Let Dr Cofnas speak at Oriel

Dear Provost,

I have no connection with Oriel College, but I care about free speech in British universities [as …]. I am writing to congratulate you and the College for standing by its decision to allow the Oxon Universities’ Reform Society’s event with Dr Nathan Cofnas on 17 November to go ahead.

As I’m sure you’re aware, since August 2025 the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 has required Oxford colleges to take reasonably practicable steps to secure free speech within the law for visiting speakers. That includes not denying them use of their premises because of a speaker’s ideas and since 1 September 2026, visiting speakers whose lawful speech is curtailed have been able to complain directly to the Office for Students.

The OfS guidance on these duties tells colleges to apply a “very strong presumption in favour of permitting lawful speech”. There is no doubt that Dr Cofnas’s speech will be lawful. In December 2025, Cambridge University concluded after a formal inquiry that his published views did not breach the law or its regulations. Further, in March 2026 Cambridge County Court found his belief in hereditarianism to be a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010, although his wider claim against Emmanuel College failed.

Dr Cofnas’s views are contested, and by allowing this event to go ahead the College is not endorsing them and should not be accused of doing so. But his views are often misrepresented. He has rejected white nationalism, writing: “I feel no need to quarantine myself from nonwhites (or non-Jews).” A template letter circulated by those seeking to no-platform Dr Cofnas contains the following quotation from a blog post by him: “Whites are the ones who brought blacks out of Africa and created the conditions where they failed to develop a culture of homework, respect for the law, and strong nuclear families. So we’ll need to take increasingly extreme measures to fix the ‘culture’ that produces bad outcomes in certain groups.” It then goes on to ask: “What might those extreme measures he is advocating for, entail?” But read in context, it’s clear that he is advocating for the opposite of “extreme measures”. He is arguing that purely cultural explanations of group disparities would lead some to advocate for ever more drastic cultural interventions, i.e., “extreme measures”, and he offers that as a reason to reject those explanations.

You are not alone in believing Dr Cofnas is entitled to express his views at a university. That’s also the view of fourteen distinguished academics who wrote to the Times when Cambridge placed him under investigation in 2024. “There is nothing to investigate,” they wrote. They included Steven Pinker, Peter Singer and the Oxford philosophers Amia Srinivasan and Jeff McMahan.

The death of Professor Jason Arday in August was a tragedy. But Dr Cofnas is being singled out as if he alone questioned Professor Arday’s record, and he did not. In July, Dr Cofnas set out evidence that parts of Professor Arday’s PhD thesis were plagiarised – although he was not the first academic to do that – and the Times and the Telegraph each ran their own analysis and reported the same problem. The Guardian investigated his claims about visiting professorships, charity fundraising and racist threats, and concluded many of them were unlikely to be true. The New York Times reported that Ohio State University had no record of employing him, although a visiting professorship there was listed on his web page at Jesus College. The Atlantic found significant discrepancies between his published memoir and his original book proposal. Are journalists from those publications to be barred from Oxford colleges too? No inquiry has found Dr Cofnas responsible for anything and the inquest into Professor Arday’s death has yet to take place.

The talk’s advertised subject is DEI and university hiring, and it includes open questions from the audience so students and academics who disagree with Dr Cofnas can engage him in debate. That would be the appropriate response to a controversial speaker, in keeping with Oriel’s Code of Practice on Freedom of Speech, which says cancellation “is undesirable and should be exceptional”. Your code of practice is excellent and I congratulate you again for upholding it.

Yours sincerely,

[Your name]