Now is surely the perfect time to remind ourselves that some of the very best critics of Critical Race Theory and DEI policies in the world are themselves black e.g. Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter etc. It’s also worth remembering that they often point to earlier often much less educated black thinkers than themselves who, despite living in much more explicitly racist social conditions than those of today, were nevertheless perfectly capable of criticising and rejecting the sort of misguided ideas propounded by the current CRT/DEI crowd.
Thanks for the SSP recommendation. In an interview, Thomas Sowell specifically named ‘A Conflict of Visions’ as the work he is most proud of from an intellectual standpoint, alongside his book on Say’s Law. The former explains very clearly and persuasively why the world is so irreconcilably divided. Essential reading.
In focusing on “Arday’s scholarly integrity” this article doesn’t deal with the bigger and more-important issue, which is that, even if all of Arday’s work were entirely legitimate, with no plagiarism or inventing of quotes, there is still nothing worthwhile there! It’s all bad, poorly written, with no analysis or insight. There is only his musings on his own “lived experience” and his musings on the lived experience of some people he interviewed. There is nothing resembling proper scholarship or actual, evidence-based advances in understanding. And all of that would be apparent to anyone who read his work. And yet he was lauded as a “world class” scholar by many other academics. Surely that is the most important aspect.
That is correct. You have correctly spotted that that is not what this piece is about.
If you would like to read me on the awfulness of this kind of scholarship, my book Cynical Theories is the most indepth consideration of that. You could also have a look at the academic papers we wrote in our sting operation to expose how bad they were.
Might be true of this post, but Pluckrose has done more than her fair share to expose the flaws & overall low quality of the sort of "scholarship" that Arday pretended to do.
Arday's quote from the 2023 Guardian interview that challenged him on some of his achievements, Arday replied "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me. Why would I lie?"
This sounds to me like it was all these institutions were the ones pushing this fame more than Arday himself, as many of Arday's "supporters" are now hastily removing their names from a letter supporting him- a very self-serving action. I've read that Arday is a pleasant person. It would be nice if he had some real friends on his side to help him, the individual, not the icon he became.
I hope he has. He is not the Messiah, just a very naughty boy. It should not be allowed to ruin his life. As he said, he has not murdered anyone. But indirectly he may have done harm to whistleblowers and his critics. He is probably “more sinned against than sinning”. I hope fate will be kinder to him than it was to Lear.
Thank you Helen for such a painstaking and lucid appraisal. I have commented elsewhere on Substack in response to an earlier post of yours before I read this latest one of yours. I have also watched today a video of Professor Andrews with his customary hyperbole complaining about Birmingham’s axeing of his Black Studies department. I have not heard the University’s side but my initial reaction is that he should be challenged about his theories and not cancelled.
Always. He is a deeply unpleasant character and a bully. He tried to sink Tom Owolade’s book by lying about it and twisting it and causing a pile-on. Appalling behaviour from a senior black academic to a very young (but brilliant) black writer. Fortunately Tom seemed to deal with this just fine, but I was worried he could have been badly intimidated by that. I’m hoping Tom will become an influential voice on race issues and I think Andrew’s feared it.
I read this book too but did not pick up on the hoohah. Perhaps Brum just ran out of patience.
When I was at university the college had a likeable but very left wing economics Don. In that era lefties in the faculty (not so in the student cohort) were rare and suspicious—it was only just over a decade after Philby et al!
(I did law not economics like my third year room mate).
This was the bearded and splendidly be-turbaned Dr Ajit Singh. Predictably his nickname was “Agitprop”.
I strongly sensed that at least one use of the phrase ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’ was imminent throughout my reading of this piece and had almost given up hope until just before the end. Thank you for providing me with the lived experience to now claim that I have the power to foresee the future.
On my own Facebook profile, I had this to say about the recent article in the Guardian about Arday to which you linked: 'If the people in charge had scrutinized Arday instead of giving him a pass because he was Black (talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations! ), then there wouldn't have been the additional embarrassment of having Arday uncovered by a so-called "race realist."'
By coincidence (?), The Eternally Radical Idea had a post about the importance of viewpoint diversity: https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/what-happened-to-the-aaup-and-why. I suspect that if Cambridge had more viewpoint diversity, it would have beaten Cofnas to the punch, or have refused to hire Arday at all.
Judging from your response, you apparently did not read all the way until the end of the sentence, which makes it clear that Cambridge likely *didn't* have enough viewpoint diversity.
I doubt that most of the critical race theory/woke defenders of Arday would've defended him to such a degree if he were a white guy. Most of the CRT proponents I've seen tend to completely ignore the actual specifics of his cancellation and only focus on the character of the people trying to cancel him or try to tie his cancellation into "systematic racism" claims, which already assume all the allegations are illegitimate.
I think one piece of the puzzle we need to look at is how few true believers there probably are - and how much it is moral and intellectual cowardice is that fills the gaps here
It is beyond credibility that those working with and around Ardey did not realise that even by the laughable standards of the field the man was a fraud and a fake. I don't really believe that every one of those is a true fervent believer in viewpoint epistemology to the extent that they believe there is some inherent truthiness to his words even when they are entirely unrelated to reality.
