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education and schooling ideological culture Internet controversy

A Scandal’s Arc

Jason Arday, scandal, plagiarism, Cambridge, DEI, race

When did you first hear the story of Jason Arday? 

In 2023, Mr. Arday became something of a public sensation in Great Britain, where his claims to being autistic, mute till age 11, and illiterate till 18 made a striking rag-to-riches/up-from-racism story upon his appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge.

The youngest Black professor at that institution ever.

But few in America heard much about him. 

Last September, Times Higher Education journalist Jack Grove documented what he alleged to be plagiarism in Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis and academic publications. Grove contacted Arday for comment; Arday responded with a letter from his lawyers. The story was not published. 

Then, a month ago, philosopher Nathan Cofnas published his exposé, which began with a litany of Arday’s autobiographical whoppers, not including the one I heard most bandied-about: that at age 7 the young Jason had been interviewed for the famous documentary Seven Up! — a glaring fib because the movie came out 21 years before Prof. Arday was born.

Cofnas compared passages in Arday’s 2018 paper to someone else’s 2012 paper. One sentence can serve to illustrate: “In particular, I seek to make a direct association between the tools of normative Whiteness and the deployment and consequences of racial microaggressions.” The italics indicate the one word Arday added.

A key contribution.

The Telegraph and The Times published stories on July 24th. On August 1, The Guardian got into it; four days later, the university opened an inquiry; the next day, Arday resigned. 

Eight days later, Jason Arday was found dead in his apartment. Suicide? That’s what many surmise, but police have only said his death was “unexpected but is not believed to be suspicious.”

For some, a cause célèbre! Vigils, ongoing. But his mourners downplay the lies and plagiarism. It’s all about racism.

But whose? Could it be those who rushed to promote a man beyond his merit merely because of race?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Thought

Brian Aldiss

Carnage added to carnage does not equal peace.

Brian Aldiss, “Basis for Negotiations,” Who Can Replace a Man? (1965), p. 152.
Categories
Today

Patriotism & Protest & Ousting

On August 19, 1919, Afghanistan gained full independence from Great Britain. Earlier, British attempts to maintain an imperial presence in this region elicited an infamous essay in protest by English sociologist and anti-imperialist Herbert Spencer (pictured), “Patriotism” (Facts and Comments, 1902).

On this day in 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was placed under house arrest, a crucial event leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In 1999, a mass rally of Serbians demanded the resignation of Slobodon Milosevic.

Categories
election law political challengers

Who Rigged Alaska’s Senate Race?

Alaska, Sullivan, open primary

On today’s Alaska primary ballot, U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent, faces an inconvenient challenger in the person of . . . Dan Sullivan.

The president of the United States is not pleased.

“Because of the trickery in the Voting, the Crooked, Radical Left Dumocrats have put up another man named ‘Dan Sullivan,’ and they did this to take Votes away from our Great Senator of the same name,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth.social. “Democrats are trying to ‘trick’ Alaskans, and treat Alaskan Voters with contempt.”

Is it contemptuous of Alaska voters?  

“His primary purpose is not to win an election,” contends the Senator, “it’s to confuse Alaskans and rig the vote for my opponent, the Democrat.”

Challenger Dan J. Sullivan’s run against the incumbent with the near-identical name, one Dan S. Sullivan, doesn’t quite pass the smell test. He sure appears to be gaming the election. Still, the rigging occurred when the state went to an open primary where anyone — regardless of party membership — can vote for anyone on the ballot.

Regardless of party.

Many people think this sort of thing is a great advance, and voters did approve it (by a whisker) in 2020 and voted to keep it (by an even slimmer margin) in 2024. But this “Nonpartisan Top Four Primary” (sending four candidates to the General Election) is open to malign voting and, yes, candidacies. When former Independent Party member and current Republican Party member Daniel J. Sullivan of Petersburg, Alaska, threw his hat into the ring, confusion was a natural (and likely intended) result. 

Election officials cooked up a halfway reasonable response: they list on the ballot “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent” and his possible vote-splitting challenger as “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” unadorned.

To prevent sneaky campaigning and voting, however, Alaskans should go the opposite direction, allowing — no, requiring — political parties to privately select their candidates. And at their party’s expense, not the taxpayers’. 

Hold the General Election after political parties have freely chosen their nominees . . . confining all game-playing and election-rigging to the smoke-filled rooms. Which voters can then judge accordingly. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Amy Levy

Death, as a general statement, is so easy of utterance, of belief; it is only when we come face to face with it that we find the great mystery so cruelly hard to realise; for death, like love, is ever old and ever new.

Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop (1888), chapter 17.
Categories
Today

Nineteenth on the Eighteenth

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

Categories
ideological culture national politics & policies

Awake to Evasion 1.0

AOC, woke 1

There are people who still debate the term “woke.” From the beginning, defenders of woke judgments, discourse, and activism claimed it was “just good manners”; others said it didn’t exist, a mere figment of “right-wing paranoia.” 

Truth is, it was a new, trendy term used to replace “social justice” and the peculiar bent and activism methods of “social justice warriors,” after “SJW” became fodder for ridicule by collegiate leftism’s opponents.

Now, more than a few Democrats are trying to distance themselves not only from the rising tide of know-nothing communism but also the woke style itself, which increasing numbers of Americans have come to loathe. The bellwether in this is U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.).

What she and her comrades said in the time of the COVID lockdowns was “not rhetoric that we would use today,” she told an ABC This Week interviewer. But she insists that the extremist/radical positions of her fellow Democratic Socialists (she’s still a member of the New York chapter) were “useful.”

Nevertheless, her apologetics for defunding the police and other crazytown nonsense was not what went viral. It was her repeating of a local politician’s statement to the effect that “Woke 1.0 was crazy” that dominated commentary.

Ha ha ha, it was a confusing time; we can move on, seems to be her takeaway.

But she herself was a big part of the madness, says Robby Soave — and so says your memory. “No one,” declares Soave, “should accept these conversions at face value.”

Of course they aren’t even conversions. They are evasions and spin. AOC is a politician, and no more honest about her past positions than she is her ignorance of economics, political philosophy, and especially . . .

Common Sense.

Of which This Is. (I’m Paul Jacob.)

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Galsworthy

Public opinion’s always in advance of the law.

John Galsworthy, Windows (1922), Act I,
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Today

Steamboat One

On August 17, 1807, Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat left New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.

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Update

An Especially Icky Aspect of the Pandemic

The white fibrous clots, previously mentioned in these pages, has received scholarly attention at last: “Self-Reported Observations of Unusual White Fibrous Structures in Embalmed Corpses: Multi-Year Survey Results from Embalmers in Five Countries, 2022–
2025.” The paper, written by Thomas F. Haviland, Laura Kasner, and Daniel Santiago, has appeared in International Journal of Innovative Research in Medical Science (IJIRMS).

Dr. John Campbell discusses it here:

This is one of the several controversial topics irregularly updated on this website.