Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Several people have realized that many of Jason Arday‘s extraordinary claims about his life could actually be tested empirically. These include his assertions that he was so autistic that he did not speak until he was eleven, could not read or write until he was eighteen, running 600 miles in six days, completing 30 marathons in 35 days (the last ten with a cracked fibula), his 5-million-pound donations to charity, and his academic jobs. (Some of the latter, like his claims of holding visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and Nelson Mandela University, have already been discredited.)
But the claims of not speaking until he was eleven and being illiterate until eighteen have always baffled me. Not only do they not seem credible (he started university at age 20), but surely, if they were true, there would be records. Does he not have parents who will attest to this? What about friends or associates? Why did not of these people weigh in supporting Arday when the press began investigating him? Because he’s made these claims repeatedly and they’ve been a crucial part of the attention he got, it’s incumbent on journalists to investigate their truth.
Well, the Guardian, which unexpectedly broke a lot of the Arday stuff in the MSM, has done so. The results are mixed: some remember him being quite vocal in primary school, while others buttress his own story. Click below to read the story. Arday’s own biography, Great and Unfortunate Things, wass published in the U.S. Tuesday and is coming out in the UK on August 27.
I’ve indented some excerpts.
The story of Jason Arday’s extraordinary rise to becoming the youngest black professor in the history of the University of Cambridge is all the more remarkable for one claim: that he did not learn to speak until just shy of his 12th birthday.
This claim was mentioned in a letter announcing his resignation last week, which came amid mounting questions about his academic work and statements he had made about his past.
Arday wrote that becoming a professor at Cambridge was something he “could scarcely have imagined” as an autistic child who was “unable to speak until I was 11 years old”.
His memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, was published by Simon & Schuster in the US on Tuesday and is due to be published in the UK on 27 August. It tells the story of how he joined Cambridge aged 37 despite having been non-verbal throughout his childhood and only learning to read and write aged 18.
But interviews with former schoolmates have produced conflicting accounts of his childhood. Two remember him speaking at primary school, describing a chatty child who loved making jokes, while two others say they did not hear him speak until he reached secondary school.
Jonathan Stewart, 40, told the Guardian he remembered Arday from when they were children growing up in south London. He described him as a good mimic who entertained other pupils by putting on accents and singing songs.
Stewart, a YouTuber who says he was in the year below Arday at Heathbrook primary school in Nine Elms, south-west London, said the academic was known as the class clown. “He was always cracking jokes. He was the comedian guy, he would even put on voices,” claimed Stewart, who said he regularly attended church with Arday.
. . .Another man, 40, who was also in the year below Arday at Heathbrook and asked not to be named, said: “I don’t remember too much about him but I certainly recollect him being able to speak.” Both this man and Stewart said they were in touch with people who had been in Arday’s class.
Arday writes in his memoir that as he approached the age of 12 the local council was on the verge of pulling his speech therapy support because he had made so little progress.
“But miraculously, just a few days shy of my 12th birthday, I spoke. It was at the start of one of my sessions, and Katrina [his speech therapist] had just said: ‘Hello, Jason.’ At that moment, I was fiddling with my hearing aid, which was bothering me, and then I took it out of my ear and said hello back to her.”
But here’s some support:
Arday denied the accounts provided by Stewart and the second man and organised for the Guardian to be sent statements by two school friends, Nick Clark and Mike Freeman, who said the account in his memoir accurately reflected the boy they remembered at school.
Clark said: “As a boy, I remember Jason not speaking and being regularly removed from class for additional support throughout his time at Heathbrook. I was not in his secondary school, but we joined the same football team at 13, when we became great friends, playing football together ever since.”
Clark’s mother, Caroline Russell-Clark, also sent a statement saying she helped out at Heathbrook for a couple of years when Arday was very young.
. . .Russell-Clark said Arday remained in the same class as her son throughout primary school. “I do not remember him speaking until he was playing in the same football team as my son aged 14/15.”
Freeman said: “I remember him not speaking during our time at Heathbrook primary school. He was regularly taken out of class for his educational needs. His severe special needs didn’t stop him playing football and games with me and others as he was still friendly and could communicate through play and actions.”
. . .Arday claimed to have completed 30 marathons in 35 days, run 600 miles in six days and raised £5m for charity over several years. After facing questions, he revised some of those claims and instead said he was part of a fundraising group that he was unable to name for legal reasons.
He also told the Guardian he had been the target of threats after his Cambridge appointment, including having a severed pig’s head delivered to his parents’ home. Subsequent investigations found no evidence to support this claim.
Simon & Schuster, which bought Arday’s memoir for a seven-figure sum, according to the academic, is pressing on with its publication and launch in the UK. The publisher did not respond to requests for comment.
So there you have it. The claims about marathons, running, and raising millions of pounds for charity were never credible and now he’s “revising” them. The proven claims about plagiarism Arday has fobbed off on a tendency to engage in “mimicry” because of his autism.
As I mentioned before, nearly all publishers, including mine, require when you publish a book, you’ve also signed a statement saying that what you assert in your text is, to the best of your knowledge, true. And surely Simon & Schuster would have done that, too. Presumably, even though many of Arday’s claims are questionable, Simon & Schuster could put that off on Arday and not their own fact-checking, which is usually minimal for most publishers. (Libel is an exception, and often mandates that a manuscript be given a “legal read.”)
What can we make of this? The plagiarism, which is extensive, is on its face unethical, and Arday’s excuses are not excusable. The marathon and charity claims are already being walked back, and the claims about recurring brain tumors, mini-strokes, and other physical ailments stretch credibility. As far as the autism and late speaking/literacy claims, well, they bear more investigation, but they’re certainly questionable. All this points to the man as a fabulist who may actually believe all the stories he told. If he doesn’t, he’s a grifter.
At least the Guardian had the moxie to investigate Arday’s claims, though there’s lots of room for more investigation—if anybody’s interested. (Apparently Simon & Schuster is not.) What is truly lame is the New York Times’ new article, “Takeaways from Jason Arday’s memoir” by Neil Vigdor (article archived here). No conclusions are reached, all judgment is suspended. The “takeaways” are simply the claims Arday makes in his book—claims we already know about. The article is superfluous and bespeaks a lack critical acumen in even noting that Arday’s claims could be investigated.
Now that colleges have morphed from institutions of higher learning to buy-a-diploma mills, colleges are increasingly catering to students’ desires. At many schools now, more than half the students get special accommodations during exams, like having rooms to themselves or extra time. (This is okay for some students, but more than half?).
At any rate, the University of Michigan has joined the ranks of schools that don’t show students their grades awarded during their first semester. (As you’ll see, they do get grades, but they’re secret and used in limited ways).
