When identity politics takes precedence over academic standards, universities cease to fulfil their purpose.
By: Andrew Doyle
Published: Aug 3, 2026
Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times. As the youngest black person ever to be appointed a professor at the University of Cambridge, there are good reasons why those who have championed him are rushing to his defence. But with each passing day, new revelations of his slippery relationship with reality seem to be emerging.
As with many fabulists, it is difficult to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Some of Arday’s boasts are quite obviously false. For instance, nobody believes that he completed the last nine of thirty consecutive marathons with a fractured leg that had swollen ‘to twice its normal size’. Or that he appeared in the television series Seven Up! as a child, even though its participants were selected in 1963 and Arday was born two decades later.
Other claims might well be embellishments on kernels of reality. No doubt he has raised money for charity, but it seems highly unlikely that his vaunted sum of £5.5 million is accurate. We know that he played snooker, but his assertion that he did so professionally would carry more weight if someone on the circuit had heard of him. Few would dispute that Arday is a keen amateur athlete. But if his claim to have run six hundred miles in six days were true, that would place him among the world’s elite sportsmen.
Perhaps most serious of all are the accusations of plagiarism. Cambridge has been quick to dismiss the matter, stating that an investigation has already been conducted by Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD thesis, and no evidence of plagiarism was found. Many readers who have compared the relevant passages side by side have reached a different conclusion. Numerous examples have been collated by Nathan Cofnas and can be seen here.
The refusal of the authorities at Cambridge to investigate the allegations properly has naturally raised suspicions that Arday is being protected because he is the poster boy for DEI. If it is true that he was raised on a council estate, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, first spoke at the age of eleven, and learned to read and write at eighteen, then his success story is unparalleled. Yet plagiarism is an extremely grave matter for an academic, and the evidence is difficult to dismiss.
The failure to hold Arday to the same standards as anyone else is, of course, a soft form of racism.
Those who have been wildly accusing his critics of racial prejudice might want to take a moment to consider whether they are engaged in a form of projection. Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge, had circulated a letter to fellow academics urging them to sign in the name of ‘anti-racism’. It might well be that some of Arday’s critics are gleefully leaping on the controversy to discredit a prominent black man, but these are unpleasant outliers. Most people are simply concerned that academic standards are being degraded out of a misguided fealty to the creed of identity politics.
Baron-Cohen’s most shameful ploy has been to cite statistics regarding suicidality in autism and then raise concerns about the ‘impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic’. This kind of emotional blackmail ought to be beneath him. While it is natural to feel sympathy for anyone who is caught in a media storm, we cannot get around the fact that Arday is a high-profile academic at a top university. The reporters who have covered this controversy are not ‘bullying a vulnerable autistic man’; they are simply doing their job.
The notion that minorities ought to be judged by lower standards is undeniably racist, and yet this is precisely the stance taken by Arday’s cheerleaders. It is possible to investigate and report on this story without veering into cruelty, and virtually all reporters have acquitted themselves admirably in this regard. But it is no small matter that Arday’s promotion prevented other people – possibly also from minority groups – from securing a role for which they may have been better qualified. Arday is not the victim here.
At present, we have no idea why Arday lifted whole passages from another academic’s work for his thesis. According to the BBC, Arday has insisted that his autism meant that in his early academic work he would rely ‘on using mimicry to make sense of information, and that similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academics’. But it is simply not the case that plagiarism on this scale is commonplace. Mistakes, of course, can be made. One might, for instance, jot down a quotation in note form without an attribution and then later take it to be one’s own writing. But look again at the sheer volume of identical passages; plagiarism does appear to be the most plausible explanation.
Hard as it is to believe, this may not even be a straightforward case of fraudulence. There are those for whom lying comes completely naturally, so much so that it is often their first instinct. The novelist Compton Mackenzie called such people the improvisatori, and famous examples he knew personally included Dr Axel Munthe, Ford Madox Ford, Lawrence of Arabia and the artist Dion Clayton Calthrop.
In the third volume of his autobiography, Mackenzie gives an example of one of these improvisatori, a military man who he refers to only as ‘T—’.
‘On one occasion cannibalism was a topic in the billiards-room. “I expect I’m the only one here who knows what human flesh tastes like,” said T—.
We exclaimed in astonishment.
“Yes, when I was on safari in Matabeleland soon after the war we had an unusually good soup one night. When I told my cook-boy how good it was he beamed and said it was because he had put in it a dead baby he had bought from its mother. Of course, I gave him a flogging and forbade him ever to do such a thing again.”
“But didn’t you feel horribly sick when you heard what your cook-boy had done?” we asked.
