Class clowns: the triumph of inanity over academia

Daniel Defoe observed that plague victims ‘never perceiv’d that they 
were infected’ until they discovered the ‘tokens’ on their skin. By that 
point, ‘nothing could follow but certain Death’.

Something similar might be said of Britain’s universities. In recent 
days, the Jason Arday affair has captured the world’s attention because 
of its absurdity. But the humiliation of Cambridge is not an early sign 
of infection. It is just a particularly visible bubo.

At one level, Arday’s fall reveals how, even in our most elite 
universities, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) dogma has warped 
intellectual standards to the point of madness. Yet a deeper examination 
reveals poor Jason to be merely a poster boy for the increasingly fetid 
system that is British higher education.

Take the London School of Economics (LSE), which has produced 21 Nobel 
Prize winners, was ranked number one in the UK by the Times Good 
University Guide last year and is internationally acclaimed for its 
teaching on economics, finance and politics. However, all first-year 
students must now take LSE100, the university’s ‘flagship 
interdisciplinary course’. Students may choose to study one of three 
modest questions: ‘How can we transform our climate futures?’; ‘How can 
we control AI?’; or ‘How can we create a fair society?’. One student 
described the course as ‘famous for being a massive waste of time’. What 
is lost in academic discipline is made up for in ideological indoctrination.

LSE students who opt to study ‘How can we create a fair society?’ 
discover a course description asserting: ‘As the expanding billionaire 
class increasingly dominates political systems, while gender and 
ethnicity gaps widen, the question of how to reach a fairer world is 
both urgent and contentious.’ Even stranger than the courses are the 
people who teach them. Among them is Dr Alex Frankovitch, whose PhD 
thesis was entitled ‘Fucking and Being Fucked: Towards a Sexual Ethics 
of Sex on Drugs’. One student recalls asking Frankovitch about Warren 
Buffett, only to discover that they (to use Dr Frankovitch’s preferred 
pronoun) had never heard of him.

Dr Carolina Are is, according to LSE’s website, a ‘digital 
criminologist… researcher-activist and content creator’ who won a Sexual 
Freedom Award in 2019. She gives lectures on reducing ‘online harms’ and 
‘how we can control AI’. When not contemplating man’s struggle against 
machine, she is a pole-dancer and instructor. The website linked to her 
university profile contains her showreel and invites visitors to ‘learn 
a pole dance choreography, pole tricks, floorwork or twerk with me via 
Zoom!’ Sadly, Friedrich Hayek, the father of modern free-market 
economics, did not offer similar services when he taught at LSE.

Are is entitled to do what she wants in her free time. But what sets 
alarm bells ringing about her academic standing is that pole-dancing 
seems to be not just an outlet for relaxation, but the focal point of 
her research.

One of her most recent papers is called ‘“Sexy jail” and performative 
transparency: Evaluating shadowbanning notifications and appeals in 
Instagram’s Account Status amongst pole dancing content creators’. It 
examines the treatment of pole dancers, ‘a demographic greatly affected 
by algorithmic precarity in the creator economy’, and concludes that 
Instagram’s system has been ‘ineffective and discriminatory’. An 
important finding, no doubt, but is such material what LSE students 
signed up for? One student complains of having to be careful not to use 
any technical language in submitted work due to Dr Are’s lack of expertise.

When asked how students should put together a presentation for the 
course, to be assessed for their final grade, Dr Are allegedly answered: 
‘I really hate when a white man gives the presentation… It’s just so 
boring.’ An LSE spokesperson said Dr Are ‘has a relevant PhD and is 
qualified to teach on the course’ and that she denies making the 
‘boring’ comment.

It would be comforting to dismiss all this as an eccentricity peculiar 
to the LSE. But so many universities across the country are wasting 
student time in much the same way. At Exeter, you can study for an MA 
and PhD in magic and occult science. At Liverpool, you can pay £6,850 a 
year to do an MA in ‘The Beatles, heritage and culture’. At Falmouth, 
students can undertake a BA in ‘Esports & Livestreaming’ at the 
university’s ‘renowned Games Academy’.

Students of global sustainable development have previously had the 
chance to enrol in a ‘surviving the apocalypse’ module at Warwick. Given 
the growing instability of the world, that may sound potentially useful. 
Yet the syllabus suggests projects on ‘mushrooms and zombies’ and 
insists the course has a ‘subtle (?) but unmasked convenor 
neurodiversity (ADHD) guiding its set-up and delivery’. I’m not sure I’m 
sufficiently neurodiverse to understand what that means.

Students on all these courses are eligible for undergraduate or 
postgraduate loans. It’s impossible to know what percentage of that 
financial support will ever be repaid to the taxpayer.

And it’s not as if prudent students can escape the madness by pursuing 
more conventional subjects. Those studying English and comparative 
literary studies at Warwick, for instance, can pick up 15 credits by 
studying a module on ‘Queering the Literary Landscape: LGBTQ+ Literature 
and Culture in the Contemporary World’. Even a maths degree offers no 
refuge. Students at Edinburgh might be surprised to learn that the 
school of mathematics is committed to ‘decolonising’. The faculty claims 
that ‘the history of mathematics typically centres cisgendered, 
straight, white European men’ and recommends that students should take 
implicit bias tests.

Madness in the lecture theatre is just the more visible by-product of a 
much longer production line. Before students can study zombies, pole 
dancing and astrology, academics must first turn these subjects into 
recognised fields of research.

