Dear supporters, 

in the last days there’s more media coverage on the subject of Nathan Cofnas’ hiring. 
Because of that, we want to quote Nathan Remcho from The Brussles Times, as he put it into words perfectly: 

„The question is not whether Cofnas should be permitted to hold his views. The question is whether a public research university in Belgium should be lending institutional credibility to those views, funding their dissemination, and providing them the cover of academic legitimacy.

Cofnas would undoubtedly dismiss my opinion as the complaint of a "woke" academic attempting to cancel a brave truth-teller. That framing is itself the strategy: by pre-labeling all critics as ideologically motivated, he ensures his own ideology goes unexamined. But the inversion runs deeper than rhetoric. He claims the mantle of free inquiry while working to dismantle it to fit his own narrative.

It is not "wokism" to call pseudoscience what it is. It is the defense of academic freedom because that freedom only retains value if it protects genuine inquiry, not baseless conclusions dressed in its clothing. The 300 staff and students at Ghent University who signed that letter are doing exactly what a university is supposed to produce: people willing to think critically about power, knowledge, and the uses to which both are put.

Belgium has statues, streets, and a royal legacy that testify to what happens when pseudo-academic racism is allowed to do its work unchallenged. We do not need to speculate about where the road leads. We have already been down it.”

We, as students at the UGent, are asking the UGent rector Petra De Sutter to reconsider Mr Cofnas’ hiring and remember what the UGent stands for as an academic institution in today’s Belgium, considering the colonial past this country is build on. 

The Brussels Times. (n.d.). https://www.brusselstimes.com/2020728/the-danger-of-legitimising-hate-through-academia