Guest Columnist Martin Hackworth: The Rot in the Academy Runs Deep

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks wearing out academic fraudster Jason Arday and his defenders. Arday, as you know by now, was an academic extraordinary only as a con artist. Arday was exposed as a serial plagiarist and fabulist. But before checking out by his own hand, he was wildly famous as the youngest black professor in the entire eight hundred-year history of Cambridge.

What he was not was a legitimate scholar in any widely accepted sense of the word. Yet about half of the academy and nearly all of the press (from center to left) seem intent on digging in behind the notion that Arday was an imperfect but essential scholar who was hounded to death over minor and common academic transgressions.

This, of course, is bullshit. It’s also par for the course in academia.

As I have mentioned repeatedly in my critiques of Arday and his defenders, they, with their laughably vacuous professional standards and scholarship, represent but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to academic fatuity. The fact that the academy cannot, as a whole, admit that the ascent of even someone as egregiously unfit as Jason Arday is a dent in their way of doing business is entirely revealing.

Yet as bad as you might imagine problems in the academy to be, I can assure you that they are actually much worse. Let’s explore.

We might as well start this journey with academics who have made spectacles of themselves by maladroitly disguising woke academic bullshit as accomplishment for the ruffians beyond the simpatico cloisters—something that rarely ends with good bourbon and a toast.

Jason Arday is off the table because he’s not around anymore to defend himself. As for the rest, let’s get after them.

Let’s begin with Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, who, despite possessing zero relevant experience in the economics, sociology, psychology, or even lived experience of aging, fancies himself, inexplicably, an expert in American gerontocracy. The self-belief that not only am I an expert in some narrow academic discipline but also in everything else is as common in the academy as it is without merit.

Moyn, along that line, regularly opines that older Americans, whom he considers a monolithic block of affluent, selfish freeloaders, represent a clear and present danger to society. I’m sure he’s a hit in every retirement community within hearing aid range of New Haven.

Moyn’s recent opinion piece in The New York Times claiming that older Americans are the source of nearly all of the country’s problems—a column so clueless and misguided that it would one day later in a career come back to embarrass even an intern writer at Teen Vogue—proved so ripe for abuse that Matt Taibbi devoted an entire column in Racket News, New York Times: Old People Suck and We Should Take Their Stuff, to mocking it. You gotta love Matt Taibbi.

Among Moyn’s complaints: older Americans vote at higher percentages than other age groups, have greater savings, and own land. He’s in favor of doing something about all of that. There are many people like Moyn in academia who believe that only a certain class of people, which includes themselves, has the right to speak freely, possess wealth, and be adroitly represented by people they do business with or vote for.

I am one of the older Americans Moyn complains about. I never miss an election even though it invariably means being called for jury duty within just a few months. I saved money and invested it all throughout my working career and am now, finally, able to afford a few nice things. I own some land. And I would love for Samuel Moyn to come and try to take any of these away.

Socialism, political disenfranchisment, and censorship are very popular ideas in academia. Most of the people I met during my time in the barrel were, though they would rarely admit it, enamored of socialism (if not communism—the main difference being how far one is willing to go to get results). These ideas (and ideals)—which may be generally described as freedom for me but not for thee—will be a recurring theme here.

Jason Stanley, an expatriate American academic, is the current Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Stanley, a lefty academic and pundit, was one of the more incoherent voices defending Jason Arday via a midwit Substack piece, “It sure looks like Jason Arday was horrifically wronged (based on citation data).” The very fact that Stanley is one of Arday’s most intransigent academic defenders tells you just about all that you need to know about him.

Stanley has been on my radar not just for his inept defense of Arday, but also for being among a small group of Ivy League academics who left America over stupors and vapors, but ostensibly in protest of a presidential election that didn’t go their way in 2024. Stanley did this so, in his telling, he could be in a much better position to fight bullies.