“Yes, I suppose I felt a bit squeamish but I have to admit that it was a really excellent soup.”’
It is a perfect example of the genre: an anecdote rich in detail and told with conviction, but utterly false. In such cases, it is not that the lie serves a purpose, but that it reveals a curious tendency in the man whose first instinct is to dwell in fantasy.
Some liars believe their own lies. Some simply relish the attention or the sense of power that often accompanies a successful deception. It is useless at this point to speculate on Arday’s motives, or even if he is aware that he has done anything wrong. Yet as a high-profile figure at a top university, any evidence of professional misconduct must be investigated. The issue is not race but standards, and a university that cannot distinguish between the two has lost sight of its purpose.
––
University refuses to investigate DEI star’s plagiarism
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The inevitable result of DEI, affirmative action and identity politics.
Calling people "racists" for the crime of noticing things doesn't work anymore.
my failures seem to be magnified under the lens I have placed myself beneath.
by pleading for recognition of my niceties, I am hoarded when I am unable to measure up to myself.
I feel as though I am unable to hold my own weight, as though I will crumble through the ground I forged.
The imbecile will be praised for less than idiocy, but the angel will have their throat slit when they are no longer capable of carrying a civilization on their spine.
I find that I am playing dress up with a halo in my hand. my faults are too immense so I want nothing more than to forfeit this crown that I placed upon my head.
however such a deed would be to forfeit my life’s ambition as well.
oh, what a miserable fate it is to dream more graciously than you’re capable of achieving.
President Biden to name national monument for Emmet Till and his mother.
The brutal torture and murder of Emmett Till followed by his mother’s decision to hold an “open casket” funeral changed America. In 1955, a young Black teenager, Emmett Till, was abducted and killed because a white woman accused Till of “whistling” at her and grabbing her wrist. (The woman later recanted the accusations during an interview for a book.) Till’s nearly unrecognizable body was pulled from a river, where it was weighted with a 75-pound cotton gin fan secured to his neck by barbed wire. Nearly 250,000 people walked past his casket, and hundreds of thousands more saw photos of Till’s mutilated body in his casket.
Two white men were charged with the murder and acquitted by an all-white jury. The defendants confessed to the crime a few months later in an interview given to Look Magazine—for which they were paid $4,000, a hefty sum in 1956. Having been previously acquitted, they could not be tried again for murder because of the Constitution’s double jeopardy prohibition.
Emmett Till’s murder and his mother’s bravery in holding an open-casket funeral galvanized the nascent civil rights movement and helped to inspire a generation of civil rights leaders, including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. On Monday, President Biden announced that he is declaring three sites as a national monument to Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. See NYTimes, Biden to Name National Monument for Emmett Till and His Mother. (This article is accessible to all.)
President Biden’s actions come at a moment of renewed overt racism in America. Florida’s new history curriculum includes prompts asking students to consider ways in which slavery “benefitted” enslaved persons by giving them skills they could use after emancipation. See Florida’s State Academic Standards—Social Studies, 2023. The linked document includes the following “benchmark” standard (on page 6):
Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
The proposed “benchmark clarification” is a stunning revision to an institution where white owners profited from forced labor by enslaved persons. To suggest that any part of that forced labor was “beneficial” is a cruel and dishonest whitewashing of a vile institution. But Ron DeSantis nonetheless defended a “pro-slavery” curriculum that his culture war unleashed in Florida. See The Independent, DeSantis defends Florida curriculum that suggests slaves benefited from forced labor.
But the Academic Standards linked above are far worse than the media portrays. The issue is not a single snippet—the language quoted above—it is the entire approach to teaching the history of slavery in the United States. I invite you to review pages 5 through 10 of the Academic Standards, and you will discover that much of the curriculum is devoted to describing slavery in Africa, Europe, and Asia—apparently to make the disgusting point that “everyone else was doing it.” For example, the “benchmark clarifications” on page 9 include the following:
Benchmark Clarifications:
Clarification 1: Instruction includes how trading in slaves developed in African lands (e.g., Benin, Dahomey).
Clarification 2: Instruction includes the practice of the Barbary Pirates in kidnapping Europeans and selling them into slavery in Muslim countries (i.e., Muslim slave markets in North Africa, West Africa, Swahili Coast, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula, Indian Ocean slave trade).
Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slavery was utilized in Asian cultures (e.g., Sumerian law code, Indian caste system).
Clarification 4: Instruction includes the similarities between serfdom and slavery and emergence of the term “slave” in the experience of Slavs.
Clarification 5: Instruction includes how slavery among indigenous peoples of the Americas was utilized prior to and after European colonization.
