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It’s not about Arday. It’s about the rot in colleges that’s been going on for a long long time. — 42 Comments

1. “Everyone involved with this needs to go, and universities need to rethink their entire curriculum in race studies and gender studies and in particular the education departments. ”

   Why should they?? The left has totally taken over academia. It’s their fortress. There is zero motivation to change. The only way forward is financial ruin for the private schools and whatever pressure the state governments can put on the public institutions. And in the blue states that also won’t happen.

2. It’s about to get a whole lot worse. Just like with DOGE, some whizkid/s are eventually going to set loose LLMs on the entire social sciences. What kind of plagiarism, fabulism, and outright unreproducible hogwash will they dig up? How much? What will be revealed that wasn’t ever read much less peer-reviewed? Much less reviewed by peers with more than a grade-school equivalent understanding? What will it reveal about entire departments of education? Does it go deeper than social sciences? Is harder university STEM research and publishing tainted by irreproducibility? How many undeserved tenures and gilded but empty-headed emeriti “chairs” are there? Will it reveal an ongoing multi-decade fraud of massive proportions revealing the swindling of billions of public and private funds? The duping of millions of alumni and scamming decades worth of charitable gifts and endowments?

   How many Ardays and Claudines are there?

   Burn. It. Down.
   All of it.

3. Like I said in the other threads on Arday it’s bigger than Cambridge or universities. The media for nearly 20 years was uncritically “reporting” on him at the behest of his PR team. They did not check those outlandish claims and they did not review any other media “reporting” on him even to see if he was telling the same story the same way twice.

   And now, like with “sharp as a tack” Biden, Now It Can Be Told how they were lied to and were victims just like us! But the reality is they are no longer in the business of delivering news, they’re just in the business of marketing narratives and they’re just going to keep doing it. They seem to be avoiding the reputational hit that Cambridge is taking, thanks to Gell-Mann amnesia.

4. There’s nothing to be done about it but I’m tired of the heat.

5. We got a mailing from our undergrad alma mater about reunions this fall. On the cover was a student wrapped in a rainbow flag, and inside were details about “affinity” gatherings for special people, which would not include us. No thanks. Plus, surveys show the degrees lead to lower-than-average salaries for first-year graduates, all for an extortionate price to attend.

6. Real DEI has never been tried.

7. There is something to be done about it, but starboard politicians do nothing.

8. “There’s nothing to be done about it…” SENNACHERIB

   Unwillin Bar-Kiss suggests; “Burn. It. Down. All of it.”

   Bingo. The ‘woke’ cancer throughout the educational system is too deep and too widespread for lesser measures to save the patient, which is Western Civilization itself.

9. Place institutions under a committed conservatorship and start firing people. The college president, the provost and a number of his camarilla, the dean of students and quite a few in that quarter, the personnel director and a number of her staff. Then you start on the faculty. Among the occupational faculties, you close the schools of education, social work, library administration, law and, perhaps, communications. In the arts and sciences faculty, you fire every corresponding faculty member of the victimology programs without regard to the department in which they sit. Other candidates for removal: cultural anthropology (certainly those not doing fieldwork in places without flush toilets), non-quantitative sociology, and studio art. Other targets: portions of history, political science, psychology, and philosophy.

10. Good news:

    From everything I read, many colleges and universities will close (or merge) in the next ten years as they provide a product no one wants at a price no one can pay.

    Then add in the lack of children coming up and the US doesn’t need all these useless schools. They will close and I will cheer.

    Meanwhile one of my favorite schools, Thomas Aquinas College outgrew its California campus and got a gift from Hobby Lobby when they were given a New England Prep School campus with great buildings for nothing and soon that campus will be at full capacity.

    They have kept their costs low and and provide a serious liberal arts edcuation.

    That’s how to do it.

    They are also very conservative so Marxists, Progs and Socialists will avoid the place. Perfect. They want to lecture people not learn anything.

11. Count the academic perfidy and corruption in Australia and New Zealand.

    Many here know that in Canada, Jordan Peterson faced it, repeatedly, albeit when he was a very full prof with much research accomplished at the Psych Dept. at the University of Toronto.

    He resigned (or retired?) before the hammer came down via academe. Instead, he had a long running issue over free speech with the government and its regulatory bodies.

12. Ixnay on the Arday.

    DEIsm (i.e. class-disordered ideologies) writ large.

13. I was.talking about the heat.

14. GaltIII has it as right.as possible.

15. Higher ed, as we know it, is doomed due to:

    * Demographic decline of potential student population
    * High prices outpacing inflation and requiring large loans
    * Declining value of diploma
    * Decline of credibility due to woke, stupidity, etc.
    * AI reducing need for white collar jobs requiring degrees
    * AI increasingly providing education outside college

    Even if higher ed had the wisdom and flexibility to change, I suspect these waves of disruption are too many to withstand.

    Creative destruction.

    Some version of higher ed will survive but it will be quite different and less powerful.

16. I have literally seen someone argue that the massive lies are irrelevant because they are not in his academic field.

17. Mary Catelli:

    What does the person say about his multiple lies about previous teaching positions? That would seem to be in his field. Or his extensive plagiarism?

