Race, reaction and the fight for democratic rights: The political issues posed by the Cofnas meeting at Oxford

 The announcement that Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” whose writings have provoked widespread controversy, is to speak at Oriel College, University of Oxford, has become the focus of a political confrontation whose significance extends far beyond another dispute over freedom of speech on a university campus. Cofnas is scheduled to speak on 17 November at a meeting organised by the recently established Oxon Universities’ Reform Society, entitled An Evening with Nathan Cofnas: Is DEI Undermining Higher Education? Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire has announced a protest outside the college and launched an open letter calling on Oriel College and the University of Oxford to refuse to host the meeting and support the society’s disaffiliation.

The controversy raises fundamental questions about the growth of the nationalist right, efforts to rehabilitate racialist views of society, the crisis of identity politics and, no less importantly, the defence of democratic rights. There must be uncompromising political opposition to attempts to explain social inequality through racial hierarchy or biological determinism. But that opposition must be distinguished from calls for university administrators to suppress meetings and decide which political views students may hear. The campaign to cancel the Cofnas meeting risks replacing administrative prohibition with political struggle.

It invites the authorities of one of Britain’s wealthiest and most prestigious universities to define the limits of legitimate political discourse. This perspective does not strengthen the struggle against reaction; it weakens it by shifting political responsibility away from students and workers and onto institutions whose role is not to emancipate society, but to administer a significant part of the existing social order. The racialist right must be confronted and defeated politically, intellectually and socially—not granted the status of persecuted dissidents through administrative bans.

Cofnas is an American philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University who studied at Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia. He has described himself as a “race realist” and is known for arguing that genetic differences contribute to average racial differences in intelligence. Overheard at Oxford reports that mainstream scientific critics reject his hereditarian position and that the Cambridge branch of the University and College Union has described his work as “race pseudo-science”.

The political significance of these arguments extends beyond the immediate academic controversies. Historically, biological explanations of racial inequality have served a clear ideological purpose: they recast conditions shaped by history and social relations as supposedly natural—and therefore more or less immutable—differences between human populations. As a result, inequalities in wealth, educational achievement, and social position no longer need to be explained by poverty, inherited wealth, unequal access to education, the organisation of employment, or society's class structure. Instead, they can be attributed, wholly or partly, to supposedly inherited differences between populations. This helps explain why biological determinism and eugenic doctrines have historically been so valuable to defenders of hierarchy.

They made existing inequality appear scientifically inevitable. Contemporary hereditarian arguments arise in a different historical context, and their proponents often distance themselves from earlier racial ideologies. Still, attempts to explain racialised social inequality biologically must face the most rigorous scientific, historical and political scrutiny.

The immediate backdrop to the Oxford meeting is the bitter controversy surrounding the late Cambridge sociologist Arday. Cofnas publicly accused him of plagiarising his doctoral thesis. Arday denied plagiarism but acknowledged mistakes in his doctoral work. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, concluded that his degree should stand. Cambridge University later announced an investigation, citing what it described as new information about his qualifications and honorary appointments. Arday resigned and died later in August. The controversy cannot simply be dismissed as an invented allegation: Africa News reported that The Times had separately examined Arday’s thesis and identified passages it characterised as “identical or near-identical” to another researcher’s work. Questions were also raised about claims concerning his sporting and charitable activities.

But legitimate questions about academic standards could not justify turning an investigation into an escalating campaign of public denunciation that destroyed an individual. After Arday’s death, his family said a “campaign of misinformation” had become “too much for Jason” and that he had experienced a “campaign of sustained abuse”. The response to his death reflected widespread anger.

A Press Association report said that more than 30,000 people attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, where Diane Abbott called the campaign against Arday “vicious” and “bitter”. By contrast, Lord Woolley described his death as a “public execution” and a “lynching”. These statements undoubtedly reflected genuine outrage. But the political framework through which much of the controversy has been interpreted—one that treats racial identity as the fundamental explanation for the conflict—obscures the deeper social and class processes at work.

