The reason why it’s so exhausting debating with academics – those on the extreme left – is not because they’re clever, but because they get so angry.
Remember that scowling shrew who argued in defence of Julius Malema’s desire to slaughter farmers? Liz Gunner was her name. Don’t let appearances deceive you. She was furious. Or more recently, Mary de Haas, testifying in the parliamentary ad hoc; particularly in her exchanges with the MK crowd, it felt like Mary was close to slamming her fists on the table, pointing to one of the party’s MPs, then performing a throat-slitting gesture: ‘You! Camouflage f***! Die!’ (parliament boasts a short but rich history of throat-slitting gestures, the first being occasioned by former ANC MP Winkie Direko in 2008).
Levels of aggro amongst extremist academics are even worse in Europe because institutions there like the London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) encourage such a distraught view of history. The University of Westminster counts among its alumni nail bombers and beheaders, some of whom joined the Islamic State – the net result of teachers demanding their students see the world only through the model of oppressors and the oppressed.
A plagiarism row has erupted at the University of Cambridge. There’s a black Professor of Sociology there called Jason Arday – who is a miracle. Born severely autistic (non-verbal until the age of eleven), Arday couldn’t read until he was 18. In 2016, he submitted a 401-page thesis – six days after having a brain tumour removed – and was awarded his PhD. In 2023, he joined Cambridge as the youngest professor in the university’s history.
That’s not all. In between all the sociology stuff, Arday tried his hand at professional football. His interest in sports, he claimed, came from joining a professional snooker tour when he was just 10 – despite being mute. Included in Arday’s CV was another astonishing feat: a record 600 miles run for charity in just six days. The British record is 623 miles.
It is not true that all academics are critical race theorists. There are outliers and one of them, Emeritus Professor David Harris, was stripped of his status for questioning the grounds upon which the idea that racism is embedded into every structure in society is ‘settled’ (he was re-instated after a U-turn from his employer). In 2023, Harris started combing through wonderboy Arday’s work and discovered that the genius had been lifting passages verbatim from previous work he’d encountered. He wrote to Arday, who ignored him, so he wrote again – this time receiving a spiky reply instructing him to continue ‘dismantling racism and ableism…and stop bullying and harassing’ (Arday).
When Harris sent Cambridge the results of an independently commissioned audit of Arday’s work, the reply was just as icy but unfortunately for them and Arday, Times Higher Education got sniffing. When one of its reporters sent Arday a list of questions relating to his expanding supply of curious works, he received a warning in his inbox from Carter-Ruck, the notorious London defamation litigator. That story was spiked.
Now the flood. The Telegraph is on the case, so too Unherd, and social media has been set ablaze by commentary. But despite the multiple examples of plagiarism presented to them, Cambridge are in no mood to table an inquiry into Arday’s academic integrity. Their model – the retarded-adjacent young black man from deprived circumstances who became a Professor before he was 40 – is too clearly symbolic to dismantle irrespective how unambiguous the plagiarism.
Enter angry, extreme leftist academics in Arday’s defence with the usual flurry of insults including the use of the phrase ‘black bodies’ (b capitalized) 0 one of whom is Simon Baron-Cohen, Borat’s cousin and Professor of Autism at Cambridge. An open letter accusing those pointing out Arday’s plagiarism of racism then prompted something called the Good Law Project to create a campaign for the embattled Professor.
This is an escalation. Founded by a privately educated lawyer called Jolyon Maugham, the GLP is quite good at separating fools from their money but extremely bad in court, where it frequently loses. Last year someone associated with the GLP was asked why it persists in being humiliated the whole time – and the answer was telling. So bad, this person claimed, is Great Britain’s racism problem, that the GLP does not weigh legitimacy or prospects before advocacy. Basically: if someone claims racism, or bigotry, the GLP mounts defence regardless of whether they are telling the truth or not.
It should not be surprising that academia is being sabotaged from within, with some of the (supposedly) cleverest people in the world willing to defend crimes against their own profession because of peripheral fantasies. In 2017, the Adam Smith Institute documented ~12% of UK academics supporting right or centre right parties, in contrast to 50% of the population. That number is almost certainly lower in America, whose academics appear to vote in bloc patterns similar to Great Britain’s Muslim communities.
In addition to a generally repulsive style of arguing, filled with uncontained disgust at having to explain their thinking to people they evidently consider inferior, far-left academics rarely face consequences. This week the science itself, or Anthony Fauci, sat before a Senate Homeland Security Committee – and kept (uncharacteristically) schtum. Michael Mann has succeeded in climate scamming for decades; Jeremy Farar’s own donors allowed him to get away with describing the charitable trust (Wellcome – his employer) as ‘racist’ and Patrick Vallance was overpromoted despite Great Britain’s lockdown catastrophe.
So how does one screw the pooch here? A hint lies in what Cambridge stands to lose should it maintain its stance. The answer then appears as an obvious ‘tell the truth’.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/13523064@N03/7807810442]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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