All of the above smacks of a white-racist defense of slavery in the US. Thankfully, Joe Biden is resisting the effort by the right to erase America’s shameful history of slavery and Jim Crow laws that enforced a system of apartheid for nearly a century after the Civil War.
Professors like Hollis Robbins express concerns that scholars are under pressure to avoid giving failing grades.
By: Leona Salinas
Published: Apr 20, 2026
Reports focus too much on over-giving A grades ‘when the inflation of an F to a D or a D to a C is the bigger concern,’ University of Utah professor says
Harvard’s recent grade inflation controversy has renewed concerns about how many students are receiving top marks. But some professors say the deeper problem in higher education isn’t just inflated A’s — it’s the quiet disappearance of failing grades.
Hollis Robbins, a former dean and professor of English at the University of Utah, told The College Fix the larger problem may be what happens to low grades before they ever appear on a transcript.
Robbins said she hears “from professors and lecturers across the country that they are under pressure from deans not to fail students who are at risk.”
In a post on X responding to a report about sinking academic standards, Robbins wrote that “universities will not let professors fail any students because they’ll lose tuition dollars.”
When she was a dean at Sonoma State University, she told The Fix that she noticed “the resources being marshaled to identify students ‘at risk of failing’ and prevent the failure.”
“While there are certainly good and socially responsible reasons for supporting students at risk of failing at public institutions, when the taxpayer is subsidizing the education, I have long seen the pressure put on faculty members not to give a student an F, even if the student deserved it,” Robbins told The Fix via email.
Her comments come amid concerns about grading standards, especially at elite universities. In November, The Fix highlighted a 25-page report from Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education warning that the university’s grading system is “damaging the academic culture of the College.” According to that report, 60 percent of undergraduate grades are now A’s.
Concerns about grade inflation are not limited to the Ivy League. At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, recently released data shows “a 0.15 point increase in the mean grade given in courses across all three of the college’s academic divisions” over the past 20 years, according to student newspaper The Phoenix.
Robbins said faculty are often nudged toward alternatives that keep failing grades off the books.
“Allow the student to ‘withdraw’ from the class instead,” she told The Fix. “Faculty are told repeatedly that the failure of a student is the faculty’s failure.”
She tied that pressure to rankings and retention.
“Universities are ranked by ‘graduation rate’ and ‘retention rate’ so every student who fails lowers the ranking of the university,” Robbins said, adding that “the pressure on faculty takes the form of constant reminders that any student failure puts the entire college or university at risk of a loss of ranking and prestige.”
Robbins also said the issue extends beyond elite grade inflation stories. “Most higher ed journalists are spending way too much time on grade inflation at the top (too many As) when the inflation of an F to a D or a D to a C is the bigger concern,” she said.
She pointed to DFW rates, or students who earn a D, an F, or withdraw.
“Universities usually flag courses with high DFW rates — students who earn a D or an F or withdraw from the course,” Robbins said. “Faculty who teach courses with high DFW rates are often brought in to an administrator’s office for a stern talking to.”
Robbins was not alone in raising that concern, as other professors and scholars on X also described administrative pressure, grading floors, or professional costs tied to giving failing grades.
However, some scholars said the opposite, including University of Washington economics Professor Jason Kerwin.
“This is overstated—I’m a college professor, and I fail students sometimes,” Kerwin wrote in a post on X responding to Robbins’ initial comment.
In an email to The College Fix, he elaborated, “I have personally given out failing grades in the past, and the university has never interfered when I have done so.”
Kerwin added, “I have always had discretion to assign grades based on my expert judgment of student performance, and never encountered any interference from campus or department administrators over the grades I assign.”
He said tenure can help protect that discretion. “An advantage of the tenure system is that it insulates faculty from this kind of pressure,” he told The Fix.
Still, he acknowledged that some pressures can shape grades indirectly. Both his and Robbins’ comments suggest the issue is less about a formal ban on failing grades than about the incentives surrounding them.
“One incentive that shapes grades is the pressure to maintain course enrollments,” he said. “If certain courses or majors develop a reputation for giving out lower grades or failing many students, their enrollments may drop as students switch to easier majors.”
Harvard’s grade inflation report attracted widespread criticism and, in February, resulted in a faculty committee proposing a 20 percent cap on A grades.
However, there has been pushback from some students, as the Wall Street Journal recently noted. And a faculty vote on the matter, initially slated for earlier this month, was postponed “to at least May to allow for extended discussion,” according to the Harvard Crimson.
The College Fix reached out to Harvard’s media relations office three times for comment over the past couple weeks, asking for more details about the grade inflation issue, including data on the number of failing grades students receive, but did not receive a response.
Technology should facilitate learning, not substitute for it.