The Arday affair exposes the profound contradictions of the diversity politics that has come to dominate universities, corporations and substantial sections of official political life. Within this framework, social progress is increasingly measured by the racial and gender composition of those occupying positions of prestige. Who becomes a professor, university administrator, corporate director, or senior politician becomes the principal measure of equality. But diversifying an elite does not abolish inequality. A university can celebrate the racial diversity of its senior leadership while students confront debt and academic employees experience insecure employment. Corporations can diversify their boardrooms without altering the relationship between shareholders and workers. Government institutions can promote representatives from different ethnic backgrounds while presiding over policies that increase poverty and social inequality. The composition of privileged layers can change considerably without transforming the social relationships upon which privilege itself rests.

The political right has learned to exploit precisely this contradiction. Reaction accepts the racial framework of liberal identity politics but reverses its direction. Where official diversity programmes attribute significance to the representation of minorities, the right declares that these same minorities have received unfair advantages. Where identity politics speaks of historical oppression, reaction increasingly portrays white people as the victims of institutional discrimination. Where liberalism invokes “lived experience”, its opponents appropriate the same terminology for themselves.

The statement issued by the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society regarding Cofnas demonstrates this process with almost parodic clarity. It claimed that he had been “repeatedly victimised with stigmatising language and structural apartheid by those with institutional power and privilege” and presented allowing space for his “lived experiences” as a means of rebalancing representation at Oxford. The rhetorical inversion is deliberate. The right has discovered that identity categories can be detached from progressive intentions and redeployed as instruments of reaction.

The development of the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society must itself be taken seriously. Registered with the University of Oxford in August, its announced programme has included Andrew Rosindell, Jim Allister, Neema Parvini and Cofnas. Its emergence points to a conscious effort to establish nationalist-right ideas among university students. We cannot counter this with the complacent assumption that reactionary politics will collapse merely because its arguments seem offensive to prevailing academic conventions.

The right seeks to capitalise upon a deepening alienation from institutions whose rhetoric of inclusivity increasingly conflicts with lived experiences of economic insecurity. Young people are continually assured that society is becoming more inclusive and progressive, even as secure employment, affordable housing, and financial independence become increasingly difficult to obtain. Reaction takes this social anger and provides it with a false target. Migrants, minorities, multiculturalism, “wokeness” and DEI become the explanation for contradictions rooted in capitalist society itself.

The international dimensions of the controversy surrounding Cofnas underscore the seriousness of these developments. Ghent University suspended Cofnas in August after his public statements about the Arday affair. The Press Association later reported that US ambassador Bill White pressured the university to reinstate him. More detailed reporting by Overheard at Oxford says the university replaced the original suspension with a three-month measure under which Cofnas works remotely, cannot teach, and must restrict his research to the subjects covered by his appointment, while an investigation continues. These details make clear the need to treat claims of simple “reinstatement” cautiously. Still, the reported involvement of an American ambassador shows that what might initially appear to be an internal university controversy has already intersected with wider political conflicts over academic freedom, DEI, and right-wing politics.

Under these circumstances, Stand Up To Racism Oxfordshire's demand that university authorities prevent the meeting is politically misguided. There is every justification for demonstrating against racism, exposing its scientific pretensions and challenging the programme of the nationalist right. But protesting a political meeting and asking the authorities to prohibit it are fundamentally different political acts. The first constitutes the exercise of democratic rights by students and workers. The second transfers political power to an administrative apparatus and asks it to determine the boundaries of permissible political discourse. Once the principle is established that university management should decide which political organisations can meet and which political opinions students are permitted to hear, no progressive mechanism guarantees that such powers will always be exercised in a way that respects the right.

