They're Getting Revenge, Starting Today...
Via the Tom Woods Letter,
I absolutely insist to you: I really am trying to stop writing about this topic. But too much insanity keeps breaking out, and I have no choice but to comment on it.
You know the story: a Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, was found to have plagiarized his dissertation, borrowed heavily from others in his published articles, produced essentially worthless research, called the police on a reporter and on a professor who asked questions about his resume, invented wild tales of athletic and academic achievement as well as philanthropic work, and (of course) accused his critics of “racism.” And then, late last week, he was found dead at his home in an apparent suicide.
That would have been it, but the left - instead of the embarrassment it should feel at having promoted the greatest academic charlatan of the past ten years (and that’s saying something) - is trying to play the victim here: mean right-wingers in the media shouldn’t have pushed so hard on the Arday story.
This is coming from people who call their enemies Nazis 24 hours a day without thinking there might be a problem with that.
Anyway, here’s the latest: the university that employs Nathan Cofnas, the academic who first broke the story about Jason Arday’s plagiarism and worthless “research,” is now being investigated by his own university for breaking the story.
Just when you think academia can’t be a bigger joke, it always finds some way to outdo itself.
Ghent University rector Petra de Sutter, former leader of the Green Party, issued a statement to the effect that while Ghent attaches “great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial,” it wants the world to know that of course it doesn’t really mean that:
Well, we just found out what that means.
They just suspended Nathan Cofnas, and he will almost surely be fired.
Cofnas wrote the original report on Jason Arday that forced academia to take notice. What he found was too embarrassing not to elicit a response. And his point is: Arday is not an isolated case. For that he cannot be forgiven.
As Cofnas put it on August 11:
This was the most embarrassing academic episode of my lifetime. Everyone just witnessed a clear-cut case of academic fraud, a man who literally called the police on people who questioned his resume, and the overwhelming response from academia was to scream “racism” and sign a petition in his defense.
After they did that, the really embarrassing stuff came out, and they persisted.
So the mask is off, in case there’s still anyone out there who didn’t know what was behind it. The whole edifice of academia nowadays is held together with Scotch tape and piano wire, and slogans.
The institutions will survive as shells of their former selves, but what was once inside will disappear. Adrian Vermeule, the one sane person at Harvard Law School, just wrote: “The elite universities are of course going to survive. They’ve been around forever and will continue on in some form. What will not survive, however, is a certain idea of the scholarly mission and life. It died of its own weakness, an inability to resist invading barbarians.”
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/21/2026 - 10:05
Continue reading...
[ H/T ZeroHedge ]
Via the Tom Woods Letter,
I absolutely insist to you: I really am trying to stop writing about this topic. But too much insanity keeps breaking out, and I have no choice but to comment on it.
You know the story: a Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, was found to have plagiarized his dissertation, borrowed heavily from others in his published articles, produced essentially worthless research, called the police on a reporter and on a professor who asked questions about his resume, invented wild tales of athletic and academic achievement as well as philanthropic work, and (of course) accused his critics of “racism.” And then, late last week, he was found dead at his home in an apparent suicide.
That would have been it, but the left - instead of the embarrassment it should feel at having promoted the greatest academic charlatan of the past ten years (and that’s saying something) - is trying to play the victim here: mean right-wingers in the media shouldn’t have pushed so hard on the Arday story.
This is coming from people who call their enemies Nazis 24 hours a day without thinking there might be a problem with that.
Anyway, here’s the latest: the university that employs Nathan Cofnas, the academic who first broke the story about Jason Arday’s plagiarism and worthless “research,” is now being investigated by his own university for breaking the story.
Just when you think academia can’t be a bigger joke, it always finds some way to outdo itself.
Ghent University rector Petra de Sutter, former leader of the Green Party, issued a statement to the effect that while Ghent attaches “great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial,” it wants the world to know that of course it doesn’t really mean that:
Well, we just found out what that means.
They just suspended Nathan Cofnas, and he will almost surely be fired.
Cofnas wrote the original report on Jason Arday that forced academia to take notice. What he found was too embarrassing not to elicit a response. And his point is: Arday is not an isolated case. For that he cannot be forgiven.
As Cofnas put it on August 11:
This was the most embarrassing academic episode of my lifetime. Everyone just witnessed a clear-cut case of academic fraud, a man who literally called the police on people who questioned his resume, and the overwhelming response from academia was to scream “racism” and sign a petition in his defense.
After they did that, the really embarrassing stuff came out, and they persisted.
So the mask is off, in case there’s still anyone out there who didn’t know what was behind it. The whole edifice of academia nowadays is held together with Scotch tape and piano wire, and slogans.
The institutions will survive as shells of their former selves, but what was once inside will disappear. Adrian Vermeule, the one sane person at Harvard Law School, just wrote: “The elite universities are of course going to survive. They’ve been around forever and will continue on in some form. What will not survive, however, is a certain idea of the scholarly mission and life. It died of its own weakness, an inability to resist invading barbarians.”
Tyler Durden Fri, 08/21/2026 - 10:05
Continue reading...
[ H/T ZeroHedge ]