Earlier this year, a team of five researchers published a paper on 
‘Decolonising the sciences: Enhancing the experience of staff and 
students from racially minoritised ethnic groups using LEGO® Serious 
Play®’. This work was the culmination of a study across three northern 
English universities in which 50 adult students, researchers, academics 
and professional staff were asked to build Lego models representing 
their experiences of racial inequality, institutional barriers and 
decolonisation. Participants constructed walls, ladders and bridges out 
of Lego as metaphors for racism. Somehow this childish activity now 
constitutes academic research.

There’s more. A researcher at Rose Bruford College, in south-east 
London, is investigating ‘the lack of career development support for 
established drag performers’. The project is intended to contribute ‘to 
drag studies as a growing academic field, addressing a current lack of 
attention about how to sustain this historically working class and 
popular performance form’.

Meanwhile, at Bath Spa, a senior lecturer in organisational behaviour 
and leadership has received a grant to investigate ‘cognitive and 
emotional costs of identity regulation among ethnically diverse early 
career professionals’. The project bemoans that ‘professions in the UK 
often promote values like competence, meritocracy and individual 
achievement, reflecting white and western norms’.

At least that’s privately funded. The government’s Department for 
Science, Innovation and Technology has just shelled out for a project at 
the University of Essex entitled ‘Towards a queer communism: Past, 
present and future horizons of liberation’.

None of this is new, of course. Frivolous and absurd studies have been 
pouring out of higher education institutions since at least the 1970s. 
In 2012, Robert J. Wallis of Richmond University published a paper 
analysing people’s experiences jumping on a life-size inflatable 
Stonehenge, concluding that ‘bouncing on the artwork-cum-plaything 
provided an immediate sensory and visceral experience which was 
meaningful in relation to the real Stonehenge’. This somehow gazumped 
Spinal Tap for Stonehenge silliness.

The difference today is that the rot appears to have spread throughout 
academia, from top to bottom. Even respected journals aren’t safe. I was 
surprised to find an article in Shakespeare Quarterly ‘refusing to 
celebrate’ the quatercentenary of the publication of the 1623 
Shakespeare First Folio. The author reasoned that we should not be 
‘dedicating our energies, at a time of international emergency, to the 
production of ever more scholarship on a 400-year-old book’. If this is 
really his view, we have to wonder what he is doing in the English 
department of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.

The author goes on to blame the Folio for climate change, arguing that 
Henry and Emily’s Folger Shakespeare Library collection ‘was built from 
the money he made working for the Standard Oil Company and its later 
derivatives, which became the progenitors of ExxonMobil’. He then asks 
us to reflect ‘on the extent to which modern cultural dispensations 
float on an often unacknowledged reservoir of fossil fuels’. Drill, 
baby, drill.

Professor Jason Scott-Warren, who wrote the article, is the director of 
the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts. He supervises graduates on 
English and European Renaissance literature and has been arrested 
several times for his environmental protest actions.

Sane students complain that, even in more prestigious universities, it 
is nigh-on impossible to find a normal supervisor for a dissertation, so 
preoccupied is everyone with queering, decolonising or sticking 
themselves to motorway bridges. It’s a lot easier to condemn Shakespeare 
for causing climate change than it is to properly analyse his work.

We will never really know what is going on in lecture theatres and 
supervisions. The University and College Union has long objected to 
unannounced lesson observation to assess an academic’s competence and 
most students don’t complain. But in the pointless courses, the insane 
modules and the absurd journal articles, we can see the symptoms of a 
morbid university disease in this country.

Faculties and academics have all broadly been left to their own devices 
for decades. The Office for Students doesn’t regularly inspect what is 
happening inside university classes. Even after the introduction of the 
revised Teaching Excellence Framework, starting next year, no one will 
ask if academia is providing any valuable insight or skills.

Student finance has guaranteed cash flow for many institutions which, 
judging by the quality of their offering, should have gone under. But 
the sickness is terminal for some. This month, after years of 
difficulty, the University of Kent completed its merger with Greenwich. 
Greenwich’s vice-chancellor is CEO of the new ‘super university’ – a 
triumph for the former polytechnic.

It would be easy to rue the decline of a formerly prestigious 
institution. But a brief glance at how academics at Kent have spent 
their time and resources tells a different story. Why did they fund a 
study into ‘what drives sex toy popularity’ in 2023? Why is one of the 
senior lecturers in 18th century studies currently supervising a project 
on queer readings of fan fiction and the ‘omegaverse’?

It’s not all decay. Many universities still have healthy organs, 
uncorrupted by ideological inanity. Researchers at Kent, for instance, 
were responsible for developing the retinal-imaging technology now used 
in many hospitals, as well as genome sequencing parrots to understand 
beak and feather disease. Yet while scientists slave away, their peers 
in Kent’s Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology are busy 
publishing research about ‘racial and economic disparities in coastal 
access and engagement’.

Academia lacks a proper incentive structure. There is no higher 
authority to differentiate the value of curing cancer compared with 
producing yet another autoethnography. Trusts like Wellcome, and our own 
government, are happy to hand out grants for the latter without pausing 
to ask what it’s all for.

If your life’s great passion is the study of bouncy castles, pole 
dancing or writing essays on autoethnography, there ought to be nothing 
to stop you from working at Toys R Us, a gentleman’s club or the 
Guardian. But these people have all chosen to pursue academia. They are 
attracted to the status it confers. This was the world in which Jason 
Arday thrived. His colleagues at Cambridge were carrying out research on 
how fairy tales can break the gender binary in playgrounds or writing ‘a 
self-portrait of an artist who teaches’. Is it really surprising that 
his error-ridden thesis didn’t stand out against this backdrop?


Lara Brown