Does this kind of poor judgment from the NEJM cast doubt on everything from that source? How long should once storied institutions continue to rest on wilted laurels?
Marcia Angell had plenty to say about this decades ago when she left the NEJM as did her predecessor who was fired. It is 100 times worse now. Really, the entire American academic world (of which I am a member) should be hanging its head in shame. Thrilled that those who are good at communicating like Vinay are at least saying the right things, even if too few read them.
The victim fatigue has gotten such that, if I wasn’t paying for Vinay’s Substack, I would just pass on this article. NEJM publishing propaganda like that makes me feel for anyone who ever held the publication in any regard. I’m actually kinda speechless.
These educated fools are so buried in their ivory tower groupthink that they have no clue what these letters tell the public. “We don’t want to know the truth. All we care about is your politics and your skin color.”
And in doing so, these letters reinforce every criticism of academia and medicine out there.
I am not a very scholarly person just your everyday working class person but in my mind this is what happens when we allow fabrications in our children to go unchecked. They turn into adults that tell ridiculous outrageous nonsense about themselves and things in their lives and are definitely ill prepared for the rigors of the real world.
The integrity of scientific journalism rests on the same foundation as scientific inquiry: rigorous impartiality. Every observation, dataset and circumstance deserves to be weighed on its own merits-free of political influence. To recognize that these journals are not subscribing to the concept of impartiality makes one recognize that they need to work much harder to gain peoples trust in "the science". Journals that were once considered top-notch such as Nature, Jama, and NEJM) need to be reliable again . Hopefully, its not too late for them to gain back their credibility.
I am skeptical of the “university system” as a whole and the product it turns out to our society. The impact is felt deeply across all industries. As a 58 year old I have seen this morph and be redefined from affirmative action to DEI but for sure it has permanent effects. At the end of the day the experiment has failed and Arday is a victim of the experiment. We live in a fallen world so it will be hard for places like NEJM to have any self reflection. Will the university self reflect??? The behavior all around of the Rector of Ghent would indicate the negative.
Remember that the academic environment of our leading children's hospitals who are run by medical school faculty harbored and encouraged the entirely corrupt and destructive transgender fiasco from which we have not yet recovered!
In a sociology PhD, research usually starts with finding a sharp question about how society works—things like inequality, culture, institutions, or social change.
You dig deep into the existing literature, then design a study using methods like interviews, surveys, ethnography, or statistical analysis of large datasets. After that comes collecting and analysing the data, and writing it all up as a dissertation under your supervisor’s guidance.
Most of the real work happens in those middle years once the topic is locked in.
Did Jason Arday do all of this?
Yes. Jason Arday completed a PhD in education in 2015. His thesis looked at peer-mentoring among student teachers and how it supports reflective practice, using action research methods.
He ran a small qualitative study with interviews, workshops, reflective exercises and questionnaires, analysed the data, and wrote it all up as a dissertation—the standard research steps.
How small?
Just four student teachers in the main peer-mentoring part of the study.
There was some wider early data—questionnaires from about two dozen people and a couple of interviews with teacher educators—but the core intervention and findings rested on those four participants.
Isn’t this a poor standard even for sociology?
Small samples are normal in qualitative work, especially action research or in-depth studies of a specific process. The goal is depth, not statistical generalisation, so four people can be acceptable if the analysis is rigorous and the insights are strong.
That said, four is on the very low end even for that approach. Critics have argued the study’s design, limited scope, and the way findings were presented made the overall contribution thin for a doctoral thesis. The later plagiarism allegations only strengthened the view that the standard was poor.
I call her "Not-a-Doctor" Jill. I read her EdD "dissertation. I've read better undergraduate term papers. It's also interesting that she got her EdD from the University of Delaware, when her husband was the sitting US Senator from that delightful little state.
Nathan Cofnas’s key Harvard claim comes from an internal 2013 analysis by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR). It appeared in the litigation materials from Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The specific data
Harvard’s OIR examined what the undergraduate class would look like under different admissions models. Under an “academics-only” model (primarily grades and standardized test scores, without the personal, extracurricular, athletic, legacy, or race preferences Harvard used), the Black share of admitted students was projected at roughly 0.67% (Cofnas rounds this to 0.7%). At the time, the actual Black share under Harvard’s holistic process was around 10–11% or higher depending on the year and counting method.
