#academic corruption

By: Office of Public Affairs

Published: May 14, 2026

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has completed a year-long investigation into the admissions policies and practices at the Yale School of Medicine.

Yale’s documents show that its leadership intentionally selected applicants based on their race. Yale’s documents reveal that they studied how to use racial proxies to circumvent the Supreme Court’s prohibition on using race to select students. Yale’s admissions data demonstrate that Black and Hispanic students have a much higher chance of admission to Yale than White or Asian students with the same test scores.

“Yale has continued its race-based admissions program despite the Supreme Court and the public’s clear mandate for reform.” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “This Department will continue to shed light on these illegal practices, and demand that institutions of higher education comply with federal law.”

The investigation showed that, in general, Black and Hispanic applicants were admitted with consistently lower academic qualifications than their White and Asian counterparts. These facts support the Department’s finding that Yale violated the law by intentionally discriminating based on race in its admissions, in clear violation of federal law.

Medical schools use substantial federal financial assistance to train the next generation of doctors. The Department is continuing its focus on eradicating illegal race politics from admissions at medical schools, where quality and excellence are vitally important to public safety.

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Hopefully this serves as a warning to every other institutionally racist university.

The video above comes from a piece the activist class at the BBC ran back in 2023 where they clearly did zero background or fact checking on the story because they were furiously masturbating over the intersectional win of this DEI hire. ⤵️

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You have to understand that everything on the above page is fake. Their… "fields" are all fake. The sentences are fake; those words, organized in that order don't say anything real. Even the "men" are fake. (They're troons.)

People with a "Gender Studies" degree are qualified for exactly two things – no more, no fewer.

Teaching "Gender Studies". Thereby perpetuating the cycle of uselessness.

Pouring coffee.

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Aug 3, 2026

Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times. As the youngest black person ever to be appointed a professor at the University of Cambridge, there are good reasons why those who have championed him are rushing to his defence. But with each passing day, new revelations of his slippery relationship with reality seem to be emerging.

As with many fabulists, it is difficult to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Some of Arday’s boasts are quite obviously false. For instance, nobody believes that he completed the last nine of thirty consecutive marathons with a fractured leg that had swollen ‘to twice its normal size’. Or that he appeared in the television series Seven Up! as a child, even though its participants were selected in 1963 and Arday was born two decades later.

Other claims might well be embellishments on kernels of reality. No doubt he has raised money for charity, but it seems highly unlikely that his vaunted sum of £5.5 million is accurate. We know that he played snooker, but his assertion that he did so professionally would carry more weight if someone on the circuit had heard of him. Few would dispute that Arday is a keen amateur athlete. But if his claim to have run six hundred miles in six days were true, that would place him among the world’s elite sportsmen.

Perhaps most serious of all are the accusations of plagiarism. Cambridge has been quick to dismiss the matter, stating that an investigation has already been conducted by Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD thesis, and no evidence of plagiarism was found. Many readers who have compared the relevant passages side by side have reached a different conclusion. Numerous examples have been collated by Nathan Cofnas and can be seen here.

The refusal of the authorities at Cambridge to investigate the allegations properly has naturally raised suspicions that Arday is being protected because he is the poster boy for DEI. If it is true that he was raised on a council estate, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, first spoke at the age of eleven, and learned to read and write at eighteen, then his success story is unparalleled. Yet plagiarism is an extremely grave matter for an academic, and the evidence is difficult to dismiss.

The failure to hold Arday to the same standards as anyone else is, of course, a soft form of racism.

Those who have been wildly accusing his critics of racial prejudice might want to take a moment to consider whether they are engaged in a form of projection. Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge, had circulated a letter to fellow academics urging them to sign in the name of ‘anti-racism’. It might well be that some of Arday’s critics are gleefully leaping on the controversy to discredit a prominent black man, but these are unpleasant outliers. Most people are simply concerned that academic standards are being degraded out of a misguided fealty to the creed of identity politics.

Baron-Cohen’s most shameful ploy has been to cite statistics regarding suicidality in autism and then raise concerns about the ‘impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic’. This kind of emotional blackmail ought to be beneath him. While it is natural to feel sympathy for anyone who is caught in a media storm, we cannot get around the fact that Arday is a high-profile academic at a top university. The reporters who have covered this controversy are not ‘bullying a vulnerable autistic man’; they are simply doing their job.

