Category: Academia

University politics and administrators.

Is the smartest response to the Jason Arday tragedy to eliminate academic research departments of sociology and education?

by philg

Prof. Dr. Jason Atta Kwei Arday, Ph.D. was a “sociology of education” scholar. His work, despite generating awe at Cambridge University, failed to impress ChatGPT. What would happen if both sociology and education were eliminated as academic research departments and, instead, the questions being asked were bounced into economics (and maybe a few to anthropology)? Would the world then suffer for lack of interesting or useful research results? ChatGPT estimated that Professor Arday was certainly a better researcher than at least 30% of the people in education/sociology and possibly better than 50% (i.e., as many as half of the people getting paid to do research in this area are even less competent).

Can anyone think of a PhD thesis or journal paper from sociology or education that has had significant impact and that wouldn’t have fit reasonably well within economics or, perhaps, anthropology?

(This is not to suggest that the “Doctor of Education” professional education programs, such as what Prof. Dr. Jill Biden, EdD went through, should be eliminated. I don’t know enough to say whether these EdD programs make better school principals and other education bureaucrats.)

How much less would future generations earn if degrees in education were no longer offered because the faculty had all been cut loose? The chart below says that young people earn $18,000 less over a 10-year horizon if they get a degree in education vs. simply do the work that a median high-school graduate would do:

(“Social Sciences” that aren’t economics get a boost in earnings, so perhaps a sociology degree actually does have cash value? Wikipedia lists a huge number of majors that could fall under this umbrella, including degrees that prepare young people for lucrative DEI management jobs. This 2015 study found that sociology graduates had among the lowest earnings of any social science majors. We also have to consider the selection bias of those who choose to attend college and those who have the stick-to-itiveness to finish a degree. That population would probably do quite well economically if they never attended college, but simply started working at 18. That same issue cuts through all of the studies, I think. An 18-year-old who had what it takes to get into college and complete a CS degree could probably also do great via self-study and practical experience as a programmer.)

Let’s check in with the world’s leading sociologists and see if we’d be sorry if they were cut loose. Here’s Joya Misra, professor at University of Maskachusetts and head of the prestigious American Sociological Association, which publishes the leading journal in the field (ASR), giving a presidential address:

She emphasizes how feminist and decolonial methods that bring sociological researchers into collaborative and participatory partnerships with broader communities can develop transformative solutions, building communities of hope, justice, and joy.

She appears to cite Hater-in-Chief Ron DeSantis!

at this time of rising authoritarianism, attacks on academic freedom, and loss of trust in science, sociology must recenter itself … DeSantis 2024

The implication that sociology is a form of “science” is interesting, but even more interesting is that the cited article is about Ron DeSantis, but isn’t by Ron DeSantis. It’s by Gary DeSantis, adjunct teacher at State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota in the tennis training capital of Bradenton, Florida. Here’s the abstract of “‘We believe in education, not indoctrination’: Governor Ron DeSantis, critical race theory, and anti-intellectualism in Florida” by the other Mr. DeSantis:

This article examines how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ remarks contribute to anti-intellectualism and fuel the pushback against critical race theory (CRT) championed by like-minded conservative Republicans who view its instruction as an affront to society and authentic historical narratives. Dismissing educators and scholars who uphold the teaching of CRT as unpatriotic and denigrating to American society, DeSantis, who has presidential aspirations, has effectively used the issue (along with a number of other matters) to solidify his conservative base fearful of social and hegemonic change. Although CRT is not taught in Florida public schools, similar to other conservative-dominated states which have seized on the teaching of CRT as anathema to their civic principles, DeSantis’ thinly veiled attempt to appease right-wing voters is yet another example of Republicans stoking cultural wars designed to energize conservative constituents against what many of them perceive as liberal attacks on their beliefs and values.

