As I have mentioned here several times, the past six years and especially the last two have profoundly discouraged me. I have seen the profession I have dedicated what I laughingly call “my career” become more corrupt, greedy and immune to ethics alarms. One of my bar associations—oh hell, I don’t have to avoid embarrassing it any more, do I? The District of Columbia Bar—that I had served well and enthusiastically for over 30 years unceremoniously fired me for daring to dig into a profession-wide ethics problem involving powerful members. Both of the distinguished institutions that gave me a diploma have revealed themselves as fatally politicized and untrustworthy. I have seen so many valued friends, colleagues and associated reveal themselves as literally rendered intellectually crippled by the The Great Stupid, and the nation I revere, respect and admire is being threatened by an ideology espoused by grifters, liars and fools who have somehow managed to bring better and smarter people down to their nauseating level.
The Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck, which I’m officially designating today, is massively important though its significant has nothing to do with Jason Arday. It is important because…
- Such a thing occurring at a major, internationally-renowned institution of higher education, demonstrated just how corrupted such institutions have become
- The specifics of the episode illustrate vividly the pure illogic as well as the destructiveness of the whole “diversity is our strength” delusion, but most disturbing of all,
- In its reaction to their self-made debacle, the progressive hive’s absence of integrity and inability to admit or even discern “what’s going on here” and conclude that they, and those they have followed, extolled and defended, have been and are spectacularly, utterly wrong.
In short, they won’t or can’t be honest, they won’t or can’t admit that their critics have been right, they won’t or can’t even accept the facts in front of them and reach a rational conclusion. I don’t even know what to call people like this. They aren’t stupid, at least not all of them. They aren’t hypnotized or hearing voices in their heads. So how can they be “fixed”? How do you deal with millions and millions of such people when they and their delusions threaten the fabric of society?
Yesterday I wrote a brief update on the Jason Arday Ethics Train Wreck noting that I had been prescient when I predicted,
“You know, don’t you, that the next step will be a tsunami of op-eds and essays criticizing and condemning the conservatives—racists, all of them— who “killed” Arday with their determination to drive a neurodivergent “of color” out of his remarkable position. So he puffed up his resume a little bit— Everybody does it. How else was someone like him to break through the societal barriers white society has erected to impede people like him? I will be shocked if Arday isn’t quickly canonized as a victim. It is the perfect way to deflect attention away from the real issues behind this tragedy.”
Nevertheless, I did not expect this desperate backlash from the Left to be so pervasive. My long-time Georgetown history professor friend posted with favor this pathetic “everybody does it and if they are white they get away with it” comment:
Doris Kearns Goodwin — Plagiarism/improper attribution. Career survived. Still a celebrated bestselling historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual.
Edmund Morris — Inserted fictional characters and invented scenes into his authorized biography of Ronald Reagan. Controversy notwithstanding, continued publishing and remained a prominent biographer until his death in 2019.
Joseph Ellis — Lied about serving in Vietnam. Suspended for a year, returned to teaching, continued publishing bestselling history.
Laurence Tribe — Acknowledged improper attribution in a book. Career survived; Harvard’s Carl M. Loeb University Professor Emeritus. (Harvard Law School)
Stephen Ambrose — Plagiarism/improper attribution across multiple books; later evidence challenged claims about Eisenhower interviews. Continued writing and remained a bestselling historian until his death in 2002.
Mike Barnicle — Resigned from the Boston Globe amid fabrication/plagiarism controversies. Rebuilt his career. Longtime television commentator and MSNBC contributor.
Mitch Albom — Published a column falsely describing athletes attending an event they didn’t attend. Suspended briefly; remains a bestselling author, columnist and radio host.
Jonah Lehrer — Plagiarism/self-plagiarism and fabricated quotations. Lost major jobs and had books recalled, but returned to publishing books.
Stephen Glass — Fabricated sources, quotations, people and entire stories. Journalism career ended; later earned a law degree and built a career as a paralegal.
Michael Bellesiles — Serious research-integrity problems in Arming America. Lost the Bancroft Prize and resigned from Emory. Later returned to teaching and publishing.
Marc Hauser — Found responsible for multiple counts of scientific misconduct at Harvard. Left Harvard but subsequently wrote books and pursued work outside traditional academia.