By: Clay Shirky
Published: Apr 29, 2025S
Since ChatGPT launched in late 2022, students have been among its most avid adopters. When the rapid growth in users stalled in the late spring of ’23, it briefly looked like the AI bubble might be popping, but growth resumed that September; the cause of the decline was simply summer break. Even as other kinds of organizations struggle to use a tool that can be strikingly powerful and surprisingly inept in turn, AI’s utility to students asked to produce 1,500 words on Hamlet or the Great Leap Forward was immediately obvious, and is the source of the current campaigns by OpenAI and others to offer student discounts, as a form of customer acquisition.
Every year, 15 million or so undergraduates in the United States produce papers and exams running to billions of words. While the output of any given course is student assignments — papers, exams, research projects, and so on — the product of that course is student experience. “Learning results from what the student does and thinks,” as the great educational theorist Herbert Simon once noted, “and only as a result of what the student does and thinks.” The assignment itself is a MacGuffin, with the shelf life of sour cream and an economic value that rounds to zero dollars. It is valuable only as a way to compel student effort and thought.
The utility of written assignments relies on two assumptions: The first is that to write about something, the student has to understand the subject and organize their thoughts. The second is that grading student writing amounts to assessing the effort and thought that went into it. At the end of 2022, the logic of this proposition — never ironclad — began to fall apart completely. The writing a student produces and the experience they have can now be decoupled as easily as typing a prompt, which means that grading student writing might now be unrelated to assessing what the student has learned to comprehend or express.
Generative AI can be useful for learning. These tools are good at creating explanations for difficult concepts, practice quizzes, study guides, and so on. Students can write a paper and ask for feedback on diction, or see what a rewrite at various reading levels looks like, or request a summary to check if their meaning is clear. Engaged uses have been visible since ChatGPT launched, side by side with the lazy ones. But the fact that AI might help students learn is no guarantee it will help them learn.
After observing that student action and thought is the only possible source of learning, Simon concluded, “The teacher can advance learning only by influencing the student to learn.” Faced with generative AI in our classrooms, the obvious response for us is to influence students to adopt the helpful uses of AI while persuading them to avoid the harmful ones. Our problem is that we don’t know how to do that.I
am an administrator at New York University, responsible for helping faculty adapt to digital tools. Since the arrival of generative AI, I have spent much of the last two years talking with professors and students to try to understand what is going on in their classrooms. In those conversations, faculty have been variously vexed, curious, angry, or excited about AI, but as last year was winding down, for the first time one of the frequently expressed emotions was sadness. This came from faculty who were, by their account, adopting the strategies my colleagues and I have recommended: emphasizing the connection between effort and learning, responding to AI-generated work by offering a second chance rather than simply grading down, and so on. Those faculty were telling us our recommended strategies were not working as well as we’d hoped, and they were saying it with real distress.
Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had AI-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current AI would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their “learning styles.” A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” And another, when asked about their largely AI-written work, replied, “Everyone is doing it.” Those are stories from a 15-minute conversation with a single professor.
We are also hearing a growing sense of sadness from our students about AI use. One of my colleagues reports students being “deeply conflicted” about AI use, originally adopting it as an aid to studying but persisting with a mix of justification and unease. Some observations she’s collected:
“I’ve become lazier. AI makes reading easier, but it slowly causes my brain to lose the ability to think critically or understand every word.”
“I feel like I rely too much on AI, and it has taken creativity away from me.”
On using AI summaries: “Sometimes I don’t even understand what the text is trying to tell me. Sometimes it’s too much text in a short period of time, and sometimes I’m just not interested in the text.”
“Yeah, it’s helpful, but I’m scared that someday we’ll prefer to read only AI summaries rather than our own, and we’ll become very dependent on AI.”
Much of what’s driving student adoption is anxiety. In addition to the ordinary worries about academic performance, students feel time pressure from jobs, internships, or extracurriculars, and anxiety about GPA and transcripts for employers. It is difficult to say, “Here is a tool that can basically complete assignments for you, thus reducing anxiety and saving you 10 hours of work without eviscerating your GPA. By the way, don’t use it that way.” But for assignments to be meaningful, that sort of student self-restraint is critical.
Self-restraint is also, on present evidence, not universally distributed. Last November, a Reddit post appeared in r/nyu, under the heading “Can’t stop using Chat GPT on HW.” (The poster’s history is consistent with their being an NYU undergraduate as claimed.) The post read:
I literally can’t even go 10 seconds without using Chat when I am doing my assignments. I hate what I have become because I know I am learning NOTHING, but I am too far behind now to get by without using it. I need help, my motivation is gone. I am a senior and I am going to graduate with no retained knowledge from my major.
