It’s not about Arday. It’s about the rot in colleges that’s been going on for a long long time.
I don’t know how far the rot extends to other countries, but it’s certainly pervasive in the US and Britain. I suspect it’s even worse at elite institutions than at institutions that once were thought of as being of lesser quality.
The scandal of the Arday story isn’t really about Arday, it’s more about his fawning enablers. But even that isn’t broad enough, because it’s about an entire system that let this happen. For it’s not just a story about plagiarism getting past a committee. Nor is it just a DEI story about race and neurodiversity, although it’s about that as well. It’s not even just about a fabulist whose lies were so obvious no one should have believed them. Primarily it’s a story about universities that have utterly lost their way. The reason I say that is that the people who have actually read Arday’s academic work or listened to speeches he’s given have concluded that the content itself is garbage – and that includes both the plagiarized parts and the parts he seems to have composed. Unintelligible, ungrammatical, meaningless sloganeering.
Arday should not have been hired as a professor anywhere, much less at Cambridge. And yet he was not only hired, but praised to the skies in an almost ecstatic frenzy.
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. It’s of absolutely zero surprise that the Arday affair involved the education department of Cambridge. Education departments have always had less rigorous scholarship than most other departments, but in recent years they have become deeply political and deeply woke.
Will this happen? To put it bluntly: no.
[NOTE: These trends were already starting in the 1960s. I’ve written many times about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind as well as the 1969 Cornell uprising. Here are some previous posts and an article on the subjects: this list as well as this post and this account by Thomas Sowell.]
“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.
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.
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.
There’s nothing to be done about it but I’m tired of the heat.
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.
Real DEI has never been tried.