UPDATE: June 4 — Following the publication of this article, Ricardo Duchesne took early retirement amid an ongoing University of New Brunswick investigation into his conduct and over 100 of his colleagues condemning his views as “racist and without academic merit” in an open letter.

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Ricardo Duchesne is a professor at the University of New Brunswick, a publicly funded institution and Canada’s oldest English-language university. He teaches undergraduate sociology classes, holds tenure and has been quoted in The New York Times on immigration. He is also a white supremacist.

Duchesne’s writings are filled with racist conspiracy theories, and he is a frequent contributor to white nationalist propaganda sites that feature articles defending slavery and eugenics. He has appeared on white nationalist podcasts where he claimed there was a “systematic rape of white women” by immigrants, and his talks are celebrated by neo-Nazis. Duchesne’s most recent book was released by an obscure publishing house whose small group of authors includes several other fringe racists, as well as Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust.

And yet Duchesne continues to teach at the University of New Brunswick, despite his extremist views and what other academics describe as shoddy scholarship and unsound methods. As he hides behind the protection of academic freedom, professors and extremism researchers say Duchesne is peddling white supremacist views while the university’s leadership is unable or unwilling to intervene. It’s a case that shows how, when white supremacists are left to fester, they can co-opt legitimate institutions and public discourse. Like the news outlets that quote Duchesne, the university offers him a badge of legitimacy so he can spread extremist beliefs online and influence students on campus.

“He’s an embarrassment to the University of New Brunswick,” said Kerry Jang, a psychiatry professor at the University of British Columbia and former Vancouver city councilor.

Jang issued a formal complaint to UNB in 2015 calling into question Duchesne’s academic credentials and his fitness to teach after reading his racist blog posts attacking Vancouver’s Asian community over a plan to study the city’s history of discrimination. Other professors followed suit, including 10 members of the university’s own sociology department who months later issued an open letter rejecting Duchesne’s views and calling them “devoid of academic merit.”

One professor who signed the letter said the faculty felt it was important to highlight that Duchesne was also a failure as an academic, with his recent work not published through respected academic journals but instead on pseudoscience propaganda sites.

But in 2015, the University of New Brunswick decided to back Duchesne, saying Jang’s concerns had been reviewed and addressed, as well as citing its commitment to uphold academic freedom. The administration never contacted Jang to discuss his complaint, he said.

In the years since, Duchesne has begun more openly promoting his extremist views as he publishes anti-Muslim, anti-black and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. In one of his blog posts for a white supremacist site, he lamented the “relentless occupation of the West by hordes of Muslims and Africans” and concluded that “only out of the coming chaos and violence will strong White men rise to resurrect the West.” And as white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups gained increasing prominence in recent years, the largely ostracized and discredited professor found a new audience.

Far-Right Extremist Connections

Duchesne is the most frequent contributor to the white supremacist site Council of European Canadians, where he has published 140 posts since 2014. Many of Duchesne’s blog posts are ahistorical opinion pieces with headlines including “Greatest Philosophers Are ALL European men” and “Europeans The Greatest In Everything Since The Beginning.” His other posts feature more unvarnished white supremacist views, including claiming that “Whites must simply reclaim the West as uniquely theirs” and that “Europeans were the first, and still the only race, to become conscious of their consciousness.”

The avowedly white nationalist propaganda outlet Counter-Currents republishes Duchesne’s blog posts in full on its site.

Then there is Duchesne’s most recent book, which he writes is an effort “to encourage Euro-Canadians to affirm their sovereign ethnic right to govern this nation as uniquely theirs.” He admits in the next paragraph that the book sometimes uses “Euro-Canadians” and “White Canadians” interchangeably.

“He’s making white nationalist arguments, that’s what the book is,” said Evan Balgord, the executive director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, an organization that monitors extremism.

“It’s not even subtext. It’s pretty clearly white nationalist,” he added.

Duchesne denied to HuffPost that he is a white nationalist and that the Council of European Canadians is a white nationalist website. He dodged a question on whether he considers himself part of the far-right, anti-immigrant identitarian movement, although he has referred to “we identitarians” in a blog post. Duchesne added that he is a “serious intellectual.”

“We consider Duchesne to be part of the alt-right neo-Nazi movement,” Balgord said in a statement from the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, explaining that he was unsurprised Duchesne tried to downplay his white supremacist views and that there is extensive evidence that shows his involvement in the movement.

Duchesne actively engages with and supports far-right extremists, Balgord said. Duchesne gave a three-part interview in January to The Occidental Observer, a website the Anti-Defamation League refers to as one of the internet’s hubs for explicit anti-Semitism. He also appeared as a guest in a YouTube video by white nationalist Faith Goldy, who was banned from Facebook, Instagram, PayPal and other platforms for her extremist beliefs and promotion of anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. Over the course of his hourlong appearance on her show, Duchesne falsely claimed that immigrants were systematically raping white women and nodded along as Goldy complained that Canada put civil rights pioneer Viola Desmond on its $10 bill.