Given these and many similar observations in the last several months, I’ve realized many of us working on AI in the classroom have made a collective mistake, believing that lazy and engaged uses lie on a spectrum, and that moving our students toward engaged uses would also move them away from the lazy ones.
Faculty and students have been telling me that this is not true, or at least not true enough. Instead of a spectrum, uses of AI are independent options. A student can take an engaged approach to one assignment, a lazy approach on another, and a mix of engaged and lazy on a third. Good uses of AI do not automatically dissuade students from also adopting bad ones; an instructor can introduce AI for essay feedback or test prep without that stopping their student from also using it to write most of their assignments.
Our problem is that we have two problems. One is figuring out how to encourage our students to adopt creative and helpful uses of AI. The other is figuring out how to discourage them from adopting lazy and harmful uses. Those are both important, but the second one is harder.I
t is easy to explain to students that offloading an assignment to ChatGPT creates no more benefit for their intellect than moving a barbell with a forklift does for their strength. We have been alert to this issue since late 2022, and students have consistently reported understanding that some uses of AI are harmful. Yet forgoing easy shortcuts has proven to be as difficult as following a workout routine, and for the same reason: The human mind is incredibly adept at rationalizing pleasurable but unhelpful behavior.
Using these tools can certainly make it feel like you are learning. In her explanatory video “AI Can Do Your Homework. Now What?” the documentarian Joss Fong describes it this way:
Education researchers have this term “desirable difficulties,” which describes this kind of effortful participation that really works but also kind of hurts. And the risk with AI is that we might not preserve that effort, especially because we already tend to misinterpret a little bit of struggling as a signal that we’re not learning.
This preference for the feeling of fluency over desirable difficulties was identified long before generative AI. It’s why students regularly report they learn more from well-delivered lectures than from active learning, even though we know from many studies that the opposite is true. One recent paper was evocatively titled “Measuring Active Learning Versus the Feeling of Learning.” Another concludes that instructor fluency increases perceptions of learning without increasing actual learning.
This is a version of the debate we had when electronic calculators first became widely available in the 1970s. Though many people present calculator use as unproblematic, K-12 teachers still ban them when students are learning arithmetic. One study suggests that students use calculators as a way of circumventing the need to understand a mathematics problem (i.e., the same thing you and I use them for). In another experiment, when using a calculator programmed to “lie,” four in 10 students simply accepted the result that a woman born in 1945 was 114 in 1994. Johns Hopkins students with heavy calculator use in K-12 had worse math grades in college, and many claims about the positive effect of calculators take improved test scores as evidence, which is like concluding that someone can run faster if you give them a car. Calculators obviously have their uses, but we should not pretend that overreliance on them does not damage number sense, as everyone who has ever typed 7 x 8 into a calculator intuitively understands.
Studies of cognitive bias with AI use are starting to show similar patterns. A 2024 study with the blunt title “Generative AI Can Harm Learning” found that “access to GPT-4 significantly improves performance … However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access.” Another found that students who have access to a large language model overestimate how much they have learned. A 2025 study from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research concludes that higher confidence in gen AI is associated with less critical thinking. As with calculators, there will be many tasks where automation is more important than user comprehension, but for student work, a tool that improves the output but degrades the experience is a bad tradeoff.I
n 1980 the philosopher John Searle, writing about AI debates at the time, proposed a thought experiment called “The Chinese Room.” Searle imagined an English speaker with no knowledge of the Chinese language sitting in a room with an elaborate set of instructions, in English, for looking up one set of Chinese characters and finding a second set associated with the first. When a piece of paper with words in Chinese written on it slides under the door, the room’s occupant looks it up, draws the corresponding characters on another piece of paper, and slides that back. Unbeknownst to the room’s occupant, Chinese speakers on the other side of the door are slipping questions into the room, and the pieces of paper that slide back out are answers in perfect Chinese. With this imaginary setup, Searle asked whether the room’s occupant actually knows how to read and write Chinese. His answer was an unequivocally no.
When Searle proposed that thought experiment, no working AI could approximate that behavior; the paper was written to highlight the theoretical difference between acting with intent versus merely following instructions. Now it has become just another use of actually existing artificial intelligence, one that can destroy a student’s education.
The recent case of William A., as he was known in court documents, illustrates the threat. William was a student in Tennessee’s Clarksville-Montgomery County School system who struggled to learn to read. (He would eventually be diagnosed with dyslexia.) As is required under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, William was given an individualized educational plan by the school system, designed to provide a “free appropriate public education” that takes a student’s disabilities into account. As William progressed through school, his educational plan was adjusted, allowing him additional time plus permission to use technology to complete his assignments. He graduated in 2024 with a 3.4 GPA and an inability to read. He could not even spell his own name.