This figure is repeatedly referenced in court documents and expert reports from the case. Analyses by the plaintiffs’ expert (Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono) reached similar conclusions: if admissions relied solely on Harvard’s academic index, African Americans would comprise under 1% of admits. Large differences in academic credentials by race in the applicant pool drive the result—Black applicants were heavily concentrated in the lower academic-index deciles.
How Cofnas used it
In his February 2024 Substack essay “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution,” Cofnas wrote:-
Under a colourblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students… In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach zero per cent. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.
He treats the undergraduate figure as a lower-bound indicator and extrapolates upward: faculty hiring draws from a much thinner right tail of the academic distribution (top PhDs, publications, research impact), so the expected Black share under pure academic merit would be even smaller.
Context and caveats
• The 0.67%/0.7% number is Harvard’s own internal modeling, not an external invention. It surfaced because of the affirmative-action lawsuit.
• It models undergraduate admissions under a narrow academic metric. Faculty hiring involves additional filters (research record, letters, fit, etc.) that are not identical.
• Post-2023 Supreme Court ruling data show actual Black enrollment at Harvard declining (from ~18% in the class of 2027 to 14% then 11.5% in subsequent classes), but still well above the pure-academics projection—consistent with residual non-academic preferences or other factors.
• Cofnas’s broader argument links this to average group differences in cognitive ability and the statistical consequences for extreme selection. That inference is contested; the raw admissions modeling itself is not.
In short, the Harvard statistic Cofnas cites is real internal data from 2013. His undergraduate number tracks the OIR/SFFA materials closely. The jump to “approach zero” for professors is his own statistical extrapolation from the right-tail nature of elite academic selection.
Nathan Cofnas’s key Harvard claim comes from an internal 2013 analysis by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR). It appeared in the litigation materials from Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The specific data
Harvard’s OIR examined what the undergraduate class would look like under different admissions models. Under an “academics-only” model (primarily grades and standardized test scores, without the personal, extracurricular, athletic, legacy, or race preferences Harvard used), the Black share of admitted students was projected at roughly 0.67% (Cofnas rounds this to 0.7%). At the time, the actual Black share under Harvard’s holistic process was around 10–11% or higher depending on the year and counting method.
This figure is repeatedly referenced in court documents and expert reports from the case. Analyses by the plaintiffs’ expert (Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono) reached similar conclusions: if admissions relied solely on Harvard’s academic index, African Americans would comprise under 1% of admits. Large differences in academic credentials by race in the applicant pool drive the result—Black applicants were heavily concentrated in the lower academic-index deciles.
How Cofnas used it
In his February 2024 Substack essay “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution,” Cofnas wrote:-
Under a colourblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students… In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach zero per cent. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.
He treats the undergraduate figure as a lower-bound indicator and extrapolates upward: faculty hiring draws from a much thinner right tail of the academic distribution (top PhDs, publications, research impact), so the expected Black share under pure academic merit would be even smaller.
Context and caveats
• The 0.67%/0.7% number is Harvard’s own internal modeling, not an external invention. It surfaced because of the affirmative-action lawsuit.
• It models undergraduate admissions under a narrow academic metric. Faculty hiring involves additional filters (research record, letters, fit, etc.) that are not identical.
• Post-2023 Supreme Court ruling data show actual Black enrollment at Harvard declining (from ~18% in the class of 2027 to 14% then 11.5% in subsequent classes), but still well above the pure-academics projection—consistent with residual non-academic preferences or other factors.
• Cofnas’s broader argument links this to average group differences in cognitive ability and the statistical consequences for extreme selection. That inference is contested; the raw admissions modeling itself is not.
In short, the Harvard statistic Cofnas cites is real internal data from 2013. His undergraduate number tracks the OIR/SFFA materials closely. The jump to “approach zero” for professors is his own statistical extrapolation from the right-tail nature of elite academic selection.
