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 plagiarising 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 favoured Trump administration tactic to a foreign university across the Atlantic. (Ghent has two small ongoing grants with the US Department of War.)

Ghent has now become the unlikely battleground for the latest clash between two competing visions of academic freedom. One sees academic freedom as a special form of free expression: the individual right of academics to pursue their research and speak their minds without fear of punishment. By this definition, Ghent University’s punishment of Cofnas for his controversial views about race and IQ — and for writing his whistleblower account of the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday — constitutes an egregious violation of academic freedom. This is the position taken by free speech absolutists.

Another view, which has gained ground during the second Trump administration, might be called “institutional absolutism”. Adopted by groups like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), this view takes academic freedom to be a collective right, the right of faculty to govern “the core functions of their disciplines”. This right is violated when an outside entity, such as a donor or government agency, attempts to bypass faculty and dictate matters of curricula, research, and personnel.

For the institutional absolutists, suspending a professor for their unpopular views doesn’t necessarily violate academic freedom, as long as it’s done by a self-governing academic body. As I reported earlier this summer, one fellow at the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom argued that the University of Pennsylvania’s decision to punish Amy Wax — a case similar to Cofnas’s — was an “example of the process of academic freedom”.

In theory, the institutional absolutists should have a reason to be sceptical of Cofnas’s punisher. It turns out that Ghent University’s rector, Petra De Sutter, previously served as both a member of the European Parliament and Belgian Deputy Prime Minister. In other contexts, such an appointment might be viewed as a suspicious melding of politics and academia.

But now that the US ambassador has weighed in, Ghent is one more example of a university being pressured by a government entity — and an unprecedented one, coming from a foreign government. The affair has seemed to turn reality on its head more than once. At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising to hear Cofnas’s critics defend his eventual firing as doubly “the process of academic freedom”.