To complete written assignments, as described in the court proceedings, “William would first dictate his topic into a document using speech-to-text software”:
He then would paste the written words into an AI software like ChatGPT. Next, the AI software would generate a paper on that topic, which William would paste back into his own document. Finally, William would run that paper through another software program like Grammarly, so that it reflected an appropriate writing style.
This process is recognizably a practical version of the Chinese Room for translating between speaking and writing. That is how a kid can get through high school with a B+ average and near-total illiteracy.
A local court found that the school system had violated the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, and ordered it to provide William with hundreds of hours of compensatory tutoring. The county appealed, maintaining that since William could follow instructions to produce the requested output, he’d been given an acceptable substitute for knowing how to read and write. On February 3, an appellate judge handed down a decision affirming the original judgement: William’s schools failed him by concentrating on whether he had completed his assignments, rather than whether he’d learned from them.
Searle took it as axiomatic that the occupant of the Chinese Room could neither read nor write Chinese; following instructions did not substitute for comprehension. The appellate-court judge similarly ruled that William A. had not learned to read or write English: Cutting and pasting from ChatGPT did not substitute for literacy. And what I and many of my colleagues worry is that we are allowing our students to build custom Chinese Rooms for themselves, one assignment at a time.
[ Via: https://archive.today/OgKaY ]
==
These are the students who want taxpayers to pay for their student debt.
As young teachers at Oxford we know how deep-rooted woke thinking is. And it’s older colleagues who stood by nodding it all through
By: John Maier and Daniel Koosi
Published: Aug 22, 2025
As young teachers at Oxford we know how deep-rooted woke thinking is. And it’s older colleagues who stood by nodding it all through
Gaslighting is an abused word these days. But gaslit is how we feel whenever we are told that the problem of woke ideology at universities has been exaggerated. We, after all, have been inside the belly of the beast for ten years. Coming up to Oxford as undergraduates in 2015, the period referred to by some as “the great awokening”, the public mood was by turns puritanical and doctrinaire, obsessed with an oddly narrow range of social justice issues.
From Rhodes Must Fall, a student campaign to press the university into removing a smaller-than-life-size statue of the Victorian imperialist from the façade of Oriel College, to the mass sit-ins of Black Lives Matter and the pro-Palestinian encampments of recent summers, each season has brought a new style of ideological fast fashion. At least such political posturing will have provided ripe material for student satire magazines, you may think. Well, not exactly: our own college’s satirical publication was forcibly shot down by a student vote (on account, of course, of its politically wrong-thinking transgressions).
When a satire of the modern-day woke university finally appears, it is likely to make its villain the kind of intolerant, blue-haired, placard-wielding undergraduate who has so shamelessly cast themselves as the protagonist of the past decade’s culture war. The more we have seen of university life, however — as undergrads, then PhD students and finally teaching — the clearer it has become that the damage being done by woke ideology is not confined to student skirmishes, but has infected academia at every level: taught content, research, disciplinary norms and even institutional design.
In fact, the conventional emphasis on the menace of woke student activism risks getting things backwards. There is indeed an important generational component to the malaise gripping universities. But the culpable figures are not students. They are those academics in positions of authority and secure employment who have negligently allowed the culture to be trashed, leaving a mess for the next generation to clear up.
Above all, the adults in the seminar room have aided and abetted the spread of destructive errors under the guise of behaving with political neutrality. Incredibly, some even flatter themselves that standing idly by as bad ideas flourish is a way of exercising mature restraint in the marketplace of ideas.
No cause illustrates this dysfunction better than trans ideology. Within our own discipline, philosophy, it has warped the intellectual environment. Most famously, Kathleen Stock was hounded from her position at Sussex for defending women’s rights against encroachment by adult males who claim to be women. When her work was presented in scholarly forums, other academics objected to being “non-consensually co-platformed” with her: an impressively obtuse complaint from the folks who insist that women have no business worrying about the presence of men in their spaces.
Holly Lawford-Smith, a sex-realist feminist, was treated in a notably underhand way by Oxford University Press, who attempted to rescind her publication contract on spurious grounds. Jimmy Doyle, a philosophy lecturer, recently left Harvard, where the highly policed atmosphere made it feel, as he told The Times in a recent interview, as though “the nation’s intellectual elite [are] enforcing moral auto-lobotomy as a condition of entry to polite society”. Worse treatment met Alex Byrne at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who, alone among senior analytic philosophers, has published sane, rigorous papers arguing for the view that “male woman” is an empty category. A few months ago, Byrne was the target of an open letter organised by his colleagues, accusing him, in a characteristically McCarthyite idiom, of “collaborating” with the Trump administration for helping to author a report about the treatment of paediatric gender dysphoria.
