Re: Class clowns: the triumph of inanity over academia

On 8/13/2026 6:46 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:
> 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.
>
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>> 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