Brian Wansink — Cornell found academic misconduct involving data, statistical methods and authorship. Resigned from Cornell; continued professional work outside his former academic position.
Brian Williams — Falsely embellished accounts of his reporting experiences, including the Iraq helicopter story. Lost the NBC anchor chair but returned to national television at MSNBC.
Ruth Shalit Barrett — Plagiarism and accuracy controversies during her journalism career. Continued writing after the original scandal, though later faced another major journalism controversy.
Marc Tessier-Lavigne — Stanford president whose laboratory papers contained serious errors and whose handling of corrections was criticized. Resigned the presidency but remains a Stanford professor and laboratory head.
White academics and journalists do face consequences for lying, plagiarism, fabrication, or misconduct. But that disgrace does not become a death sentence for their careers or their humanity. Many have been allowed to apologize, regroup, keep working, publish again, rebuild their reputations, and have second acts.
I had to point out that her first example, Doris Kearns, is a legitimate and credentialed scholar who taught a course I took and admired, and she never claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days or had schools she never taught at listed in her biography. I didn’t bother noting that including Stephen Glass ( or Mike Barnicle or Mitch Albom) with the academics iss an outrageous apples-and-oranges cheat, as they were not academics, and in Glass’s case (and he is very white), his humiliation and condemnation was analogous to Arday’s, and Arday might have also “built a career as a paralegal” if he hadn’t been clinically insane and hadn’t killed himself.
One would think that when the New York Times, which seldom finds an issue it won’t spin the advantage of progressives and Democrats, begins a story like this in its thorough examination of the Arday affair …
Ethics Alarms 
While I stand by my prior comments regarding Arday’s culpability, you are absolutely correct that the bigger picture is far more sinister and dangerous. Excellent analysis.
About 8,000 people carried that Olympic torch, and that was in 2012. Unless his face was up front and center (I don’t recall, someone please say if so) I think calling him a “mascot” is a bit disingenuous.
How about calling him a mascot at Cambridge?
But TW, those were not random people with names picked from a hat. 7,300 people were chosen through public nominations for community and personal achievements and the rest were athletes, performers, and public figures. I don’t know which group Arday was part of, but either way he was being held up as someone of note, and that status was being broadcast to the public and his peers.
I was thinking in terms of “a company mascot”. I doubt even Disney have 7,300 such distinct mascots. But fair enough, I was concerned with a too narrow definition.
I like the Spanish use that centers on “pet.”
“In Spanish, mascota most commonly means “pet” — a domesticated animal kept for companionship or pleasure, such as a dog, cat, bird, fish, or small mammal. It is used in everyday contexts like Tengo una mascota (“I have a pet”) or ¿Tienes mascota? (“Do you have a pet?”). Broader and Figurative Uses
Beyond pets, mascota can also mean “mascot” — a person, animal, or symbol representing a team, group, or organization, often associated with good luck or identity. For example: El búho es la mascota de nuestro equipo (“The owl is our team’s mascot”).
Historically, the word comes from the Provençal/Occitan mascoto, meaning “charm” or “lucky talisman,” and entered Spanish in the 19th century. Over time, it shifted from referring to lucky charms to companion animals, possibly because pets were seen as bringing comfort or good fortune.”
I think “pet” and “lucky charm” or “talisman” all describe how Oxford viewed this hire. Maybe even “companion animal” would apply!
The inimitable Dr. Thomas Sowell (Red Kryptonite to the Didn’t Earn It crowd) puts a finer point to it in his Mascot Politics.
PWS
Asking the Left to admit its culpability is akin to asking a large set of people to commit mass heresy before the world and each other. Do not hold your breath.
The alphabets have their intersectional religion. Their banners hang everywhere. Without their shared faux victim hood and resultant anger, they have nothing.
Perhaps letting them destroy someplace well known is the only way to sweep the cobwebs from their eyes. New York seems like a good candidate.
I don’t for a second believe that this Jason Arday was remotely intelligent enough to commit the abundance of plagiarism that brought about his downfall. Rather, I believe elements at Cambridge conspired to create this fiction. Now, they’re attempting to portray him as a victim.
Has anyone else noticed how much Jason Arday looked like Meghan Markle?
Shame.
???
That’s my tongue in cheek “shame.” You should know me by now.
no, but his face looks “shiny” in every photo I have seen.
very fake looking.
looked like makeup
-Jut
“Has anyone else noticed how much Jason Arday looked like Meghan Markle?”