18. AFAICT *everything* Arday has said is a massive lie. I don’t believe any of it, not about when he started talking or reading and certainly not that bullshit about running 20 marathons in 20 days or whatever the hell it was. I barely followed this story but it the stench of sociopathic lying was overwhelming. When he got to the marathons I said to myself “He’s just trolling them now to see what he can get away with”. Has *any* of this been proven?

    And yes you are absolutely right, neo, the story is not really about Arday but those who let this happen. Either appallingly naive and gullible or worse yet, they figured he was lying but didn’t care because DEI. Academia delenda est.

19. The article by Thomas Sowell is a treasure, and he explains very clearly what happens when the wrong solution is applied to a problem.

    Neo’s post from 2014 was excellent (of course), and the comments were illuminating (of course), but the final one on that thread was depressing.
    https://thenewneo.com/2014/04/10/brandeis-the-death-of-cornell-and-the-death-of-the-university/#comment-835936

    A on October 7, 2014 at 7:47 pm said:
    Thank you for this article! I attended Cornell for undergrad, and it is amazing to see how the black students and other minorities (for the record, I’m a conservative minority which puts me on the outs with most of the other people I know) on campus romanticize this event. I started reading about this after I left Cornell, in particular Sowell’s record. Needless to say, I’m horrified and shocked to see how as a university, students have completely blackwashed this and call it a “civil rights triumph”. What a despicable action, and Cornell today has unfortunately not changed for the better.

    I don’t know anything about Cornell specifically, but I doubt the situation has improved over the last 12 years either.
    FWIW, 1969 was 57 years ago.
    I was still a junior in high school and don’t actually remember hearing much at the time about the problems of the Institutes of Higher Learning (we did not have race riots at the local Baptist College, then or ever, although we always had a cohort of African students in that era). When I did read about it later, I was appalled that the reaction of the administration was anything other than having all of the thugs arrested immediately.
    Especially since there was precedent for exactly that.

    https://thenewneo.com/2014/04/10/brandeis-the-death-of-cornell-and-the-death-of-the-university/#comment-757169

    Paul in Boston on April 10, 2014 at 3:21 pm said:
    I arrived at the University of Chicago for grad school in 1969 right at the end of the era of major activism. Nothing of signifcance happened there because the one attempt was met by promptly expelling all the students involved. Worked like a charm…

20. This long comment IS about Arday, gathering up some of the reading I did over the week-end.

    https://freebeacon.com/media/exclusive-simon-schuster-selectively-edited-disgraced-scholar-jason-ardays-memoir-to-soften-now-toxic-reputation/

    The Free Beacon has obtained two advance proofs of the book, due to be released in the US next week, and identified telling edits made in recent months
    …
    John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University and a columnist at the New York Times, is a critic of race-based affirmative action. McWhorter, who is black, told the Free Beacon that he believed Cambridge had engaged in an act of tokenism by appointing Arday and had chosen “a black person with no concern for excellence.”

    Regarding Simon & Schuster, McWhorter said, “That they have not cancelled the book dehumanizes Arday. They should have pity on someone who looks so ridiculous and incompetent. It looks like they figure if it’s a black person it’s ‘understandable.’ That’s about a millimeter from outright bigotry.”

    Simon & Schuster’s edits also make it harder, perhaps deliberately, to corroborate or disprove Arday’s stories. The names of two publicists involved in his charitable efforts—and the names of certain professors and a disability officer—were replaced by pseudonyms, or the names were removed entirely.
    …
    The Free Beacon also previously found that after Jack Grove, a reporter at Times Higher Education, launched a lengthy investigation into Arday in the middle of 2025, the publisher quietly edited an online bio of the academic to remove some false claims and tone down embellishments he’d made about his charity fundraising and athletic feats.
    …
    Edits to one section of the memoir, about Arday’s freshman year at Queen Mary University of London, are particularly telling. In the January proof, an instructor tells Arday, then 20, that the faculty is “trying to determine if this is really your work.” But the later draft softens the instructor’s question to simply “if you are really capable of this.”

    The more recent proof of the book removes a disclaimer on its opening page that “some dialogue has been re-created.”
    …
    Following the memoir’s mawkish conclusion, in which Arday gives advice to marginalized populations, the early edition tacks on a bio that touts Arday’s superlative academic bona fides. In its place, the updated draft simply includes a playlist of the pop songs he has sprinkled throughout the text as emotional anchor points.

    The last paragraph of the story was my favorite.

    It was all very entertaining, because of course these are all “stealth edits” such as the media indulge in on-line with mad abandon, whenever some past rhetoric becomes embarrassing. Given the way that S&S is walking back some of their own rhetoric, Arday is a fitting addition to their publications list.

    The post includes some of the back-story with Cofnas.