Thank you so much for continuing to point out the nakedness of the emperor, in this case wearing the fig leaf of the NEJM. The medical school from which I received my degree gave each of us a subscription to the NEJM as freshmen, and I’ve continued to subscribe to it for the past 53 years, though I have watched it during that time descend from a lofty perch as a beacon of logic and reason into a parody of itself. Sadly, it has become emblematic of the decadence of our culture.
I'm so old, I remember when NEJM was actually a medical journal. Sadly, a lot of "prestige" journals seem to be going that way. Woke mind virus, indeed.
This is exactly why intelligent people no longer go into academia & it attracts only “pretend” intellects. Current academia, similar to the popular crowd in high school, are vacuous, insecure & egotistical. If you go along & make them look good you’re in. If you outshine them you’re destroyed.
„Whoever at Ghent made the decision to suspend a lowly postdoc— fire that person”: The attached “Suspension_Letter” was signed by “Prof. dr. Petra DE SUTTER, Rector”.
Wikipedia has the following to say about the president of Ghent University:
“She came out as transgender and underwent male-to-female gender transition in 2004.[1] ”
“In the 2014 European elections, De Sutter was second on the list for the Flemish Green party.”
“As a trans woman,[1]she became the first openly transgender Belgian to be on a party election list.[8] “
“As member of the Socialists, Democrats and Greens Group, she was a member of the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons”.
Does this kind of poor judgment from the NEJM cast doubt on everything from that source? How long should once storied institutions continue to rest on wilted laurels?
How could it not? If they are willing to publish something like this, what does it imply about their supposed "standards"?
Marcia Angell had plenty to say about this decades ago when she left the NEJM as did her predecessor who was fired. It is 100 times worse now. Really, the entire American academic world (of which I am a member) should be hanging its head in shame. Thrilled that those who are good at communicating like Vinay are at least saying the right things, even if too few read them.
We used to call it the “Brown Journal.” And not just because it used to arrive in a brown paper mailer.
It is one thing for an institution to show signs of decline. It’s quite another to show signs of being compromised.
Credibility should collapse much faster in the latter case.
The NEJM lost any semblance of credibility during the last 6 years. Whether they can regain it depends on answering some very hard questions.
They have been doing this since 2020 and that's just when I first noticed. I'm sure it's been going on longer than that.
2020 was indeed an awakening year.
The victim fatigue has gotten such that, if I wasn’t paying for Vinay’s Substack, I would just pass on this article. NEJM publishing propaganda like that makes me feel for anyone who ever held the publication in any regard. I’m actually kinda speechless.
These educated fools are so buried in their ivory tower groupthink that they have no clue what these letters tell the public. “We don’t want to know the truth. All we care about is your politics and your skin color.”
And in doing so, these letters reinforce every criticism of academia and medicine out there.
I am not a very scholarly person just your everyday working class person but in my mind this is what happens when we allow fabrications in our children to go unchecked. They turn into adults that tell ridiculous outrageous nonsense about themselves and things in their lives and are definitely ill prepared for the rigors of the real world.
The integrity of scientific journalism rests on the same foundation as scientific inquiry: rigorous impartiality. Every observation, dataset and circumstance deserves to be weighed on its own merits-free of political influence. To recognize that these journals are not subscribing to the concept of impartiality makes one recognize that they need to work much harder to gain peoples trust in "the science". Journals that were once considered top-notch such as Nature, Jama, and NEJM) need to be reliable again . Hopefully, its not too late for them to gain back their credibility.
I am skeptical of the “university system” as a whole and the product it turns out to our society. The impact is felt deeply across all industries. As a 58 year old I have seen this morph and be redefined from affirmative action to DEI but for sure it has permanent effects. At the end of the day the experiment has failed and Arday is a victim of the experiment. We live in a fallen world so it will be hard for places like NEJM to have any self reflection. Will the university self reflect??? The behavior all around of the Rector of Ghent would indicate the negative.