Click below to read the WSJ article on the deep-sixing of grades, or go here to read an archived version:
An excerpt (indented; my own comments are flush left):
The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.
The program, set to start in fall 2027, applies to students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, which enrolls about half of Michigan’s roughly 8,000 first-year students.
A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.
I’m wondering whether student anxiety will really abate because of this. What happens during the second semester, if you know you passed but don’t know where you stand? If you barely passed during your first semester and get a “pass”, you might want to work harder, but you won’t know where you stood initially in competition with your classmates. Also, the grades do count for scholarship and awards, so they aren’t irrelevant. Will your inability to know your “internal” grades possibly increase anxiety?
And why does the risk of mental problems decrease after the first semester? After all, you’re going to get real, “external” grades from then on.
This tactic is not unique:
Schools including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology have implemented similar “grade-covering” programs in past years.
The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes. University of California math and science professors have urged UC regents to reinstate entrance exams because so many freshmen were unprepared.
Of course poor preparedness is the fault of secondary schools like high schools, but entrance exams can help. The SATs or equivalent tests are even better, and, in combination with high-school grades, are the best predictor of how well a student does in college—and later life.
But in a perverse move designed to coddle students (they have numerous excuses), many schools no longer require such tests for admission (the University of Chicago makes them optional), or prohibits you from submitting scores at all. This kind of coddling is also instantiated in grade inflation. Harvard has taken ineffectual steps to remedy this, but at least they require SATs or ACTs for admission. Michigan doesn’t.
In May, Harvard University faculty voted to approve a 20% cap on the number of A’s per undergraduate course in an effort to curb grade inflation. It won’t apply to A-minuses, which committee members predicted would become the most awarded grade.
At the University of Michigan, a review by the news site MLive found that 74.1% of all undergraduate grades in 2022 were an A+, A or A-. A decade earlier, that percentage was 57.6%.
Kenneth Lowande, a former Michigan political science professor who left for Rice University, said he didn’t think the new policy would make much of a difference because grade inflation had made grades largely irrelevant. Michigan no longer mandates the SAT or ACT for undergraduate admissions.
“Grades have lost their value as an indication of quality or excellence,” Lowande said.
That’s true if you gauge quality relative to others. If everyone is excellent, of course, grades do indicate quality, but that’s not the case. What we have is an Alice In Wonderland “All Must Have Prizes” mentality based on coddling. And the students love it:
Michigan students lauded the new policy. Student body president Summit Louth said he had spoken to around 50 classmates and they were either happy or jealous the policy didn’t exist when they were freshmen. Poor mental health is closely tied to academic stress and anxiety among students, Louth said.
Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.
How does Louth know that?
Derek Peterson, a history professor and former chair of the faculty government, said he believes the move is generally beneficial because it will give students a chance to explore subjects more freely.
If that’s the idea, why give grades at all? Why not give written evaluations that can be put in students’ transcripts? That might be difficult for large courses, but several schools, according to Grok, have completely dispensed with letter grades:
Schools That Dispense with (or Heavily Minimize) Traditional Grades
. . . . several colleges (mostly small liberal arts institutions) fully or largely replace letter grades with narrative evaluations (detailed written assessments of a student’s performance, strengths, weaknesses, and growth). Examples include:
Hampshire College — Narrative evaluations only; no letter grades or traditional majors.
The Evergreen State College — Narrative evaluations; no letter grades or GPAs.
Alverno College — Ability-based assessment with detailed feedback; no traditional letter grades.
New College of Florida — Narrative evaluations / performance reviews.
Antioch College / Antioch University — Narrative evaluations (sometimes alongside or instead of grades).
Sarah Lawrence College — Strong emphasis on narrative evaluations (letter grades are recorded but secondary).
St. John’s College — Seminar-based “Don Rag” discussions; letter grades are recorded but available only by request.
Narrative evaluations would seem to be better anyway for small courses, but in light of the difficulty of grad schools or employers reading a bunch of narratives, I still favor traditional grades, but with caps like Harvard’s. If that policy is made public, students can’t beef about it when they arrive.
There comes a time in life when the free rides stop. Employers don’t dispense with evaluation of employees early in their tenure on the grounds of mental health. And college, where you can seek counseling if you’re upset or distressed, is the place for it to start—if you haven’t already gotten grades in high school! This may sound curmudgeonly, but part of the art of living is to realize that you are not the best at everything, and to either accept that or try to better yourself. After all, grades are not the totality of existence.
As I reported two days ago, Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday was the subject of several reports of unethical behavior as well as fabulism. Yesterday he resigned his position at The University of Cambridge after there were multiple credible accusations of plagiarism in his Ph.D. thesis and his scholarly papers (which didn’t seem so scholarly). He also told unbelievable tales about his life, including having raised £5 million pounds for charity, of having run 30 marathons in 35 days, and of having been threatened when there was no evidence of the reported threats. He sicced the police on journalists inquiring about his life, and blamed all the inquiries and criticism on racism. He said that he was diagnosed as autistic when young, did not speak until he was 11 years old, and could not read or write until he was 18.
The pressure on Arday grew sufficiently intense, and the accusations so numerous, that Cambridge finally announced they were investigating him. In light of this and other mounting investigations, he quit his job (see his resignation letter below); all this is reported in the New York Times (here and here; links free, h/t Keith) and the Guardian. His autobiography, scheduled to appear this coming week, is apparently still in the works, but I suspect it will be withdrawn. From the NYT:
His resignation came hours after Cambridge announced an investigation into Arday, and six days before the scheduled release of his memoir “Great and Unfortunate Things,” by the Simon & Schuster imprint 37 Ink, in the United States.
A representative of Simon & Schuster, which has so far stood by the book, told The New York Times on Wednesday that the publisher had no comment beyond the statement about Arday it released last week, citing “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”
It is with profound sadness that I write to resign, with immediate effect, from my position at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College.
When I accepted the extraordinary honour of becoming Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, it was, without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life. To become the youngest Black professor in the University’s history was something I could scarcely have imagined as a child growing up with a diagnosis of autism, unable to speak until I was eleven years old.
The response from so many people across the world was overwhelming. Thousands celebrated not simply my appointment, but what it represented: that talent, perseverance and hope can triumph over even the greatest adversity. It has been the privilege of my life to teach my students, to learn alongside them, and to witness their curiosity, kindness and ambition. They have given me far more than I could ever have given them.
Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack. While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.
I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.
But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great.
I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.
For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away.
This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me. It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.
To my students: thank you. Teaching you has been the greatest honour of my academic career. Your brilliance, compassion and determination give me enormous hope for the future.
To my colleagues and to the many thousands of people, from every corner of the world, who have supported me, defended me, written to me, and believed in me when it mattered most, I offer my deepest gratitude. Your kindness has carried me through some of the darkest moments of my life.
