Tag: academia

And … I’m Back

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“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”  Huzzah! I’m back.  Like a Phoenix rising over Arizona.  Like Prometheus released from his cruel shackles I am back again!

Now what to discuss?  Of course, Jason Arday!

I mean this story is practically unbelievable.  Arday was the poster boy for DEI overreach.  Someone who was illiterate until he was eighteen was given a doctorate and then made the youngest black professor at Cambridge University with a dissertation that was plagiarized from the work of another black doctoral candidate.  And then there are the outrageous lies on his resume and about his private life including the statement that he ran 30 marathon races in 35 days with six of them on a broken leg.  He claimed to be a college instructor in Ohio at a college that had no knowledge of him at all.  He even claims to have had brain cancer without anyone else having ever heard of it.  And after being exposed as a fraud he has now, apparently committed suicide.

Presently, the Left is attempting to frame the people that uncovered his various frauds as his murderers.  A few have started describing his death as a “lynching.”  Well, I have an alternative opinion.  My underlying thesis is that DEI as it is currently perpetrated in academia is responsible for Arday getting into the terrible mess he suicided over.  If his thesis advisor had checked his work against the other published works in his field they would have discovered that he was a plagiarist.  In fact if they had bothered to check his references they would have known that several of them were fake.  And based on the comments by several of his students who have come forward, Arday was absurdly unqualified to teach in his discipline and should have been close to being discharged by the university already.  The fact that the department that gave him his doctorate degree didn’t acknowledge how woefully unqualified he was to teach at Cambridge proves that he was being hired as a DEI figurehead to show Cambridge’s commitment to social justice even at the cost of depriving his students of a decent education in that subject matter.  So DEI at Cambridge is responsible for Arday’s mess and is therefore the root cause for his death.

Now, Arday is only one of several black academicians recently exposed for plagiarism and other fraudulent practices.  This recent trend seems to have as its source a willingness of honest academicians to admit that “the emperor has no clothes.”  Colleagues who have watched as universities rewarded black academicians for substandard work now see that it is safe to speak up.  And now that they have, the truth has penetrated into the open and more and more cases will surface.

Jason Arday had a wife and two children.  His death is a catastrophe for them.  I take no pleasure in it.  But if his wife is looking to start a lawsuit then Cambridge University is the logical defendant to sue.  They should be punished for allowing plagiarism and fraud to be their public policy.

 

U. of Penn. Donors Attempt Reform of Ivy League School

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Heather Mac Donald at the City Journal documents a revolt that seems to be going on behind the scenes at at least a couple of the Ivy League schools that have been in the headlines of late.

Apparently the donors have been chafing for some time at the direction the university has taken.

“University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill would not have been forced to resign last weekend had Penn’s donors and alumni not been organizing against her for two months.

…

The Penn rebels have now upped the ante. They have drafted a new constitution for the school that makes merit the sole criterion for student admissions and faculty hiring. The new charter requires the university to embrace institutional neutrality with regard to politics and faculty research. The rebels want candidates for Penn’s presidency to embrace the new charter as a precondition for employment.”

Could such a thing happen?  Would the federal government allow it?  I’m sure everyone reading this would be highly skeptical of such an outcome.  If nothing else it would require the un-employing of hundreds of DEI commissars that fill the corridors of the ivy-covered halls of Penn and Harvard.

And what of the grievance study departments?  How could such organizations fit into a merit based regime.  Other than employment for the “professors” what merit exists in what they do?  No meaningful purpose is served by what they do.  In fact, everyone is harmed by it; society, the students and the parents who have to pay for it.  Could this be the beginning of a revolt against the degradation of academia?  Hard to believe.

But when the ox being gored is that of the rich and powerful, things can happen.  Well, isn’t that how most revolutions occur?  Antisemitism has collided with progressive privilege and this has awakened the donors to the monster they themselves have fostered.

We’ll have to see.  After all you can’t turn a ship on a dime.  And the academic world has been corrupted for not decades but generations.  The only thing that favors reform is the sheer crushing weight of the bloated bureaucracies that have been created in these woke places.  America can no longer pay for the cost of the parasites sucking at the lifeblood of these dying schools.  Especially since they’ve almost stopped teaching anything meaningful.

Will the reforms at Penn happen?  Stay tuned and I’ll comment as information becomes available.

Update:

I just read the ZMan’s post for today.  He addresses this incident and he says that nothing will come of it.  Well, we’ll have to see.  Maybe a Festivus miracle is in the offing.

Here’s a Blueprint for Fixing Red State Colleges

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Ron DeSantis has provided proof of concept for disinfecting a college of its woke parasites.  The writer of this article goes through the why and the how of doing this to every Red State public college.  and he shows that even the private ones can be stopped from many of their worst excesses by anti-discrimination laws that prevent many of the equity hiring practices.

He draws attention to the fact that although college administrators were willing to adopt the progressive agenda of the woke movement, nevertheless they are easily cowed into following the mandates of the state that pays their salaries.  They’ll probably pay lip service to the cultural marxist outrage professed by the gender studies department but they’ll bend to the mandates of the governor and the legislature to keep their jobs and the gravy train of pension benefits.

And the same goes for the academics.  They know where their bread is buttered and they’ll back down and toe the line rather than lose their generous salaries and fabulous perks.  Kudos ot Ron DeSantis for pioneering this concept.  May all the other Red State governors copy his play book and rid half the country of woke campuses.

DeSantis Appoints Conservatives to a College Board of Trustees

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Finally, finally.

A red state governor FINALLY did something to change the orientation of hyper-leftwing colleges.

“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday made six new appointments to the New College of Florida Board of Trustees, including Manhattan Senior Fellow Christopher F. Rufo.

Rufo’s work has been featured on PBS, Netflix, and international television and has been notable for challenging critical race theory.

The New College of Florida in Sarasota, is a top-ranked public liberal arts college and is the designated honors college of the state university system.

DeSantis’ news press secretary Bryan Griffin sent a statement to Fox News Digital claiming that the academic institution has been “captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.”

“All of these appointees have a firsthand understanding of the Florida education system as a product of their work with us and the Florida Department of Education on other important initiatives. We are grateful to them for lending their time and expertise to the benefit of Florida’s students,” the DeSantis office told Fox News Digital.

“The New College of Florida is a public institution with a statutorily stated mission of ‘provid[ing] a quality education.’ Unfortunately, like so many colleges and universities in America, this institution has been completely captured by a political ideology that puts trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning.”

The statement added, “In particular, New College of Florida has reached a moment of critical mass, wherein low student enrollment and other financial stresses have emerged from its skewed focus and impractical course offerings.””

It’s about damn time!  Sure this is one college in something like 3,200 colleges in America.  Sure there will be battles from day one and the feds will punish the college every chance it gets.  But it’s a step in the right damn direction.  Now every other red state governor should do the exact same thing over and over again.

This DeSantis guy is pretty good.  He’s doing the right things.  He’s thinking clearly about how things can be changed and he’s reaching out to good people to do those things.  He’s making Florida a much better place.  That’s got to be a good thing.  Whether he should be president or vice president is a different question.  Maybe he should stay as governor of Florida and maybe end up the de facto leader of the red state coalition.  But any way you look at it he’s making a real difference.  Bravo.