Circling back to Joya Misra, in her address she mentions the problem of “overinclusion”, which does not mean hiring the incompetent/below-average because of personal characteristics:

In one article, we focus on the experiences of faculty of color, considering how faculty in the twenty-first century, in an era of DEI, still experience substantial exclusion and exploitation in their jobs (Misra, Kane-Lee, et al. 2024). We theorized three different processes. First, we conceptualized overinclusion: how faculty of color are asked to do more work, and work that is devalued in promotions, such as mentoring and service—leaving them less time for more valued activities, such as research, as well as less choice about what they would like to do

The second process we identified is active exclusion. Research on faculty of color has identified this issue for decades … Active exclusion explains why highly qualified people are not offered jobs, not offered good jobs, receive fewer resources for their work, or face greater challenges being promoted.

Prof. Misra’s personal work:

We have to do the work to identify inequalities before we can identify more equitable approaches. But I worry that we too often stop at identifying the disjunctures, the inequalities, and the brokenness of our world

The world is “broken” when someone like her can get a lifetime taxpayer-funded job?

As a feminist and as a methodologist, I suggest we build on participatory action and community-engaged methods to envision a different, more community-focused discipline … As such, I adopt an epistemological approach to knowledge production that builds on feminist and decolonial methodologies, even as it is at odds with some traditional approaches to empirical research. Feminists have long called for epistemological approaches that undo the divide between expert and participant

Building on this work allows us to link U.S. sociology to sociological traditions from other parts of the world, where the relationship between academia and activism looks different.

There’s a bit of hope in western Maskachusetts:

In the town of Amherst, where I live, we are working on a plan for reparations (Lord et al. 2023). How can we possibly make reparations for the centuries of enslavement, displacement, discrimination, death, and the constant grind of anti-Black racism? … So far, the town has pledged only two million dollars to the reparations fund and has yet to fully fund that two million … I am endlessly infuriated with the town for not doing more. And yet, what is the alternative? Not to work toward reparations?

Maybe there’s some social media output for Prof. Dr. Joya Misra, Ph.D.? A quick search revealed that she was far too virtuous to have an account on X. She posted on Facebook in support of what the Supreme Court found to be racism that violated the 14th amendment:

She was proud to have been injected with the Sacrament of Fauci:

What about on Blue Sky, the natural home for conventional-minded progressives? Joya Misra does have an account!

(When the candidate for whom the majority of people vote is elected, that’s the end of democracy.)

She re-skies (?) a blue (?) exhorting the righteous to #resist:

Considering all of the above, and remembering that this is perhaps the best sociologist in the United States (elected by peers to head their organization), would it be a net loss to the average citizen if all departments of sociology were shut down and the taxpayer funds redirected to economics, literature, engineering, and actual science?

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Preparing for the Age of AI with Prof. Uju Anya at Carnegie-Mellon at $93,614 per year

by philg

Large Language Models (“AI”) are transforming our world. How is Carnegie-Mellon’s linguistics department preparing students to contribute to the Age of AI? Professor Uju Anya has been in the news lately. Example:

On Sept. 8, [2022, as Queen Elizabeth II was on her deathbed] Anya tweeted from her personal account, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

(Note that use of the phrase “chief monarch” shows an inability to use the English language. There are no non-chief monarchs. Wokipedia: “The word monarch comes from the ancient Greek words monos (meaning “alone”) and arkhein (meaning “to rule”).” Also, is it fair to characterize the UK in 2022 as an “empire”? “Small Islamic island nation,” perhaps? If we are looking back to the 19th century and want to paint the former empire in a better light we could say “Ender of the Arab and African slave trades that began circa 700 AD (Arab) and BCE (African).”)

As with What does Syracuse University teach for $100,000 per year?, nobody asks what students at CMU, each of whom theoretically pays $93,614 per year for the privilege, are learning from Prof. Uju Anya. (Let’s also not forget the taxpayers, who contribute in the form of subsidized student loans (sometimes entirely forgiven!), tuition grants, research grants, tax exemptions for the university’s endowment, and tax deductions given to donors (that increase the burden on other taxpayers).) She’s the author of Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil.