This is not the end of my work. It is simply the end of this chapter.
I need time to heal. I need time to simply be myself again.
And when that time comes, I will return.
I will return stronger, wiser and with the same determination that has always defined my journey. There is still so much work to do, and I look forward to doing it alongside so many of you in the years ahead.
For now, however, I ask only for understanding, for compassion, and for the space to begin again.
With gratitude,
Professor Jason Arday
Again, he admits no guilt, but implies that “relentless accusations”, which he’d always attributed to racism or ableism, had made his life at Cambridge Uni intolerable. I feel a bit sorry for the guy, for, after all, his rise was promoted by people who bought into the oppressor/victim narrative. But he himself is responsible for telling apparently false stories about his academic career and life, and for stealing from other scholars. As I said, Arday’s meteoric rise, as well as the many people who defended him in light of credible accusations, constitute an insult to reputable black and minority scholars everywhere.
I doubt Arday will return to academics, for what university would hire him? He is tainted permanently, and the plagiarism and statements about his life are there for all to see. Let this be a lesson to Cambridge to hire solely on the basis of merit rather than to tick an identity box.
Here’s the take of philosopher Maarten Boudry; read the whole thing, and watch the video at the end:
It was inevitable that Jason Arday would be forced to resign from @Cambridge_Uni. But this was never about him. In fact, he has been a godsend, providing living evidence of the unbelievable level of corruption and sheer stupidity that has infected elite institutions.
Jason Arday’s planned interview with the New York Times on Monday, ahead of his book launch, has been cancelled.
“Asked if, at any point in the editing process, revisions were made to Arday’s book to adjust or correct claims that have been challenged publicly, a spokeswoman said… pic.twitter.com/E46U8pt18E
This is the most egregious example I know of someone advancing to a high position in academics while constructing an apparently fraudulent past, as well as having committed multiple instances of plagiarism. The amazing thing is that Cambridge University is apparently not investigating sociology professor Jason Arday despite a complete lack of evidence for his unbelievable claims about his past.
That, perhaps, is because Arday is one of the few black professors at Cambridge, and has argued strenuously that his critics, and those who pointed out his plagiarism, are motivated solely by racism. Besides the accusations of using other peoples’ words (and committing other errors) in both his Ph.D. thesis (granted at Liverpool John Moores University) and in published papers, Arday argues that his achievements come in the face of severe disabilities: he is, he says, autistic, did not speak a word until he was 11, and couldn’t read or write until he was 18. Despite that, he managed to attain his full (tenured) professorship in 2023, at the age of 37 or 38, and was the youngest black professor in the UK. (He had previously had positions at at the University of Rothampton, Durham University and the University of Glasgow.)
The story or Arday, and how his claims unraveled (or now look unbelievable) has been told widely in the press. The fact that the Guardian has the most comprehensive summary of his apparent behavioral fabulism (e.g., apparent lying) is telling, for the Guardian, being very woke, would be the one “mainstream” paper I would expect to defend Arday, or at least to avoid reporting on the issue. To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, “If you’ve lost the Guardian, you’ve lost the progressives.”
You can read three of UK articles below by clicking on the headlines. The Guardian and Times of London articles are particularly informative.
Here, in bold caps are the areas in which Arday has made dubious claims or committed apparently unethical acts:
AUTISM AND LATE DEVELOPMENT: I’ve mentioned these claims above, and, as far as I know,there is no evidence presented for any of them. Surely if he didn’t speak until age 11 and did not become literate until 18, there would be some evidence or testimony to that effect. Wikipedia says he got “his undergraduate degree in education studies with physical education at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree validated by the University of Surrey in 2008.”) In other words, he got his undergraduate degree five years after he became literate, which means that he began university only two years after becoming literate.
PLAGIARISM: Initially the instances of Arday’s accused plagiarism were turned up by two people who have reputations for “race realism” (whatever that is), but since then other people have examined the evidence. Here’s a small part of it. This is the report from Grok when I asked it to give examples of Arday’s purported plagiarism. Grok gave references, but I’ve left them out.
PhD Thesis (2015, Liverpool John Moores University) Titled “An exploration of peer-monitoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research,” this is the most prominently cited case. Analyses (including by Cofnas using plagiarism detection software like Copyleaks, and by The Telegraph) identified extensive textual overlap with the 2009 PhD thesis of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers (Brunel University), on a closely related topic of reflective practice and student teachers in action research.
Reports cite more than 100 passages (or in later analyses, around 180–188 sentences) that are identical or nearly identical, often with minimal editing (sometimes retaining copy-editing errors from the source). Zwozdiak-Myers is cited about 17 times in Arday’s thesis and appears in the bibliography, but the overlapping passages frequently lack quotation marks or clear in-text attribution for the specific wording.
Additional overlaps were noted with other sources, including a 2013 paper by April G. Douglass, Dennie L. Smith, and Lana J. Smith; a 2007 paper by Semiyu Adejare Aderibigbe, Laura Colucci-Gray, and Donald Gray; and works by Muhammad Athar Hussain et al. (2011) and Peter Kahn et al. (2008).
Critics (including Harris and biochemist David Sanders, who reviewed related evidence) described this as a pattern of close paraphrasing or near-verbatim copying beyond isolated passages. LJMU and Cambridge stated investigations cleared him on this point.
2018 Paper in Social Sciences “Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?” (claiming focus groups with 32 minority students). A 2023 correction was issued to add citations and clarify where ideas were adapted from prior research (particularly Memon et al. 2016 in BMJ Open, on mental health services in Black and minority communities).
Accusations include substantial unattributed textual and structural overlap with Memon et al., plus interview quotes presented as from Arday’s own subjects that closely matched (or appeared patched from) those in the earlier paper. The correction notice focused on citations, but Retraction Watch reported additional undisclosed post-publication changes: alterations or removal of multiple quotes (e.g., 12 of 31 reworded/trimmed, 6 cut), removal of claims about using NVivo software for iterative coding and independent verification by a second researcher (replaced with simpler “review and reflection”), and participant numbering inconsistencies.
Harris and others flagged “puzzling similarities” in 2023, leading to the correction.
Other Papers: Cofnas and others examined additional publications from Arday’s listed works and reported issues in several:
A paper in Educational Philosophy and Theory (around 2020/2021, “Attempting to Break the Chain…”) was corrected for text overlap with the Memon paper and Arday’s own prior work (citations added in methodology).
2018 paper in Whiteness and Education (“Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity…”): Reported overlaps with Nicola Rollock (2012) and Payne Hiraldo (2010).
2022 papers (e.g., in Higher Education and British Journal of Sociology of Education): Minor instances such as sentences matching Wikipedia, reused/altered quotes from prior work, and methodology descriptions closely tracking the Memon-derived approach without full citation.