The notion that minorities ought to be judged by lower standards is undeniably racist, and yet this is precisely the stance taken by Arday’s cheerleaders. It is possible to investigate and report on this story without veering into cruelty, and virtually all reporters have acquitted themselves admirably in this regard. But it is no small matter that Arday’s promotion prevented other people – possibly also from minority groups – from securing a role for which they may have been better qualified. Arday is not the victim here.

At present, we have no idea why Arday lifted whole passages from another academic’s work for his thesis. According to the BBC, Arday has insisted that his autism meant that in his early academic work he would rely ‘on using mimicry to make sense of information, and that similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academics’. But it is simply not the case that plagiarism on this scale is commonplace. Mistakes, of course, can be made. One might, for instance, jot down a quotation in note form without an attribution and then later take it to be one’s own writing. But look again at the sheer volume of identical passages; plagiarism does appear to be the most plausible explanation.

Hard as it is to believe, this may not even be a straightforward case of fraudulence. There are those for whom lying comes completely naturally, so much so that it is often their first instinct. The novelist Compton Mackenzie called such people the improvisatori, and famous examples he knew personally included Dr Axel Munthe, Ford Madox Ford, Lawrence of Arabia and the artist Dion Clayton Calthrop.

In the third volume of his autobiography, Mackenzie gives an example of one of these improvisatori, a military man who he refers to only as ‘T—’.

‘On one occasion cannibalism was a topic in the billiards-room. “I expect I’m the only one here who knows what human flesh tastes like,” said T—. We exclaimed in astonishment. “Yes, when I was on safari in Matabeleland soon after the war we had an unusually good soup one night. When I told my cook-boy how good it was he beamed and said it was because he had put in it a dead baby he had bought from its mother. Of course, I gave him a flogging and forbade him ever to do such a thing again.” “But didn’t you feel horribly sick when you heard what your cook-boy had done?” we asked. “Yes, I suppose I felt a bit squeamish but I have to admit that it was a really excellent soup.”’

It is a perfect example of the genre: an anecdote rich in detail and told with conviction, but utterly false. In such cases, it is not that the lie serves a purpose, but that it reveals a curious tendency in the man whose first instinct is to dwell in fantasy.

Some liars believe their own lies. Some simply relish the attention or the sense of power that often accompanies a successful deception. It is useless at this point to speculate on Arday’s motives, or even if he is aware that he has done anything wrong. Yet as a high-profile figure at a top university, any evidence of professional misconduct must be investigated. The issue is not race but standards, and a university that cannot distinguish between the two has lost sight of its purpose.

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The inevitable result of DEI, affirmative action and identity politics.

By: Frederick Attenborough

Published: Aug 5, 2026

Professor Jason Arday reported fellow academic Dr David Harris to police after Harris raised concerns about apparent errors and possible plagiarism in his work

Cambridge University’s embattled “academic superstar”, Professor Jason Arday, reported a fellow academic to the police after being challenged over apparent inconsistencies, errors and possible plagiarism in his work – raising troubling questions about the use of harassment law as a shield against awkward scholarly scrutiny in an increasingly litigious, low-trust society.

The academic was Dr David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University and one of the first scholars to raise concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and several subsequent peer-reviewed publications on race, inequality and education, including his treatment of concepts such as structural racism, whiteness, decolonisation and racial microaggressions.

It was not Harris’s first encounter with institutional hostility arising from his scrutiny of critical theory and related intellectual traditions, including Critical Legal Studies, Black Studies and strands of Marxist and Frankfurt School thought. Last year, Marjon revoked the emeritus title he had held since retiring in 2011 after he published a monograph critically examining the body of ideas now commonly described as critical race theory. Internal emails later obtained through a Subject Access Request showed senior administrators describing his research as “controversial” and suggesting that the University should “probably sever ties” with him. Following an intervention by CAF, however, the University reversed its decision and restored the title earlier this year.

