It's a well worn cliche that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the tragic death of Jason Arday has highlighted the signposts to that hell.
Barry Wall, who writes the Substack "The Court of the EDIJester" writes:
If cases like this are not one-offs, and I suspect strongly they are not, then the real Tragedy is larger than one individual, or institution.
Indeed not. There is evidence a-plenty of dubious academia.
Wall makes a far more critical point about the value of universities and the pursuit of excellence:
Meritocracy, intelligence, talent and excellence, the application of rigorous principles that identify, create and fund those who are the best of us; in whatever field, has given us an extraordinary life, luxurious in fact by any historical standard.
Cognitive ability is one of the strongest predictors of who reaches that level of achievement, and the only one that matters in the long run.
This is the engine that drives the machine in the creation of our wonderful civilisation.
It is through this that sees women, men, of all backgrounds discover, invent and create in ways that uplift themselves and others, thousands, millions. Whether it be in medicine, engineering, chemistry, computing, design or creativity, the nurturing of minds applying reason, thought, research, enquiry and philosophy to humanity, the world and the universe.
Wall says what's far worse than the Arday tragedy is the philosophical state of higher education that erodes all of this.
Diversity statements at recruitment stage become ideological screens that filter out wrong think, and competence then barely gets a look in.
This is the tragedy, there are after all only a few who could be brain surgeons or engineering geniuses and those high-ability people who notice that identity and political conformity outweigh results leave or never enter precisely because they excel cognitively...
The result is a thinner pipeline of the people most likely to generate the breakthroughs that later become miraculous treatments, ideas or inventions that enrich the world for us all.
Not only is competence devalued as being not of primary importance, but the ideological compliance that critical theory demands (because the term is essentially Orwellian - you cannot be critical of critical theory or you will be accused of being "x"ist (bigoted against an oppressed class, because critical theory is for "liberation" of the "oppressed")).
China is not growing its technical capacity and capability by embracing a philosophy that degrades and diminishes individual achievement, decries science as "Western" or an oppressive tool that might be called "yellowness". It's absurd to imagine that the strategic rivals of liberal democracies would kneecap their cleverest people, unless it was to protect their own power.
Yet the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand are all subordinate to this malign philosophy that resembles the intellectual sclerosis of education in north Korea, which has spent decades being subordinate to a manufactured pseudo philosophy called "Juche".
Juche is used to be manifestly reductive of all history, economics, politics and public policy to the utterances attributed to the Kim family, with blame for everything lying at the United States, followed by Japan and allies of the United States. Note, of course, that Pyongyang abandons this nonsense altogether for its research into military technology including nuclear weaponry, including cyberwarfare and its extensive involvement in transnational crime and smuggling. Reason is important when your objective is to achieve.
Wall points out that at worst, making science less attractive and denying the advancement of some because of identity could be costly by taking talent away from its potential:
In the worst case scenario tens of millions still die each year from diseases that are, in principle, a matter of better science.
Perverting the rate at which high-ability talent reaches the positions where that science is done has a body count.
The same EDI machinery that elevated an unstable personal narrative at Cambridge is the machinery that makes the next generation of geniuses and innovators harder to find.
The wider cost is paid by society atrophied in identity creation, virtue signalling, therapeutic twaddle and the desire of a fetid lanyard class hell bent on enforcing equity through the application of power.
Consider for a moment how someone who is clever, talented and motivated, and who either doesn't belong to one of the declared "oppressed" identities, or who doesn't want others thinking their recognition comes from being one of the "oppressed" identities. Who, with any esteem, really wants to be thought of as a DEI hire, someone advanced not because of their abilities, but to tick a box?
Furthermore, if you don't embrace the stifling binary world of critical theory, you'll be cancelled and hounded out of being heard and out of careers, forever blighted by the cardinal sin of being deemed Xist or Xphobic. You may be accused of simply being in the pay of the claimed conspiracy of global capitalism through the Atlas Network, or even worse just being a white supremacist/fascist/hate monger/Zionist or one of the many other monikers thrown about rabidly.
You might even find your career stifled because you haven't paid appropriate fealty to critical theory concepts - whether it be not taking into account the views of enough people of an oppressed identity, not reflecting an oppressed culture in your research about - say - Ancient Greece
On the Arday story ended sadly by his own hand, I thought Barry Wall's comment is a good place to end:
The story of Jason Arday is tragic, hubristic and sad, but it is also a metaphor for our society as a whole, living a constructed delusion, predicated on identity, shored up by approved emotional responses and maintained by a state apparatus so steeped in its love of all things EDI that what was once insane is now becoming sane.
The real tragedy is that the machine that creates, maintains, elevates and lauds the processes and ideas that allows an Arday to thrive and succeed is profoundly anti-civilisation and we must eradicate it in all its forms.
The Cambridge debacle is more than a case of academic misbehaviour, it is a portent, an omen if you will, and we would do well to heed it.
Perhaps the very worst element of all of this is how impotent, incompetent and ignorant so many politicians are of this philosophical cancer. Of course maybe half embrace it and are subordinate to it, because it fits within their own philosophy, of those who maybe would not embrace it, perhaps another half are too frightened to do anything but leave it alone, whereas most who confront it do so in a blundering blunt and counterproductive way.
The answer to this is not a counter-identitarianism, switching oppressed and oppressive roles, the answer is to return to enlightenment values, modernism and reason.