Far more of them are simply moral and intellectual cowards. They go along with it for an easy life, they go along with it because the true believers are vicious and they don't want the fuss or the risk to their career. It is this silent cowardly majority that really define why academia has always fallen to nonsense and always will. After all this quote comes from way before most of our lifetimes and is as perfect a summary of the situation as you could find. The academic method with peer review and the processes of promotion in academia all but guarantee that it will be dominated by conformists who lack intellectual courage.
"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." - George Orwell, 1945
It was true then, it is true now. The exact form of idiocy that will overtake our idiocracy of an intelligentsia will change over time, their excuses for why they have to go along with it will vary with circumstances, but the pattern retains eternal. The only way to reform that is to fundamentally reform the processed that are used to reinforce it - and that themselves attract and promote the sort of people who will be like this and those who will exploit this.
I'm going to echo Coel Hellier's comment in this thread and re-post a comment I made on this sad and sorry affair :
"I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The whole thing is like some comedy sketch. Arday himself clearly has some issues and a somewhat tenuous relationship to truth.
As an ex-academic (theoretical physics) I don't always take too much of an issue with plagiarism when it's a matter of mere phrasing. It's still wrong, but copying someone else's explanation of a known concept or known research or, ahem, borrowing their phrasing without attribution is relatively minor. Still wrong though.
Where it's a (very) serious issue is when you take someone's original research or insight or results and pass them off as your own. In my view that should warrant instant dismissal.
The deeper issue for me is not so much integrity (although that's obviously very important) but one of *quality*.
I have no intention of reading any of Arday's work - life is far too short - and will trust Cofnas' assessment of it. The thing here is that the work itself does not even come remotely close to anything I would consider to be at "professorial" level. I'd be even harsher to be honest. I don't even see why it should have been published in academic journals at all, falling way below the standards of academic rigour and methodology I would expect.
So the big question - to which we all know the answer - is how on earth did he get away with it?"
Coel is right. Although the plagiarism accusations are (potentially) very serious, as is the accusation that he copied/fabricated some of his 'research' data (i.e. the interviews he conducted), the *real* issue is how in the name of Cambridge's musty underwear did such work EVER get judged to be at professorial level?
I suppose after seeing so many examples of absurd-level surrealism presented as 'scholarship' in academia by now I shouldn't be too surprised. Ironically, it was this ridiculous absurdity that you and your colleagues thoroughly exposed and yet it still goes on.
OK there is another aspect to this unrelated to the things most people are discussing which you correctly point out
I looked at one of the other papers being criticised and it was an autoethnobiographical piece.
The problem is that this worthless approach is a cheap way to get published. This is basically cargo cult academic work - it has the surface appearance of being academic but is inherently worthless.
Its value is exactly zero. Well OK I will concede in a certain infinite-researchers / infinite-keyboards sort of way that its possible that something of small value might in principle be produced this way before the heat death of the universe.
But those around him, those recruiting him, are engaging in this nonsense so they are in no position to call out the nonsense for the worthless waste of time it is. They are all in it together and they all know they are vulnerable because its such obvious bullshit to anyone outside their bubble who takes a moment to look into it. Its just a cheap worthless way to pad out their list of peer reviewed publications. It has no more value than AI slop but they are all in it and they therefore all have to defend it.
And your title is perfect. A story too good to question indeed.
Which points to an old fault of our academic institutions (which I love) -- a inherent fault that has persisted through the ages, and which the intellectual trends of the last 30 years have transformed into a deathly sickness.
Universities are built on prestige and are inherently conservative institutions. Prestige is a form of power from which cascade a number of advantages, both material and immaterial, which also contribute to the production of outstanding research and advances in knowledge -- alongside a lot of pure rubbish.
But this means that Universities tend, despite their commitment to the search for truth, to embrace the common wisdom of their members about what's "done" and what's "not done", and to impose its standards, and to extol the stories that are "too good to question": those that increase prestige, a very finite resource.
This quest for prestige is something that in the past, for a vast number of different reasons and under sundry winds, also caused a number of poor scholars to be established as excellent, and not a little of poor scholarship to be published without much review, because they came from or swam in the right circle, because they brought prestige to the University.
This did not work so badly until the mentioned three decades past. Established knowledge was what constituted the bulk of prestige, and it was hard to budge, which forced new ideas to fight harder and refine themselves in order to be accepted and become the next established knowledge.
But once the established knowledge (aka: the common wisdom of the professoriat based on the external and internal social pressures) becomes that there must be no established knowledge... what remains is only the prestige. And the quest for prestige is an old habit.
For almost 15 years now I have been watching our cultural institutions play a game of one-upmanship on displaying exhibits that constitute a presumed source of social prestige.
I am very afraid that these debacles will become increasingly more numerous. Like you said in your essay yesterday, the work, to re-create the means and structures that generate reality-based established knowledge, will be long and hard.
An anecdote springs to mind. When Albert Speer proudly invited his architect father to view his scale model of the proposed "new Berlin," the elder Speer stood there in silence for only a few seconds before uttering, "You have all gone mad." The younger Speer needed to hear that, but was no longer capable of absorbing and acting on an honest assessment of the situation.
Why did it take outsiders to reveal the truth about Arday? Was there no one in all of Cambridge, LJMU, Durham University, University of Glasgow. all of Simon & Schuster, Princeton University Press, and Routledge capable of grasping the truth? Or had they all gone mad?