    On July 28, a week after the plagiarism accusations against Arday were first published on Substack by Belgium-based American scholar Nathan Cofnas, the left-wing legal advocacy nonprofit The Good Law Project circulated an open letter condemning what it asserted were “entirely false allegations of plagiarism” that were the product of a racist, right-wing plot. Multiple top Cambridge academics signed the letter, pledging their “unwavering solidarity” with Arday. But as evidence against him mounted, culminating in Cambridge launching the investigation against him, three of those academics wavered after all, removing their names. A fourth removed his Cambridge affiliation.

    “Arday was held up as an example of how an ‘indomitable will’ trumps skill and talent, but we now see that will by itself doesn’t get you so far,” Cofnas, who is particularly controversial for endorsing science suggesting race is tied to intelligence, told the Free Beacon.

    Reading some of the posts by Cofnas explains why those bolded parts are important: that is exactly how the Cambridge faculty viewed him, so of course they didn’t believe anything he said, even though he produced copious evidence for his claims.

    But that’s a topic for the next part of my comment.

21. If you haven’t read the post by Nathan Cofnas that started the tipping of the slag heap, it was very interesting to look into the past connection of its author with Cambridge.
    The plot points would satisfy any good scriptwriter.

    First, the post with the proofs that Arday was a serial plagiarist of outstanding proportions. I won’t go into those at all, but clearly they were enough evidence to finally force a public reckoning.

    I was interested in the question of why Cofnas and why now, despite Arday’s long history of fabricated events and fake vitae, and even earlier suspicions of his scholastic pilfering.
    Hint: there was an anonymous tipster.

    https://ncofnas.com/p/dei-fraud-and-cover-up-at-cambridge

    University refuses to investigate DEI star’s plagiarism
    Nathan Cofnas Jul 21, 2026
    …
    I was recently contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge (whose name I will not reveal) who alleges that Arday is a plagiarist and fabulist. My source claims that many if not most professors at Cambridge have known about this for more than a year. However, Arday and/or Cambridge’s administration are using intimidation and legal threats to squelch the story. As far as I am aware, the only mention of Arday’s alleged plagiarism that exists in the public domain is on the personal website of retired Plymouth Marjon University professor Dave Harris. (More on that later.)*

    Besides the plagiarism, there are serious questions about Arday’s biographical claims.

    That has to qualify as the understatement of the year.

    However, it is impossible to prove or disprove Arday’s biographical claims without more direct evidence. Therefore, I will only address questions about his scholarship.

    Here I present evidence that, starting with his PhD dissertation, Arday routinely passes off the words and ideas of others as his own. If one removes the apparently plagiarized material from his record, there is little or no real scholarship. I discuss the cover-up by senior administrators at Cambridge and the broader implications for free speech and DEI ideology.
    …
    When you take away the work that is plagiarized or not otherwise written by Arday, there is essentially nothing resembling real scholarship. There is no indication that Arday is familiar with even elementary statistics. His research involves reporting his own experiences of alleged racism or having conversations with people and providing subjective commentary.

    *Side-note:
    Arday’s reaction to a perfectly normal question from Harris demonstrates his standard modus operandi, which seems to be endemic to scammers, conmen, Marxists, and political activists of all persuasions.

    Dave Harris is a retired Professor of Leisure and Education at Plymouth Marjon University. He hosts a website that provides free teaching materials.

    Harris writes that he first read Arday’s work with the intention of summarizing the arguments to make them accessible. However, what he euphemistically refers to as “oddities” were “so frequent that they dominated [his] reading.” Harris emailed Arday, pointing out examples and asking if he could provide clarification.

    Arday replied to Harris as follows: “Please do not email me again. Should you have the time to spare, I invite you to direct your resources elsewhere. Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

    After Harris and his colleague prodded several journal editors and administrators at Cambridge, two journals issued corrections to Arday’s publications.

    Back to the main plot:

    The Cover-Up
    Jason Arday was hired by Cambridge explicitly to advance the cause of racial diversity. When he joined the university in 2023, the official announcement included the following quote by Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education Bhaskar Vira:
    …
    (Readers of this Newsletter may remember Vira as one of the administrators who tried to get me fired from Cambridge in 2024 for writing about race and affirmative action.)

    Remember this parenthetical; it links to an earlier post that is important.

    In other words, hiring Arday was an overtly political act. Everyone involved—including Arday himself—understood that he was being recruited to promote the ideology of DEI and increase the representation of certain groups.

    You can imagine how Vira, Cremin, and others felt when in June 2023 they received an email from Dave Harris’s colleague alerting them to Arday’s alleged plagiarism. If hiring Arday was “proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities,” what would it prove if the university placed him under investigation, let alone held him accountable if it turns out he engaged in wrongdoing?

    I have the correspondence between the tipster and the administration.
    …
    From the perspective of the university (represented by Rhys Morgan), any pre-2023 plagiarism was irrelevant. It is difficult to understand this position. Arday was hired on the basis of his work. Surely the university would wish to know whether or how much of this work was fraudulent.
    …
    I have heard from multiple sources that Arday and/or the university have sicced the law firm Carter-Ruck on journalists or academics who raised questions about Arday. In any case, there are obvious questions about Arday’s work and life story. The fact that literally no one at Cambridge has spoken about this publicly suggests that, at the very least, the administration has created an atmosphere of intimidation where people are afraid to express controversial ideas. This is consistent with the experience I wrote about a couple months ago in “Cambridge University’s War on Free Speech.”