What if Anthropic isn’t hiring anyone for their Speaking Blackness in Brazil group? Prof. Anya teaches “Hip Hop and Funk Discourses of Black Womanhood in Brazil and the U.S.” (all course materials hidden behind a paywall to exclude those who don’t pay $93,614 per year to CMU). That would prepare a CMU graduate to work in the Black Womanhood in Brazil department at OpenAI.

More work by this professor whom the CMU administrators were wise enough to hire in 2021 (four years after Google’s “Attention is All You Need” transformer paper kicked off the machine learning/ChatGPT revolution) and subsequently wise enough to agree to pay every week until she dies (“tenure”; the lifetime paycheck drawn from the students paying $93,614 per year and from the taxpayers (“the chumps”)):

Her Instagram seems to have been locked down recently:

(Note that the “lesbian” is given priority over the “mom” role. Would that work for a cisgender heterosexual man? List sex habits before “father”?)

Google indexed her tenure announcement from two years ago, but it can no longer be viewed:

Finally, ChatGPT found that if you’re a federal taxpayer (“a chump”) you kicked in $180,000 via the U.S. Department of Education for “An HSI-HBCU collaboration to create open access Spanish language curricula celebrating Blackness in Latin America (P017A230050)”, from which Uju Anya was paid.

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What does Syracuse University teach for $100,000 per year?

by philg

“Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills” (WSJ) covers the financial slide at this Rust Belt school pretty well, but doesn’t dig into the product. Let’s pick a few professors at Syracuse and see what a $100,000/year customer might learn from they/them.

Scholar-activist, Professor Kishi Animashaun Ducre:

“The Black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice”, “Katrina as Postscript to Racialized Spaces in Louisiana.”, and “Addressing Environmental and Food Justice toward Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Poisoning and Imprisoning Youth”

Professor PJ DiPietro (she/they, her/them, hers/their):

engages decolonial thinking, hemispheric Latinx studies, and critical theories of race, gender, transgender, and sexuality

“The Coloniality of Gender”; “Trans of Color is an Oxymoron. Humans, nonHuman Animals, and the Bodies Beneath Animals”; “Co-Creating Transdisciplinary Decolonial Curricula”; “Hallucinating Knowing: (Extra)Ordinary Consciousness, more-than-human Perception, and other Decolonizing Remedios within Latina and Xicana Feminist and Queer Theories”

Here’s a department that acknowledges that the university is on stolen land, which it refuses to give back and won’t pay rent on:

What they promise students will be able to do after forking over $400,0000 and four years away from the AI Klondike:

Integrate feminist and queer theory and practice to challenge social relations, representations, knowledges, institutions, and policies.
Model feminist and queer competencies of collaborative learning that embrace cooperation and mutual aid.

From Professor Eunjung Kim, a member of this department:

Kim, E. (2010). How Much Sex Is Healthy? The Pleasures of Asexuality.

Kim, E. (2024). Asexual Kinship: Capitalism, Reproduction, and an Imperiality of Asexuality.

(At least 14 years of studying people not having sex.)

Update: I posted this on X and so far (a day later) it is up to 434,000+ views. One X comment, “This is scary! If true.”, inspired me to visit the Syracuse.edu web site again. This time, I picked the Syracuse School of Education and then picked the first faculty member from an alphabetical list: Professor Barbara Applebaum. She has a “research focus” of “critical whiteness studies; epistemic injustice; feminist philosophy” (Wikipedia: “Epistemic injustice occurs when an individual or group is wronged in their “capacity as a knower”, meaning that their ability to produce knowledge is called into question.”) Prof. Applebaum teaches a full semester course on “Critical Whiteness”:

Her book Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy promises to “help white students understand and acknowledge their white complicity”. Some Amazon reader review excerpts:

Included are Applebaum’s ideas on how to indoctrinate others to accept this insane ideology that seeks to, at its core, tear down society and “liberate the oppressed” into the Communist utopia that awaits if they could only be “woke” enough to see it! Utter garbage. Stay away.

I am using this work as a foundation of my dissertation. I really don’t know where I would be without this important piece of work.