Of course that’s absolutely the way one fights bullies—with mean faces and taunts from the other side of Lake America. I’m certain that we in the opposition are all trembling in our boots.

That’s sarcasm, of course. The only thing to be taken less seriously than a vacuous, midwit academic is a tough-talking, vacuous, midwit academic from a time zone away.

Claudine Gay—political scientist, plagiarist, and deer-in-the-headlights former president of Harvard—is no scholar. Don’t take my word for it; you may view her CV here. Gay’s record of publications and talks would be austere for even a community college president.

But before Jason Arday, Gay was the quintessential DEI rises to the top fail at an old and formerly prestigious university.

In the aftermath of Gay’s disastrous testimony before Congress on antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 attacks, it came to light that Gay had a knack for something besides checking the right boxes on an Ivy League hiring form—plagiarism. In several papers, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay paraphrased or quoted over a dozen authors without proper attribution.

A hastily created, under-the-radar review by an internal committee at Harvard initially cleared Gay. But when lawyers representing Harvard began threatening newspapers with legal action, the ruse collapsed and Harvard was forced to cut their losses. But Claudine Gay is still at Harvard after being its shortest-tenured president and pulling down a salary of nearly a million dollars a year.

I’ve looked at the papers written by Gay and the source material she used. Gay was in clear violation of Harvard’s own plagiarism policy. And it was not subtle. In many of her publications, Gay used entire paragraphs, nearly verbatim, from the source material without attribution.

There’s no getting around this. It’s blatant plagiarism. When my students at a lowly regional university pulled anything like this, it was a bad day for them if I found it. But for Gay and others like her who exist in a world where merit and actual accomplishment matter far less than identity, it’s a path to becoming a college president, a political and social influencer, and very wealthy.

Meredith Raimondo, who, while Dean of Students at Oberlin College in Ohio, engineered a $36 million judgement against Oberlin in favor of a local business, Gibson’s Bakery, parlayed her incompetence in student affairs into a new position as Vice President of Student Affairs at Oglethorpe College in Georgia.

During a now famous 2016 incident, a member of the Gibson family (and store employee) confronted a male Oberlin student who, along with two female accomplices, had attempted to shoplift two bottles of wine upon being refused a purchase with a fake ID. When the Gibson’s employee attempted to call the police, a melee ensued. When the police arrived, they found the Gibson’s employee on the ground being kicked by all three students.

The police arrested all three students, who later pleaded guilty to theft and other misdemeanors related to the assault. None of the students received any jail time. All three issued statements, as part of a plea bargain, to the effect that Gibson’s actions were reasonable and were not racially motivated.

Shoplifting is unfortunately common—even in a small place like Oberlin, Ohio (population 8000). Other small businesses in the area had reported losses due to shoplifting during the same time, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. Given all of this, most reasonable people would conclude that a deal involving a guilty plea, an accurate statement of events, some community service and a promise to behave in the future would be a good outcome for the students.

But the brain trust at Oberlin did not see it that way. Not by a long shot.

Administrators at Oberlin, led by Dean of Students Raimondo, while fully and completely aware of the facts of the case, suspended business with the bakery and encouraged a student boycott of Gibson’s by fanning a false narrative that the employees of Gibson’s had racially profiled the students who’d shoplifted.

After talks between parties failed to resolve the dispute, Gibson’s sued Oberlin College for libel and breach of contract. Oberlin then adopted a very curious (at least to those who know little about how higher education works) defensive posture by, among other things, going after members of their own faculty who were defending, rightfully, Gibson’s Bakery.

Several analysts described Oberlin’s strategy as legal malpractice. A string of defeats led to a lengthy string of long-shot appeals—Oberlin’s attempt to outlast the elderly owners of the bakery. In the end, Oberlin was ordered to pay Gibson’s $36 million in damages. But Raimondo came out of it all just fine.

It turns out that you almost cannot be a big enough screw-up in the academy to earn a demotion. Just ask anyone at Oglethorpe.

