Quotas and merit: the ‘scandalous’ Cofnas reminds us that these are opposing logics

Racist, obscurantist, social Darwinist, supremacist Zionist. These are the labels with which, in recent days, the academic community across half the world has honoured Nathan Cofnas, the researcher at Ghent University who lifted the lid on Jason Arday’s cauldron. While it is true that Arday took his own life, many regard Cofnas as the moral instigator. Petitions are circulating online calling for him to be sacked. One of the incriminating statements dates back to a 2014 blog post, in which Cofnas wrote that under a system based solely on merit, Black people would not have attained many of the positions they now hold at university. The petitions fail to mention that Cofnas was commenting on an internal Harvard study which found that, if admissions were based solely on test results and academic record, the proportion of African-American students would fall from 14 per cent to 0.7 per cent, whilst those of Asian origin would surge from 18 per cent to 43 per cent. The obvious is being stated: quotas reserved for minorities exist precisely to facilitate the admission of those who would otherwise have been excluded. The question to ask is not whether this is the case, but whether the entire mechanism represents a glaring misunderstanding on the part of academic progressivism.

Supporters of quotas confuse two different things: equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. The former guarantees the same starting point for everyone: anyone who meets the requirements can compete for a place. The latter seeks to manipulate the end result, prioritising group membership over individual merit, so that the outcome reflects a proportion decided behind closed doors. The former is a sacrosanct principle. The latter is an aberration. Though long dormant, the debate actually has ancient roots: introduced in America in the 1960s, minority quotas were immediately contested by those who believed they were incompatible with selection based on merit. They were the subject of satire in Soul Man, a 1986 film about a penniless white student who pretends to be black to secure a scholarship at Harvard. True to the Jeffersonian principle of a ‘natural aristocracy’ of talent and virtue, Milton Friedman explained in his book Free to Choose (1980) that sidelining the individual is an affront to freedom and stifles the drive to excel. Granting anyone the status of student or scholar not on the basis of what they are capable of, but simply because they belong to an ethnic group, is poor pedagogy. Thus, the standard of the institution is lowered even for those whom the quotas are intended to help.

Equal opportunities and equality of outcomes are based on opposing logics. After forty years of pretending to have forgotten this, Cofnas has reminded us of it. It is above all this that his colleagues scattered across the globe cannot forgive him for.