CAMBRIDGE: THE EDUROT HAS REACHED STAGE FOUR TERMINAL LUNACY

Before we get down to this week's blogs and business, here's an update on Miss Shiloh.  She continues to hold her own with this vestibular ideopathy. She still stumbles a bit, though today she appears to be better than yesterday.  If their diagnosis is correct, this should clear up within the next seven days (around next Monday). Accordingly, I have canceled this Friday's vidchat to move it to a week from Friday (hopefully!) as I have to be ready to run her into the veterinarian or veterinary emergency room any time this week. I am hoping that this condition is not more serious (there are two other much rarer conditions with the same symptoms).  She is much more chipper today so I am grateful for that. Thank you all for your patience and good thoughts/prayers.  They mean a lot to me.

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It's been so long since I've had a good rant about the weaponized stupidity that is the modern quackademy that we're long over due. Perhaps, sensing this, a number of you sent articles to me about the current madness. This one, however, requires a bit of "context."  Back when I had finished my doctorate at Oxford and had submitted it to the university for the appointment of the examiners, I began shopping around for the "regalia" of the degree. I finally found a store on the Cornmarket that carried all the academic regalia for all of the university's degrees. A polite gentleman with a character straight out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel pulled this and that robe off of the hangers and displayed them proudly. My jaw was a little agape with my less-than-enthusiastic reaction, as the regalia that I was looking at would make me look like I might have stepped off the label of a bottle of Beefeater's gin. There was a nice big red-and-blue-thingie which one wore for "really high occasions", and there was a black-sort-of-lace thing with big flaps and black crochet (or something) at the end of the flaps for less auspicious occasions, like landing at Heathrow airport. To be frank, I was a little embarrassed, but I finally rationalized the plumage as being exactly what I had come to Oxford for: a sense of tradition, stability, and a connection to a long academic past. I paid the man and departed the store with a couple of boxes of robes, debating whether I should have taken the salesman up on the store special, which included a sedan chair and ostrich feather fans for those hot, muggy days.

You might be wondering why I am bothering you about the nuances of Oxford academic regalia. It's because one of our regular article spotters (P.T.) saw this one, and passed it along:

Cambridge’s Black Time-Travelling Professor (And His Many Superhuman Feats)

Without further ado, the case for terminal, stage four, weaponized stupidity at Cambridge University begins right in the opening paragraph, which, incidentally, backhandedly confirms something I've been trying to warn people about long before we decided to develop this website. Feast your eyes upon this curriculum vita:

Running a single marathon is a great achievement. Running 30 marathons is a spectacular feat. Running 30 marathons in 35 days is something only a world-class athlete could achieve. But running 30 marathons in 35 days, and running the final nine of those marathons with a broken leg – that’s an impossible feat that would require superhuman powers. But that is exactly what Jason Arday has claimed to achieve. But that’s not all, Jason Arday’s incredible feats aren’t just limited to running nearly 240 miles on a fractured leg without medical intervention, he also claimed to have run 600 miles in six days on a treadmill (without any evidence), played both football and snooker at a professional level (a boast that was apparently taken out of context), raised over £5.5 million for charity (but can’t name a single donor), managed to go 15 years with a barely a wink of sleep, and even appeared on the famous television documentary series Seven Up! – which originally premiered a whole 21 years before he was even born. This is the story of Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, who was appointed as Professor of the Sociology of Education in 2023.

And - oh! - the obstacles that Mr. (Dr.?) Arday had to overcome. As the article relates, he fell somewhere on the autism spectrum disorder, and had no verbal communication for... a long time. He learned to communicate (again, according to the article) using "music, rhythm, and song lyrics". Are we allowed to speculate that this was in the service of learning to recognize unrelenting iambic pentameter?

But miraculously, Jason beat all the odds, and at the last possible moment he learnt (sic) to speak. But the miracles just kept on coming and Jason managed to attend local schools in South London and eventually left secondary education with two GCSEs – one in Physical Education and one in Textiles.

Was that in Theoretical PhysEd?*  Analytical Textilology? But I digress.

But despite the mountainous struggles that would have beaten most men, Jason was determined to go further still – and eventually, not even the boundaries of time itself would hold him back.