For years, trans ideology has presented academics with what economists call a “collective action problem”. Intervene alone, and the costs can be huge; bite your tongue and at least you might have a quiet life. Recently, opting for the high personal cost strategy, we published a public essay, Philosophical Malpractice, on a brief submitted to the US Supreme Court by 21 Yale philosophers, some of the most distinguished figures in the discipline. Styling themselves as impartial experts, they argued that a state-level ban by Tennessee on medical interventions such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones was presumptively unconstitutional. In effect, these academics were intervening on the side of inducing symptoms such as lifelong sterility in psychologically distressed children. That such a position can sail under the flag of political neutrality, and do so largely unquestioned, is a sign of how far academia is from a healthy intellectual equilibrium.
Elite academia in America now faces a reckoning. Advocacy groups have used lawsuits to expose its illegal hiring practices. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that methods of positive discrimination used by elite universities in admissions were, as many had long suspected, racist and unconstitutional. More recently – maliciously, indiscriminately and in many cases, to the detriment of good science – the Trump administration has forced universities such as Harvard and Columbia to the negotiating table by withholding their vast federal research budgets. Much of the insurgent right, on both sides of the Atlantic, has revelled in seeing its philistine agenda put into practice. But elite universities are responsible for putting themselves in a position in which their own culpable failures can be so credibly exposed.
For years, these institutions have systematically silenced or ignored the few internal truth-tellers who have tried to sound the alarm about indulgence of cancel culture, anti-meritocratic appointment processes, the flourishing of antisemitism on campus, the metastasising spread of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) infrastructure, and the collapse in intellectual standards all the foregoing are liable to trigger. Now — in Columbia’s case, to the tune of $200 million — they are paying the price. America, often regarded as the progenitor of academia’s woke obsession, is also the first to try to reign in its excesses.
What has gone wrong? Simple: academia is biased. And though the indulgence of the disturbing demands of trans activism may provide the most vivid expression of this bias, the problem is far more general. Outside economics, many academics indulge poorly evidenced, anti-capitalist posturing to an incredible degree. Identify yourself as a socialist, or openly sympathise with the objectives of murderously oppressive left-wing regimes, and no one will blink. The academic publisher Routledge has a 114-book series on Fascism and the Far Right, whose “scope includes anti-fascism, radical-right populism, extreme-right violence and terrorism”. It has no comparable series on communism and the far left.
Volunteer woke-coded examples in humanities seminar rooms or at conferences and you should expect to receive solemn nods of approval. By contrast, try asking otherwise opinionated academics point-blank whether, for instance, any male sex offenders should be housed in women’s prisons and the result is usually a bout of spluttering incredulity, as if you have just made a brazenly impermissible move in a game everyone is playing. Persist, and you’ll meet with irrelevant prevarication, and a sudden bout of reticence as to whether it’s the kind of issue about which academics should even venture an opinion. Many academics are so resistant to the idea their profession might be biased that they refuse to agree to the terms in which a discussion of the problem can be conducted. Use words like woke or cancel culture and one’s left-wing interlocutors will often pull a sophisticated grimace. Sometimes they will insist that they don’t even know what those words mean. Such opportunistic confessions of ignorance are exactly symptomatic of bias. Woke is a nice, simple word for the phenomenon it names. By denying its use to their opponents, academics are, ironically, engaging in a practice which in other contexts they call “hermeneutical injustice”: depriving marginalised people of the words they need to describe the injustices they face.
Even as moderate academics nitpick over its meaningfulness, academia’s radicals embrace the term woke to name what they take to be their own moral-cum-intellectual virtue. The philosopher Rima Basu, for instance, commends a woke attitude as the “virtue” of “[exercising] a kind of indirect long-term control over how we engage in inquiry”. In the same paper, Basu argues that even if you have strong evidence for statistical generalisations such as “African-Americans commit murder at disproportionate rates”, it is not just wrong to assert them but impossible even to know them, in effect because of their potential to be used in racist reasoning. Though other philosophers provide rigorous responses to such arguments, they typically maintain, or feign, obliviousness about how weird and wrongheaded the ideas are in the first place. They collude in the self-image of their woke-identified colleagues as being on the side of moral virtue and intellectual progress.
But woke scholarship is highly regressive. Not only does it retard the pursuit of fairness and truth it claims to promote, it takes intellectual steps backwards. Many woke theories are messy and ugly, useless for acquiring real insight or theoretical understanding, and encode errors so glaring even non-experts can see them a mile off.
