The Problem Is Not Just DEI or Academic Fraud; Academic Standards Are Gone

John, Beege, and I have all written about the Jason Arday scandal at the University of Cambridge because each of us understands that the fate of Jason Arday, the fabulist who became an academic star at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, says little about this one man and quite a bit about the corruption of our major institutions. 

I really don’t care much about Arday himself. Why would I? I had never heard of him before, and like Jussie Smollett, I hope not to hear much about him again. Arday only matters because the Expert™ class made him important, and it is the Expert™ class that was corrupt in a much more important way than Arday. 

As I wrote earlier today, Arday is just a microcosm of the credentialed class as a whole, which is built on fabulism. It is certainly the case that there are excellent people with credentials — during COVID we saw the emergence of Jay Bhattacharya and Vinay Prasad, who both stood up for scientific standards and who paid a high price for doing so. 

But for the most part we had the Expert™ class all in lockstep, and banded together to destroy anybody who stood in the way of enforcing the Consensus™. You could almost hear the “97% of scientists agree” mantra when they spoke their lines of bull excrement. We all paid a high price because their ultimate loyalty was to the institutions that fed, clothed, and showered them with prestige; we were pawns on the board. 

Academia is now what General Pete Worden called the “self-licking ice cream cone,” meaning that it is a closed little world whose main or only goal is sustaining itself and growing in access to resources, power, and prestige. Its primary product is self-praise, and in its lust for money it keeps churning out crap. 

NEW: 10 gibberish PhDs at the “University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies”

Plus: I consider what thesis I will be submitting to the Centrehttps://t.co/bh4C30LXPS

— Charlotte Gill (@CharlotteCGill) August 6, 2026

You have probably heard of the theory that our society has been overproducing “elites,” or more properly aspirants to elite status. It’s why the DSA is riddled with overeducated anti-society morons who are resentful that they are downwardly mobile. They are the people on X who lecture you with tweets that begin with phrases like “Historian, here, let me tell you why you are an idiot…”

The Arday scandal is definitely a new low, and involved:
(2/) pic.twitter.com/Z9JzrkI3Hv

— Neil O’Brien (@NeilDotObrien) August 6, 2026

Many people have noted that as shocking as the fact that Cambridge hired Arday despite his being a fraud, what is almost as shocking is that the “work” he produced was complete nonsense riddled with grammatical errors. Any person who read it would realize immediately that it was gibberish and not the product of the “best scholar in the world” in his field, as his department chair put it. 

And that’s saying something, since the field itself is nothing but gibberish. As is much of what passes for “scholarship” these days. Much of it is intellectual, and often enough descriptions of literal, physical onanism that a normal person might wonder how billions of dollars get poured into institutions that churn out scholars who write about their onanistic practices. 

But my piece argues the real problem is not these spectacular examples of absurdity, but the flood tide of badly written zero-value guff.

Stuff that would be described as “woke” is part of it, but there’s much that is pointless – read by no one, and of use to no one.
(4/)

— Neil O’Brien (@NeilDotObrien) August 6, 2026

Arday isn’t the only spectacular example of academia going mad:

-In 2022 we learned about the Manchester PHD involving masturbating to Japanese child porn.

– We had a Sunday Times investigation found millions being fraudulently claimed by people with no intention at all of studying, prompting the Education Secretary to refer it to the Public Sector Fraud Authority.

-The University of Liverpool agreed to rename Gladstone Hall – instead of the great Liberal Liverpudlian statesman, it now celebrates Dorothy Kuya… a lifelong member of the Communist Party of Britain.

-We had the Grievance Studies Affair, where academics deliberately published absurd papers in journals, including, “”Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon” (in Gender, Place & Culture) and “An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant” (in Sex Roles) 

There is an entire genre of “scholarship” that is comprised of theses that amount to diaries of one’s feelings about various issues. “As a transgender they/them person of color who likes ice cream, I have observed that…” is passed off as profound scholarship. 

And why would a university care anymore? It keeps the money flowing and federal and state governments seem thrilled to throw more of it at them, and until now employers demanded that their prospective employees be credentialed by these institutions. 

Oh wow 😬

University of Michigan will HIDE first-semester grades on transcripts for students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

It’s to “curb the mental health crisis”

AND

The policy is mandatory for all students bc “covering an individual’s grades will… pic.twitter.com/YJylVbIjYf

— Neetu Arnold (@neetu_arnold) August 6, 2026

Oh wow 😬

University of Michigan will HIDE first-semester grades on transcripts for students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

It’s to “curb the mental health crisis”

AND

The policy is mandatory for all students bc “covering an individual’s grades will inadvertently become equated w/them not doing well in a class”

Universities have even given up on trying to educate students in any meaningful way. It interferes with their business model, and if they use standardized tests or share grades anymore, they couldn’t virtue signal about social justice nearly as much. 

They have their own agendas. Expand. Get more money. Impose a political agenda. Rinse, repeat. 

Think of how good COVID was for business. Fame. Fortune. Political agendas being implemented. What’s not to love?

Unfortunately, these institutions are fundamentally compromised, despite their being absolutely vital to our societal and economic model in the Western World. They have become enemies within, yet we cannot simply strangle them without first replacing them with something fit for purpose. 

I would argue that we should split the STEM fields from the Liberal Arts, but that would still require the STEM fields themselves to be purged of the large fraction of radicals who produce little but poison the well. 

If you have suggestions for how to do that, let me know. Because I despair about fixing a problem of such size, complexity, and importance without inflicting too much damage. 

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