The Jason Arday debacle is a prime example of the Liberal-Progressive mindset in action.
The wokesters in academia uncritically believed this fantasist's outrageous claims (30 marathons in 35 days, appearing on a TV show that aired 20 years before he was born, among a host of other lies and fabrications). They ignored repeated, insistent, evidenced warnings about his credibility and about his plagiarism, and the ease with which he was granted his degree in Critical Race Theory, one of the most Mickey Mouse degrees going. They ignored those warnings because they have become blinded by their own vision - they did not want anything to get in the way of their drive for DEI - Arday was to be their poster child. Well now, it has all come crashing down - the Emperor is indeed naked after all!
Even more serious is that fact that Arday himself set the Police on a journalist who was asking questions about his qualifications, and instead of telling him to wind his head in (as they should have) the Police actually took him seriously. They instructed the journalist not to contact him again... and this wasn't some blogger or podcaster they were talking to, this was Jack Grove, a reporter and science/research policy journalist for Times Higher Education. Asking questions of dubious academics is his ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ job!!
Of course, Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley and has now admitted they were wrong. He said officers "dropped the ball" and admitted the complaint should have been "screened out earlier on as not requiring investigation". But this is what I have been talking about in the "Behaviour of UK Police" thread. This mess has been made, and Rowley's comments are a clean up job. They didn't learn anything from the Alison Pearson debacle, or the cockup with Graham Linehan, or Harry Miller, or Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine. It seems they still haven't learned to check first before taking action.
I would hope that this would be a fatal blow to DEI, that this disaster might trigger a period of self-reflection by academia that would eventually see a return to degrees and honors awarded purely on merit... but I'm afraid this wont happen. The mind-virus is too well established in the academic hierarchy - they will see this as a minor setback, and will plough on until the next debacle.
Cambridge is now a laughing stock having committed one of he greatest academic blunders in its history, but I'll bet there are other Jason Ardays out there in places like Oxford, LSE, et al.
www.bbc.co.uk
