Runciman on Arday

The following is from the New Statesman 

A dream of Cambridge

At one time Cambridge was considered a place where the smart had holed up so as to escape the Black Brain Death unleashed by the idiot box. That was a dream. Smart people don't linger at Uni. 

The university’s place in the public imagination is as illusory as Jason Arday’s academic credentials

Not quite. We have some dim idea that the 'Silicon Fen' (i.e. high tech firms 'spun off' from the University) contribute a lot of money to the UK economy. The University of Cambridge alone generates nearly £30 billion annually for the UK economy, with over £23 billion driven directly by its innovation and commercialization arms. In total, the Fen is valued at 222 billion. 

By David Runciman

Who gave up Academia for podcasting 

Oceans of virtual ink have been spilled about the case of Jason Arday because it was the right story at the right time to grab the maximum attention.

It is 'silly season' but it chimes with what Burnham has to say about paying poor people to get their kids to ditch degrees in favour of apprenticeships. Also, it confirmed the suspicion that Nathan Cofnas was right but for the wrong reason. The fact is smart blacks don't go into academia.  Nor do smart white people unless they are pederasts or as lazy as fuck. 

It happened in high summer, when apart from the interminable heat there wasn’t much else going on.

It was Arday's claims of sporting prowess which interested ordinary people. Was he a blagger who had landed on his feet? Sadly, no. He was a pathetic fantasist who topped himself when his make-believe world unravelled. 

The other thing which made the Arday story topical was the fact that whistleblowers had been accused of racism and had been investigated by the police.  

It unfolded in stages, which kept people interested: first the accusations of plagiarism, then the piece-by-piece unravelling of Arday’s life story in the run-up to the publication of his now absurd-seeming memoir.

If there's a book deal, could a Netflix series be far behind? Arday might turn into a bona fide celebrity as the street-smart blagger who fooled the snobbish dons of Cambridge.  His next step would be to do a podcast with Prince Harry before launching his own line of salad dressing. 

Above all, though, this was Cambridge. Had Arday been exposed while still a professor at Glasgow University it would have caused a fuss, but nothing on this scale.

Southerners believe that head-butting is the chief educational skill required of Professors in Glasgow.  

The contrast between the augustness of the institution and the very contemporary dynamics of Arday’s downfall is what gives the tale its piquancy.

Wokeness spares no one. 

Race, class, snobbery, wokery

Werewolves. The head of the Department is a werewolf. Her rival, the Principal, is a vampire directly descended from Vlad Dracul.  

– somehow they’re all thrown into sharper relief when the setting is that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations, some of them now in tatters.

Werewolf accidentally ate the Vice Chancellor. So embarassing! 

But what is really going on here is that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through the fantasies people have about Cambridge.

Nobody gives a shit about the place. If it aint Hogwarts, we're not fucking interested mate. 

That place doesn’t really exist any more. When news outlets want a generic picture of the university to illustrate their tales of collapsing standards, they usually pick King’s College Chapel or the Senate House – suitably imposing edifices to juxtapose with the squalid goings-on being exposed.

There was a time when everybody there was a homosexual KGB spy.  

But those buildings are no more representative of the university these days than Arday was.

Universities don't matter save as hubs for knowledge based industries. At one time that was Priestcraft. But that was long ago.  

A more accurate image would show one of the gleaming new campuses a little way out from the centre of town where the money and power increasingly reside: either the West Cambridge site, on which the new science and tech departments are housed, or the Biomedical Campus to the south of the city, where the university’s hospitals and research centres exist alongside the headquarters of AstraZeneca and, soon, a £400m R&D centre for GlaxoSmithKline, which is relocating from Stevenage.

Education is a knowledge based industry. The Cambridge Dept. of Education should be working with AI companies to boost educational outcomes. Whining about White Privilege helps nobody. 

Then there are the science parks incubating would-be world-beating start-ups clustered to the north of town. These places have shiny new railway stations – Cambridge North and, more recently, Cambridge South, which opened in June. They have lavishly funded new buildings, including the £58m Whittle Laboratory, which opened in July. This is where the action is.

Becuase this is useful. What Arday & Co did was not just stupid & useless, it was actively mischievous. 

Arday was professor of the sociology of education and a fellow of Jesus College. Those grand titles sound like they tick all the important boxes for status and significance.

Fuck off 'Sociology' means 'stupid shite'.  