    I will discuss that post, and the earlier one I noted, in the next comment.

    Cofnas connects all the dots in this conclusion, which is uncomfortable for many people, but would probably not surprise Allan Bloom or Thomas Sowell.

    There are more than a thousand black people in the UK with IQs over 140 who would be capable of doing serious work in the sociology of education. If Cambridge administrators wanted a black professor to serve as a role model for underrepresented minorities, they could have found someone qualified. Instead, they grabbed a random black person with an unvetted fairytale backstory and almost nothing that even resembles genuine scholarship. When evidence of the black person’s long history of plagiarism is brought to their attention, they excuse it on the basis that he was the victim of “direct and indirect racism.” In their view, he cannot be asked to follow the same rules that we expect schoolchildren to understand. I know it sounds silly to say that “leftists are the real racists.” But by hiring Jason Arday and refusing to investigate credible accusations against him, isn’t Cambridge making a statement that the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards?

    There is a conflict between what universities such as Cambridge call “DEI” and something else that they claim to value, namely, free speech. DEI demands that we accept the fiction that people like Jason Arday, who are hired because they tick certain identity and ideology boxes, are just as qualified as scholars selected on the basis of academic merit. But if people are allowed to speak freely, they might point out that this is false. The Cambridge administration resolves the dilemma by siding with DEI against free speech. Faculty know what is likely to happen to them if they speak about the Arday situation. That is why the administration has been able to bury the story for three years.

    The upshot is that we lose both free speech and equality. Equality means treating people the same without regard to immutable characteristics like race, and that is not what is happening at Cambridge.

22. Cue “The Look of Love”

    Ran across a pretty cringey video–can’t find it now–of middle aged white female Cambridge University Education Department head, Professor Hillary Cremin, welcoming Arday to Cambridge, holding both his hands in hers, casting admiring—can we say “worshipful” glances at him–effusively praising him, saying that “he is the best at the research he does,” “Cambridge is lucky to have him,” etc., etc.; it’s quite a tongue bath.

    She should be really, really embarrassed, and I hope that this video haunts this academic idiot for the rest of her hopefully short career.

23. Now for the backstory that explains why the tipster gifted his wares to Cofnas specifically, and why the Cambridge faculty immediately branded Cofnas as racist, right-wing, and controversial: they are correct on two of the three, but the first charge is a subjective judgement; the second is a standard label for anyone outside of the leftist silo; and the third is a situation of their own making.

    (Note: both links I mentioned in the comment above are actually to the same post; I was thinking that another article I read on his Substack was one of them.)
    He starts with an amusing graphic, by the way, which always gets my attention.

    https://ncofnas.com/p/cambridge-universitys-war-on-free

    One out of six thousand academic staff exercising his academic freedom is one too many
    Nathan Cofnas May 11, 2026

    Sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”:

    Racist racist Noah Carl
    How I’m shocked that here you are
    In St. Edmund’s you seem so high
    Like a racist in disguise

    This piece of unrhymed doggerel, along with a petition signed by hundreds of academics, persuaded the administration at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge to fire Noah Carl in 2019. One of Carl’s supposed crimes was writing an article in Evolutionary Psychological Science titled “How Stifling Debate around Race, Genes and IQ Can Do Harm.” He also reported politically incorrect data on crime and immigration.

    In May 2022, I received an offer for a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Faculty of Philosophy at Cambridge. Most of my friends warned me not to accept. What happens if people rewrite the lyrics of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to be about how I am a racist? The fact that “Cofnas” doesn’t rhyme with anything won’t stop the protesters. Then I will be fired and my career will be over. Better to take another attractive offer I got from a top university in Asia where the students don’t care about Western political correctness.

    I made the fateful decision to go to Cambridge because of what happened after the Noah Carl affair. In December 2020, the university instituted iron-clad protections for free speech. The University Statement on Freedom of Speech, which was approved by the university’s governing body with 87% of the vote, made the following declaration:

    The University will ensure that staff are able to exercise freedom of thought and expression within the law without placing themselves at risk of losing their job or any University privileges and benefits they have.

    In case this was unclear, the Statement emphasized that protection extends to views that are considered “disagreeable, unwelcome or distasteful” (as all unorthodox views, right or wrong, are perceived by the majority). There was no escape clause or wiggle room. After 811 years, Cambridge was now a free speech university.

    It was a lie.

    After accepting a job at Cambridge on the promise of free speech, I was betrayed the moment the administration determined that free speech was inconvenient for them. I was effectively driven off campus with threats of violence against me brushed off as not a big deal. I was forced to resign from my paid position as undergraduate examiner. A senior administrator and two philosophy professors (including the chair of the faculty) met with student protesters to conspire about how to “[get] rid of him” even before they had bothered filing trumped-up charges against me. The Faculty of Philosophy adopted new policies to ensure that controversial scholars could never be hired again. I was subjected to a year-and-a-half-long investigation straight out of Idiocracy. Emmanuel College, where I held the position of College Research Associate, terminated me on the grounds that my belief in hereditarianism “amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies.”