There were a number, at Cambridge and in other institutions, who raised questions since 2023, Prof David Harris in specific, and Prof Martyn Hammersley. They were dismissed and silenced -- and Harris was reported to the police for harassment by Arday (invoking harassment, racism and ableism seems to have been the normal way that any question into Arday was handled).
It is no madness, but it is a sickness of the mind I believe, and one that does obliterate the ability to use reason in an articulate manner.
For the publishers, it is not that, it is a matter of profit. That book will sell, according to their projections, and it will sell well. That is all that is there for them. They have no commitment to truth, it is not their function.
But for the Universities, for most of our cultural institutions, and a part of society who should have a commitment to truth, it is that.
We may call it a madness if you wish -- but it is not of the raving kind, it is a madness that works in oddly logical ways.
It is the madness of blind belief, the same that Herr Speer embraced, and hundred of thousands like him in every stripe and colour all over the world and all across history. Belief in an ideology, in a destiny, or in the revealed word of a religion -- never mind which, the motivation of this belief is the same: the need to feel good and be approved of, with or without a corollary of satisfying personal rage or resentment.
Blind belief possesses as its main feature an impermeability to evidence, and an infinite capacity for assuming any refuting evidence as false or at the very least irrelevant.
There have been undoubtedly bad actors pursuing personal interests, in this sad and disgraceful story in which a man ultimately lost his life.
But the University establishments, in the majority I think, believed and blinded themselves. They saw a man that embodied the Antiracist creed (a doctrine that bears little resemblance with diminishing racism) and whatever he fed them they ate; they pushed him (especially if he was mentally fragile like some people with our supposedly shared condition are) to feed them with impunity more and more absurdities that increased the hero-myth built around him. It is the way of cults.
And there are forms of insanity in cults, which one only can see from the outside. But the people involved in them still have agency and bear responsibility.
The talk about Arday's death and the excessive focus of the press on his case, shifts the issue to passing the blame, sidestepping the reason why it became such a big case in any way.
It was not, it is not, a matter of a supposedly obscure (hyper-celebrated star academic) whose every word got picked apart by cruel people intent on hating on the achievements of a black man.
It became a big case because it is epitomatic of the ideological disease that has metastasised in most of the cultural institutions of the English-speaking world. A disease that destroys academic reliability and attacks the very roots of the search for truth, a disease that creates men like Arday and then close ranks against evidence until they are destroyed and beyond.
You and I could only see self-defeating madness. But the believers see their Truth, which needs no evidence.
Yet another “isolated” case that should surprise no one. History repeats itself so often that somewhere there must be a form to fill out with a name (which does not even have to be the real one), fabricated qualifications, as well as virtues and heroic deeds. There must also be a large field for listing victimhood claims and the corresponding aggressive reactions justified by “inequality.” I foresee an infestation of this profile in the academic world (a shortcut to becoming an authority on anything), because now, with AI, there is no longer even any need to plagiarize anyone. And I will go further: universities will BAN the use of software that identifies the use of AI, so as not to expose wrongdoers to embarrassing situations.
Arday is the product of vainglorious academics looking for cheap applause. People out here in the real world took one look at his list of achievements and immediately fell about laughing - it was obvious to most that it was the machinations of a fantasist! Until the more honest academics walking those august halls are prepared to stand up and shout that the Emporer has no clothes then this nonsense is bound to continue.
Your reading is very generous. And the claims were indeed so grandiose that you have to inquire more about the credibility of the people who believed them. I suppose we'll never know, but I wonder if they started smaller than they ended up and increased as no one caught him, which is the usual pattern of the grifter. They get away with it, so they up the ante. They almost get a certain pleasure in it, and feel the need to invent more and more grandiose lies to test the limits. I think that explains the extraordinary bewilderment contained in "I thought you'd just believe me."
Unfortunately, I think all of us who have worked in academia and are being honest about it have a story that resembles this one in type, although usually not in magnitude. The most egregious one that I have was more about incompetence once the person was hired, at which point he stated that he "doesn't believe in meetings" and missed both less important meetings and then, once he saw he could get away with it, more important ones--like student oral exams--and as a matter of policy. His Ardayness, if you will, was in, after a time, no longer making excuses but just announcing boldly that he slept in and expecting no consequences. And indeed there haven't been any to date. He's still grinning shittily at one from every corner of the website, as this small liberal arts college's only black faculty member. Someone told me later that it was well known when he was hired that his scholarly output was poor, his interview was "strange," and there were possible issues of him claiming to have worked at places and with people that "couldn't be verified," but they didn't feel that they could raise any of these issues without incurring the wrath of the dean, who was and remains his staunch defender. In the spirit of escalation, at some point he decided that he could just not hold a large number of his classes and probably nothing would happen, which also seems to be true. Someone I know who still teaches there suggested that maybe they could just pay him a lower salary for the use of his image and name and not assign him any duties at all, since he seems to make things actively worse by claiming to be a faculty member but not functioning as one.
I'd be especially angry if I were a black scholar, knowing that the experience is ubiquitous enough that my colleagues might be thinking of me as having an asterisk next to my name. I think there's plenty of blame to go around here, and you're probably right that the larger share of it should fall on the shoulders of the institutional actors. It's a classic good intention gone horribly sideways, that ends up hurting the people you're trying to help. A sad case all around.
I think AI may actually bring about the end of plagiarism, at least in the traditional sense. If anyone can ask an AI to generate an original argument or explanation tailored to a prompt, there’s much less incentive to copy someone else’s work word for word.
