Theodore Dalrymple's piece in The American Conservative begins with a classroom joke that is no longer allowed to be a joke. Sixty years ago an English teacher said his job was to teach discrimination: between the good and the bad, the beautiful and the meretricious. That older meaning has been driven out of polite institutions almost as thoroughly as "gay" was driven out of meaning "cheerful." What replaced it is not a more precise moral vocabulary. It is a bureaucratic weapon. "Discrimination" now names almost any unwelcome judgment, provided the target can be slotted into a protected story. The Cofnas–Arday affair is only the latest demonstration that the word has been stretched until it no longer needs a discriminator, a power relationship, or even a falsehood.
Nathan Cofnas did not hire Jason Arday, fire him, grade him, or sit on a committee that controlled his salary. He published allegations about the quality and originality of Arday's academic work. In ordinary English that is criticism. Ghent University, at least in the charge Dalrymple discusses, treated it as discrimination against a dead man. The move is the whole doctrine in miniature. Once discrimination is detached from the act of withholding a job, a house, or a vote, it becomes a mood that officials can detect in a footnote. The critic need not be wrong. He need only have chosen the wrong subject. Any journalist who attacks a public figure "discriminates" in the same empty sense, because he picked that figure from an infinity of others. If that is enough to violate an institution's "core values," then the core value is not fairness. It is a veto on speech that embarrasses the right people.
The only question that should have mattered is whether Cofnas's claims about the work were true. Dalrymple notes that further checks have tended to confirm them, and that Arday himself half-explained the "mistakes" by pointing to autism and other difficulties. Truth does not become racism because the author is disliked, and plagiarism does not become a peccadillo because it is common. Universities still manufacture the next administrative class. If they cannot tell borrowed text from original thought, they are not engines of knowledge; they are credential mills with a moral police attached. To say that pointing this out is "discrimination" is to say that some scholars are too symbolically useful to be read closely.
The counter-arguments Dalrymple walks through are the standard liturgy of the anti-discrimination cult. Plagiarism cannot be proved beyond metaphysical doubt because no one can see intention, therefore the charge is unfair. Plagiarism is everywhere, therefore singling out Arday is persecution. Other offenders were treated more gently, therefore the real crime is racial double standards aimed at Arday rather than slack standards aimed at the university. Each step converts a question about a text into a question about the accuser's soul. The last step is the martyrdom plot: if Arday suffered, someone must have martyred him, and the someone must be Cofnas. Reality is then inverted. The man who asked whether the work was honest becomes the offender; the institution that rewarded the work becomes the tribunal of feeling.
That inversion is what "woke" anti-discrimination actually does. It does not abolish hierarchy. It replaces the old hierarchy of merit with a new hierarchy of sacred victims and punishable speakers. Discrimination in the teacher's sense: the ranking of arguments, evidence, and prose, is treated as violence. Discrimination in the activist's sense, the attribution of motive to anyone who ranks those things when the author is the wrong kind of person, is treated as justice. The cult needs the word to keep expanding because the original civil-rights meaning was too narrow to sustain a professional class. Housing covenants and literacy tests were finite. Microaggressions, "harm," "erasure," and now criticism of a CV are infinite. An infinite definition is a full-employment program for diversity offices.
Ghent's dilemma, as Dalrymple frames it, is not philosophical. It is reputational. Uphold Cofnas and you admit that a fashionable appointment was built on sand; yield to the petitioners and you hand a mob the power to decide what a university may notice. He compares the petitioners to the German professors who denounced relativity as a Jewish theory. The analogy is cruel and, in one respect, exact: both groups wanted the institution to treat an empirical claim as a moral contaminant. Relativity survived because physics still had to predict the orbit of Mercury. Academic integrity has no equivalent check once "impact" and "inclusion" outrank citation honesty. Then the safe bet is damage limitation, which usually means punishing the messenger just enough to make the next messenger think twice.
None of this requires denying that racial hatred exists or that institutions once used "standards" as a mask for exclusion. It requires noticing that the remedy has become a theology. In that theology, disparate outcomes are proof of sin, scrutiny of a protected scholar is proof of animus, and the old duty to discriminate between good work and bad work is itself the original crime. Language follows power. When a university can call a journal article discrimination, it is no longer arguing about fairness. It is announcing that judgment is a licensed occupation, and that the license will not be issued to people who keep using words as if they still meant what they said.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/cofnas-arday-and-the-ever-expanding-discrimination-definition/