10 thoughts about the Jason Arday story, the suspension of Nathan Cofnas, Cambridge and what it represents about universities and politics more broadly.
Vinay, you and Dawkins have summarized well. The DEI emperor truly has no clothes. Cambridge's promotion (in all senses) of serial fabulist and academic cipher Arday is pure racism. But I don't expect Cambridge to self-correct, demote the people who hired Arday, and heed the wake-up call. Bureaucracies are populated by cowards. They will circle the wagons, blame everyone else, and dig the hole deeper. They only care about survival, not academic merit, which as you found by reading a sampling of sociology papers, is mostly garbage dressed up in the unintelligible prose of postmodern theory.
I've always felt it's incumbent on the writer to be understood- post modern theory writers believe the opposite... they think it's the responsibility of the reader to understand what they write- no matter how difficult to read their prose might be
I used to teach as an adjunct at an unnamed University (hint-Prasad got his degree there) and I was asked to give a talk on pca etc. in the graduate school sociology seminar. I was appalled at the low level of underatnding of statistics that was displayed by student and professor alike.
Arday---academic black privilege on steroids. Unfortunately, the rule not the exception. The term "social science" should replace "jumbo shrimp" as the most frequently cited example of oxymoron.
When I read point 7 I thought, well- if you go and read other sociology papers you may find similar levels of gibberish ... lol- and you totally covered that with point 8. I remember taking the time to read Jill bidens dissertation when her whole controversy erupted- I just laughed while reading- you can't fault the PhD student for meeting the standards of their chosen discipline.
Well done Vinay! I appreciate that your observations are common sense and factual. One thing that you could slip in a bit more is that the Covid vaccine mandates were so unethical because the vaccine utilized a new technology that had never tested before and thus there was no safety data. We made our healthy kids take it and Fauci knew that it did not affect transmission. I still get crazy angry when I think of all these university presidents pontificating and showing themselves to be the pseudointellectual empty suits that many of them are in their responses to Covid and vaccine mandates. I won't name names but there were plenty of high level universities spouting utter crap.
1) The institutional response to criticism in personnel assessment is to rebound it back to the individual (Arday was vulnerable and a fabulist who conned us), with full promotional institutional leverage in tow.
2) The institutional support leveraged to individuals promoted by the University are legal resources, for both censorship and for retaliation. The global academic playbook, as you've alluded to in your commentary, is exactly the same.
3) Not all "whistleblowers" are of the same ilk as Cofnas; the vast majority of whistleblowers are however, placed in the same basket as Cofnas (a troublemaker who's on the fringes of acceptable society).
4) What's the harm done when the voices of Cofnas, or Arday, get silenced?
VInay, you get better and better. This is the best article on Arday I have seen. Many thanks.
Vinay, you and Dawkins have summarized well. The DEI emperor truly has no clothes. Cambridge's promotion (in all senses) of serial fabulist and academic cipher Arday is pure racism. But I don't expect Cambridge to self-correct, demote the people who hired Arday, and heed the wake-up call. Bureaucracies are populated by cowards. They will circle the wagons, blame everyone else, and dig the hole deeper. They only care about survival, not academic merit, which as you found by reading a sampling of sociology papers, is mostly garbage dressed up in the unintelligible prose of postmodern theory.
I've always felt it's incumbent on the writer to be understood- post modern theory writers believe the opposite... they think it's the responsibility of the reader to understand what they write- no matter how difficult to read their prose might be
I used to teach as an adjunct at an unnamed University (hint-Prasad got his degree there) and I was asked to give a talk on pca etc. in the graduate school sociology seminar. I was appalled at the low level of underatnding of statistics that was displayed by student and professor alike.
Nor is this an isolated incident, here as well as across the pond…
Arday---academic black privilege on steroids. Unfortunately, the rule not the exception. The term "social science" should replace "jumbo shrimp" as the most frequently cited example of oxymoron.
When I read point 7 I thought, well- if you go and read other sociology papers you may find similar levels of gibberish ... lol- and you totally covered that with point 8. I remember taking the time to read Jill bidens dissertation when her whole controversy erupted- I just laughed while reading- you can't fault the PhD student for meeting the standards of their chosen discipline.
Well done Vinay! I appreciate that your observations are common sense and factual. One thing that you could slip in a bit more is that the Covid vaccine mandates were so unethical because the vaccine utilized a new technology that had never tested before and thus there was no safety data. We made our healthy kids take it and Fauci knew that it did not affect transmission. I still get crazy angry when I think of all these university presidents pontificating and showing themselves to be the pseudointellectual empty suits that many of them are in their responses to Covid and vaccine mandates. I won't name names but there were plenty of high level universities spouting utter crap.
1) The institutional response to criticism in personnel assessment is to rebound it back to the individual (Arday was vulnerable and a fabulist who conned us), with full promotional institutional leverage in tow.
2) The institutional support leveraged to individuals promoted by the University are legal resources, for both censorship and for retaliation. The global academic playbook, as you've alluded to in your commentary, is exactly the same.
3) Not all "whistleblowers" are of the same ilk as Cofnas; the vast majority of whistleblowers are however, placed in the same basket as Cofnas (a troublemaker who's on the fringes of acceptable society).
4) What's the harm done when the voices of Cofnas, or Arday, get silenced?