That monograph formed part of a wider research programme Harris had pursued for several years, examining how such ideas and frameworks were used in empirical educational research. Arday’s work was therefore directly relevant to his interests, but it came to Harris’s attention only amid the considerable publicity surrounding Arday’s appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge in March 2023.

Harris’s opening email to Arday, sent on 4 May 2023, was almost absurdly polite: unmistakably scholarly, but also courteous and measured. He explained that he was reviewing Arday’s work as part of a wider research project and attached a detailed document setting out concerns about what he described as “puzzling similarities” in the reported data, repeated passages and possible failures of attribution. The covering email concluded simply: “I would welcome any response.”

When none came, Harris sent a brief follow-up a week later.

Arday replied that same day but did not address the substance of Harris’s concerns. Instead, he recast Harris’s intervention as little more than pettifogging criticism of spelling and grammar, and as evidence of a failure to appreciate the structural racism and ableism which, in his view, such scrutiny helped to perpetuate.

It was, he wrote, “disappointing that you have imposed yourself on me in the manner you have, i.e. without any reflexivity or humility whatsoever”. He continued:

“You will likely know, from your literature reviews not from experience, that the academy is a hostile place for Black scholars. There are very few of us that become professors, and even fewer in the fortunate but precarious position I am in, which is having the platform to represent and uplift other people of colour even beyond academia. As a Black, autistic man with global developmental delay and severe dyslexia, the odds are even less likely; my hope has always been that people like me feel inspired to pursue academia, and that people like you can make space for this.”

“Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism,” Arday added, “you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes.”

Harris was, he said, “a monument to the fact we live in a society where grammar is valued above equity”. He ended with the warning: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

Harris nevertheless replied, prefacing his remarks with an expression of admiration for Arday as someone who had overcome considerable personal and professional adversity, before returning to the academic issues and correcting what he regarded as an inaccurate and damaging account of his own disciplinary history.

What followed is now a matter of public record. Arday contacted the Metropolitan Police to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris. Because Harris is based in Plymouth, the matter was referred to Devon and Cornwall Police, which declined to pursue it.

As an organisation that defends academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law, CAF takes no view on the ultimate merits of the allegations concerning Arday’s work. We are, however, deeply concerned by what appears, on the evidence available to us, to have been an attempt to use the criminal law to suppress legitimate scholarly scrutiny.

It might be said that no great harm was done, since the legal threshold for harassment is high and the police declined to pursue the complaint. But that assumes that the threshold will always be properly understood and applied at the outset. Where lawful speech is recast as criminal harassment, much may depend on whether those receiving the complaint recognise just how demanding the law actually is, rather than allowing subjective offence or the complainant’s own characterisation of the conduct to stand in for the statutory test.

In this case, that statutory test is found in the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Section 1(1) prohibits a person from pursuing a course of conduct which amounts to harassment and which they know, or ought to know, amounts to harassment. Under the Act, a “course of conduct” must involve conduct on at least two occasions, although two instances do not, without more, establish harassment. Section 2 makes breach of that prohibition a criminal offence, while section 3 creates a civil remedy through which damages or an injunction may be sought.

Since Arday complained to the police, it was presumably the section 2 offence, rather than the civil remedy under section 3, that was under consideration. But the substantive threshold is demanding in either context. A civil claim rests on the same section 1 prohibition, and, at the outset of Hayes v Willoughby (2013), Lord Sumption described harassment as a “persistent and deliberate course of unreasonable and oppressive conduct, targeted at another person”, calculated to cause, and actually causing, alarm, fear or distress. Because the same statutory concept of harassment governs both the tort and the criminal offence, the conduct must, even in a civil claim, be grave enough to sustain criminal liability under section 2.

Lord Nicholls explained the nature of that threshold in Majrowski v Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Trust (2006):

“[C]ourts will have in mind that irritations, annoyances, even a measure of upset, arise at times in everybody’s day-to-day dealings with other people. Courts are well able to recognise the boundary between conduct which is unattractive, even unreasonable, and conduct which is oppressive and unacceptable. To cross the boundary from the regrettable to the unacceptable the gravity of the misconduct must be of an order which would sustain criminal liability under section 2.”

