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 