I also think we’re headed toward a point where AI-assisted writing becomes widely accepted, much like calculators did for math. That has some interesting consequences. People who struggle to write coherent or well-reasoned arguments will suddenly be able to produce polished, persuasive work with very little effort. AI won’t make them experts, but it will dramatically raise the quality of what they’re able to produce. We are lucky that the golden era of DEI / CRT passed and was largely discredited before LLMs became this good.
I think there are ways in which that can be ethical and effective and ways in which it cannot. Yet. It won’t let me link a note where I went into this!
Unfortunately, we are not out of the woods yet when it comes to DEI /CRT permeating our educational institutions. It looks like DEI /CRT has a very long half life and will be with us for many more years. Increasing number of males in US high schools are being permitted to participate in female sports competitions by simply claiming to be female. They do so under the ideological banner of "inclusion". Even more seriously, there are many hundreds of males who are incarcerated in the prisons which are supposed to be for females, and many of these males are serving prison sentences after having been convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes perpetrated against girls and women.
As I understand things, here in California—which is an outlier in the United States—we hold about 100,000 people in our prisons and jails, of whom about 2500 say they are transgender, non-binary, or intersex (of all types), of whom about 1000 have requested to be transferred to women’s prisons, of whom 50 have been transferred, of whom one—Tremaine Carroll—was transferred to Chowchilla State Women's Prison, raped two women inmates, and then was transferred back to Salinas Valley State Men's Prison.
One transwoman in California—Carmen Guerrero—was strangled to death by her cellmate Miguel Crespo at Kern Valley State Men's Prison back in 2013.
In California's prisons, about 4% of inmates report having been raped. About 40% of transwomen inmates report having been raped.
Yes. We here in the state of California are doing an awful job here. Given how much money we spend on our prisons we should be doing a much better job of providing safety and security and humanity. And the reason we are not doing so is because we are, at least by the preferences we reveal in the systems we construct, pay for, and maintain, collectively a bunch of assholes. Along many different dimensions, one of which is transferring Tremaine Carroll to Chowchilla State Women's Prison
But, Holly—the people who have convinced you that "many hundreds of males who are incarcerated in the prisons which are supposed to be for females, and many of these males are serving prison sentences after having been convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes perpetrated against girls and women" appear to me to be highly likely to be lying to you, and to not wish you well—they want your attention, your money, and your votes for reasons of their own that are malevolent ones. I would advise you to think hard about who is lying to you, and why.
Hope you and yours are well, or, rather, as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island.
Here is an overflowing libertarian brain: how can this play out in terms of Nozick’s framework for Utopia: basically, live & let live (chp 10 of ASU). Suppose that Cambridge is just an undisclosed "Funky Town community” and that you study sociology of education there not to be clever and knowledgable but to be kind and in that community, being funky is rule of the day. All of Arday’s characteristics are exactly those that members of Funky Town believe are required to be funky. As long as there is full and complete information, what is the harm done? This includes accepting all the funky practices. Cambridge’s mistake all along was PR: they simply forgot to say that they are Funky Town.
In which case we are missing the whole story: Funky Town wanted the branding without the disclosure and this resulted in a pile on to a person. And those piling on also have a duty of due diligence because it causes harm, and harm violates moral rights. They failed as well. They needed to check. Maybe they would have discovered that Cambridge is Funky Town and the problem is that it was not branded properly. That is not Arday’s fault!
More seriously, there really is a reading of the Arday this way. The Board of Electors that elected Arday were electing him for a purpose and his profile really was unique. He was, all things considered, “the best in the field”. Ponder that for a moment. It’s not false: he may have been the best in the field for what they wanted.
Why? Because the elector simply did not care about academic standards and propriety. Their objective function to be maximized was something other than “scholarship” in any canonical sense of the word. They selected an advocate, and consciously so. And they found one. And for them, the truth of the back story was irrelevant. We can criticize them for that, but not Arday himself.
Arday was, then, hounded for being the very person he actually was, and selected because for what he was. The fact that this created a scandal first in the UK academic community and then rapidly spread around the world and outside the narrow confines of academic news has nothing to do with Arday. It has everything to do with the fact that the Cambridge leadership entirely misjudged its status as a global leader and the consequent risks and burdens of such an appointment brings. Anyone with a modicum of common sense could have seen that Arday’s story was incredulous. One only had to ask for the medical records, school reports, track down former teachers etc. It’s not that hard. But maybe that did not matter and quite possibly should not matter for what Cambridge wanted to achieve. A risk, of course.
The Cambridge leadership took the risk, and Arday paid the price. That’s wrong!
Really, it's time for a rethink. It’s not all about racism, DEI etc. It’s all about our underlying normative priors.
Now is surely the perfect time to remind ourselves that some of the very best critics of Critical Race Theory and DEI policies in the world are themselves black e.g. Thomas Sowell, Coleman Hughes, John McWhorter etc. It’s also worth remembering that they often point to earlier often much less educated black thinkers than themselves who, despite living in much more explicitly racist social conditions than those of today, were nevertheless perfectly capable of criticising and rejecting the sort of misguided ideas propounded by the current CRT/DEI crowd.
Thomas Sowell is a tour de force. “The Vision of the Anointed; Self-congratulation as a basis for Social policy”—what a title for a book!