Harris had notified journals of concerns about solo and co-authored articles, resulting in at least two corrections.
Experts like Sanders stated there was “no question that there is extensive plagiarism” based on dossiers of comparisons. Some analyses noted that certain overlaps might not trigger basic software checks focused only on exact matches.
You can see Nathan Cofnas’s initial report with examples here. I’ll reproduce just a few:
This is clearly not coincidental, nor are there quotation marks to indicate the prose was taken from elsewhere. There are many more examples. Regardless of Cofnas’s background or motivation, this appears to be plagiarism pure and simple. Cofnas also notes this (I give one example):
Arday appears to borrow from other sources without attribution. I won’t go through all of the examples detected by Copyleaks, but here are two more.
First, he copies and paraphrases from an obscure article by Muhammad Athar Hussain et al. published in the Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education in 2011.
Again, there are others.
Did Arday get punished for this? Apparently not. He attributes the accusations to racism of others determined to destroy him, to not being told what plagiarism consists of, and to ‘inadequate supervision and support” as an undergraduate. From the Times:
Concerns were first raised privately in 2023 (Harris to Arday, Cambridge, and LJMU; also involving Martyn Hammersley). Journals issued corrections; universities said they investigated and found no misconduct (Cambridge noting standard practice of deferring to the PhD-granting institution for thesis issues and describing the public claims as a “vile campaign”). Times Higher Education prepared a story in 2025 but did not publish after legal correspondence from a firm retained by Arday. Cofnas’s 2026 post (prompted in part by internal Cambridge concerns) brought wider attention.
Arday has said errors occurred due to insufficient support given his autism and disabilities, that he supports proper investigations, and that panels concluded the issues were honest/reasonable errors within standards of the time for some overlaps. Supporters have framed the scrutiny as racially or ideologically motivated. Critics argue the scale of unattributed near-verbatim material, quote issues, and pattern across works indicate serious problems with academic integrity, independent of the accusers’ views.
He told the newspaper: “There has been, since I arrived at Cambridge, a very well orchestrated and co-ordinated campaign to unseat me from my position.”
He argued this was “racially motivated” and that he had become a “lightning rod” for criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy.
Arday said some errors in his early academic work was because of his autism, as he relied on using mimicry to make sense of information, and that similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academics.
“We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody. I think the cruelty that I’ve experienced and the positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable,” he told the newspaper.
Mimicry? That’s also bizarre. Did nobody ever impart to Arday the problem with copying? Was he completely unaware that this is a no-no in academics?
The Times notes that the Liverpool John Moores panel cleared Arday of plagiarism:
The panel concluded in March that the citation issues were a result of “honest and reasonable error” and also detailed that the text overlap with Zwozdiak-Myers was “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time”.
That’s absurd.
You can find more about the plagiarism at Aymenn’s Monstrous Publications and at Bathetic Fallacy. Even Retraction Watch, while bending over backwards to give Arday a big break, winds up concluding that the investigation should go further, also implying that Arday should be punished if he committed plagiarism.
There’s no doubt that these allegations were made because of political and ideological reasons. There’s no coincidence that they initially were made public by a long-time critic of both the school and DEI broadly. There’s also no coincidence that the story has been largely carried by publications that share those ideologies.
But the coverage in Retraction Watch, the increasing number of academics expressing concerns and the evidence itself indicate, to me, that this shouldn’t just be dismissed. It needs a public, transparent investigation.
While I understand Cambridge’s reluctance to investigate a dissertation that was submitted elsewhere, Arday was hired on the basis of those credentials. If they are dubious, the school should want to know. Similarly, Liverpool John Moores University should want to know if their PhD was granted on false pretenses. If they have performed a thorough investigation and it does clear Arday, then releasing details would only help both him and the school.
PHYSICAL FEATS:
Arday claims that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, falling on the 20th marathon and sustaining a hairline fracture in his fibula. The Guardian asking doctors, deems this nearly impossible, but Arday says his finished with “his right leg swelling to twice its normal size.” This may include his claim that he ran 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in six days.
CHARITY WORK:
Arday says that he raised 5 -5.5 million pounds for charity over 20 years. Challenged on this, he explained that this was not personal fundraising, but as part of a larger group,whose identity he cannot divulge because of nondisclosure agreements. There is thus no evidence about this, either.
PERSONAL THREATS:
Arday claims a history of threats, and though I don’t doubt that some of them are real, he makes wild claims that have not been substantiated. From the Guardian:
In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.
The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.
The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.
He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.
In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.
Again, there is no evidence to substantiate Arday’s claims. We see a pattern of apparent fabulism.
APPEARANCE ON “SEVEN UP!”:
Arday claims that he was in the well-known BBC documentary series Seven Up!, which tracked a group of children born around 1957 over many years. This could not be true because Arday was born in 1985. The Daily Fail of August 3 (here and see reference below) notes that Arday has since backtracked:
Last night Professor Arday said that when he talked of ‘Seven Up’, he didn’t mean ‘Seven Up’ the famous TV series, which followed children at seven-year intervals in the format he described. He says that in fact he was referring to ‘a local community and parent-led initiative developed around the Ubuntu principle that “it takes a village to raise a child”.
Two things struck me about all this. First is the eagerness of both Cambridge and his Liverpool unis to exculpate Arday despite what seems to be arrant plagiarism. This surely has to have something to do with Arday’s ethnicity as well as his claimed learning disability, which would appear to make him a double victim. And he leans heavily on the victim trope, arguing that the accusations are motivated by his blackness and a desire to bring him down. Perhaps some of that inheres in this fracas, but as the size of this scandal became apparent, as well as the failure of universities to do anything about it, lots of reputable people have become involved. Some black people have claimed that if Arday’s missteps are excused, it will diminish the real accomplishment of black British scholars.
Second, as far as I can see, there’s a complete absence of evidence for any of Arday’s claims, whether they be about his disabilities, his marathons, his charity donations, the threats he claims he received, and his appearance on television. And there’s simply no credible accusation for his plagiarism. We’ll have to hang on and see if Cambridge does anything about this.
Here’s a lecture by Arday: “I know what I know: The story of Graceland”. I’ve just found it and have listened only to the beginning. I can see that Arday’s genial demeanor could make people less willing to come down hard on his missteps and misstatements. In the short bit of the lecture I heard he’s very critical of Paul Simon, accusing him of racism and taking credit for other people’s music. As far as I know, none of that is true, either.
And it’s a true equation, at least as demonstrated by the paper below (and others) in a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, brought to my attention by Luana (I don’t know how she finds these things).
I had to read this paper three times to even understand its thesis, but I think I do now. And its thesis is something like this (I may of course be wrong since the paper is not only opaque but dreadful).
