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What began as a newsletter about a Cambridge professor has since morphed into an international scandal, with the US ambassador now weighing in.
On Friday, US Ambassador to Belgium Bill White posted a statement on X condemning Ghent University for suspending Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas had accused Jason Arday of plagiarizing parts of his PhD thesis, setting off a wider reckoning over the late academic’s record. White condemned Ghent’s “retaliation against an American scholar” following his “accurate whistleblower reporting on academic fraud”, calling the institution “dishonest” and “corrupt”. “We are therefore reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University,” he concluded, extending a favored Trump administration tactic to a foreign university across the Atlantic. (Ghent has two small ongoing grants with the US Department of War.)
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John D. Sailer is the director of higher education policy and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on X here.