The academy ignored the warnings; today it is taking a stand against Trump and Jason Arday

Perhaps we are too caught up in the memory of Guccini to pay it any mind, but this is in fact a news story that deserves the heading ‘gigantic metaphors of our time’. The facts, in a nutshell, even if you already know them. Jason Arday – “the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history”, a social sciences prodigy, the little Mozart of diversity – resigned the day before yesterday: plagiarism, inflated credentials, a fabricated biography. He denies it all, crying racism. Meanwhile, he even entrusted his resignation letter to AI, which immediately makes me like him. But plagiarism bores me. Plagiarism is uncovered by software. That’s not the point. The point, if anything, is the construction of his persona. This is where things get interesting. Riding the wave of Black Lives Matter, Arday had a powerful backstory – autism, a child who didn’t speak until the age of eleven, a disability turned into a source of empowerment. All the rest was woven around this, like a woke version of a Frank Capra film: thirty marathons in thirty-five days, one with a broken leg, millions donated to charity. Black, with a boyish face and soft, androgynous features. Arday was living proof that theories of inclusion are right, that they work, and that they will produce many little Ardays. Arday’s time at Cambridge was like a prestigious ‘talent show’ on the hunt for stories of oppression and redemption, tears and applause, where the ‘it happened to me’ narrative ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a method (a video is doing the rounds on social media showing a lecturer hugging him and saying ‘you’re the best professor in the world’: it looks like a scene from a Maria De Filippi show). Arday taught the sociology of education – and here lies the crux of the matter. In the hard sciences, a criterion, however battered, still holds: or at least we like to believe it does. In the social sciences dominated by critical theory, however, this is not the case. There, everything and its opposite is acceptable, provided the right words are used: inclusivity, gender, lived experience, intersectionality, decolonisation – a lexicon now also used by influencers and TikTokers in search of sponsors. Theories designed specifically so that they cannot be falsified or debated. Not hypotheses but dogmas. You either believe them or you don’t. And any objection is irrefutable proof of the objector’s privilege. That’s that. Arday took it to the extreme: when a journalist asked him to account for his CV, he responded by reporting him to the police. If reality is a social construct, any construct can become real – and any question an act of violence.

Thirty years ago, the physicist Alan Sokal sent a completely nonsensical essay to the prestigious journal Social Text: quantum gravity as a ‘social and linguistic construct’, peppered with fashionable buzzwords, bogus mathematics and fawning references to French philosophers. A prank. They published it with great fanfare. A wonderful book came out of it, "Intellectual Impostures", now impossible to find, dismissed as a ‘neoliberal attack’ on the humanities – when Sokal, a left-winger, wanted quite the opposite: to demonstrate the risk of unchecked nonsense, to safeguard rigour, the ability to distinguish sound reasoning from gibberish, because if that goes, everything goes. And so it was. What a relief, then, to track down that book almost in secret during my PhD. I felt less alone. I, an ignorant, aspiring semi-educated soul, couldn’t understand how the homeland of Diderot and Voltaire had ended up bestowing upon us the elusive power of Foucault, Derrida’s logophallocentrism, the schizoanalysis of Deleuze and Guattari, Althusser’s surdétermination and other post-structuralist delicacies. Masters for whom totalitarianism was always and only Western, and reality never existed – not even when it hits you in the face like a door slamming shut. The university couldn’t care less about Sokal-style objections, and carried on as if nothing had happened. Until it crashed head-on into Trump and, today, into Arday. A man who didn’t cheat the system; if anything, he understood the game. He knows that academics write knowing they won’t be read. They have no audience: they publish to be assessed by two or three colleagues, counted, ranked – not discussed or understood. Citations bounce around in a closed circuit, between articles that nobody opens. The perfect place to bluff. Now the circle is complete: you write a paper using AI, a professor assesses it and feeds it back to the AI. The machine writes, the machine reads, the machine evaluates. Then, if necessary, you tack on a “life experience, a trauma, a story of oppression”, and off you go. Now Arday is leaving Cambridge. But the assembly line remains running, and plagiarism is truly the least of our problems.