Where the alleged harassment consists of speech, the domestic courts have warned against silencing expression on the basis of subjective assertions of offence or insult. In publication cases, they have also stressed that even robust criticism will not ordinarily amount to harassment.

The European Court of Human Rights has likewise repeatedly underlined the importance of academic freedom and scholarship to the functioning of democratic societies. In Erdoğan and others v Turkey (2014), it held that academic works addressing matters of public concern should receive the highest level of protection under Article 10. Its case law also recognises that the “public watchdog” role is not confined to professional journalists, but may extend to academics and researchers contributing to public debate.

Measured against those principles, nothing in the correspondence reviewed by CAF remotely approaches the threshold for harassment. No doubt it would have been more prudent for Harris not to send a further response after Arday warned that any additional contact would be treated as “bullying and harassment”. But, viewed in the context of the exchange as a whole, one additional reply arising directly from a dispute over published scholarship could hardly be described as the persistent, oppressive and unacceptable course of conduct described in Hayes and Majrowski.

In taking no further action, Devon and Cornwall Police got the decision right. But as the recent cases of Maxie Allen, Darren Brady, Julian Foulkes, Kellie-Jay Keen, Markus Meechan, Jennifer Swayne, and David Wootton demonstrate, police forces have not always covered themselves in glory when deciding whether lawful but contentious expression warrants arrest or investigation under broadly framed communication offences.

Harris’s experience does not, of course, establish a pattern, and it would be wrong to suggest that academics routinely report their critics to the police. Even as a one-off, however, it augurs badly for the future in an increasingly litigious and low-trust society if criminal harassment law begins to look like an available response to awkward scholarly criticism.

Part of the danger is that the consequences of an allegation of harassment, or another speech-based allegation of a similar kind, can begin long before a court determines whether the legal threshold has been met. The police may investigate, arrive at an academic’s home in full view of their neighbours, request a voluntary interview under caution or, where the legal test for arrest is satisfied, take the still more serious step of arresting them. Stress and uncertainty do not lie dormant, waiting for a charging decision – and nor, for that matter, does reputational damage. Once the whispering begins within a university department, professional consequences may start to accumulate of their own accord. In that sense, the process can itself become punitive, exerting a powerful chilling effect even where no charge ultimately follows.

Academics will be less likely to engage in robust debate and scholarly inquiry – testing published claims, identifying apparent errors or raising concerns about research integrity – if doing so exposes them to allegations of criminal wrongdoing and the prospect of a prolonged police investigation. That is why any tendency to reach for the criminal law when confronted with academic criticism must be checked before it becomes, if not normalised, then at least an attractive means of avoiding difficult but legitimate questions.

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By: Colin Wright

Published: May 29, 2026

We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.”

But that’s not really true.

Science doesn’t correct itself like a thermostat adjusting the temperature in your house. Science is a human institution run by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to career incentives, groupthink, moral fads, political pressure, and fear.

And when those forces capture academic journals, peer review stops being a filter for bad ideas and starts becoming more of a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.

This isn’t exactly new.

In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish a totally gibberish article in the journal Social Text full of trendy postmodern jargon. His point was simple: if you flatter the ideological commitments of certain academic editors, nonsense can pass as real scholarship.

Two decades later, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian pulled off the “grievance studies” hoax, placing over a half dozen absurd papers in peer-reviewed journals. One paper used dog parks to analyze rape culture and “queer performativity.” Another rewrote parts of Mein Kampf in the language of feminist theory.

The problem wasn’t just that fake papers got published. It was that they were completely indistinguishable from the real thing.

And today, the problem is even worse.

We now have serious science journals publishing papers about feminist lesbians marrying brine shrimp. We have disturbing papers that aim to “queer” and sexualize infants. We have scholarship on “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “trans-dog intimacies.”

But while Clown World papers are concerning because it makes a complete mockery of academia, the same broken, ideologically captured system is also publishing research in legitimate science and medical journals that pushes sex and gender pseudoscience, relies on deeply flawed data, and influences policies on the medical transition of children and young adults.

That’s not funny. That affects real people. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects children.

