To my mind, one of the most maddening aspects of the whole Jason Arday affair has been the business-as-usual progressive and pro-DEI biases of the mainstream media and of the blogosphere. Have you noticed, for example, how most of the news articles and blog posts (both in the U.S. and the U.K.) reporting or commenting on the Jason Arday affair mention Nathan Cofnas’s damning substack post exposing Arday’s alleged misconduct (i.e. the post that set this entire affair into motion), but how — at the same time — few, if any, of these articles and blog posts actually bother to provide a link to Cofnas’s original exposé, which is titled “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge“. Hmmm. (As of this writing, the one exception I can find to this sneaky media blockade is Retraction Watch; see here.) In addition to the above links, I have also archived Cofnas’s devastating hit piece here for good measure in case our big tech overlords were to try to erase it from the Internet.

Be that as it may, the case of this now-deceased academic con artist provides us another painful reminder of what we already should have known about so-called “critical theory”, education studies, and post-modernism more generally. (Surprise, surprise!) And his death may have not been in vain for another reason, for his alleged misconduct highlights another major gap in academia: the lack of legal liability for research fraud. After all, why should Cambridge University be immune from liability (especially to her students) for hiring Arday in the first place, and why should the academic journals that published Arday’s fraudulent work likewise be immune from liability? On these questions, see my 2017 paper “Legal Liability for Research Fraud.” (My main argument is that, without the threat of legal liability, the parties in the best position to detect research fraud, like academic hiring committees and journal editors, will have no economic incentive to change their intellectually pernicious and shallow DEI ways.)

Bonus links: Why philosophers hate that ‘equity’ meme. (I include this link because I see this popular meme as an intellectual litmus test of sorts.) Also, like my colleague and friend Josh Blackman, I cannot help but ask, How many more Jason Ardays are there, especially in academia?