Imagine a leader who wastes government money on vanity projects at the expense of higher taxes but is criticized by no one benefiting.
That isn't just California government now, it was also an 1837 fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen. In "The Emperor's New Clothes", he refashions an old story, in this case as a con artist team who convinces an emperor they can make clothes invisible to everyone stupid. They, of course, provide nothing at all. He and his sycophants pretend to see the cloth they weave because they don't want to seem stupid.
No one wants to look stupid, so when he walks around naked they pretend to see his new outfit. Only a child says the guy is simply naked.
The story works in the case of disgraced former academic Jason Arday for two reasons: the first is that humanities academics are the sycophants, led by Professor Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s education faculty, who gushed that Jason Arday's invisible clothes were “the best in the world”; the second is that the person who pointed out that the clothes don't exist at all is the one getting fired. Because the fraud who clearly had mental health issues killed himself.
Arday at his PhD ceremony (Liverpool John Moores) in 2016. Provided by University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education
Also getting blamed: reporters. Not fuzzy-wuzzy "journalists" whose job is to affirm the bias of readers but actual reporters who did their jobs and had social justice warriors demanding they be doxxed so they could be intimidated. For reporting that fellow Cambridge academics that thought their new emperor had no clothes. He ran 300 miles in three days? Couldn't speak until age 11? What?
Even Guardian gets called out. They are the darlings of the anti-science and anti-semitic left in England and even they were too reporter-y for these neo-nazis on social media? Link
Exaggeration is one thing. Nearly every actor claims some movie they worked on nearly killed them and others on the production also agree they see those invisible clothes. Dr. Nathan Cofnas instead exposed the real problem, that Arday's dissertation was so similar to the dissertation of Dr. Paula Zwozdiak-Myers at Brunel University from 2009 it even had the same grammatical/copy-editing errors. Professor Arday had a response to that; it wasn't intentional, it was his autism. And, of course, racism. Because European philosophers in academia are so known for being racist?
No, they are not. Individuals are individuals but even in America, a political conservative can't even get hired in humanities departments so a racist would not.(1)
But then Arday killed himself and guess who will be fired? Cofnas. Because he tripped up more than one academic of color and said DEI was not how academic hiring should be done.
Most people agree academics should be hired based on merit, not picking winners and losers based on melatonin levels. It is a federal crime in the United States for the last 60 years to make hiring decisions based on race.
For saying the new emperor of sociology at Cambridge was not wearing any of the trappings everyone there pretended they saw and loved, Cofnas is guaranteed to be fired. The "investigation" is a pretense and he has no tenure. If they don't fire him by next week they will simply order that his employment agreement not be renewed. Because everyone else was pretending about Arday and they didn't want to be called ... racist. He put his career at risk, the kind of thing academics claim is vital to their mission.
Is Quentin Tarantino a plagiarist or does he do homages to things he likes? Shakespeare? Dr. Jane Goodall was a plagiarist. Goodall just said she had copied some stuff to research later and forgot and left it in because she was an addled elder but that was acceptable because the only people who believe any of the weird claims she made embraced her as part of their political tribe anyway. Lots of people have been shown to have instances of plagiarism because it is subjective, and if it does not look like overt fraud, they can get away with it. I wrote a book on Halloween Science. It also has stuff written by other people here. It has nearly 200 citations. If it should have 201, I don't know, citing is somewhat subjective, but it would be impossible to call it fraud. I'd have been fine adding any needed if the book needed them.
What Professor Arday did was such overt fraud that Cambridge was forced to investigate; something they very much did not want to do.
Because other people were already investigating, it was not one guy with a racist agenda, and Professor Arday was not forgetting some citations. It was overt and either his fellow academics were incredibly, shockingly, too stupid to see it or they were ignoring it because they wanted to create a cultural narrative. The opposite of what should be happening at any school, much less one that claims to be prestigious.
There is a third level to this; Andersen did not invent the basic plot of his naked emperor story, it was around in many cultures for centuries. He did not cite Aesop or Jineśvara or many others who had written something similar before. Now that the Arday debacle has made so many humanities academics look ridiculous, expect to see a 19th century fairy tale author trotted out as a plagiarist.
Because plagiarism has been made political by people who did not want to see the truth about Professor Arday.
NOTE:
(1) Unless they are racist against Jewish people. That seems to be an immediate tenure track opportunity now.