Whatever ones personal views may be it is a disgrace that Syracuse University would employ this author as a academic professor. This book deposits ideas that are simple anecdotal opinions based of off no scientific data and tries through the use of word salad to push them off as facts deliberately attempting to manipulate data to deceive its intended audience knowing full well that the audience it is targeting does not have a sophisticated understanding of statistical analysis or historical awareness. … [the book] no business in a place of higher education and the author should seek psychological intervention for her racist presuppositions and destructive methods of solutions to her paranoid delusions.

This book helped me understand that most white people aren’t ignorant, but just have a different kind of knowledge that’s based on ignoring racism. And that this is a very active thing that they do (even if it’s unconscious).

It might be a challenge figuring out how to adapt this work to improve the pedagogy in an aeronautical engineering class…

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Fact-checking at the New England Journal of Medicine

by philg

From “Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia” (New England Journal of Medicine, August 20, 2026):

Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. … Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard … Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution.

As pointed out in Plagiarist Claudine Gay getting paid $3.1 million/year after “resigning” from Harvard, anyone with access to ChatGPT and/or Google could determine within less than one minute that Claudine Gay was still on the Harvard payroll (not “ousted”) and with a little more diligence, determine that she was being paid a higher-than-average wage.

If the NEJM didn’t fact-check this article what else aren’t they fact-checking?

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Explaining the academic socialist factory

by philg

The freshmen are arriving at elite universities this weekend. Four years from now, they’ll come out ready to do “community organizing” for Ayatollah Mamdani’s Senate campaign. Given that students don’t listen to professors, how is it possible that four years at a university is a reliable path toward becoming what Americans call a “socialist” (nothing like the Soviet Socialism in which every able-bodied adult had to work, of course!)? The Wall Street Journal carries a brilliant explanation of the mechanism, which does not require any student to learn anything from any professor, by a teacher at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, Kimberlee Josephson (not in quote style for readability):

When your first brush with adulthood involves endless consumption and no cost, it gives you the wrong idea of how the world works.

Universities operate as a closed economy: centrally administered, collectively resourced, carefully controlled by administrators who hope their plans aid retention efforts.

Over the past several decades, the college campus has morphed into a comprehensive residential and lifestyle provider. Beginning in the 1990s, when colleges started competing more aggressively for larger enrollment numbers, investing in student life became a way to recruit students. Expanded student unions, more-comfortable residence halls, larger recreation centers, campus programming offices and improved dining choices became the norm.

By the early 2000s, colleges faced an “amenities arms race.” Rec centers were revamped with climbing walls and lazy rivers; dorms gave way to apartment lofts with expansive lounges; campus coffee bars were established with national brands.

At elite institutions, students enter a nearly self-contained community. They ride campus buses without paying a fare. They enter expansive recreation centers without a membership card. They attend concerts, meet career coaches, reserve study rooms, download software, join student organizations, and participate in countless campus activities without ever reaching for a wallet.

If transportation is universally available without fares on campus, it may seem natural to ask why urban transportation doesn’t function similarly. If counseling services and mindfulness programs are readily available in college, paid time off for mental health may seem like a reasonable expectation in the workplace. If fitness centers, technology services, entertainment options and countless other amenities appear to operate without cost, comprehensive public provision elsewhere may seem practical.

A cohort raised on all-you-can-eat meal plans, campus shuttles and bundled student services may be evaluating public policy through the only economic model they have ever personally experienced.

Given these arrangements, is it any wonder that many graduates experience sticker shock on entering adult life? Grocery bills, utility payments, security deposits, transportation, internet service, gym memberships and countless other expenses suddenly become explicit rather than bundled. What many describe as an “affordability crisis” may partly reflect the shock of moving from a bundled institutional economy for which someone else usually pays to an unbundled market economy in which one has to earn his own keep.

… we should spend less time scrutinizing classroom lectures and more time examining the economic environment students inhabit every day. The most influential economics lesson many students receive may come from the institutional design of the university. Before blaming the professors, consider the campus.