All babies are queer. But “queer” doesn’t mean the definition below produced by Grok:
In activist and academic circles tied to the LGBTQ movement, it now functions mainly as a broad umbrella label for people who identify as non-heterosexual in orientation or who reject alignment between their self-perception and biological sex. Its meaning remains imprecise by design in many cases.
Rather, by “queer”, the author and, I guess, the contributors, apparently mean “a departure from norms”, so that every baby is “non-standard”. This leads to the question, “How can a baby be non-standard” when all babies are nonstandard?” This is the conundrum that apparently motivates this issue.
The author apparently means, and I quote:
In our approach, queer babies are neither having gay sex nor are they the babies destined, by the backward logic of cause-effect development, to become gay adults. We are not, in other words, using ‘queer’ as a descriptor of either sex acts or people. Rather, claiming the essential queerness of babies posits that babies are queer on their own terms – which is to say, because we were all babies once, that there is something constitutive about this queerness.
So how were we all queer as babies? To answer this, the author turns to Freud.
Freud provided more than a hint of how to think about the queerness of babies. In his first foray into a theory of sexuality, overtly entitled Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905/1955), Freud introduced the notion of polymorphous perversity, beginning in the first essay with an insistence that what is deemed ‘perverse’ – namely, a deviation from either the normal (reproductive) sexual aim or normal (hetero)sexual object – is so common in sexual life that he is forced to conclude ‘there is indeed something innate lying behind the perversions’ (1905/1955, p. 171). That which is deemed non-normal, or perverse, thus sits at ‘the innate constitutional roots of the sexual instinct’, a claim that Freud further insists is ‘only … demonstrable in children’, specifically in infants. What for Freud is crucial about the early stages of infantile sexuality is that the sexual instinct, which in adults appears to be singular and teleological, is revealed to consist of ‘component instincts’ and partial objects
Okay, so all babies are queer because they all have infant sexuality as construed by Freud, a sexuality instantiated at adulthood when the psychoanalysts get their claws into patients. But this still doesn’t tell us how babies are “departures from the norms”.
At any rate, this exercise in academic logorrhea combined with discredited Freudian theory can be read by clicking the title below (it’s the introduction to a whole issue on queer babies), or by reading the pdf here. The author is Misha Kavka at the University of Amsterdam, whose c.v., laden with papers about queerness, is here.
Here is a screenshot of some but not all of the contents so you can see what academics are getting paid to produce:
I will give one extended quote from the paper so you can see how dire it is: full of opaque and just awful writing, wordplay (common in this kind of postmodern piffle), and a questionable thesis that cannot be tested.
For an introduction to the issue of ‘the queerness of babies’, it may be no bad thing to attempt a definition of both terms. First, the easier one: ‘baby’ both is and is not a metaphor, which is why we present it here in the plural. There is no getting away from the fact that the baby, always an overdetermined signifier, slides into a metaphorics of potential on the one hand and helplessness on the other, precisely because the baby in reality is the infans, defined in the psychoanalytic tradition as ‘the one who does not speak, and is therefore not fully inscribed, only partially represented by language as a symbolic system’ (Poulios & Papadaki). This infans who does not yet speak – and who may never speak, as the psychoanalyst Nadine Cordova reminds us – is nonetheless ‘spoken of long before its arrival … and is even inscribed somewhere long before it appears’ (2024, p. 97, my translation). Marked by the trauma of birth, not (yet) in language but already inscribed into and symptomatic of the family, as Bice Benvenuto argues in ‘Oedipus in Pieces’ here, the baby is a psychic enfleshment that arrives both too soon (born prematurely, according to Lacan) and too late (as Diego Semerene posits in this issue, ‘A baby is a commissioned portrait. After someone’). Moreover, as Poulios and Papadaki argue, the infans represents not just an early developmental period but a field of psychic life that remains ‘active during the whole life of the subject, in parallel to and quite independent from the primary and secondary processes of mental function’. In that sense, the baby marks a (prelinguistic) developmental phase as well as a psychic formation which we never leave behind – that is to say, from which we must always depart. Thus, our very attempts to figure, to re-member and/or to analyse the baby make of it a quandary and a question. In that sense, this perfectly standard baby – the infans whom we cannot (yet) make sense of – is also perfectly queer.
Beyond its complicated linguistic history, ‘queer’ in contemporary use tends to circulate between two meanings. As an abstraction, whether philosophical or socio-cultural, it gestures towards that which is non-standard, anti-normative or what Sara Ahmed calls ‘oblique or “off line”’ (2006, p. 161); in Lee Edelman’s psychoanalytically inflected understanding, queerness sits on the edge of the Symbolic, rather like the infans, since it is ‘a matter of embodying the remainder of the Real internal to the Symbolic order’ (2004, p. 25). In its more specific uses, on the other hand, the term ‘queer’ is aligned with sexuality, referring to practices, desires and identities that deviate from heterosexual norms, as denoted by the ‘Q’ in LGBTQIA+. As queer theorists of the last three decades have shown, there are many points of crossover between these two meanings, to the degree that the sexual lurks in many a mention of ‘queer’, however abstracted, in often enticingly scandalous ways.
“Infans” in Latin translates to “one who cannot speak”. Yet Kavka also repeatedly talks about “interrogating the baby,” although babies can’t answer questions. That, too, must be postmodern lingo.
Had enough? I won’t quote the Freudian stuff because the man was a fraud, though the authors swallow his theories as “truths”, just as a pelican swallows a fish. At the end of the paper, Kavka tells us “what we are calling on ourselves, and others who feel beckoned, to do. A quote:
to turn our attention to the baby, the infans, as the post-foetal but pre-Symbolic agent provocateur who arrives both too soon and too late;
to acknowledge the baby as a primary site of queerness, which describes the as-yet-undetermined formation of the becoming-subject;
to separate the sexual from the genital and, by extension, to understand sexuality (infantile and beyond) on the spectrum of polymorphous perversity rather than as a binary;
to position the queer baby before identification and hence before the adoption of sexual identity, while acknowledging its necessary connection to the sexual nature of the drive; and
to turn our attention to the clinic, where the invitation to question the baby in a different way can, we hope, open up ‘the path to sovereignty amidst inhospitable conditions’ (Poulios & Papadaki).
At any rate, you can see what the authors are called to do, which again includes “questioning the baby,” even though the baby cannot speak.
After reading this paper several times, between swigs of Pepto Bismol, I left both amused and angry. Amused because the author could have given her thesis in one paragraph, but tricks it out with all kinds of allusions to Freud, postmodernist thought, and wordplay like this (bolding is mine):
. . . let us begin by sitting with the notion that the baby is ‘essentially queer’ – which is, no bones about it, both the core contention and the field of play for the contributors to this issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.