The defence of freedom of speech must therefore be separated from political agreement with the ideas being expressed. Cofnas has the right to advance his arguments, and students and workers possess the equally essential right to condemn and oppose them. Those rights are not contradictory. Political freedom depends upon both. A mass political demonstration against racism represents the active exercise of democratic rights. In contrast, administrative cancellation removes the political issue from students and workers and hands it to the university bureaucracy. Suppression also supplies the right with its preferred mythology. Movements that seek to portray themselves as persecuted outsiders challenging an intolerant liberal establishment benefit enormously whenever their opponents attempt to prevent them from speaking. They can then present arguments that ought to be subjected to ruthless criticism as forbidden truths that powerful institutions supposedly fear.

More fundamentally, the growth of racial politics cannot be understood apart from the social conditions that make reaction possible. Britain is characterised by immense private wealth alongside declining public provision and profound economic insecurity. Millions struggle with housing costs, deteriorating services and uncertainty about their future. Under such circumstances, nationalist politics offers an explanation deliberately calculated to conceal society's structure. Migrants become responsible for housing shortages, refugees for overstretched services, multiculturalism for social fragmentation and diversity policies for declining opportunities. Each such argument directs social anger horizontally toward another section of the population instead of vertically toward concentrations of wealth and economic power.

This is why the struggle against racism cannot ultimately be separated from the struggle against capitalism. Marxism does not deny racial discrimination or minimise its consequences. It explains racial oppression historically and socially rather than treating race as the fundamental organising principle of human society. Workers do not stop sharing common material interests because they have different skin colours, religions, or national origins. On the contrary, ruling classes have repeatedly exploited such differences precisely because workers share interests that transcend national and racial divisions. When workers are persuaded to understand each other principally as members of competing racial communities, their capacity for common political action is undermined.

The answer to racialism is therefore not an alternative system of racial politics with more progressive objectives. Black workers and white workers, British-born workers and migrants, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and non-religious workers cannot emancipate themselves through competition for privileges within the existing social structure. Their common interests lie in transforming that structure. The great historical strength of socialist internationalism is its insistence that humanity can overcome racial and national antagonisms only by attacking their material foundations and uniting working people across the divisions cultivated by the ruling class.

The 17 November meeting should therefore become an occasion for political clarification rather than administrative censorship. Students and academics should expose the history and scientific weaknesses of racial determinism. Workers and young people should oppose attempts to blame migrants and minorities for the social crisis. They should challenge the nationalist programme associated with Reform UK and reject efforts to turn legitimate anger over deteriorating living standards into hostility towards vulnerable sections of society. At the same time, they should oppose attempts to hand university authorities powers to suppress political organisations. A movement genuinely capable of confronting reaction requires confidence in political argument and mass mobilisation, not reliance upon administrative prohibition.

This dispute ultimately concerns something much greater than whether Nathan Cofnas speaks for ninety minutes in an Oxford lecture theatre. The return of racialist ideas is one manifestation of a broader political crisis produced by staggering inequality, declining confidence in established institutions and the absence of a mass socialist alternative through which social opposition can find progressive expression. Reaction grows by exploiting this vacuum. It transforms class antagonism into nationalism, economic insecurity into hostility towards migrants and social inequality into competition between racial groups. Its arguments acquire influence not because racial pseudoscience has suddenly become intellectually convincing, but because conditions of profound social crisis create opportunities for forces that divert anger away from capitalism.

Fighting this danger requires a fundamentally different orientation. Students and workers must oppose racism without surrendering democratic rights, defend migrants and minorities without accepting the fragmentation of society into competing racial constituencies, and confront the nationalist right without placing themselves politically under the authority of the institutions of the existing order. Above all, they must recognise that the fundamental social division is not between white and black, native-born and migrant, or one nationality and another, but between the working class, whose collective labour sustains society, and the capitalist class that controls its productive resources and appropriates its wealth.

Racial pseudoscience will not be defeated by persuading Oriel College to lock the doors of a lecture theatre. Nor will administrative rulings from university authorities halt the growth of the nationalist right. We must defeat these forces in open political struggle by exposing the social interests they serve and removing the conditions on which they feed. That demands building an independent socialist movement that unites workers and young people across every racial and national division in opposition to inequality, nationalism, and the capitalist system itself.