    In December 2025, Cambridge published a “Statement on Disciplinary Investigation (Dr Cofnas)” on the university’s website. Leaving aside some anti-racist boilerplate, it is just two sentences long:

    Dr Nathan Cofnas published a blog which provoked considerable controversy and prompted a significant number of complaints which the University, as his employer, was duty bound to investigate. A rigorous inquiry concluded that [Cofnas’s] published views, while seen by many as offensive, did not breach the law and did not contravene University regulations designed to uphold free speech.

    According to Cambridge, that’s the whole story. Complaints were investigated and then I was exonerated.

    Here I will tell the true story of what happened. I’ll only leave out some minor details to protect innocent parties and avoid talking about conversations that were off the record.

    The most obvious lesson is that Cambridge is not a free speech university, and anyone with controversial views would be a fool to accept a job there. There are also broader lessons about the state of free speech in academia in general, and philosophy in particular.

    His recital of “the true story” is very long, and generally interesting, but not really relevant, because of course the faculty of Cambridge did exactly what leftists always do when their stated principles conflict with their actual ones: they dumped the statements without hesitation.

    The main focus of their objections is his belief in hereditarianism (that intelligence has a heritable component that differs among racially distinguishable populations), which is guaranteed to be “disagreeable, unwelcome or distasteful” in any university.

    So: controversial, because the faculty and students can’t abide contrarian philosophies; right-wing, because his beliefs are not 100% on-board with DEI; and racist, because any discussion of racial characteristics means you hate black people period.

    There is no doubt he believes in hereditarianism, but you would have to read his posts to determine for yourself if they are racist in what USED to be the general meaning of the term, before it was repurposed as a label for anything deviating from strict adherence to the DEI cult.

    I don’t have a position on his position in re that philosophy.

    I do have a position on how unbelievably naïve Dr. Cofnas must have been to assume that a statement supporting free speech by a university administration (other than The University of Chicago) was anything stronger than vaporware.

    I also think his conclusionary section is worth pondering.

    Many universities have issued lofty declarations about how committed they are to free speech and academic freedom. But students know that if they repeat certain formulas—“Professor X traumatized me,” “I can’t work because X is here,” “Professor X erased my existence”—the administration will treat it as an emergency that overrides any written policy. The one exception in the Anglosphere may be the University of Chicago. However, even at Chicago I am not aware of a known dissident being hired in the past couple generations.

    Although Cambridge University did not fire me, the administration weaponized the judicial process to keep me off campus while the clock ran out on my contract. To the best of my knowledge, not a single person in a position of authority ever told the students that their demands were illegitimate. As I said before, out of seven student complainants interviewed as part of the anti-Cofnas investigation, only one claimed to be familiar with the university’s free speech policy.

    Western academia traces its origins back to the ancient Greek philosophers who wandered around the agora arguing with people. In most cases there were few material rewards for this vocation. At his trial, Socrates described himself as being in “utter poverty,” then he was sentenced to death. Diogenes was literally homeless, and eventually sold into slavery.

    Throughout history, many of the philosophers who left the most enduring mark worked outside or on the margins of academia. Spinoza turned down the only university job offer he ever got—a professorship at Heidelberg, which came with the condition that he not “disturb religion publicly established.” David Hume never worked at a university, having been rejected by both Glasgow and Edinburgh. Nietzsche self-published Beyond Good and Evil seven years after he resigned from the University of Basel. (It sold less than 250 copies.) Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill never held university positions. Most of the philosophy that means anything to anyone was written before peer review was a thing, or when peer review was much less “rigorous” than it is today.

    [Photo caption]
    Diogenes lived in a wine jug. When Alexander the Great offered to give him anything he wanted, Diogenes told him to stop blocking his sunlight. Pictured by Paride Pascucci (1891).

    There is an inherent tension between the goals of philosophy and the logic of institutions. The point of philosophy is to follow the argument where it leads, even to the bottom of a cup of hemlock. Whatever their stated mission, institutions inevitably adopt institutional survival as a paramount goal. They may reward people who advance the cause for which the institution was established. But, in practice, they will often bestow honor on those who simply promote the smooth functioning of the machine through conformity and risk aversion. People who are by nature disposed to defend the Current Thing can serve as foils for other philosophers. But philosophy as a discipline makes no sense if everyone is like that.

    We now have the absurd situation where the limits of philosophical inquiry are set by the most emotionally fragile students at each university. Except for the libertarians, philosophers who publicly challenge conventional left-wing views have been virtually purged from academia.

    I recently started a one-year, part-time postdoc at Ghent University. I’m very happy to be here, except when students are throwing bottles at my head because they disagree with my lecture. However, I am hanging on to an academic career by my fingernails. I would ask my critics to think about the day after I am banished for good. Will philosophy really be more interesting or better equipped to address important problems when there is no room for someone like me?