I also enjoyed two books by the black author Spencer Shaw Page
Thanks for the SSP recommendation. In an interview, Thomas Sowell specifically named ‘A Conflict of Visions’ as the work he is most proud of from an intellectual standpoint, alongside his book on Say’s Law. The former explains very clearly and persuasively why the world is so irreconcilably divided. Essential reading.
Could this also be stated as academic standards, and the danger of placing relationships above outcomes? Is Academia about relationship-building or life-or-death outcomes. Or alas, does Academia want all the prestige of being a trustworthy source for expertise in life-or-death outcomes (e.g. Social Justice), without the hassle and unpleasantness of verification? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/trust-the-new-workplace-currency/201507/the-problem-with-a-trust-but-verify-approach?msockid=2dcd4ab49553606b17975f6e940d61e5
In focusing on “Arday’s scholarly integrity” this article doesn’t deal with the bigger and more-important issue, which is that, even if all of Arday’s work were entirely legitimate, with no plagiarism or inventing of quotes, there is still nothing worthwhile there! It’s all bad, poorly written, with no analysis or insight. There is only his musings on his own “lived experience” and his musings on the lived experience of some people he interviewed. There is nothing resembling proper scholarship or actual, evidence-based advances in understanding. And all of that would be apparent to anyone who read his work. And yet he was lauded as a “world class” scholar by many other academics. Surely that is the most important aspect.
That is correct. You have correctly spotted that that is not what this piece is about.
If you would like to read me on the awfulness of this kind of scholarship, my book Cynical Theories is the most indepth consideration of that. You could also have a look at the academic papers we wrote in our sting operation to expose how bad they were.
http://bit.ly/2OsWnnH
This one is about Critical Race Theory which Arday drew on most.
https://ilvalues.org/essays-2/demystifying-critical-race-theory-so-we-can-get-to-the-point/
Might be true of this post, but Pluckrose has done more than her fair share to expose the flaws & overall low quality of the sort of "scholarship" that Arday pretended to do.
Arday's quote from the 2023 Guardian interview that challenged him on some of his achievements, Arday replied "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me. Why would I lie?"
This sounds to me like it was all these institutions were the ones pushing this fame more than Arday himself, as many of Arday's "supporters" are now hastily removing their names from a letter supporting him- a very self-serving action. I've read that Arday is a pleasant person. It would be nice if he had some real friends on his side to help him, the individual, not the icon he became.
I hope he has. He is not the Messiah, just a very naughty boy. It should not be allowed to ruin his life. As he said, he has not murdered anyone. But indirectly he may have done harm to whistleblowers and his critics. He is probably “more sinned against than sinning”. I hope fate will be kinder to him than it was to Lear.
Thank you Helen for such a painstaking and lucid appraisal. I have commented elsewhere on Substack in response to an earlier post of yours before I read this latest one of yours. I have also watched today a video of Professor Andrews with his customary hyperbole complaining about Birmingham’s axeing of his Black Studies department. I have not heard the University’s side but my initial reaction is that he should be challenged about his theories and not cancelled.
Always. He is a deeply unpleasant character and a bully. He tried to sink Tom Owolade’s book by lying about it and twisting it and causing a pile-on. Appalling behaviour from a senior black academic to a very young (but brilliant) black writer. Fortunately Tom seemed to deal with this just fine, but I was worried he could have been badly intimidated by that. I’m hoping Tom will become an influential voice on race issues and I think Andrew’s feared it.
I read this book too but did not pick up on the hoohah. Perhaps Brum just ran out of patience.
When I was at university the college had a likeable but very left wing economics Don. In that era lefties in the faculty (not so in the student cohort) were rare and suspicious—it was only just over a decade after Philby et al!
(I did law not economics like my third year room mate).
This was the bearded and splendidly be-turbaned Dr Ajit Singh. Predictably his nickname was “Agitprop”.
O to be vacuously puerile once more!
I strongly sensed that at least one use of the phrase ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’ was imminent throughout my reading of this piece and had almost given up hope until just before the end. Thank you for providing me with the lived experience to now claim that I have the power to foresee the future.
On my own Facebook profile, I had this to say about the recent article in the Guardian about Arday to which you linked: 'If the people in charge had scrutinized Arday instead of giving him a pass because he was Black (talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations! ), then there wouldn't have been the additional embarrassment of having Arday uncovered by a so-called "race realist."'
By coincidence (?), The Eternally Radical Idea had a post about the importance of viewpoint diversity: https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/what-happened-to-the-aaup-and-why. I suspect that if Cambridge had more viewpoint diversity, it would have beaten Cofnas to the punch, or have refused to hire Arday at all.
"if Cambridge had more viewpoint diversity. . . "
That there is a mighty big IF, pardner!
Judging from your response, you apparently did not read all the way until the end of the sentence, which makes it clear that Cambridge likely *didn't* have enough viewpoint diversity.
I doubt that most of the critical race theory/woke defenders of Arday would've defended him to such a degree if he were a white guy. Most of the CRT proponents I've seen tend to completely ignore the actual specifics of his cancellation and only focus on the character of the people trying to cancel him or try to tie his cancellation into "systematic racism" claims, which already assume all the allegations are illegitimate.