. . . Taking an autotheoretical approach to disinterring the personal, political and familial histories that swaddle the baby within the (in)vestments of those who came before, Semerene adopts the word travesti – reclaiming the Latin American term for a not-quite-passing transwoman – to figure the travesti baby as a stand-in for parental lost objects whose hand-me-downs fit only ‘as an act of passing’.
. . . If this polymorphous yet indeterminate baby, swaddled but never quite separate, is a symptom of the family, as Benvenuto reminds us, then the queerness of the baby is also bound, precipitously, to a queerness of relations stretching from the first car(ri)er to the transference between analyst and analysand.
This is just one symptom of bad writing: not only opaque prose (perhaps it’s comprehensible to other contributors, but certainly not to well-read academics like me), but also showing off by making puns.
And why was I angry? Because as a scientist all I see is a bunch of obscurantist theorizing with no way to test it, and the authors are getting both money and professional credit to write this stuff. And either a library or subscribers have to pay to read the stuff. Most of all, because although psychoanalysists and sociologists purport to be engaged in truth-seeking, there is no truth, and no way to find it, within this paper. It is empty theorizing. How appropriate that it draws on Freudian psychoanalysis, founded by perhaps the most famous fraud in academic history. Although throughout his life Freud claimed to be doing science, Fred Crews shows definitively that he was a grifter and a charlatan, making up many of his results and simply lying about many things. And yet Freud is still regarded by many academics as a great thinker, and analysts still use his methods—which will cost you a lot of time and money—to “address” people’s problems.
If you want an example of why the humanities are in trouble, simply read this paper or (God help you) the rest of the issue. I’ve written before about why the art—and by extension much of the humanities—can’t help us find propositional truth, but rather aim at helping us see how other people think and thereby prompting us to reflect on ourselves. But the only light this paper sheds is on the convoluted thinking of a coterie of postmodern academics.
And for a purgative, read the book below, which is not only immensely revealing (it’s based on a ton of research) but superbly written. We live in a culture that, sadly, is still saturated with Freud’s ideas, and everyone who calls themselves educated needs to read Freud: The Making of an Illusion.
“Fat Studies” is not a pejorative term, but rather an activist branch of academia with an agenda, including the claim that being fat is not unhealthy, and is a sign of oppression by the weight-deprived. Particularly disturbing—and detrimental to health—is the persistent assertion that fatness (or whatever you want to call obesity) is not injurious to health.”Healthy at all sizes” is the mantra.
But a gazillion medical studies show that this is an arrant lie. Now it’s not good to point out to someone that they’re fat, for, as Grania once told me when she was alive, that is a thoughtless, hurtful, and even useless remark. “Fat people,” she said, “know that they’re fat.” There should be no social stigma attached to the condition. But neither should we silently accept assertions that fatness is not harmful to health. For lives can be saved by pointing out the dangers. Stigmas are one thing, empirical distortions another.
There’s a Wikipedia article about the “Fat acceptance movement,” which it also calls “fat pride, fat empowerment, fat liberation, and fat activism.” And Fat Studies even has its own eponymous academic journal. It’s an open-access journal, and you can see the latest issue here. Scanning the articles, you immediately see the field’s ideological bent. These are simply the first five articles I saw, and they’re not just about fatness, but, vis-à-vis intersectionality, also connect fatness to all other purported forms of oppression (note the use of “playful” and non-standard language, a characteristic of postmodernist writing):
Luana Maroja has been fascinated by this field, I suppose because of its plethora of antiscientific assertions. She recently went to two lectures at the school where she teaches, Williams College, and wrote about them in the article below, just published on the Heterodox STEM site. Click the screenshot to read for free, or find the article archived here. It’s written in an objective, reportorial fashion, but what she heard was appalling.
I’ll reproduce a couple of excerpts below (indented):
Public confidence in higher education has dropped sharply in recent years. The main contributors appear to be a lack of ideological diversity in colleges and universities, constraints on open inquiry, and the erosion of empirical standards in parts of the academy. Here I describe two college-sponsored events dealing with “fat studies”—one in late 2024 and another in April 2026—which I attended out of simple curiosity about this academic discipline. Here is an account of the claims made at these events taken from my notes.
Lecture 1:
My biology and pre-med students were particularly intrigued by a Gender Studies talk that promised to “interrogate the false association between fat and unhealthiness” (see workshop description below). Being new to “fat studies,” I was curious to see more about this claim. Two years later, I decided to attend a second event, wondering whether the messaging had shifted in the age of Ozempic and following the 2024 elections. What I encountered may sound satirical, but it was not. The speakers were dead serious. I have kept the speakers’ names private; my aim is not to mock individuals but rather to show the persistence of anti-scientific perspectives in this field at my college. Both cases exemplify the ideological erosion of science that has led Americans to lose confidence in their colleges and universities.
. . .The event opened with identity: the speaker stated that she identified as “fat, white, and used they/them pronouns.” I learned that “obese,” “BMI,” and “weight” are seen as pejorative terms that should never be used. She added that it was bigoted to suggest that obesity is mainly a lower-socioeconomic-class issue tied to the inability to afford healthy food. This view, we were told, wrongly assumes that the foods fat people eat are unhealthy and that being fat is bad. We were then asked to “pair-share” with colleagues in the room, about our emotions and body image and recount when we first developed the idea that being fat is bad.
The speaker next wrote down the roots of “fatphobia” on the board (see figure below). Body mass index (BMI), she said, was invented to discriminate against fat people, and its origins lie in capitalism. White people were blamed for creating the notion that “whites are thin” as a way of oppressing black people. Medicine was described as another culprit: there is no such thing, we were told, as a “healthy diet.” Instead, “a healthy diet is what you like to eat.” Further, children were described as having an innate ability to sense how much food and what kind of food they need. The research on whether processed foods affect health was described as unclear. What ultimately harms fat people, the speaker claimed, is oppression and dieting. Anti-fatness, we learned, goes hand in hand with every other system of oppression: “Whenever we are talking about anti-fatness, we are also talking about white supremacy”.
The medical system was described as actively discriminatory: “When fat people come into the hospital with cancer, they are told to lose weight before being screened,” and waiting-room chairs are too small. These forms of discrimination, rather than physiology itself, were said to explain the observed correlations between fatness and health problems.
Here are some of the lies purveyed by the speaker, and the evasions they use when called out:
At this point people began asking questions. I inquired about animal studies: surely, fat rats do not die at higher rates because of fatphobia? The reply was nonsensical: “everyone knows fat is protective in rats.” A student noted the well-documented correlation between cardiovascular disease and fatness. The speaker asked for references. When he responded that there were thousands, she reminded the room that “correlation is not causation” and that people die from oppression and from being forced into diets.