A reasonable take-away, in other words, from four years at a high-end college or university is that government-run everything works great so long as chumps can be found to pay all of the bills (parents in the college case; “the rich” in the overall U.S. society case).

Note that students also get seemingly “free” stuff beyond their immediate campus. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for example, a long list of schools give the MFA money (from the students’ parents) so that when students show up they’re not confronted with the $30 price that most visitors see ($0 for SNAP/EBT card holders!). Don’t need to show ID to vote in Maskachusetts, of course, but everyone can agree that “presenting a valid ID on the day of their visit” is a reasonable demand for entering the museum at a $0 cost.

Fun fact for pilots: Prof. Josephson previously taught at Lycoming College! (The ultimate resume would include Lycoming College and Continental Florida University!)

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The sad death of Jason Arday

by philg

It was fun to mock the English academics who promoted Jason Arday to various positions, but I was saddened to hear of his death:

In my view, the responsibility for this man’s death lies entirely with those who set up the racist system (“DEI”) that prevailed while he received his degrees and his academic jobs. The absurd inventions that Dr. Arday spun, e.g., running 30 marathons in 35 days, were a natural response to being in an environment set up by academic racists. We don’t blame a fish for breathing via gills. The fish doesn’t know anything different from the water in which he swims. DEI was the water in which Jason Arday was immersed for more than 20 years.

RIP.

Related… screen shots from Simon & Schuster, which supposedly fact-checked his autobiography.

A completely different perspective:

the sixth group of people defrauded by Jason Arday is the British people. Arday sat on numerous charities, boards, committees and other DEI institutions not only funded by the British taxpayer but devoted to the erasure of British culture and the demographic replacement of the British people in our homeland. To this end, Arday was awarded numerous honorary doctorates, fellowships and academic awards and given a correspondingly wide public platform to spread his message of hate and racial discrimination against White people.

And a similar perspective to mine, perhaps phrased more succinctly:

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Would ChatGPT have hired Jason A. K. Arday?

by philg

It’s Academic Integrity Day here on this blog… (see Plagiarist Claudine Gay getting paid $3.1 million/year after “resigning” from Harvard)

The smartest people in the Islamic Republic of the UK hired Jason A. K. Arday to hold a professorship at Cambridge University in 2023, which is a huge appointment (what we call “assistant professors” they call “mere lecturers”). He’s been in the news recently for Claudine Gay-style plagiarism combined with an unusual life story. From “Icarus in the Faculty Lounge” (The Atlantic):

According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time [2023], Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”

That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants [enrichers!]

Arday’s grad-school alma mater, Liverpool John Moores University, which first received direct complaints about the dissertation last fall, did its own investigation and cleared Arday of wrongdoing. “A confidential procedure was conducted,” the university told me in a statement. “Professor Arday’s PhD still stands.” But some of Arday’s other academic papers had potential problems too—and they seemed much worse than the mere borrowing of language. Quotes from structured interviews that Arday claimed to have performed closely resembled those used by other researchers; parts of some interview responses also reappeared across different studies under Arday’s name, attributed to different people. This duplication, if deliberate, would be something other than plagiarism—it would be academic fraud.

Might this be Donald Trump’s fault?

Some of the people who were going after Arday had a political agenda. Cofnas, the philosopher who put Arday’s dissertation through a plagiarism checker last month, argues for a “hereditarian revolution” based on the idea that innate differences in intelligence and other traits exist across racial groups. (He also claims that “the humanities and much of the social sciences have been slain on the altar of DEI.”)

Everyone loves an abuse survivor:

The doctors who assessed him as a toddler told his mother that “there’s no one in there” and that he was “no better than a vegetable.” Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.) As a boy, Arday rocked and hummed and banged his head until he bled; he slammed cupboard doors and smeared his feces on the walls. Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize.

Arday is nearly deaf in one ear; he’s dyslexic; he finds simple math befuddling; he has “marked difficulties” with memory, reading, and processing skills. As a teen, he was beaten so severely by a group of kids his age that he became an epileptic. To make his way through secondary school while—by his own account—illiterate, he needed ample help: support assistants who sat beside him in class and took notes on his behalf.