Heh!
PWS
To your long-time Georgetown history professor, you can reply that all he has done is demonstrate why the left has lost all credibility. He thinks he is showing how it is fine to plagiarize. All the has shown is that those institutions no longer care about academic rigor and have no credibility.
Now about the plagiarism. There are different grades of plagiarism. Let me explain why the current round of plagiarism is so devastatingly bad.
When I was in grad school, many of us were asked to carefully check the introduction chapters of foreign students’ dissertations. Because of the difficulty of writing in a foreign language and the differing intellectual property standards in different cultures, there was a lot of plagiarism and the advisors were very careful to detect it and get it corrected before the defense. This is a mockup of a typical Asian students introduction.
“Poorly worded original sentence. Sentence directly copied from source 1. Two sentences directly copied from source 2. Poorly worded original sentence tying the thoughts together.
Four sentences from source 3. One sentence from source 1. One sentence from source 4. A poorly worded original sentence tying them together.
rinse and repeat.”
You can see what is going on. They lack the English language skills to really blend the thoughts from the different sources together, so they just copy whole sentences (occasionally paragraphs) from many sources and tie them together with some original sentences. This is plagiarism, but this is pretty easy to fix. They are writing a typical intro, they just aren’t doing the paraphrasing and integration of the ideas needed. We would work with the students to get this fixed so that there weren’t any problems. There are probably a lot of programs that didn’t do this, resulting in a massive amount of plagiarism. I am fairly sure this is pretty common in dissertations, especially the Introduction chapters (which are typically reviews of the literature and not original research).
This is not the plagiarism of Claudine Gay and Jason Arday. From what I have read, both of these people substantially plagiarized only 1 author each. This has the danger of making their plagiarized works not original, but other people’s work passed off as their own. This is much more serious. In the former plagiarism, original work is done and described, only the background work is introduced using a hodge-podge of other people’s sentences. In the case of Gay and Arday, it is possible that there never was any original work, at least nothing substantial.
The first type of plagiarized dissertation is a problem because of the lack of paraphrasing of sentences. The work is worthy of a doctorate, but the work was worded with plagiarism. The latter is a problem because there may not be sufficient original work to justify the doctorate at all. These are potentially illegitimate degrees, which is why these are so serious. For Harvard to keep such a person on faculty is appalling and shows the academic bankruptcy of the institution.
This is the result of the repudiation of meritocracy. To justify DEI, they had to state that merit didn’t matter, and it was racist to boot. Meritocracy is whiteness. This is easy to do in a field that doesn’t really matter. There is no ‘right’ way to justify black supremacy. There is no ‘correct’ way to declare everything ‘whiteness’ and bad. There is no ‘right’ way to blame everything bad on ‘the patriarchy’. There is no merit in those fields because there is no absolute truth, no reality to check against. In fact, such fields would declare all three of those things ‘whiteness’ and ‘the patriarchy’ and rail against them. As this cultural Marxism spread from the deconstructionists to all other fields, merit was placed on the back burner. We reached the point where air traffic controllers were selected for NOT knowing anything about engineering, aircraft, or air traffic control!
I don’t know what can be done for people who will justify Arday and Gay’s plagiarism and lack of ability in flagship institutions. I suspect you can’t reform it, you can only destroy it and start again. I explained to my classes how the dark ages happen, how you end up with people who can’t actually understand the knowledge that came before. I explained how it could take over 1000 years to rebuild an education system to the point that the old knowledge could be used. The pre-meds just ignored it. The engineering students pointed out that they can’t understand their textbooks now and need the professor to interpret it for them. They engineers were scared and the pre-meds denied that it could happen.
We better find some way to get back to objective truth and transmitting knowledge to the next generation because we are about 30 years from the next dark ages.
I’m reminded of the book Small Gods from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. If I remember correctly, one character speaks of an Omnian missionary who was sent to another country to spread the word of the one true god Om. The people there killed the missionary.
At least, that was the “deeper truth” of the matter. The “superficial” truth was that the people had ridiculed the missionary and thrown vegetables at him until he returned to Omnia, and his own church executed him for his embarrassing failure. But spiritually, quintessentially, the people’s rejection of the missionary’s message was literally murder, for which Omnia declared war on the country in question.