But that’s another illusion. People who work in Cambridge sometimes joke there are now three universities: science and tech to the north and west, biomedicine to the south and the old parts left in the middle.

At one time, there were 'two cultures'. Now there is only one culture & a wide spectrum of paranoid grievance studies. 

This is “heritage” Cambridge, the bit tourists come to see.

There are posh Colleges & Departments. Runciman himself, the fourth Viscount, was a Cambridge don.  

It contains most of the colleges and most of the social science and humanities departments. It’s not exactly a Potemkin university since a lot of very hard work still goes on behind the facade.

Sadly, most of that work could be better done in 10 seconds by an AI.                                        

But it can feel like it is primarily for show while the real business is being conducted somewhere else.

No. Some of the Applied Sciences are 'businesses' but there are commercial applications for other Departments as well. The University Press makes a good profit on textbooks, dictionaries, translations and so forth. Oddly, their biggest seller- Richard Murphy's 'Grammar in use'- isn't by a don. Murphy was just an ordinary teacher only belatedly granted an honourary MA from Cambridge.  

One prompt for the outrage about Arday’s appointment to a professorship is that the university seemed to treat it – and him – as window dressing, a way of parading its progressive credentials before the world.

They were promoting a low IQ fantasist. Us darkies suspected this was deliberate. It wasn't. Whitey can be as stupid as fuck.  

Self-evidently something went badly wrong in how this happened. But no one should conclude that it’s only at the woke edges that this sort of preoccupation with appearances is at play. After all, King’s College Chapel is now window dressing too.

Runciman may be right about non-STEM subjects. They may now be all entirely shit. But tech companies don't need no fucking window dressing. They just need to be better than the competition. Sadly, if that competition is in China, they are bound to lose.  

I worked at Cambridge for nearly 30 years, ending up as a professor and head of the politics department.

i.e. worthless shite.  

The university is organised into different schools, and politics is in the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, alongside other subjects including sociology and education. We would meet regularly to talk about the pressures we were under and the need to defend our disciplines.

You don't need to defend stuff which aint shit.  

Occasionally, though, we would be joined by senior figures from other parts of the university – science, medicine, engineering – when wider issues were at stake, usually involving money.

People won't pay for a shit sandwich. The question was whether non-STEM subjects could raise productivity for knowledge based industries. Incidentally DEI has potential in that regard- or so it was once believed. 

I can still recall how baffled these people sometimes seemed not simply by our preoccupations but even by what it was we actually did. They were polite but unavoidably patronising. We were heritage Cambridge, useful for how the world saw us, but hard to take seriously on our own terms.

It's always nice to chat to a Viscount. My memory is that his dad was a Social Choice theorist- i.e. quite mathsy.  

When CP Snow wrote about the “Two Cultures” – initially in the New Statesman – at the end of the 1950s his complaint was that the arts and humanities people were so sure of their own importance that they hadn’t bothered to acquaint themselves with even the rudiments of scientific knowledge.

Then they became adversely selective and thus too stupid to do so.  

He had no doubts about who was patronising whom.

Mrs Thatcher was a Chemist. She fucked up the upper class something rotten.  

hat is not the problem now. Academics in the social sciences and humanities can feel so unsure of their importance that they end up doing whatever they can to attract attention.

By decolonising their subject and pretending to be love child of Che Guevara & Malcolm X.  

Even if it is sometimes short of cash, Cambridge is not short of wealth – partly thanks to the endowments of some of the colleges, and partly because of the money flowing in to the sciences. Its humanities departments are not subject to the sorts of pressures they might face elsewhere. There is no talk of mass redundancies or of closing down entire disciplines. Nevertheless, one way to get attention is to raise more money, especially for new professorships.

Arday's position was internally funded. You can't blame some Soros for him.  

Often, this money arrives before anyone has decided what the new professorships are for. Arday’s position was one of scores of new ones that have been created to generate a sense of purpose. It can seem incredible that tougher questions weren’t asked at the time of his appointment and they certainly should have been. Yet there are now so many panels frantically trying to fill so many of these roles that it can be hard to find enough qualified people to sit on them.

Fair point. The new Universities started to insist on PhDs even for obviously vocational courses. This meant you had a spate of useless thesis on Sociology of Hair Dressing or Phenomenology of Plumbing. Could Cambridge use its extra prestige to muscle in on the action? Also what would be cool would be have some darkies loudly demanding the toppling of statues of dead white dudes. Why is Churchill College not called Mahatma Phule Mahavidyalay?  