Determined to pursue sports and teaching, Jason then went to a local college to study for a BTEC diploma, which allowed him to bridge the gap into higher education. This was another major milestone for the young achiever – and this herculean feat was made even greater as Jason claimed that due to his late language development, he did not learn to read or write until he was 18 years-old. Some may scoff at Jason’s two GCSEs and BTEC diploma, but to have achieved these grades whilst not even being able to read and write proved that he was nothing short of a child prodigy. Jason then went on into higher education, and graduated from St Mary’s University in Twickenham in 2008 with a BA in Education Studies and Physical Education before serving as the university’s Student Union Athletics President for a year immediately following his graduation. For many, this would be the end of a long and arduous academic road, but to Jason, it was just the beginning.

Jason then went on to earn an MA in Education and Pedagogy from St Mary’s and later completed a PGCE at the Institute of Education to become a qualified school PE teacher. At this point, after achieving so much, and overcoming so many almost insurmountable hurdles, he could have entered a well-paid role in teaching. But Jason was still hungry for more, leading to his transitioning into the subject of Sociology of Education and going on to earn a Master of Education (MEd) followed by a PhD in Education from Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. 

Well, apparently, the degree was in Theoretical PhysEd.

If you're getting the idea that this man was promoted because of his disability and "blackness", with quackademic institutions falling all over themselves to push the man along to the very pinnacle of the system, you'd be entirely correct:

That is exactly how Jason ended up in his position at Cambridge, not so much because of Jason’s myriad of self-professed achievements, but because the institution never checked any of his claims. And this isn’t mere conjecture: the University of Cambridge has now admitted that officials did not conduct an independent textual analysis when hiring Professor Jason Arday in 2023, instead, their vetting process relied heavily on ‘institutional trust’ and ‘reputation’ rather than any raw forensic auditing. In short, because Jason had already been vetted, hired, and promoted to senior positions by three other highly respected institutions (Roehampton, Durham, and Glasgow), Cambridge’s hiring panel assumed his foundational work was immaculate. Instead, Cambridge University’s appointment panel was deeply captivated by Jason’s unique, highly inspirational backstory and the focus of the hiring process was centred on his vision for the sociology department and his high-profile advocacy work surrounding diversity and inclusion, rather than a line-by-line verification of his past work. After all, who needs to know if a candidate can actually do the job they are being hired for when they fit the diversity profile so perfectly?

And then there was the plagiarism:

An analysis of Jason’s 2015 PhD thesis, which was awarded by Liverpool John Moores University, revealed something truly shocking: the document contained 188 sentences that were identical or nearly identical to a thesis written by a student at Brunel University in 2009. But these issues weren’t just limited to Jason’s PhD, textual overlaps were then identified in several of Jason’s subsequent journal articles, leading to two separate journals issuing formal correction notes. In some papers, Jason allegedly recycled borrowed text and framed the lines as “direct quotes” from research subjects he claimed to have interviewed himself.

And on and on it goes, ending in the predictable denouement that the mounting attacks against him were because of racism.

So why am I going around Harvey's Barn with my own recollections of buying the Oxford regalia for my degree, and the Adventures of the Incredible Professor Arday? It's because of this unforgettable picture, which proves that sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, and that sometimes, with enough stupidity and corruption, regalia is no longer a tradition, or a connection to a venerable academic past. Sometimes it's merely a ridiculous costume worn by a man.

And lest I forget, go back to that first cited paragraph from the article. Let it be noted that Mr. Arday obtained his degrees in "education". Not in biology, physics, history, literature, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, engineering, programming, or whatever, but in 'education", proving once again that those "degrees" and that "discipline" are about the political and cultural agendas of lunacy, and not about anything having to do with passing down the rigors of actual academic mastery of a subject.  We can formulate it as a rule: if your candidate for a position in your company or college has an "Ed." in their degree abbreviation, they've already sold out to lunacy.

See you on the flip side...

(If you enjoyed today's blog, please share it with your friends.)

*and in case you think I forgot my asterisk footnote, I didn't. "Theoretical PhysEd" is actually mentioned in the American television sitcom Community, about a very sub-par community college that specializes in offering "academic" courses of absolute fluff, one of which is "Theoretical PhysEd."  When I first heard that, I laughed out loud, little imagining that it was becoming reality in the United Kingdumb.