Re: Class clowns: the triumph of inanity over academia

On Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:28:55 +0100, Julian <[email protected]>
wrote:

>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.

Because, you see, virtually anything can be politicized.

>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
-- 
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian  shrinks in horror and warns others away