I think one piece of the puzzle we need to look at is how few true believers there probably are - and how much it is moral and intellectual cowardice is that fills the gaps here
It is beyond credibility that those working with and around Ardey did not realise that even by the laughable standards of the field the man was a fraud and a fake. I don't really believe that every one of those is a true fervent believer in viewpoint epistemology to the extent that they believe there is some inherent truthiness to his words even when they are entirely unrelated to reality.
Far more of them are simply moral and intellectual cowards. They go along with it for an easy life, they go along with it because the true believers are vicious and they don't want the fuss or the risk to their career. It is this silent cowardly majority that really define why academia has always fallen to nonsense and always will. After all this quote comes from way before most of our lifetimes and is as perfect a summary of the situation as you could find. The academic method with peer review and the processes of promotion in academia all but guarantee that it will be dominated by conformists who lack intellectual courage.
"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool." - George Orwell, 1945
It was true then, it is true now. The exact form of idiocy that will overtake our idiocracy of an intelligentsia will change over time, their excuses for why they have to go along with it will vary with circumstances, but the pattern retains eternal. The only way to reform that is to fundamentally reform the processed that are used to reinforce it - and that themselves attract and promote the sort of people who will be like this and those who will exploit this.
I'm going to echo Coel Hellier's comment in this thread and re-post a comment I made on this sad and sorry affair :
"I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The whole thing is like some comedy sketch. Arday himself clearly has some issues and a somewhat tenuous relationship to truth.
As an ex-academic (theoretical physics) I don't always take too much of an issue with plagiarism when it's a matter of mere phrasing. It's still wrong, but copying someone else's explanation of a known concept or known research or, ahem, borrowing their phrasing without attribution is relatively minor. Still wrong though.
Where it's a (very) serious issue is when you take someone's original research or insight or results and pass them off as your own. In my view that should warrant instant dismissal.
The deeper issue for me is not so much integrity (although that's obviously very important) but one of *quality*.
I have no intention of reading any of Arday's work - life is far too short - and will trust Cofnas' assessment of it. The thing here is that the work itself does not even come remotely close to anything I would consider to be at "professorial" level. I'd be even harsher to be honest. I don't even see why it should have been published in academic journals at all, falling way below the standards of academic rigour and methodology I would expect.
So the big question - to which we all know the answer - is how on earth did he get away with it?"
Coel is right. Although the plagiarism accusations are (potentially) very serious, as is the accusation that he copied/fabricated some of his 'research' data (i.e. the interviews he conducted), the *real* issue is how in the name of Cambridge's musty underwear did such work EVER get judged to be at professorial level?
I suppose after seeing so many examples of absurd-level surrealism presented as 'scholarship' in academia by now I shouldn't be too surprised. Ironically, it was this ridiculous absurdity that you and your colleagues thoroughly exposed and yet it still goes on.
Long live the conceptual penis!
OK there is another aspect to this unrelated to the things most people are discussing which you correctly point out
I looked at one of the other papers being criticised and it was an autoethnobiographical piece.
The problem is that this worthless approach is a cheap way to get published. This is basically cargo cult academic work - it has the surface appearance of being academic but is inherently worthless.
Its value is exactly zero. Well OK I will concede in a certain infinite-researchers / infinite-keyboards sort of way that its possible that something of small value might in principle be produced this way before the heat death of the universe.
But those around him, those recruiting him, are engaging in this nonsense so they are in no position to call out the nonsense for the worthless waste of time it is. They are all in it together and they all know they are vulnerable because its such obvious bullshit to anyone outside their bubble who takes a moment to look into it. Its just a cheap worthless way to pad out their list of peer reviewed publications. It has no more value than AI slop but they are all in it and they therefore all have to defend it.
And your title is perfect. A story too good to question indeed.
Which points to an old fault of our academic institutions (which I love) -- a inherent fault that has persisted through the ages, and which the intellectual trends of the last 30 years have transformed into a deathly sickness.
Universities are built on prestige and are inherently conservative institutions. Prestige is a form of power from which cascade a number of advantages, both material and immaterial, which also contribute to the production of outstanding research and advances in knowledge -- alongside a lot of pure rubbish.
But this means that Universities tend, despite their commitment to the search for truth, to embrace the common wisdom of their members about what's "done" and what's "not done", and to impose its standards, and to extol the stories that are "too good to question": those that increase prestige, a very finite resource.
This quest for prestige is something that in the past, for a vast number of different reasons and under sundry winds, also caused a number of poor scholars to be established as excellent, and not a little of poor scholarship to be published without much review, because they came from or swam in the right circle, because they brought prestige to the University.
This did not work so badly until the mentioned three decades past. Established knowledge was what constituted the bulk of prestige, and it was hard to budge, which forced new ideas to fight harder and refine themselves in order to be accepted and become the next established knowledge.
But once the established knowledge (aka: the common wisdom of the professoriat based on the external and internal social pressures) becomes that there must be no established knowledge... what remains is only the prestige. And the quest for prestige is an old habit.
For almost 15 years now I have been watching our cultural institutions play a game of one-upmanship on displaying exhibits that constitute a presumed source of social prestige.
I am very afraid that these debacles will become increasingly more numerous. Like you said in your essay yesterday, the work, to re-create the means and structures that generate reality-based established knowledge, will be long and hard.