. . . The speaker proceeded to write the word “Science” on the board under the heading “institutional problems.” She later stated that genetics, not food consumption, explains body weight: “People can be 15 pounds above or below their genetic makeup and no more or less.” This was another nonsensical idea, easily contradicted by looking at the recent past: just a couple generations ago people of every demographic group were skinnier than they are today, and the genetics of those groups could not have changed much in such a short time. The exchange illustrated how data-based questions were repositioned from a legitimate inquiry to an expression of overt bigotry.
A graph from Luana’s article (she made it) showing the rise in obesity over the last 35 years, which may reverse if Ozempic and other such drugs become prevalent. Note, though, that. as you see below, some Fat Studies people object strenuously to weight-loss drugs.
Oy! There’s more, including graphics and photos, but let’s move on to Lecture #2:
My second encounter with “fat-studies,” in April 2026, was a talk sponsored by the Dively Fund (created to support LGBTQ events, although the talk contained almost no LGBTQ content). It was billed as “A conversation on Blackness, Queerness, Gender, Fatness, Disabilities and Their Intersections.” Attendance here was higher—roughly 20 students plus three adults, myself included.
As before, I approached the talk with genuine curiosity; I wondered whether this corner of “studies” would adapt or remain unchanged in the era of Ozempic and recent shifts in public discussions of obesity.
Some of the speaker’s themes overlapped with those of the first event, including the claim that “good and healthy” food is simply whatever you like to eat. There was also a brief and negative reference to Ozempic: “GLP-1s are terrible because they make fat people appear suicidal for not wanting to lose weight.”
The rest of the talk took a very different direction. Because the content was somewhat disjointed, I will share some direct quotes. We were told that “fatness was invented to prepare individuals for war by the Nazis” (though the speaker later added that it was invented by the slave trade). “Body fascism is now practiced in France, USA, Israel and Britain.” “The ideal body is militarized to displace and violate black people.” “Fat fascism is about the subjugation of the slave and slave-adjacent (Palestinians).” “The Jewish body is imposed on Palestinians by starvation and the denial of junk food [which is the kind of food they would like to eat].” “This subjugation did not begin with Trump; it began with democracy and those elected to represent society.” Michelle Obama’s healthy-lunch initiatives were cited as a pre-Trump example. “Fatphobia is the making of the slave.” “Fatness has been projected onto African flesh.” “You are not men or women; you are just fat or thin in a ship hold” (referring to slave ships). “After Nazis, COVID, HIV, [and] slaves, one must prove they are fit and not crippled—this is how ableism started.” “Nationalists don’t believe cripples have the right to exist.” “Freedom requires the death of our desires.” “Our love keeps us in shackles. We need to divest from love to bring the revolution” (though the speaker added that his love for his people was too strong to relinquish).
Double oy!
Luana’s message is at the end:
When college-sponsored events list ‘Science’ itself as an institutional problem, they expose a deep split in how people view knowledge and truth—and in what these events are really selling. The talks confirmed this split: questions were met not with counter-evidence but with accusations of bigotry, rote reminders that ‘correlation is not causation,’ or outright commands to stop speaking—along with preposterous assertions that flouted basic standards of evidence. Such tactics do more than mislead audiences; by violating the very norms of reason and evidence that people have long accepted as good science, they accelerate the erosion of public trust in both science and higher education.
When people like (recently) the AAUP say that faculty should control the college curriculum, stuff like this calls that claim into doubt. “Academic freedom” does not give professors the right to purvey lies to students, especially lies that are harmful to one’s well-being. And believe me, this kind of stuff is not only the subject of academic journals, but has made its way into the classroom. Grok, in a half minute of trawling the internet, came up with at least six universities that have courses on Fat Studies, including Harvard University. Here’s one from Southern Oregon University(click screenshots to enlarge):
The intersectionality and postmodernism that pervade these courses are clear. “Fatness as a social justice issue”, “fat liberation,” and so on. As I said, Fat Studies courses can be useful if they trace historical oppression against obesity, and thereby help dispel social stigmas against fatness. But I’d bet a pile of dosh that these courses do a lot more than that!
Oh, and shame on Williams College and its Gender Studies program for promoting speakers who lie about science.
I mention this because she is distressed at the very low math performance of entering students in Berkeley (and other schools in the University of California [UC] system), but did some calculations to show, as Governor Gavin Newsom intended with his 2024 California Education Compact, that the chances of a student getting admitted to a University of California branch are higher the worse the student’s high school is! Newsom and some “progressive” educators are against using standardized tests like the SAT for students applying for college, because they believe standardized tests discriminate against minority students. Grade-point averages (GPAs) are one predictor of college and post-college success, but grade inflation is eliminating the inter-student variation that made GPAs useful, and data show that standardized tests add substantial predictive value to success (especially for highly selective schools like Berkeley), so it’s better that schools have both kinds of information for applicants. Nevertheless, in an attempt to achieve “equity,” UC schools have completely barred the use of standardized tests, and that was against the recommendations of both a UC faculty task force and members of the Board of Regents.
At my own University, standardized tests are optional, but, weirdly, are used only when they can help a student get admitted, which seems to defeat the purpose of using a standardized benchmark. Here’s what Grok says about the University of Chicago’s standardized testing policy for admissions:
UChicago has maintained a test-optional policy since implementing it in 2018 as part of its UChicago Empower Initiative (initially focused on expanding access for first-generation and low-income students). This policy applies to all applicants, including domestic, international, and transfer students.
No Harm Testing Policy.In addition to being test-optional, UChicago uses a distinctive “No Harm” policy:
Submitting SAT or ACT scores is entirely your choice.
If you submit scores, they are only considered if they would positively affect your chance of admission.
Scores that could negatively impact your application are not used in the review process.
You can self-report scores on your application (via Common App or Coalition); official scores are only needed if you’re admitted and enroll.
This approach gives applicants flexibility—strong scores can help, but weaker ones (or not submitting) won’t hurt you.
Lana maintains that the omission of test requirements, (and I’d add the use of “no harm testing policies”) hurts everyone: reducing the chances of really good students getting into even moderately good schools, while harming students from poorer schools by eliminating the pressure for them to study the “right” way: not memorizing but actually learning the material and learning to think, which you need to get good SAT scores. (It also eliminates the pressure for teachers to teach that way.) If you’re poorly qualified for a college you attend, the chances of you either dropping out or going into a “gut” major are higher.