Remember that the academic environment of our leading children's hospitals who are run by medical school faculty harbored and encouraged the entirely corrupt and destructive transgender fiasco from which we have not yet recovered!
How do you research a sociology phd?
In a sociology PhD, research usually starts with finding a sharp question about how society works—things like inequality, culture, institutions, or social change.
You dig deep into the existing literature, then design a study using methods like interviews, surveys, ethnography, or statistical analysis of large datasets. After that comes collecting and analysing the data, and writing it all up as a dissertation under your supervisor’s guidance.
Most of the real work happens in those middle years once the topic is locked in.
Did Jason Arday do all of this?
Yes. Jason Arday completed a PhD in education in 2015. His thesis looked at peer-mentoring among student teachers and how it supports reflective practice, using action research methods.
He ran a small qualitative study with interviews, workshops, reflective exercises and questionnaires, analysed the data, and wrote it all up as a dissertation—the standard research steps.
How small?
Just four student teachers in the main peer-mentoring part of the study.
There was some wider early data—questionnaires from about two dozen people and a couple of interviews with teacher educators—but the core intervention and findings rested on those four participants.
Isn’t this a poor standard even for sociology?
Small samples are normal in qualitative work, especially action research or in-depth studies of a specific process. The goal is depth, not statistical generalisation, so four people can be acceptable if the analysis is rigorous and the insights are strong.
That said, four is on the very low end even for that approach. Critics have argued the study’s design, limited scope, and the way findings were presented made the overall contribution thin for a doctoral thesis. The later plagiarism allegations only strengthened the view that the standard was poor.
About what you would expect from a PhD in Education. Just as DR. Jill.
I call her "Not-a-Doctor" Jill. I read her EdD "dissertation. I've read better undergraduate term papers. It's also interesting that she got her EdD from the University of Delaware, when her husband was the sitting US Senator from that delightful little state.
Nathan Cofnas’s key Harvard claim comes from an internal 2013 analysis by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR). It appeared in the litigation materials from Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The specific data
Harvard’s OIR examined what the undergraduate class would look like under different admissions models. Under an “academics-only” model (primarily grades and standardized test scores, without the personal, extracurricular, athletic, legacy, or race preferences Harvard used), the Black share of admitted students was projected at roughly 0.67% (Cofnas rounds this to 0.7%). At the time, the actual Black share under Harvard’s holistic process was around 10–11% or higher depending on the year and counting method.
This figure is repeatedly referenced in court documents and expert reports from the case. Analyses by the plaintiffs’ expert (Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono) reached similar conclusions: if admissions relied solely on Harvard’s academic index, African Americans would comprise under 1% of admits. Large differences in academic credentials by race in the applicant pool drive the result—Black applicants were heavily concentrated in the lower academic-index deciles.
How Cofnas used it
In his February 2024 Substack essay “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution,” Cofnas wrote:-
Under a colourblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students… In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach zero per cent. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.
He treats the undergraduate figure as a lower-bound indicator and extrapolates upward: faculty hiring draws from a much thinner right tail of the academic distribution (top PhDs, publications, research impact), so the expected Black share under pure academic merit would be even smaller.
Context and caveats
• The 0.67%/0.7% number is Harvard’s own internal modeling, not an external invention. It surfaced because of the affirmative-action lawsuit.
• It models undergraduate admissions under a narrow academic metric. Faculty hiring involves additional filters (research record, letters, fit, etc.) that are not identical.
• Post-2023 Supreme Court ruling data show actual Black enrollment at Harvard declining (from ~18% in the class of 2027 to 14% then 11.5% in subsequent classes), but still well above the pure-academics projection—consistent with residual non-academic preferences or other factors.
• Cofnas’s broader argument links this to average group differences in cognitive ability and the statistical consequences for extreme selection. That inference is contested; the raw admissions modeling itself is not.
In short, the Harvard statistic Cofnas cites is real internal data from 2013. His undergraduate number tracks the OIR/SFFA materials closely. The jump to “approach zero” for professors is his own statistical extrapolation from the right-tail nature of elite academic selection.
