What Did You Expect? | Mises Institute

As Murray Rothbard pointed out again and again, the government has no business getting involved in education. In a free market society, people are at liberty to establish whatever educational institutions they wish, and so long as they can secure sufficient funding, they will stay in business. They are free to set up their own standards on whom to hire as faculty. Matters are entirely different if the government gets involved. Then, people must conform to its demands, whether they want to or not.

Ever since the passage of the phony Civil Rights Act of 1964, the U.S. government has demanded that universities institute various measures to combat “discrimination” against various groups it wishes to support. Measures of this kind used to be called “affirmative action” and they are now called DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). Similar legislation is in place in Britain. The result has been to further corrupt university education. Academic standards have gone by the board, and phony subjects like “critical race theory” have been added to the course list of universities that used to be considered the best in the world. In some courses, professors must teach according to a prescribed political agenda. Following DEI rules, universities have sought out supposedly disadvantaged racial and sexual minorities both as students and professors; As the distinguished philosopher Paul Boghossian has pointed out:

The most straightforward form of distortion [in scholarship] arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it. Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise. This is so not simply because a preordained consensus is likely to be wrong (or at best right for the wrong reasons). The deeper problem is that an artificial consensus of this sort can only be maintained by distorting the scholarly ecosystem in ways that are profoundly damaging. In any discipline structured in this way, research findings will inevitably sometimes conflict with the conclusions that have been sanctioned in advance. The social and historical facts relevant to social justice are complex and hard to know. Given this, genuinely open inquiry will inevitably serve up results that challenge orthodox assumptions. (This is so even if those assumptions are ultimately correct; in any area of academic interest, there is a perennial risk that good faith scholarship will turn up what is later shown to be misleading evidence.) A discipline that has subordinated scholarly rigor to its political project will need mechanisms for suppressing this sort of conflict, and indeed we find many such mechanisms in the disciplines we have studied.

A case that sounds like a parody of the situation has recently attracted much attention, that of Jason Arday, who is a professor of the sociology of education at Cambridge University. Although he claims that he did not learn to read until he was 18, he became the youngest black professor ever appointed at Cambridge. He is close to being an autistic cretin, self-described as “slow” and unable to write on his own. It transpires that he is a blatant plagiarist.

Here is a summary of the plagiarism case, according to The Times of London: “The Times was also able to highlight similarities between some passages of his 2015 thesis on peer-mentoring among student teachers and the work of Zwozdiak-Myers, of Brunel University.”

Note that for Arday and his supporters, plagiarism is not an academic sin. At most Arday has made some mistakes, but it is only “racists” who would call attention to such matters. The whole notion of objective truth is just another expression of white racism. Whites oppress blacks and want to exterminate them, and, as critical race theory teaches us, attempts by whites to be anti-racist are themselves racist.

What makes the Arday case stand out is that, as I mentioned before, he has been outed as a first-class confabulator. He claims to have completed a number of marathons in succession, even though he ran them with one of his legs injured, doing so in times that would elevate him to world-class status. He said that a hooded figure came to his office and threatened him, even though a security camera of his office did not show such a person.

The Times comments: 

Arday has also faced questions about his claims of near-superhuman achievements in running events, but stood by his assertion that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in three days on the treadmill and 600 miles in 12 days. He has said he has raised up to £5.5 million for charity and told The Times: “I can’t make people believe me. Nobody lives their life having a receipt for every single thing they say or they’ve done.” He did not raise all the money for charity, he explained, but was part of a syndicate of about 100 people, yet when he spoke at events or to the press the coverage focused on him The charity WaterAid cast doubt on claims Arday had made about “installing water points” in South America and west Africa, saying that it never sent volunteers abroad. On Tuesday it emerged that his claim on the Cambridge Faculty of Education web page that he was a visiting professor in the University of Glasgow’s School of Education was not true, although he was a professor of sociology in the school in 2021. He raised eyebrows over his recollection of taking part in what he described as Seven Up. A friend later clarified that he was not part of the famous, long-term television programme, but an informal network of black mothers that shared a name with the series which began in 1964.

According to The New York Times, “Arday’s supporters have said he is a victim of racially motivated attacks. A petition in support of Arday organized by the Good Law Project, a progressive nonprofit, has drawn mor than 14, 00 signatures, including from prominent figures like Simon Baron-Cohen, who is the director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, and five members of Parliament from the Labor Party. The petition calls the allegations of plagiarism against Arday entirely false, and part of a broader “attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.”

Only the repeal of the phony anti-discrimination laws and the total withdrawal of the government from education will give us any chance of cleaning out the rot in academia, which in any case will be a Herculean task.