The argument and the crucial graph is included in Lana’s new article in the Free Press, “Bring Back the SAT”. You can read it if you’re a subscriber by clicking below, but I’ll reproduce some of her arguments plus the graph:
Lana gives several extended anecdotes about great students, once destined for Berkeley or UC San Diego, not getting in and having to go to community colleges, as well as students who got high grades by memorizing but did poorly in schools because they didn’t really learn to think. Many of those students, due to the negative correlation, get into places like UC Berkeley and UC San Diego. I’ll mostly summarize the assertions about educational policy. (Quotes from Lana’s article are indented.)
What does an A grade in AP Calculus mean when it is paired with a score of 1 on the national exam? Exactly what a recent UC San Diego report revealed: In too many public schools, grades have become completely decoupled from learning.
None of this was Diego’s fault [his name is changed]. But now, he would face the reality of a world-class university. He would be required to retake calculus at Berkeley before moving on to the grueling upper-division requirements of mechanical engineering. With his immense drive and determination, common sense says he would catch up. Right?
“Getting into calculus in 11th grade is impressive,” I told him during the interview. “How and when did you realize you were good at math?”
“Math was always very difficult for me,” Diego replied. “But I worked hard and memorized all the formulas.”
This is the last thing a math professor wants to hear. Mathematics is not about rote memorization—it’s about conceptual understanding and logical reasoning, and Diego was never taught the difference. Like countless students at schools where teachers don’t understand mathematics themselves, he was instead taught what my colleague Hung-Hsi Wu calls anti-mathematics: a confusing, disconnected collection of unexplained procedures to be memorized for a test—and then immediately forgotten.
On the UC system’s abolition of SATs in 2020 and what it means for students like Diego:
To succeed now, Diego will need to unlearn these habits and rebuild his mathematical foundation from scratch, with much of what he has already learned not helping but standing in the way.
I desperately hope he manages to do so. But statistically, the chances are dangerously low. With the foundational deficiencies Diego demonstrated in his interview, the probability that he will survive his first Berkeley calculus course, even with a barely passing grade, is 50-50. He will spend his entire college career in a frantic, exhausting game of catch-up, and it is far more likely that he will be forced to change his major—leaving a hardworking young man’s confidence badly shaken, his engineering dreams derailed, and significant public resources wasted.
None of this would be as likely if the UC system still used a standardized test benchmark. The SAT was completely abolished for UC admissions by a Board of Regents decision in 2020, driven by concerns that standardized tests disadvantage minority and low-income students. This decision went against the unanimous, data-driven recommendation of the UC faculty task force—and against many of the Board of Regents’ own stated convictions. The SAT, imperfect as it is, measures knowledge of the absolute basics and the ability to reason clearly under a time constraint. An SAT score would have told us—and Diego himself—the truth about his preparation before it was too late.
Even more importantly, preparing for the test is itself a powerful intervention. If Diego knew that the SAT stood between him and a Berkeley engineering degree, his drive would have led him to use free, high-quality resources away from rote memorization and toward real mathematical reasoning. The preparation itself would have rewired his foundation. We failed Diego once by not providing him a decent math education. We should not fail students like him again by removing the incentive to build one themselves.
This is why my UC colleagues and I wrote an open letter to the Regents demanding a return to standardized testing. Within days, it garnered over 1,400 signatures, including those of 60 department chairs across the UC system. This unprecedented consensus is significant because STEM faculty aren’t political activists—they are the ones shaping California’s next generation of mathematicians and engineers.
That is indeed a powerful consensus!
According to Lana, the disconnect between grades and merit involves schools infusing courses with ideology:
Many of my colleagues teaching introductory gateway courses are not so lucky. They report a feeling of the bottom falling out of the classroom. “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6,” one professor said. “The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”
The root cause of this bifurcation is California’s broken K-12 education. Teachers are trapped in systems that prioritize ideology over subject mastery, pressured by administrators to inflate grades, lower standards, and pass unprepared students along. The state has spent tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail line that has yielded zero benefit. It has spent far more, and done far worse, inflicting immense generational damage on California’s youth by failing to provide them a quality K-12 math education.
This is the fundamental reason why we cannot honestly satisfy the Newsom Compact’s goals. The onus for a decent math education has fallen entirely on parents. Those who can afford to move to a good school district or send their kids to after-school programs do so. Children of those who cannot are usually left trapped with subpar math instruction. Meanwhile, the schools that provide rigorous education become increasingly competitive. This is the engine behind the bifurcation we are seeing.
And here’s the critical and completely counterintuitive graph, the result of “progressive” thinking. Lana introduces it this way (bolding is mine)
An analysis of official California Department of Education data reveals that this is a systemic pattern. Over the last decade, the UC system has transitioned from a positive correlation between a high school’s math and English proficiency and its admissions success to a statistically significant negative correlation. Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates’ chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.
The graph is due to Hart Hornor-Jones, a UCSD graduate student in sociology. It’s a bit confusing to the layperson, so let me clarify it. (Thanks to Jay Tanzman, who put me onto the article and is a statistician, for explaining it to me.) It is a plot over time in which the Y-axis values represent correlations: the correlation in one year between the assessed quality of a high school itself (not of a student), and the probability of students from that school being accepted to two UC schools: Berkeley and San Diego. The points not only fall with time, but have gone below zero into negative territory, showing that the worse the school, the higher the chances of a its students getting into Berkeley and, especially, UC San Diego, where there’s a whopping -0.5 correlation between high school quality and probability of its students getting into UCSD. (If you’re statistically minded, you could say “how BAD a high school you went to is 25% of the reason you got admitted to UC San Diego.”)
This result is in fact what Newsom and other higher-ups had in mind, for high schools rated of lower quality also have a higher proportion of minority students. This negative correlation largely, says Lana, resulted from an ongoing attempt to achieve equity by upgrading the admission chances of students from poorer schools. I believe Lana’s point is not that this situation is the result of dropping SATs—for the correlation was already falling before 2020 when SATs were abolished—but that we now need the SATs to be able to assess how good students really are.
I’m told that nearly all high-school students in California get straight As now, so GPAs are a terrible predictor of success, even though I’m also told that “conventional wisdom” says that GPAs and standardized tests are roughly equally important in predicting success in college. That may be wrong, at least for California, but I’ll depend on diligent readers to look it up.
Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that if you go to a worse school, your chances of getting into the two best UC branches improve! Lana winds up for calling for the reinstatement of SATs, and I’m with her:
It is too late to reintroduce the SAT for the 2026 cycle, but we can still help thousands of students like Diego who will apply to the UC system in 2027. That is why a growing coalition of faculty members is rushing to force an emergency course correction. If a car full of your children is hurtling toward a cliff, it is not the time to create yet another subcommittee. You’ve got to slam on the brakes. The University of California must recognize this academic emergency for what it is and act to immediately restore objective standards to the admissions process.
Now if you’re a “progressive”, you’ll object to her characterizing SATs as “objective”, but that’s an argument for another day.