Few academics are sufficiently sensitive to the damage woke bias has done to universities. When one inhabits an ideologically stifling atmosphere, it can be tricky to put one’s finger exactly on what is so malign about it. Any specific worrying detail can be dismissed by opponents as trivial; any impressionistic worry accused of lack of specificity. Still, as woke academics have often noted, the accretion of many subtle wrongs can have a cumulatively disastrous effect.
Externally, the proliferation of woke error has done severe reputational damage. As one physicist, based at Rutgers in the US, put it on social media: universities’ claims to be capable of self-reform will be credible “when they can correctly count the number of sexes present in the human species”. Academics who don’t register that connection — readily perceived by virtually everyone else — are kidding themselves.
Internally, it was a mistake of academia’s moderates to assume that woke theories could be successfully quarantined within certain fields without ramifying to the broader profession’s detriment. Once certain patterns of argument and inference gained unquestioned acceptance among whole cohorts of tenured professors in less rigorous departments, it was certain they would infect the rest of the system.
The rapid growth of EDI exacerbates the problem. (Salaries for EDI officials have doubled over three years at British universities: with Oxford the largest employer of all.) As a matter of simple sociology, it is unrealistic to expect faulty arguments for woke conclusions to be properly exposed in the classroom while the administrative infrastructure is mandating compliance with them outside o f it.
Thought and action are not so easily divided. Any teenager off to university to start a humanities degree next month will encounter the result of a scholarly environment that treats inadequate, moralistic theorising with an unearned respect. An analysis of cross-disciplinary US college syllabuses, shared by the psychologist Steven Pinker on X, revealed a pervasive bias towards woke scholarship. With the US figures probably propped up by its “great books” tradition, the UK’s figures were even direr: the gender studies specialist Judith Butler listed thousands of times more often than Plato; the cultural critic Edward Said more often than Shakespeare and the radical French philosopher Michel Foucault more than virtually anyone.
What comes next? The position of academia today resembles, in certain respects, that of financial institutions on the eve of the 2008 crash. Universities have been peddling the intellectual equivalent of collateral debt obligations, the bomb that set off the 2008 financial crisis, which mixed together valuable products and toxic ones. Insulated from accountability to the market by the bubble of student loan debt, universities have had the latitude to behave in ways that have not only helped shred their credibility but now justify, indeed, necessitate, external intervention.
America’s lawsuit disclosures have made it clear that many universities there were simply not alive to the fact that their hiring policies were racist and illegal in the most ordinary sense of those terms. In the UK, academic job listings sometimes require candidates to demonstrate their commitment to EDI in a manner doubtfully consistent with their legal duties to promote academic freedom. Academics often think of their institutions as the honest, hard-working underdog, compared with “big, bad corporations”. That self-conception obscures to them how they could be guilty of exactly the same legal and moral failings of which they accuse private-sector institutions. Universities are large publicly subsidised institutions, as vulnerable to self-perpetuating cycles of dysfunction as any other. It is reckless to think they will course-correct under their own momentum: an expectation which, if proposed as a non-interventionist remedy to the troubles in any other public body , would be rightly viewed as mad.
But listen to prominent spokespeople for the academy and it becomes radically unclear what external constraint they deem appropriate. They spurn accountability to the market or to public opinion. They certainly don’t think they’re directly accountable to the government; in fact their track record suggests they don’t even think they should be accountable to anti-discrimination law. Unless and until academics identify a specific, realistic mechanism for their own regulation, any complaints about externally imposed reforms have little credibility. Much academic research, to be clear, is good. The best academics are smart people, by any reasonable standard, their vulnerability to woke notwithstanding. Indeed, a complicating factor in getting honest and serious academics to recognise the problems in their profession is that many of them tend to underestimate the severity of the errors of their less able colleagues, especially in “studies” departments, where it is not uncommon for scholars to lack basic statistical literacy.
There are many lessons to draw from academia’s sustained indulgence of woke ideology. Any serious government should curb the funding of EDI bureaucracies. Subsidies that have been used to inflate the demand for college degrees, depressing standards, should be wound down. Tenure, a form of job security often justified on the grounds that it liberates academics to speak their minds, has proven doubtfully effective in that respect. Its unfortunate effect now may be to allow some of the worst proponents of a bankrupt ideology to continue to haunt their institutions long after the excesses of woke are banished from the rest of public life. The past decade has shown that wokeness disables academia from promoting knowledge and furthering the good in myriad ways. Perversely, but unsurprisingly, one of the things that bias precludes, for those in the grip of it, is its own discovery and correction. Steering universities towards this realisation should be the aim of academia’s real progressives.
John Maier and Daniel Kodsi’s book, Fall of the Ivory Tower, will be published next year