An anecdote springs to mind. When Albert Speer proudly invited his architect father to view his scale model of the proposed "new Berlin," the elder Speer stood there in silence for only a few seconds before uttering, "You have all gone mad." The younger Speer needed to hear that, but was no longer capable of absorbing and acting on an honest assessment of the situation.
Why did it take outsiders to reveal the truth about Arday? Was there no one in all of Cambridge, LJMU, Durham University, University of Glasgow. all of Simon & Schuster, Princeton University Press, and Routledge capable of grasping the truth? Or had they all gone mad?
There were a number, at Cambridge and in other institutions, who raised questions since 2023, Prof David Harris in specific, and Prof Martyn Hammersley. They were dismissed and silenced -- and Harris was reported to the police for harassment by Arday (invoking harassment, racism and ableism seems to have been the normal way that any question into Arday was handled).
It is no madness, but it is a sickness of the mind I believe, and one that does obliterate the ability to use reason in an articulate manner.
For the publishers, it is not that, it is a matter of profit. That book will sell, according to their projections, and it will sell well. That is all that is there for them. They have no commitment to truth, it is not their function.
But for the Universities, for most of our cultural institutions, and a part of society who should have a commitment to truth, it is that.
We may call it a madness if you wish -- but it is not of the raving kind, it is a madness that works in oddly logical ways.
It is the madness of blind belief, the same that Herr Speer embraced, and hundred of thousands like him in every stripe and colour all over the world and all across history. Belief in an ideology, in a destiny, or in the revealed word of a religion -- never mind which, the motivation of this belief is the same: the need to feel good and be approved of, with or without a corollary of satisfying personal rage or resentment.
Blind belief possesses as its main feature an impermeability to evidence, and an infinite capacity for assuming any refuting evidence as false or at the very least irrelevant.
There have been undoubtedly bad actors pursuing personal interests, in this sad and disgraceful story in which a man ultimately lost his life.
But the University establishments, in the majority I think, believed and blinded themselves. They saw a man that embodied the Antiracist creed (a doctrine that bears little resemblance with diminishing racism) and whatever he fed them they ate; they pushed him (especially if he was mentally fragile like some people with our supposedly shared condition are) to feed them with impunity more and more absurdities that increased the hero-myth built around him. It is the way of cults.
And there are forms of insanity in cults, which one only can see from the outside. But the people involved in them still have agency and bear responsibility.
The talk about Arday's death and the excessive focus of the press on his case, shifts the issue to passing the blame, sidestepping the reason why it became such a big case in any way.
It was not, it is not, a matter of a supposedly obscure (hyper-celebrated star academic) whose every word got picked apart by cruel people intent on hating on the achievements of a black man.
It became a big case because it is epitomatic of the ideological disease that has metastasised in most of the cultural institutions of the English-speaking world. A disease that destroys academic reliability and attacks the very roots of the search for truth, a disease that creates men like Arday and then close ranks against evidence until they are destroyed and beyond.
You and I could only see self-defeating madness. But the believers see their Truth, which needs no evidence.
Yet another “isolated” case that should surprise no one. History repeats itself so often that somewhere there must be a form to fill out with a name (which does not even have to be the real one), fabricated qualifications, as well as virtues and heroic deeds. There must also be a large field for listing victimhood claims and the corresponding aggressive reactions justified by “inequality.” I foresee an infestation of this profile in the academic world (a shortcut to becoming an authority on anything), because now, with AI, there is no longer even any need to plagiarize anyone. And I will go further: universities will BAN the use of software that identifies the use of AI, so as not to expose wrongdoers to embarrassing situations.
Arday is the product of vainglorious academics looking for cheap applause. People out here in the real world took one look at his list of achievements and immediately fell about laughing - it was obvious to most that it was the machinations of a fantasist! Until the more honest academics walking those august halls are prepared to stand up and shout that the Emporer has no clothes then this nonsense is bound to continue.
Your reading is very generous. And the claims were indeed so grandiose that you have to inquire more about the credibility of the people who believed them. I suppose we'll never know, but I wonder if they started smaller than they ended up and increased as no one caught him, which is the usual pattern of the grifter. They get away with it, so they up the ante. They almost get a certain pleasure in it, and feel the need to invent more and more grandiose lies to test the limits. I think that explains the extraordinary bewilderment contained in "I thought you'd just believe me."
Unfortunately, I think all of us who have worked in academia and are being honest about it have a story that resembles this one in type, although usually not in magnitude. The most egregious one that I have was more about incompetence once the person was hired, at which point he stated that he "doesn't believe in meetings" and missed both less important meetings and then, once he saw he could get away with it, more important ones--like student oral exams--and as a matter of policy. His Ardayness, if you will, was in, after a time, no longer making excuses but just announcing boldly that he slept in and expecting no consequences. And indeed there haven't been any to date. He's still grinning shittily at one from every corner of the website, as this small liberal arts college's only black faculty member. Someone told me later that it was well known when he was hired that his scholarly output was poor, his interview was "strange," and there were possible issues of him claiming to have worked at places and with people that "couldn't be verified," but they didn't feel that they could raise any of these issues without incurring the wrath of the dean, who was and remains his staunch defender. In the spirit of escalation, at some point he decided that he could just not hold a large number of his classes and probably nothing would happen, which also seems to be true. Someone I know who still teaches there suggested that maybe they could just pay him a lower salary for the use of his image and name and not assign him any duties at all, since he seems to make things actively worse by claiming to be a faculty member but not functioning as one.
