From the Daily Mail:
Nathan Cofnas is a Leverhulme Trust research fellow at Emmanuel College
By ELIZABETH HAIGHPUBLISHED: 02:17 EST, 9 February 2024
A fellow at the University of Cambridge has sparked controversy again after claiming that the idea of equality between races is a ‘thesis based on lies’ and there would be no black professors at Harvard if admission was based on merit alone.
Nathan Cofnas, a college research fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy, published the online blog post on Monday in which he discussed how to ‘build a better world’ by convincing others of his beliefs. …
He wrote: ‘In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0 percent.
‘Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.’
Almost certainly, that’s what most presidents of Harvard believed, at least back when they hired smart ones: getting rid of affirmative action/quotas/DEI would cut the black share of tenured Harvard professors by 80% or more. So that’s why they don’t do it.
I like to joke that just as in the Nicholas Cage movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets, where each president of the United States gets to thumb through a book revealing what really happened at Roswell, Dealey Plaza, and the Gulf of Tonkin, Ivy League presidents get their own book of secrets, which turns out to be a dog-eared copy of The Bell Curve.
But has any honest liberal come out and said this in public? Christopher Jencks? Freddie DeBoer? Nicolas Lemann? Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
My impression is that virtually everybody on either side of the affirmative action issue is clueless about how big a thumb on the scale is required to get blacks up somewhere close to parity in highly cognitively demanding jobs.