The prevailing idea seems to be that a Cambridge professorship is sufficiently important that everyone involved should have given it their fullest attention, to the extent of checking all the further particulars. I’m afraid that’s another fantasy.

Cambridge dons can't reed gud.  

Overworked people take shortcuts in Cambridge as they do everywhere else.

What Cambridge considers work, the rest of the world calls wanking.  

And they prioritise what is important to them, which doesn’t always mean putting a premium on academic rigour.

Or being able to reed gud.  

When I ran the politics department I once called a meeting to remind my colleagues that because we studied politics we should be careful not to allow our own political views to become too visible if we wanted to be taken seriously.

David is White. He's a fucking Viscount. Also he has a dick. That's totes triggering to me coz dicks cause RAPE.  

An academic discipline needs to be dispassionate, I suggested.

It needs to be alethic. Without periodic verification, a research project rapidly degenerates.  

The pushback was overwhelming, particularly from younger members of staff. Why, they wanted to know, should we do these poorly paid and frequently stressful jobs if we don’t get to use them to promote the things we think really matter?

In other words, why eat your own shit unless you are doing it as part of a broadly based campaign to bring about the banning of heterosexual dicks?  

I was conscious of how old-fashioned I sounded in trying to warn them against the dangers of grandstanding.

i.e. standing up in front of everybody and shoving your hand into the back of your pants and pulling out 'chocolate cake' which you proceed to eat with gusto.  

I was also very aware that their need for ancillary compensations was driven by a real sense of hardship.

not to mention mental illness 

A lot of the grunt work of teaching undergraduates in Cambridge is done by

shit-eating cretins 

junior academics on short-term contracts with precarious career prospects.

Coprophagy isn't a career move.  

Meanwhile, the professors, especially the ones who have been tempted in on favourable terms to newly endowed chairs, often get off lightly.

Though they still have to eat their own plagiarised shit.  

It is an increasingly unfair system, which is one way to ensure that it will be shot through with politics from top to bottom.

Academic politics is so virulent because the stakes are so low.  

Professor Arday also seems to have neglected his teaching obligations, though in his case this may have been driven more by a sense of futility than of privilege. Some of his students claim they didn’t need supervising, which is hardly surprising from someone who must have known he had very little to teach them in academic terms.

At least he wasn't teaching them with his dick.  

There are many extremely diligent and hard-working professors.

How would Runciman know? He was an academic- i.e. a lazy tosser. Podcasting, too, aint exactly shovelling coal or plucking cotton for the Man.  

Nonetheless, seen from the lower rungs of the pyramid, Arday is not the only one who looks like he was there just for show. And yet the lower rungs still get filled.

You can drive for Uber on the side.  

The fact is that it is not only onlookers who allow their fantasies about Cambridge to get the better of them. Whenever one of these poorly paid and precarious jobs gets advertised there are hundreds of applicants, most of whom believe it can’t be as bad as it appears from the outside once you get on the inside. In reality, it’s often worse.

The difference between teaching Skool & teaching at Collidge is that you don't have to do as much nappy-changing in the latter. Sadly, the two are likely to converge quickly enough.  

My wife used to be a psychotherapist in Cambridge and she had a lot of stressed and miserable young academics as clients. She’s always remembered a line from one of them. “My mum loves telling everyone I’m a Cambridge don. But I’m the poor sod who has to do it.”

But he isn't yet having to change the nappies of his students. That day will come.  

The use of Cambridge academic life for purposes other than purely academic ones

Cambridge was a great place for the KGB to recruit.  

does not only happen on the progressive side of the political divide. This is not simply a tale about wokery. Some right-wing commentators have linked the Arday scandal to an earlier example of left-wing bias getting in the way of intellectual standards when Jordan Peterson had a visiting fellowship to Cambridge rescinded in 2019 following a staff and student backlash. But what was someone like Peterson being brought to Cambridge for except as a way of generating attention?

He was considered a good debater. Was his statistical methodology kosher? Lots of people in various industries would be interested in seeing the thing thrashed out. That's not stuff Runciman understands.  

It’s not as if he lacks a platform for anyone who wants to know his views on pretty much any subject under the sun.