I'd be especially angry if I were a black scholar, knowing that the experience is ubiquitous enough that my colleagues might be thinking of me as having an asterisk next to my name. I think there's plenty of blame to go around here, and you're probably right that the larger share of it should fall on the shoulders of the institutional actors. It's a classic good intention gone horribly sideways, that ends up hurting the people you're trying to help. A sad case all around.
I think AI may actually bring about the end of plagiarism, at least in the traditional sense. If anyone can ask an AI to generate an original argument or explanation tailored to a prompt, there’s much less incentive to copy someone else’s work word for word.
I also think we’re headed toward a point where AI-assisted writing becomes widely accepted, much like calculators did for math. That has some interesting consequences. People who struggle to write coherent or well-reasoned arguments will suddenly be able to produce polished, persuasive work with very little effort. AI won’t make them experts, but it will dramatically raise the quality of what they’re able to produce. We are lucky that the golden era of DEI / CRT passed and was largely discredited before LLMs became this good.
I think there are ways in which that can be ethical and effective and ways in which it cannot. Yet. It won’t let me link a note where I went into this!
Unfortunately, we are not out of the woods yet when it comes to DEI /CRT permeating our educational institutions. It looks like DEI /CRT has a very long half life and will be with us for many more years. Increasing number of males in US high schools are being permitted to participate in female sports competitions by simply claiming to be female. They do so under the ideological banner of "inclusion". Even more seriously, there are many hundreds of males who are incarcerated in the prisons which are supposed to be for females, and many of these males are serving prison sentences after having been convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes perpetrated against girls and women.
As I understand things, here in California—which is an outlier in the United States—we hold about 100,000 people in our prisons and jails, of whom about 2500 say they are transgender, non-binary, or intersex (of all types), of whom about 1000 have requested to be transferred to women’s prisons, of whom 50 have been transferred, of whom one—Tremaine Carroll—was transferred to Chowchilla State Women's Prison, raped two women inmates, and then was transferred back to Salinas Valley State Men's Prison.
One transwoman in California—Carmen Guerrero—was strangled to death by her cellmate Miguel Crespo at Kern Valley State Men's Prison back in 2013.
In California's prisons, about 4% of inmates report having been raped. About 40% of transwomen inmates report having been raped.
Yes. We here in the state of California are doing an awful job here. Given how much money we spend on our prisons we should be doing a much better job of providing safety and security and humanity. And the reason we are not doing so is because we are, at least by the preferences we reveal in the systems we construct, pay for, and maintain, collectively a bunch of assholes. Along many different dimensions, one of which is transferring Tremaine Carroll to Chowchilla State Women's Prison
But, Holly—the people who have convinced you that "many hundreds of males who are incarcerated in the prisons which are supposed to be for females, and many of these males are serving prison sentences after having been convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes perpetrated against girls and women" appear to me to be highly likely to be lying to you, and to not wish you well—they want your attention, your money, and your votes for reasons of their own that are malevolent ones. I would advise you to think hard about who is lying to you, and why.
Hope you and yours are well, or, rather, as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island.
Yours, J. Bradford DeLong
Here is an overflowing libertarian brain: how can this play out in terms of Nozick’s framework for Utopia: basically, live & let live (chp 10 of ASU). Suppose that Cambridge is just an undisclosed "Funky Town community” and that you study sociology of education there not to be clever and knowledgable but to be kind and in that community, being funky is rule of the day. All of Arday’s characteristics are exactly those that members of Funky Town believe are required to be funky. As long as there is full and complete information, what is the harm done? This includes accepting all the funky practices. Cambridge’s mistake all along was PR: they simply forgot to say that they are Funky Town.
In which case we are missing the whole story: Funky Town wanted the branding without the disclosure and this resulted in a pile on to a person. And those piling on also have a duty of due diligence because it causes harm, and harm violates moral rights. They failed as well. They needed to check. Maybe they would have discovered that Cambridge is Funky Town and the problem is that it was not branded properly. That is not Arday’s fault!
More seriously, there really is a reading of the Arday this way. The Board of Electors that elected Arday were electing him for a purpose and his profile really was unique. He was, all things considered, “the best in the field”. Ponder that for a moment. It’s not false: he may have been the best in the field for what they wanted.
Why? Because the elector simply did not care about academic standards and propriety. Their objective function to be maximized was something other than “scholarship” in any canonical sense of the word. They selected an advocate, and consciously so. And they found one. And for them, the truth of the back story was irrelevant. We can criticize them for that, but not Arday himself.
Arday was, then, hounded for being the very person he actually was, and selected because for what he was. The fact that this created a scandal first in the UK academic community and then rapidly spread around the world and outside the narrow confines of academic news has nothing to do with Arday. It has everything to do with the fact that the Cambridge leadership entirely misjudged its status as a global leader and the consequent risks and burdens of such an appointment brings. Anyone with a modicum of common sense could have seen that Arday’s story was incredulous. One only had to ask for the medical records, school reports, track down former teachers etc. It’s not that hard. But maybe that did not matter and quite possibly should not matter for what Cambridge wanted to achieve. A risk, of course.
The Cambridge leadership took the risk, and Arday paid the price. That’s wrong!
Really, it's time for a rethink. It’s not all about racism, DEI etc. It’s all about our underlying normative priors.