And when critics try to respond, they often discover there’s no serious mechanism for correction. Submitted Letters to the Editor often go completely ignored. Contrary evidence is rejected without comment. As a result, the best critiques are often relegated to personal blog posts, social media threads, or newspaper op-eds, while the original paper remains in the literature wearing the armor of “peer review.”

That is untenable.

So Kevin McCaffree, editor-in-chief of Theory and Society, and I decided to do something about it.

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we announced a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.”

The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it.

A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks.

Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention?

If yes, it gets published.

And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue.

That’s how science is supposed to work.

Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen.

That’s what we’ve done.

Okay, I just came across this crazy paper, and I need you to hear about it.

It's called "Integrating Indigenous Knowledge Systems for Epistemic Justice and Engaged Physics Education in a South African University of Technology." This is published in the African Journal of Higher Education, Community Engagement.

Okay, I'm just going to go straight into the abstract and read bits of it because it's crazy.

So the abstract begins, it says, this is a conceptual study that examines "how indigenous knowledge can be meaningfully integrated into physics education at a South African university of technology to advance epistemic justice," because this is what we need in physics education apparently, "and the scholarship of engagement."

It then says, "while physics is often framed as a culturally neutral discipline grounded in Western epistemology, this positioning," apparently, "marginalizes indigenous ways of knowing and limits the social responsiveness of curricula. Adopting a critical conceptual and theoretical synthesis of literature, policy, and curriculum discourse, the study identifies key epistemological, pedagogical, and institutional barriers to integration." And then one of these barriers to integration is "the dominant assumption of physics as universally valid."

In response, the paper develops what they call a "pluriversal" engagement framework, as I guess opposed to a universal one. This is applicable to all universes, I suppose, "that operationalizes indigenous knowledge systems integration through reciprocal community-university partnerships, curriculum co-design, and contextually grounded pedagogy."

It then says, "to strengthen practical relevance, the study draws on illustrative examples from UOT contexts, including the use of indigenous architectural practices to teach thermodynamics, community-based astronomy initiatives linking indigenous cosmologies with physics concepts, and co-teaching models involving indigenous knowledge holders."

Again, it goes on to say that the whole point of this is to advance "epistemic inclusion" and to embed indigenous knowledge within physics curricula, because that's what our schools need more. We need more indigenous ways of knowing in the hard sciences. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this. I plan to do more of these quick responses to these crazy articles as I happen to come across them.

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Abstract

This conceptual study examines how Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) can be meaningfully integrated into physics education at a South African University of Technology (UoT) to advance epistemic justice and the Scholarship of Engagement (SoE). While physics is often framed as a culturally neutral discipline grounded in Western epistemology, this positioning marginalises Indigenous ways of knowing and limits the social responsiveness of curricula. Adopting a critical conceptual and theoretical synthesis of literature, policy, and curriculum discourse, the study identifies key epistemological, pedagogical, and institutional barriers to integration. These include dominant assumptions of physics as universally valid, limited lecturer preparedness, and weak institutional mechanisms for community engagement. In response, the paper develops a pluriversal engagement framework that operationalises IKS integration through reciprocal community-university partnerships, curriculum co-design, and contextually grounded pedagogy. To strengthen practical relevance, the study draws on illustrative examples from UoT contexts, including the use of Indigenous architectural practices to teach thermodynamics, community-based astronomy initiatives linking Indigenous cosmologies with physics concepts, and co-teaching models involving Indigenous knowledge holders. These examples demonstrate how engagement can function as a process of knowledge co-production, rather than consultation. The study argues that integrating IKS through engaged, pluriversal approaches enhances conceptual understanding, strengthens curriculum relevance, and advances epistemic inclusion. It contributes to AJHECE scholarship by reframing community engagement as an epistemic practice and offers actionable strategies for embedding Indigenous knowledge within physics curricula in Universities of Technology and similar Global South contexts.

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He's right. This is "evolution is just a theory" and "teach the controversy."

Hierarchy is good. Exclusion is good. Marginalization is good. The notion that all ideas are equally valid, legitimate and good is monumentally retarded and objectively false.

Divine revelation should be marginalized. "Other ways of knowing" should be excluded. Science is superior to superstition.

We don't have to lie or pretend otherwise.

Remember this?