(What good are “notes” if a person is “illiterate” (unable to read)?)

By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter.

Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style.

As his dissertation deadline approached, Arday started having blurry vision; medical scans revealed a brain tumor. After it was removed, he had a ministroke and lost his short-term memory. “I’d worked on my thesis for over thirty months, and now I was reading it as if for the first time,” he writes. As one might expect, his thesis defense did not go smoothly. One examiner was suspicious of his work: “I am struggling to see that there is any original contribution here,” she said, according to the book. But Arday, who often likens himself to Rocky Balboa, managed to fight back, and in the end, he passed. (The memoir brings up the fictional boxer in about a dozen different contexts.)

(Note that Rocky is now a Florida resident (Journal of Popular Studies) and stopped paying taxes to Gavin Newsom in 2024)

More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”—delaying his attempt just long enough for a member of his family to rescue him. “In the end,” he writes, “my decision to listen to the Eagles likely saved my life.”

I reached out to the book’s fact-checker [at Simon & Schuster] to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. … the book’s release is still on track and that it has even been designated as an “Editors’ Pick” on Amazon

This wasn’t part of the book proposal, but it seems that Prof. Dr. Arday, Ph.D. was also an RAF Red Arrows pilot:

The Professor’s PhD thesis is available online. I downloaded it and asked ChatGPT to “evaluate the quality of research and writing”. Some excerpts from the full interaction:

The biggest problem is the sample and selection mechanism. There are only four intervention participants, selected from 46, and selection expressly included whether the candidates demonstrated characteristics that the researcher thought “resonated with the study’s aims and objectives” and a desire/capacity to improve their teaching. … More seriously, the researcher was a lecturer at the university attended by the subjects and already had relationships with them.

There is also no convincing counterfactual. There is:

no control/comparison group,
no random assignment,
only four highly selected subjects,
an intervention that the researcher helps facilitate,
and outcomes that are overwhelmingly based upon the subjects’ own narratives and perceptions.

The thesis itself eventually admits a crucial point: it cannot determine with certainty whether improved reflective practice would have occurred naturally rather than because of the peer-mentoring intervention.

Contribution to knowledge: This is probably the weakest part of the intellectual case for a PhD.

Writing quality: This is much easier to judge: the prose is substantially below the standard I would expect in the final, examined copy of a PhD thesis from a British university. The problems aren’t occasional typos. They’re pervasive. Even the title contains an erroneous apostrophe… Throughout the thesis there is a characteristic tendency to take a simple proposition and turn it into an elaborate nominalized construction. … Most problematic is the repeated use of inflated pseudo-technical expressions that obscure ordinary ideas.

The prose also affects the scholarship: This is more important than cosmetic proofreading. The convoluted language sometimes makes it difficult to determine exactly what proposition is being asserted and how strongly.

Should Arday have been given the big job at Cambridge?

Cambridge’s published criteria for its highest professorial level say that a Professor at Grade 12 should demonstrate: “outstanding achievement in research and research leadership assessed by reference to international levels of excellence”… Against that benchmark, Arday’s 2023 record looks unusually thin.

Cambridge’s February 2023 announcement … emphasizes his work on race … and, very explicitly, the importance of his appointment to Cambridge’s efforts to increase representation of people from disadvantaged and ethnic-minority backgrounds.

Asked to place Arday in a percentile of people in the same field, ChatGPT grudgingly estimates “somewhere around the 30th–50th percentile overall” (i.e., quite a few people with PhDs in education/sociology are far dumber than Dr. Arday!).

Here’s the Amazon page showing that this is, according to their experts in Seattle, among the world’s “Best Biographies & Memoirs”:

Throw out your Life of Johnson. It’s not among the “Best Biographies”.