But hearing him justify a particular methodology would still be interesting depending on how smart his interloctuors were.  

The academic who invited Peterson was James Orr,

a former corporate lawyer  

who works in the Faculty of Divinity.

Because he actually believed in the Divine. How very strange?  

He is also, as of this spring, Reform ’s head of policy.

Which is why Reform will fail. Don't send a Wyckhamist to do the job of a knuckle dragging Neanderthal.  

Orr is perhaps best known for his intellectual friendship with JD Vance

an ex-lawyer & convert to Catholicism 

and for the private chapel he has built in the grounds of his house outside Cambridge where he hosts like-minded thinkers for reflection and prayer. The chapel is constructed out of an old shipping container.

Viscounts have marble chapels- right?  

Cambridge has always had its secret right-wing cabals

The faculty was right wing. Then the country as a whole moved in a Thatcherite direction & suddenly the only City that mattered was the City of London.  

and networks, just as it’s always had its spies. But the point about them was that they used to be secret. The dons were sure enough of themselves that they played their political games in their cloistered rooms, confident that the corridors of power extended into Cambridge colleges. Not any more.

Not since Thatcher entered Number 10. There was once a Cambridge Econ Group led by Wynne Godley- 'the Cassandra of the Fens'. Now he is chiefly remembered as a victim of Masud Khan- the alcholic Psychotherapist.  

So much of it now is just for show.

Cambridge loses money on home students. That means more show, less substance.  

Arday’s case is egregious on many levels.

He was promoted as a super-star. Sadly, he was as stupid as fuck.  

Perhaps the worst of it is the university’s original response to allegations of plagiarism, which it immediately denounced as a witch hunt.

Yes. That is what gave the story legs. Otherwise, Arday is just a blagger who fooled stupid, senile, dons. What was truly objectionable was the notion that anyone who says anything negative about a darkie is Adolph fucking Hitler and should be arrested and sent to jail for a very long time. 

It is one thing to fail to spot evidence of academic misconduct, but it is something else entirely to fail to acknowledge it when it is pointed out to you.

The thing we are dealing with here is monumental stupidity. These nutters don't understand what 'evidence' means.  

Still, though, this sorry tale is symptomatic of a wider university culture in which so many people fear for their futures and are uncertain of what their purpose is.

When an industry become sick- i.e. uncompetitive- people stuck within it will display such pathologies.  

Anyone who thinks Cambridge should be immune from this by dint of its prestige and privilege is missing the point.

Non-STEM subjects are shit no matter where they are taught.  

So much of the prestige and privilege of Cambridge is now bound up in leveraging the university’s – and the town’s – advantages in tech and scientific research.

Sadly, it may lose that 'acquired advantage'. Politics isn't some stupid shit you teach cretins. It is about changing fiscal and monetary and industrial and manpower policy. Runciman could have helped the Silicon Fen. Scratch that. Maybe he has been helping the Hi-Tec sector. He just doesn't want to reveal this to readers of the New Statesman coz Neo-Liberalism is soooooo evil.  

Social science and humanities academics can argue as much as they like about how important their subjects are for critical thinking and human flourishing

my shit sandwich is really tasty! How come Subway won't put it on the menu? Is it coz I iz a Viscount? Earls get all the breaks. Indeed, the sandwich is named after one such nobleman. As for Dukes, don't get me started mate. Ever heard of Beef Wellington?  

but as the new technology marches on, it gets harder and harder to feel confident that these arguments will win out.

But, so long as you are a Professor, you still have to keep chewing on a shit sandwich.  

AI is helping scientists capture Nobel prizes and helping mathematicians solve puzzles that seemed beyond human reach.

It can also help academics in low IQ fields get to use advanced statistical or analytical techniques.  

What is it doing for people who read and write books for a living

as opposed to academics who have to pretend to read & write shite 

except to make them worry whether they can trust anything that matters again, including the essays being written by their students?

They can screen those essays easily enough.  

Grandstanding can sometimes feel like it’s all that’s left. The joke used to be that academic politics are so poisonous because the stakes are so low. Now, it’s more like the politics are so performative

coprophagy could be called performative. The truth is, it is just plain nasty.  

because the real stakes are being played out somewhere else entirely

That was always the case. The cloister is a retreat from the world. So is the toilet. Because of unconscionable cuts to University funding, today more than ever, it is important that we show solidarity with the people of Gaza by eating our own shit.