    ****
    The “disagreeable, unwelcome or distasteful” posts.
    I think we can reasonably conclude that Cofnas was brandishing blowtorches in front of the snowflakes, almost as if he wanted to test the University’s commitment to their lofty free speech declaration.

    https://ncofnas.com/p/why-we-need-to-talk-about-the-rights

    To win over the elites, the right needs to challenge the Big Lie that motivates wokism: the equality thesis
    Nathan Cofnas Jan 02, 2024
    …
    Why Everything Goes Woke
    When we understand what wokism is, it will be obvious why it is such a powerful attractor for smart people—at least when the other option is mainstream conservatism.

    Wokism is what comes from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If you assume that all human populations have literally the same distribution of innate ability, it follows that all group differences in outcome must be the result of environmental factors. Suppose you truly believe that African Americans and Chinese Americans would on average be equally good at math and equally likely to run afoul of the law if only they were treated the same. With the right intervention, Nigeria could become like Korea, and our inner cities could be transformed into Silicon Valleys—or at least Koreatowns. The persistence of race differences in income, IQ, education, health, crime rates, etc., almost all disfavoring blacks, triggers an increasingly hysterical effort to find and correct the environmental cause.

    https://ncofnas.com/p/a-guide-for-the-hereditarian-revolution

    How to win the elites and create a better world
    Nathan Cofnas Feb 05, 2024
    …
    The prospect of a hereditarian revolution strikes some people as inconceivable and/or even more terrifying than wokism itself. Here I argue that, without hereditarianism, the fight against wokism is futile, and that a hereditarian revolution is both feasible and desirable. “Race realism” is the best term to describe the scientifically correct position. When the elites accept race realism, we can construct a better world.

    And there are several post-Cambridge-termination articles along the same lines.

    FWIW, I don’t agree with all of his assertions and arguments, but I do think he raises a lot of interesting questions, provides a huge amount of research and data, and needs to be answered not cancelled, which of course I believe about all ideological and philosophical controversies.

    I also note, from skimming several of his posts, that he would be as likely to be cancelled by conservatives as he is by leftists, except that we don’t “do that sort of thing” with the same vigor.

24. This is a good summary of his main theses. He skewers conservatives, Republicans, and President Trump along with most of the Left, but for different reasons.

    https://ncofnas.com/p/dont-scapegoat-women

    Wokism is an idea-driven ideology that predates the Great Feminization by more than a century
    Nathan Cofnas Jan 07, 2026

    According to former American Conservative editor Helen Andrews, wokism is “simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” It “appeared out of nowhere” in the 2010s because that’s when female representation at elite institutions passed the 50% mark. Cancel culture—which she sees as a central component of wokism—is “simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.” Women such as herself may be exceptions, able to live up to male standards. But groups of women inevitably go woke because that is their nature.

    Andrews defended this theory at the National Conservatism Conference last September, and her talk is one of the most watched videos on NatCon’s YouTube channel (270,000 views as of today). In October, she published a viral article on the same topic. Many people appear to agree with her own assessment that “the explanatory power of this simple thesis [is] incredible.”
    …
    During the George W. Bush years, Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to refer to ideas that feel true even if they are not supported by evidence. Andrews’s argument is, I suggest, a case study in truthiness. The idea that women cause wokism seems to jibe with lived experience. If you say something politically incorrect at work or school, you’ll probably be hauled into a woman’s office. (HR departments are 74% female.) Woke academic fields such as English, sociology, and Grievance Studies are estuaries of estrogen. The blue-haired female college student is a classic woke stereotype. But there is a big leap from that, which is true, to Andrews’s conclusion.

    On my account, wokism is a coherent ideology. It is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of egalitarian morality. The equality thesis, which says that all groups have the same innate distribution of socially relevant traits, has been a tenet of Western liberalism for more than a century. Virtually everything you think of as wokism is a rational, moral response to persistent inequality of outcome, given the false belief that race is skin deep and the sexes are interchangeable. Over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries, wokesters made increasingly desperate attempts to fix the environment and bring about equality of outcome among groups. But, to the extent that race and sex disparities reflect natural differences that cannot be fixed, the woke project failed. Wokesters were forced to resort to magical thinking about microaggressions and systemic racism to explain why the gaps won’t go away.

    I will address each of the four steps of Andrews’s argument in turn. They are all wrong, except for step (3), which is half wrong.
    …
    The best way to discover truth is usually to have a debate between advocates of different ideas. It is a problem that the majority of women want to shut this down. However, that does not make women inherently woke. Most women want to be protected from controversy coming from both the woke left and anti-woke right. Their lodestar is safety, not race communism per se.

    Wokism Is More than 100 Years Old
    The linchpin of Andrews’s argument is timing. Wokism “appeared out of nowhere” when female representation reached a tipping point around the Great Awokening, ergo the latter caused the former.