Related:

  • “Jason Arday taught me. Here’s what I learned” (Fiona Brown in Unherd): “Before Arday arrived at Roehampton, university leaders enthusiastically told us of his amazing backstory: how he only learned to speak at 11 and write at 18, and how excited they were to have him teaching us. … I can honestly describe Arday’s teaching as terrible. He rarely used the PowerPoint slides. Instead, he usually sat casually on a desk, giving his generalized views on racism … Roehampton is a very diverse university, both in terms of racial background and neurodiversity, and takes inclusion seriously. More than two-thirds of the class were either black or from other non-white backgrounds. Most were women… In the end, Arday gave me 70% for my essay. That sounds good — except that my average for the year was 75%, meaning my overall result was dragged down. … In our meeting, I explained that 70% was a low mark for me and asked him to provide feedback. Suddenly, his friendly, confident demeanor changed. I now saw a side of him I’d never seen before: angry, but also scared. Arday implied that I was racist, and said that the only reason I wasn’t happy with 70% was due to my “white privilege”.”
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Closing out Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

by philg

As we complete our celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, celebrating the common culture, language, and religion of Samoans, Koreans, Burmese, and Rajasthanis, here’s an ABC story that will warm the hearts of Asian American and Pacific Islander parents:

A high school senior who lived through homelessness much of his childhood was accepted to 65 colleges, and plans to attend an Ivy League school in the fall.

Note that if we believe The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications we wouldn’t expect Lamont Newell to do as well as a 17-year-old with the same grades and same test scores (assuming that he took any tests; Columbia is permanently test-optional) who came from a successful (not homeless) family. Our society has chosen to invest in Mr. Newell, who won’t be paying or borrowing a dime for his education (“California teen who grew up homeless earns full ride to Ivy League school after 65 college acceptances”), rather than invest in an Asian 17-year-old whose parents worked like slaves to avoid homelessness and/or reliance on “public assistance” (i.e., taxpayers). If University of California economist Gregory Clark is correct, in other words, by lower admissions standards for those whose families are poor, the U.S. is doing the opposite of what investors in higher education would do if the goal were a return on investment.

(Why is it “society” rather than “Columbia” investing in Mr. Newell? At least half of Columbia’s money comes from taxpayers thanks to (1) Columbia’s tax-exempt nonprofit org status (investment returns aren’t taxed; half of every donation comes from taxpayers rather than the donor because the donor’s tax bill is reduced), (2) Columbia’s federal grants that yield massive overhead profits.)

Related:

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Lack of commitment to the bachelor’s degree

by philg

Department of Kids Today… I had dinner with a friend whose son is a freshman studying engineering. Dad has an MD/PhD so you might expect the child to put some value on credentials. “I would drop out if I were offered the right job,” he said. “After all, college is a means to an end. If the end is already available, why spend additional years on the means?”

Companies are already getting rid of old people in favor of young people who are “AI-native”. What if companies figure out that a high school graduate who is proficient with AI tools is just as productive as someone with a bachelor’s degree who is proficient with AI tools?

If I could short a basket of high-tuition private universities, minus the Ivy League, I would!

Related:

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How to write a thank-you note to a teacher

by philg

Young readers: it’s almost the end of your semester. Here are some of the messages from students in our FAA Ground School class at MIT (back in January) that would have warmed my heart if engineers had hearts…

[ Sloan executive MBA track; Chinese] It was wonderful to be your student. Thank you for teaching us.

[Chinese] Thank you to you and Tina again for the wonderful ground school over the past three days! I really enjoyed it and learned a lot. … Safe travels back to Florida, and thanks again!

I really enjoyed the ground school this past week.

[European] I would like to express my sincere appreciation for your guidance during the Private Pilot Ground School. The course was fun, insightful and has left me well-prepared for the upcoming FAA knowledge test.

Thank you for this class. Genuinely, I enjoyed everything that I learned.

Thank you all for this class. Really appreciated it.

Now that we live in the email age, don’t forget that it is easy to thank a teacher! I recommend copying the first example! It’s Mother’s Day and this is definitely the kind of thing that most moms would like to see a child do!

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