Just last week, Nathan Cofnas, the academic probably most responsible for unmasking Jason Arday, was suspended from his postdoc position at Ghent University by Rector Petra De Sutter. Only in the present-day academy may one academic achieve accolades in life and martyrdom in death for mendacity, but another be shunned for telling the truth about it.

Rector De Sutter is a genuine piece of work, who kicked off the last academic year at Ghent with an address defending free speech and academic freedom. This speech was subsequently found to contain fabricated quotes that turned out to be the result of AI hallucinations. Rector De Sutter confirmed that AI was used to create the speech.

De Sutter, a male gynecologist who identifies as a woman, evidently found Cofnas’ exposé of Arday, another academic from a marginalized group, a bit too close to home and suspended Confas—for telling the truth.

Academic malpractice happens everywhere. A year ago, an Idaho jury, after months of trial, testimony and legal maneuvering, took less than three hours to reach a unanimous verdict awarding $3 million in damages against Boise State University to Sarah Fendley, the owner of Big City Coffee (full disclosure, Sarah and I are friends). The jury also awarded an additional $1 million in damages against former BSU Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management, Leslie Webb. Webb is now the Vice Provost of Student Success and Campus Life at the University of Montana.

This verdict was awarded because the jury agreed that Big City Coffee was forced from the Student Union building at BSU because Fendley had displayed a thin blue line flag at another location off-campus during the heyday of Black Lives Matter and the George Floyd protests. This was too much for a vocal minority of students at BSU, who complained about the presence of Big City Coffee at BSU to sympathetic administrators, including then BSU President Marlene Tromp.

In the reddest of states, BSU stands out as a hotbed for issues that are not popular with anyone else in a zip code in any direction away from the blue turf. Yet despite Tromp’s mishandling of this issue (among many others), ultimately costing millions, she managed to parlay professional incompetence as the leader of BSU into a post-BSU position as the 28th President of the University of Vermont.

Shellyne Rodriguez, an American visual artist, organizer, and former CUNY adjunct, was, a while back, fired from Hunter College—not for cursing at, then disrupting, a student display, but for chasing a reporter working on the story down the street with a machete. After front-page photos of the chase led to her dismissal from Hunter, Cooper Union hired Rodriguez for another faculty position. Rodriguez lasted less than a year at Cooper Union before being dismissed there for antisemitism.

I fully expect Rodriguez to emerge as the president of an Ivy League school, a scholar at Cambridge, or possibly a rector at Ghent, any day now. Cambridge even has a current opening in the Bullshit Studies Department.

Last, but not least, one of my favorites—Melissa Click. Click, as you may recall, was, some time ago, an assistant professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Missouri, but she was fired after being indicted for threatening and impeding two student journalists during a campus protest (resulting in 20 hours of community service for a misdemeanor third-degree assault charge).

Now, for most people beyond academia, this type of professional embarrassment would ensure that their next job involved a yurt without indoor plumbing somewhere in Outer Mongolia. Click, instead, became Chair of Communications Studies at Gonzaga.

As bad as you think these people are—and you aren’t wrong—there are plenty more like them flying under the radar because bad academics are mostly immune to bad consequences. Those who are a bit quicker on the uptake become rich, the arrogant ones are feted, and the dumb ones are promoted. Those are the consequences of academic failure. The academics who just keep their heads down and pursue scholarship regardless of where it leads are the ones who get screwed.

During my time in the field of physics, which many assume to be immune to idiocy, I encountered people I was forced to take seriously who advocated for every dumbshit, ill-conceived (or both) notion imaginable: cold fusion, postmodernism, cloaking devices, UFOs, other ways of knowing, colonialism of math, magic nuclear batteries, Bigfoot, ad infinitum, and ad nauseum.

My time was up a decade ago. It’s just gotten worse. And it’s abundantly clear that help is not on the way.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.