    In fact, what we now call “wokism” has been the ideology of Western liberals for more than a century. Women were mass recruited into institutions largely because the white male elites were already woke.
    …
    As I discuss elsewhere, John Locke, the “Father of Liberalism,” first defended the equality thesis in 1690. He claimed that if an Englishman had been raised as a Hottentot in Africa, he would be no different from an African. If a Native American were educated in England, he would be “as good a mathematician as any in it.” For whatever reason, Locke didn’t seriously think through the moral implications of racial blank slatism, so he himself never became woke. But the ingredients of wokism were there in 1690.

    Many liberal luminaries such as John Stuart Mill, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Alexander von Humboldt believed the same thing as Locke. By the late 19th century, race denial was arguably the orthodoxy among Western liberals. It became a foundational principle of behaviorism—an influential movement in psychology founded by John B. Watson in the early 20th century.

    When you combine the equality thesis with Christian moral sensibilities (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female” and “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me”) you get wokism.
    …
    The tipping point for the Great Awokening wasn’t female representation passing 50%. It was when people realized that another generation of affirmative action and Black History Months were not going to bring about equality of outcome. Perhaps catalyzed by social media, the moral panic began around 2012. People started using the word “woke” to describe what was happening, but the ideology came long before the word. Previously it was called “political correctness,” and before that it went by other names.

    The empirical premise of wokism is that all groups—including the sexes—are innately the same, at least with respect to socially relevant psychological traits. Therefore, in a just world men and women would have equal outcomes.
    …
    The Great Feminization may also have reinforced wokism because female influence will reinforce any orthodoxy. Women seek safety in what is culturally familiar, which, in our society, is social justice and race denial. In other times and places, women have been equally enthusiastic about protecting non-woke orthodoxies. They are naturally conservative, not woke.

    Controversy, thy name is Legion!

25. What Huxley said … as higher ed appears to produce nothing worth the cost of paying for it, most intelligent 18 years olds (and likely their parents) will rationally calculate that they will be better off investing in acquiring a skill they will be paid a good wage to practice, rather than a useless piece of paper and a job as a coffee shop barista with a mountain of debt. A teenager with intellectual curiosity about any of the softer skills would be better off going the autodidact route or investing in anything from the Great Courses catalog.

26. John Galt III: “Meanwhile one of my favorite schools, Thomas Aquinas College outgrew its California campus and got a gift from Hobby Lobby when they were given a New England Prep School campus with great buildings for nothing and soon that campus will be at full capacity.”

    The prep school you’re referring to is Northfield Mount Hermon School (NMH) in Gill, Massachusetts, in the Connecticut River Valley. The Northfield campus was left vacant when NMH consolidated its operations at the Mount Hermon campus on the other (west) side of the Connecticut River in 2004-2005. The Mount Hermon campus has newer buildings and better athletic facilities, but the Northfield campus has more-attractive buildings and a nicer location. You can see some of Northfield campus–and the famous Bridge of Flowers in nearby Shelburne Falls, MA–in Alexander Payne’s 2023 movie “The Holdovers”.

    Thomas Aquinas College was given the Northfield campus in 2017 by the National Christian Foundation (NCF), which had acquired it from Hobby Lobby in 2012. TAC admitted its first class in the fall of 2019.

    Coincidence: I just finished moving a very large batch of books from the personal library of a long-time neighbor and retired UMass professor (Romance Languages and Classics) to the Dolben Library at TAC this week. I had a chance to talk with the librarian about how things are going at the Northfield campus. TAC is still working on renovating some of the older buildings and building up the student body but it’s very much a going concern. So: a traditional Christian college solidifying its position in the heart of deep-blue western Massachusetts even as a progressive college–Hampshire College in Amherst–is going out of business. May it be a trend.

27. Women seek safety in what is culturally familiar, which, in our society, is social justice and race denial. In other times and places, women have been equally enthusiastic about protecting non-woke orthodoxies. They are naturally conservative, not woke.

    In support of the hypotheses that women are naturally conservative, consider support for Salvador Allende in Chile. In the 1970 Presidential Election in Chile, men cast 41.6% of their votes for Allende. Women cast 30.5% of their votes for Allende. This was consistent with previous Presidential elections in Chile.

    (James R. Whelan, Out of the Ashes: Life, Death & Transfiguration of Democracy in Chile 1833-1988, page 109)

    So: a traditional Christian college solidifying its position in the heart of deep-blue western Massachusetts even as a progressive college–Hampshire College in Amherst–is going out of business. May it be a trend.

    Let us hope so. I am not a churchgoer, but much prefer the approach of Thomas Aquinas College to that of Hampshire College. Disclaimer: a high school peer is a graduate of Hampshire College.

28. Here’s a video clip of Dr. Hilary Cremin, Head of Faculty & Professor of Education at U Cambridge, gushing to Arday, “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

    –Fox News, “Cambridge DEI professor resigns after plagiarism, resume fabrication EXPOSED” (cued up to Cremin)
    https://youtu.be/KSpY-vzjysg?t=34

    Watch, as she blows up her academic credibility in a matter of seconds. I don’t see how she gets over this.

    Note that she indicts the rest of the board approving Arday as sharing her over-the-top opinion.

    The video goes on to a general discussion of the rot in academia.

