither appeals to “pseudo-science” nor to “free enquiry” succeed in doing.
Lastly, if we do think it is too much to ask of non-white students that they accept to be taught by professors whose scholarly work declares them to be intellectually inferior, it is not clear why we ought to expect white students to shrug off being taught by professors whose scholarly work declares them to be morally inferior. And for every Cofnas pushing the former position, there are hundreds of academics pushing, or at least flirting with, the latter. Indeed projects like Cofnas’s have gained much of their public support from reactive disgust at the obsessive attacks on “whiteness” enshrined in universites.
“Race” is a crude category, whether it be used to make sense of politics, of morality or of intellectual activity. Isn’t the proper work of scholars to explode such crude categories, rather than exploit them?
