The doctrine of subsequent remedial measures holds that evidence of safety improvements, fixes, or changes made after an accident cannot be used in court to prove that a defendant was negligent. However, when a miscreant reacts to an incident of negligence or wrongdoing by taking measures that make it look more guilty without fixing anything, what do you call that? I vote for “really stupid.”
In the wake of its worldwide humiliation in the Jason Arday scandal and its craven, mealy-mouthed public declarations as the mess reached its climax with the fraudulent professor’s death, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education decided to hide its faculty. The staff list is now offline. When one tries to access it, the screen above appears.
A double-secret faculty! Cool!
Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice promised that the investigation of how an emotionally disturbed fantasist who fabricated credentials, his biography and his scholarship yet nonetheless was passed into the faculty of one of the most prestigious universities in the world would be “thorough and transparent.”
That’s nice, but forgive me for being skeptical: how transparent is Cambridge likely to be when it won’t reveal who’s on its faculty? I suppose it’s possible that the professors are so embarrassed to be associated with Cambridge now that they will enter the Professor Protection Program and are only going out in public wearing Groucho glasses.
Ethics Alarms 
Cambridge should really just mail people diplomas like some states here just mail ballots. The diploma could even have check boxes for a major and minor of the recipients selection. Autopen the relevant authority’s name on it and there wouldn’t even be a need for return postage or processing. .
On a completely unrelated note, the University of Michigan is now going to hide the fist semester grades of everyone. Sigh. I can tell no Michigan alumni were involved with this decision.
If they were worried about harrassment, they could’ve simply removed the contact info from each person’s bio. People could still track down their info in other ways, but that’s still true even after taking down the whole faculty page.
Do you remember that book in the Harvard Library that was bound in human skin that I suggested might be cursed, and thus the cause of Harvard’s troubles? It turns out the Cambridge University Library has an entire Occult Collection. It apparenty includes “Spirit Trumpets”, which can be used to communicate with spirits during dark seances, as well as an “Envelope of Ectoplasm”, whatever that is.
Surely there must be some object hidden in the bowels of their collection that carries a curse as powerful and evil, or perhaps even more so, than that abomination that was in Harvard’s library. What else could possibly explain Cambridge’s self-inflicted humiliation?
This whole scandal is skirting around the big questions around the value of higher education today. Starting this year, colleges and universities have to prove that their graduates make more than the average high school graduate or lose access to student loans for those programs. Answer this question: What percent of college programs are a value to society and which are a detriment or useless? If a pathological liar with no demonstrable knowledge can teach at one of the top universities in the world for years in Sociology, what of value is really being taught in Sociology? What Sociology research is actually valuable if this is one of the top researchers in the world?
We can see the benefit of engineering, agriculture, physics, chemistry, of geology, nursing, medicine, of history, but what benefit to society are all the grievance studies degrees? How does research in how to complain about white men and European civilization really advance civilization? If the majority of our universities are focused on destroying our civilization, should we be paying tax dollars for that? Shouldn’t we fund people that want to vandalize roads, businesses, and government buildings if we are going to do that, just so we don’t discriminate (oh sorry, did we do that through USAID?).