29. Huxley, et al.: The academy has become an abomination with worthless output; we all appear to agree on that.

    Here is an additional consideration: Trump and his cohorts undertook to do away with the H-1B Visa program early in his second administration because of that program’s alleged job-theft from American college graduates in favor of immigrant populations–largely people from India; America first, after all. Right? RIGHT??

    Here is the problem with Trump’s position: Potential employers of STEM college graduates (and other-discipline graduates as well) have long recognized those graduates for what they are: Underprepared, poorly educated people who are not fit to perform the work required by the actual marketplace. I worked as a geology adjunct nearly 30 years ago, when I and my colleagues could see quite well that the students coming into our classes were not ready to take on the learning at hand–much less enter the professions for which what we tried to teach them was required. Nothing about any of that has improved, as anyone paying attention to these matters knows very well.

30. Re: Dr. Hilary Cremin’s profile at Cambridge website
    _____________________________

    Professor Hilary Cremin is a senior professor in the Faculty of Education. She co-chairs the THRiVE research group, whose professors and researchers investigate human thriving in and through Education. This includes topics such as wellbeing, peace education, conflict, equity, inclusion and social justice. Together the group has a significant portfolio of research and publication.

    Hilary’s own work focusses on Education, Peace and Conflict, whether this is: inner peace; interpersonal conflict resolution; social / community peace; global peace; or peace with the planet and non-human species. Her book Positive Peace in Schools with Terence Bevington outlines a framework for peace education in schools and communities. It forms the basis for her most recent peace education research project – the Cambridge Positive Peace Hub – which is creating an interactive digital platform for schools globally whilst supporting a global network of peace educators, researchers, policy-makers, visionaries and young people.

    Hilary’s most recent book Rewilding Education calls for an urgent global conversation about the aims and purposes of education in times of existential crisis. It proposes radical change, moving from education as monoculture to education as ecosystem. Learning in and through Nature, and in embodied and contextualised ways are highlighted in case studies from around the world.

    Hilary uses the arts, auto ethnography and poetry in her research. She welcomes approaches from collaborators also interested in these methods and ideas.

    https://faculty.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/cremin#profile
    _____________________________

    Sounds like a 60s/70s free school teacher.

31. huxley: Hilary’s most recent book Rewilding Education …

    So, she’s a homeschooling advocate.

32. Cretin.

    (Though I’m sure she’s an absolutely wonderful person: caring, thoughtful, considerate to a fault, intelligent, articulate, friendly, helpful…well, we all have our blind spots….)

33. What that’s telling is is that the ‘faculty of education’ at Cambridge should not exist. The whole lot should be fired at Cambridge and everywhere else.
    ==

34. I would be quite wary of Cofnas.

35. Here is another story about the sewer that is “higher education.” This sewer is Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/09/elite-academia-leadership-hypocrisy/687969/

36. Attitudes toward Israel on the part of academics teaching Judaism, Israel, Hebrew, and the Holocaust:

    https://x.com/MaxAbrahms/status/2087351189838967078

37. Has anybody seen a better proposal than a 30% quota of D & R professors? Or else lose the tax benefits the govt gives to non-partisan colleges.

    We need to talk more about policies to reduce the well known problems.

38. According to ChatGPT Cambridge has options in responding to Cremin and other Cambridge professionals. (I’ve omitted the summaries of each option.):
    __________________________________________

    [U Cambridge has] a fairly broad spectrum of possible outcomes for Cremin and the other people involved:

    * Nothing formally disciplinary.
    * Institutional criticism without personal sanctions.
    * Loss of administrative positions.
    * Formal reprimand or other disciplinary action.
    * Resignation.
    * Dismissal in an extreme case.

39. A man in my position can’t afford to look ridiculous.
    — Jack Woltz, “The Godfather” (1972)
    __________________________________

    One can learn a lot about power dynamics by watching GF.

    This is why I think the Arday scandal expands further to include U Cambridge, if not academia in general. The Arday scandal contains so many outlandish claims that just about everyone gets the joke and enjoys laughing about it.

    Not something Cambridge can be happy about or ignore. It’s one thing to be controversial and argue about plagiarism counts; it’s another to be the butt of a joke that has reached the front pages.

    A university in Cambridge’s position can’t afford to look ridiculous.

40. A university in Cambridge’s position can’t afford to look ridiculous.

    Will that result in jokes about Cambridge being classified as hate crimes? 🙂

    One of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is to ridicule your opponent.

41. @ Art Deco > “I would be quite wary of Cofnas.”

    I agree completely. However, I was intrigued by the fact that he was the one “breaking” the wall protecting Arday, and wondered who he was and what connection he had with Cambridge.

42. Remembering the video I found of Professor Crimin’s worshipful, adoring welcome of Jason Arday to Cambridge–the looks she was giving him, and the vibe of the whole thing–I believe that this comment, about “white women and their “Mandingo fantasies,”” may have hit the mark.*

    * See https://x.com/PatriarchTree/status/2087620432111317160?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2087620432111317160%7Ctwgr%5Ea285052aba49f53abb8c76afe691ea1c78e4e5f4%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F816442%2F

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