Nathan Cofnas’s key Harvard claim comes from an internal 2013 analysis by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research (OIR). It appeared in the litigation materials from Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
The specific data
Harvard’s OIR examined what the undergraduate class would look like under different admissions models. Under an “academics-only” model (primarily grades and standardized test scores, without the personal, extracurricular, athletic, legacy, or race preferences Harvard used), the Black share of admitted students was projected at roughly 0.67% (Cofnas rounds this to 0.7%). At the time, the actual Black share under Harvard’s holistic process was around 10–11% or higher depending on the year and counting method.
This figure is repeatedly referenced in court documents and expert reports from the case. Analyses by the plaintiffs’ expert (Duke economist Peter Arcidiacono) reached similar conclusions: if admissions relied solely on Harvard’s academic index, African Americans would comprise under 1% of admits. Large differences in academic credentials by race in the applicant pool drive the result—Black applicants were heavily concentrated in the lower academic-index deciles.
How Cofnas used it
In his February 2024 Substack essay “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution,” Cofnas wrote:-
Under a colourblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students… In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach zero per cent. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.
He treats the undergraduate figure as a lower-bound indicator and extrapolates upward: faculty hiring draws from a much thinner right tail of the academic distribution (top PhDs, publications, research impact), so the expected Black share under pure academic merit would be even smaller.
Context and caveats
• The 0.67%/0.7% number is Harvard’s own internal modeling, not an external invention. It surfaced because of the affirmative-action lawsuit.
• It models undergraduate admissions under a narrow academic metric. Faculty hiring involves additional filters (research record, letters, fit, etc.) that are not identical.
• Post-2023 Supreme Court ruling data show actual Black enrollment at Harvard declining (from ~18% in the class of 2027 to 14% then 11.5% in subsequent classes), but still well above the pure-academics projection—consistent with residual non-academic preferences or other factors.
• Cofnas’s broader argument links this to average group differences in cognitive ability and the statistical consequences for extreme selection. That inference is contested; the raw admissions modeling itself is not.
In short, the Harvard statistic Cofnas cites is real internal data from 2013. His undergraduate number tracks the OIR/SFFA materials closely. The jump to “approach zero” for professors is his own statistical extrapolation from the right-tail nature of elite academic selection.
Thank you so much for continuing to point out the nakedness of the emperor, in this case wearing the fig leaf of the NEJM. The medical school from which I received my degree gave each of us a subscription to the NEJM as freshmen, and I’ve continued to subscribe to it for the past 53 years, though I have watched it during that time descend from a lofty perch as a beacon of logic and reason into a parody of itself. Sadly, it has become emblematic of the decadence of our culture.
See also: Scientific American magazine.
'Send your kids to an SEC college'. Hahaha. And right on point! Or to Hillsdale so they can learn to think for themselves.
I'm so old, I remember when NEJM was actually a medical journal. Sadly, a lot of "prestige" journals seem to be going that way. Woke mind virus, indeed.
And people still wonder how people like Trump get elected when the institutions are still rife with this disgusting insanity.
NEJM, Lancet, JAMA--all have been poisoned by bias and politics for a very long time.
Best article since the Bible!
Amen!!!
This is exactly why intelligent people no longer go into academia & it attracts only “pretend” intellects. Current academia, similar to the popular crowd in high school, are vacuous, insecure & egotistical. If you go along & make them look good you’re in. If you outshine them you’re destroyed.
I think there are several medical journals that could consider rebranding as “The Journal of Medical Social Justice”.
„Whoever at Ghent made the decision to suspend a lowly postdoc— fire that person”: The attached “Suspension_Letter” was signed by “Prof. dr. Petra DE SUTTER, Rector”.
Wikipedia has the following to say about the president of Ghent University:
“She came out as transgender and underwent male-to-female gender transition in 2004.[1] ”
“In the 2014 European elections, De Sutter was second on the list for the Flemish Green party.”
“As a trans woman,[1]she became the first openly transgender Belgian to be on a party election list.[8] “
“As member of the Socialists, Democrats and Greens Group, she was a member of the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Displaced Persons”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra_De_Sutter