August 21, 2026

NATHAN COFNAS: How I Became the Scapegoat in the Jason Arday Affair.

I’m an easy scapegoat because I hold views about race that are controversial and easily misunderstood. I argue that differences between ancestral populations aren’t entirely due to environmental forces, and that some group disparities stem from natural differences for which no one is to blame. I made a widely quoted statement: “Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students.” That sentence has been cited repeatedly as evidence that I’m a racist.

Few people are aware that my statement about Harvard admissions was summarizing a finding by Harvard itself. In the course of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, Harvard disclosed an internal study conducted in 2013, which found that, if admissions were based only on grades and test scores, the undergraduate population would be 0.7% African-American—a significant reduction from current levels. Racial representation at many American institutions is maintained by Harvard-style affirmative action.

I didn’t quote Harvard’s statistic to celebrate it, or because I believe that black people don’t belong at universities. There are many brilliant black scholars. But it’s a difficult fact to face that in a truly colorblind system that didn’t take race into account, there would be a shocking lack of diversity in certain institutions. As I said in the controversial essay that mentions the Harvard statistic, “when it comes to policymaking in a multiracial society, we might need to make sure that everyone feels they have a voice in determining our collective fate.” To this end, I argued for taking measures to ensure meaningful representation of major demographic groups. But we shouldn’t do this under the banner of DEI, which automatically blames differences in outcome on white racism.

Many people have asked me if I regret writing the Arday exposé. This is a tricky question to answer. I set off a series of events that led to a death. If I say I have no regrets, it sounds like I don’t appreciate the horrific nature of the outcome. If I say I do regret it, it sounds like I’m accepting moral responsibility for what happened.

The lesson can’t be that it’s unacceptable to point out wrongdoing that implicates powerful public figures. That’s what I did when I exposed fraud and institutional corruption at Cambridge.

Now, for self-interested reasons, there’s another case of corruption that I object to: the scapegoating of a whistleblower by powerful institutions that refuse to accept responsibility for their own actions.

Cofnas writes that he’s been “flooded with death threats, [and] smeared in countless newspaper articles.” It’s obvious from his piece in the Wall Street Journal that all that ink has placed him under a considerable amount of pressure. In an effort to foster an environment where public discourse is informed, fair and respectful, shouldn’t journalists back off in that sort of situation to reduce the potential amount of “media harm?”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll