Quotulatiousness

August 9, 2026

Hopefully the last word on “L’affaire Arday”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On her Substack, Helen Dale discusses the recently resigned Cambridge professor Jason Arday, the people who positioned him to fail, and what their motivations were in doing so:

Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.

Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off.

Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair.

Oceans of ink have been spilt already on this issue, so I’m not going to relitigate the main background. Instead, I want to make four observations, in no particular order.

1. Oh, the humanities (and social sciences)

The problems across these two large disciplinary areas long predate the idiotic wokery that got Jason Arday appointed to a professorial chair at Britain’s second oldest, second most famous university. Yes, wokery has made them worse, chiefly because the theoretical frameworks animating it — which Lorenzo Warby has written about both here and at his own place — deny the possibility of truth outside that of personal experience. This means people don’t just get their own opinions, they also get their own facts.

[…]

2. Nathan Cofnas is not racist

There are two distinct things going on in the background to the Arday appointment(s). The first is that he was appointed despite being a complete doofus and as dumb as a stump. The second is that while there probably are black candidates out there qualified to be a Cambridge professor, there won’t be many, and they are highly unlikely to be the descendants of slaves (from the Caribbean, the United States, or South America). They’re much more likely to be from a posh Nigerian background, and a particular Nigerian tribe (Igbo).

In the words of computer scientist Eric S. Raymond:

    This is completely predictable to anyone who has spent 10 minutes reviewing the data on racial differences in mean IQ and knows what that implies for the right end of the bell curve.

    The intersection set of people with predominantly sub-Saharan African ancestry with people sufficiently bright to deserve a university professorship is not empty, but it’s vanishingly small. The demand greatly exceeds the supply.

    Which is why we’ve seen this movie many times before, and will again. They can’t help it. Corrupted academia would rather hire thousands of other incompetents than let go of its “anti-racism” to hire on merit alone.

The refusal to grapple with the black-white average IQ gap is astounding, and while the (mostly) white people responsible for appointing Arday look like absolute fools, the black intellectuals who refuse to accept an established fact look both truculent and dishonest. They don’t have to accept it’s genetic. They do have to accept that it’s real. As far as I’m aware, only one major black intellectual, Wilfred Reilly, accepts the existence of the gap (disclosure: I have been a guest on Wilfred’s podcast). If there are others, I would be delighted to know their names.

Two issues fall out of this. The first is that Nathan Cofnas is not racist for pointing it out. Facts are not racist. The second is that if people disagree with Cofnas’s secondary argument that the reason for the gap is primarily genetic, then yelling racist! at him does not prove him wrong. Evidence is what you need if you want to prove someone wrong, not moral abuse.

3. It’s the rule of law, Jim, but not as we know it

The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights — coupled with social preferment — over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian.

Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people — and especially humanities and social science academics — think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists — albeit in limited form — in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.

[…]

4. Enter Carter-Ruck, or Journalism v. Law v. a bloke with a blog

It’s been widely — and accurately — reported that junior academic Nathan Cofnas broke the Jason Arday story on his personal blog. However, it shouldn’t have been his job to do. The same (or very similar) research had been done separately by both a retired academic (John Harris) and a journalist with Times Higher Education — an outlet dedicated to the tertiary education sector and owned, ultimately, by Rupert Murdoch. In response to both sets of revelations, either Cambridge or Arday or perhaps both in concert (this is unclear on the facts available to me) instructed Carter-Ruck, the most famous — and aggressive — specialist defamation law firm in the United Kingdom. Historically, Private Eye magazine (often a victim of their attention) referred to them as “Carter-Fuck” and, more recently, “Farter-Fuck”.

Despite the fact that the THE has libel insurance and Murdoch generally defends his publications, the magazine backed down. Jack Grove is the reporter who had his story spiked. I have it on good authority that several Cambridge academics — and perhaps people from other universities — then approached Cofnas with the material that they (and possibly the THE) had collated. Cofnas — being young & junior — is what lawyers call “a man of straw”. Suing him in defamation would benefit no-one, least of all Carter-Ruck. He published, scooping Jack Grove.

August 8, 2026

Pointing the finger of blame accurately

Filed under: Britain, Education, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Librarian of Celaeno wants you to know that former professor Jason Arday did nothing wrong:

Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Once upon a time, an autistic black child was born. Usually, it takes several years to figure that out (the autism, not the blackness), but so autistically autistic was the infant Jason Arday that it was immediately apparent to everyone without there even needing to be any public record of it. Perhaps there is some lost evidence of him having a Reddit account as a toddler; one can speculate. Arday was unable to talk until age 11 and has been unable to stop talking ever since, which is fortunate since otherwise many of his unbelievable life accomplishments would now be unknown.

The range of setbacks he has overcome boggles the mind. Despite being illiterate until age 18, Arday not only graduated high school, but got into college, where he finally learned how to read good. This is even more incredible when you consider that the same year he discovered what the alphabet did he was beaten into epilepsy by random teens — he forgave them so thoroughly that any documentation of the incident is now gone from police records — and that some unspecified time before that he was in a car accident that left him in a waking coma for months. He studied so hard in college that he gave himself a brain tumor, which he evidently removed by himself in the mirror, since there is no evidence of a surgeon having done so. It may be that Arday has in fact learned to read several times in his life, but keeps getting that knowledge erased by semiannual episodes of CTE.

Even though he’d accumulated a substantial amount of what for a normal person would be crippling physical trauma over the course of his short time in the world, of the sort that would require medical interventions that would otherwise severely limit active life, Arday rapidly became one of the world’s most elite athletes. He participated in a ‘30 Marathons in 35 Days’ challenge, which was actually somewhat documented by an independent contemporary account, in the midst of which he suffered a hairline fracture in his fibula, which he seemingly just shrugged off to complete the remaining nine marathons. This was apparently the last time he ran slowly enough for anyone to witness, however, because his career as an ultramarathon runner who hyperGogginsed his way through 600 miles in six days passed entirely without notice by the few other people on Earth who could conceivably do that. He played semi-professional soccer, but was so good that he got bored with it and moved on before anyone could write his name down on a roster. Along the way, Arday became one of the best snooker players in Britain, with a skill level far beyond the need to participate in any public tournaments, other than the single amateur contest he entered but was too gracious to the other players to win.

He surmounted the intellectual challenges involved in becoming a PE teacher, and from there went on to earn a Ph.D as a black man, with his thesis largely consisting of arguing that it’s easier to do well in academia if you’re not closely supervised. It was so convincing a premise that his doctoral committee at Liverpool University evidently forewent actually reading the dissertation, perhaps also having concluded that his proximity to their whiteness had burdened him enough already. It was thus that Dr. Arday came into being, following a path blazed by Ibram X. Kendi as a bedredlocked black man writing about being black while being black blackly in a world basically controlled by the bad guys in Caddyshack.

On Substack Notes, Michael Southon also points the finger at the people who enabled Arday’s rise and attributed racist beliefs to anyone who asked questions:

Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.

Cambridge University was so proud of its choice of Jason Arday that they invited the BBC to film Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, welcoming Arday to his new post. In the clip you can hear Cremin gushingly tell Arday:

    We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.

Arday himself is incredulous and suggests that some people will see his appointment as “tokenistic”. In response, Cremin assures him he is “world class”.

The Telegraph reports that when Arday’s students complained that they weren’t being properly supervised, they were told they were being “racist”.

The truth is that Cambridge was desperate to appoint more people of colour. His alleged autism ticked another box on the identity politics agenda. The dreadlocks were icing on the cake.

Will this episode, which has been reported around the world, finally convince the establishment that DEI is a disastrous social policy that lowers standards and turns august institutions whose reputations are based on centuries of meritocracy into the laughing stock of the world?

I doubt it.

Also on Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes finds the behaviour of Hilary Cremin to be emblematic of a kind of condescending attitude found most frequently among liberal white women:

We know the type.

And it does tend to be a woman.

They love nothing more than to put on that awful softy, patronising voice, as if talking to a small child.

I am reminded of that excrutiating clip of Hilary Cremin (Head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education) “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do“.

Really? “The best in the world”?

Like the bestest in the whole big wide world ever! 😂

I’m surprised she didn’t lean in and give him a pat on the head.

Wtf?

And that tone. 😭

It’s bad enough when they do it to kids.

I have posted about this “tone” before.

Near where I live there’s a Waitrose. The spiritual home of such a woman.

There used to be a Muslim woman wearing a hijab who would beg for money outside. I never gave her money because she seemed fake to me.

Always clean and well presented with the latest new iPhone (!), she would look up from her phone when she saw someone approaching, visibly completely change her facial expression, tilt her head to one side in a kind of puppy dog, “poor me” way, and put on a kind of fake whimpering “please help me!” and hold her hand out.

It was so obviously fake af!

One day I was waiting outside the shop for my daughter who had run in to get something.

As I waited, these two middle class, middle aged women stopped to talk to her.

They were both fawning over her, using that same softy patronising tone, falling over themselves to praise her. One of them said “you’re so beautiful and brave” and the other put her arm around her.

It was such a sychophantic display of patronising bullshit, I think I might have thrown up a little bit in my mouth.

This pathological sickly, performative fawning over their little pet minority groups, is something to behold!

And they were both being played.

This beggar wasn’t homeless. So obviously! You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to think so.

But they really are a special kind of stupid.

They just wanted to feel good about themselves. It’s all about their need to feel like they’re “good kind people”.

Then, no doubt make a FB post about it so all their other annoying cloying phoney friends can “coo” over how much they adore their little darling minority pets.

🤮

August 6, 2026

More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Cambridge Knew in 2023

On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)

On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.

That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.

In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)

Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.

He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.

[…]

The Claims, Laid Out Together

Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:

  • Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
  • Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
  • Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
  • Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
  • A mother with five degrees.
  • A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
  • Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
  • Deaf in one ear.
  • Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
  • Covered 300 miles in three days.
  • Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
  • Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
  • Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
  • Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
  • Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
  • Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
  • Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
  • Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
  • Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
  • Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
  • Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
  • Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
  • Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.

This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.

That is the real failure.

In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?

Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.

The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.

Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.

It was not enough. And it never should have been.

Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.

Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.

In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.

“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,” he wrote. “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.”

The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:

Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.

Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:

The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.

We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.

Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.

Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.

    As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.

You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.

The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?

They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.

Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.

The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.

August 4, 2026

“Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times”

Filed under: Britain, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Jason Arday affair has only just drifted into my view, but it seems utterly fascinating that a young man with such a … varied and colourful personal history … has risen to be the youngest black professor at Cambridge. His backstory is (probably) too perfectly aligned with progressive worldviews to be true:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times. As the youngest black person ever to be appointed a professor at the University of Cambridge, there are good reasons why those who have championed him are rushing to his defence. But with each passing day, new revelations of his slippery relationship with reality seem to be emerging.

As with many fabulists, it is difficult to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Some of Arday’s boasts are quite obviously false. For instance, nobody believes that he completed the last nine of thirty consecutive marathons with a fractured leg that had swollen “to twice its normal size”. Or that he appeared in the television series Seven Up! as a child, even though its participants were selected in 1963 and Arday was born two decades later.

Other claims might well be embellishments on kernels of reality. No doubt he has raised money for charity, but it seems highly unlikely that his vaunted sum of £5.5 million is accurate. We know that he played snooker, but his assertion that he did so professionally would carry more weight if someone on the circuit had heard of him. Few would dispute that Arday is a keen amateur athlete. But if his claim to have run six hundred miles in six days were true, that would place him among the world’s elite sportsmen.

Perhaps most serious of all are the accusations of plagiarism. Cambridge has been quick to dismiss the matter, stating that an investigation has already been conducted by Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD thesis, and no evidence of plagiarism was found. Many readers who have compared the relevant passages side by side have reached a different conclusion. Numerous examples have been collated by Nathan Cofnas and can be seen here.

The refusal of the authorities at Cambridge to investigate the allegations properly has naturally raised suspicions that Arday is being protected because he is the poster boy for DEI. If it is true that he was raised on a council estate, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, first spoke at the age of eleven, and learned to read and write at eighteen, then his success story is unparalleled. Yet plagiarism is an extremely grave matter for an academic, and the evidence is difficult to dismiss.

The failure to hold Arday to the same standards as anyone else is, of course, a soft form of racism …

On Substack Notes, Michael Southron says he’s getting a strong Jussie Smollet vibe from this story:

The Jason Arday affair is beginning to remind me of Jussie Smollett.

Not because we know that Arday fabricated anything. We don’t. But because of the strange self-protecting logic that surrounds allegations of racism.

Smollett’s story was initially believed because it fitted so perfectly with what many people already believed about America: a black, gay actor attacked by racist, homophobic Trump supporters. The allegation seemed almost to validate itself.

Something similar is happening with Arday.

He says a severed pig’s head was sent to his family home. Yet police can reportedly find no record of the investigation he described. The butcher he said police visited says no officers ever came. There are apparently no photographs or contemporaneous messages.

He also says a masked man twice entered his Cambridge faculty building and threatened him, on one occasion with a knife. Yet the man was apparently captured by no CCTV, seen by no colleagues, and Arday reportedly warned nobody in the building at the time.

“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” Arday told the Guardian. “Why would I lie?”

That sentence may be the most revealing part of the whole affair.

Because questioning Arday’s claims now risks being folded into the very narrative those claims are supposed to establish.

Arday says he has been targeted because of racism. Questions are raised about the evidence for his claims. Those questions are then portrayed as part of a “vile campaign” against him — which becomes further evidence that he is being targeted.

The allegation begins to protect itself.

He is a victim of racism, therefore questioning his account may itself be racist; and because questioning his account may be racist, his claim to be a victim of racism receives less scrutiny.

It is a perfect circle.

August 1, 2026

QotD: The “tiers” of US post-secondary education

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

First, there are at least three tiers of “higher ed”, and “publish or perish” only applies to the top level. And by “top level” I mean strictly by volume, the size of the student body. You want tenure at Ohio State (student body pushing 70,000), you’d better publish your ass off, because Ohio State (etc.) are what’s called “Research-1” universities. That is, they exist to do research. I know, I know, they’ve got a Latin motto that says something about citizenship and character development and whatnot, but fuck all that. Their money comes from grants, so you better be cranking out the research.

Level two is your SPLACs [Small Private Liberal Arts College (the denizens of a SPLAC are of course Splackavellies, in honor of the stupidest song of the 1990s, which is an amazingly high bar)]. The Ivy League schools are SPLACs, and the rest of them are their lesser (sometimes extremely lesser) imitators. You don’t need to publish squat to get tenure at Yale or Harvard if you bring something else [visible diversity, for example] to the table.

The third level is the junior college level. They call themselves “community colleges” in most cases — can’t use junior, it’s able-ist or age-ist or some shit-ist — but you know what I mean. Lots of kids do their first two years at one, getting all the BS “liberal arts” requirements out of the way before they transfer to Ohio State (etc.) to do their major classwork, so lots of History (etc.) profs work at JuCos. (This is the way to do it if you feel you must go to college for some reason, which 90% of the time you mustn’t).

I’ve done time at all three, because of academia’s worst-kept secret: Something like 75% of ALL classes, nationwide, at all levels and in all disciplines, are taught by non-tenure track faculty. Lots of these instructors are grad students, who will theoretically go on to get tenure-track jobs, but there’s a vast floating pool of scab labor known as “adjunct professors”, and I was one of those — a guy with a PhD who isn’t on the tenure track …

… and now never will be, because “adjunct professor” is like “sex worker” — yeah, it’s theoretically just a job now, but good luck getting hired to do anything else once it’s on your resume.

In my case that was by choice, as I loved my field, I loved teaching, but I did NOT love all the rest of the shit that goes along with university employment, and since I had (and have) an ad libitum gig that pays the bills I could follow my bliss, as they said back in the Sixties (I’m told). And since all eggheads are tech-illiterate I was able to do a lot of “online ed”, too. Which is the easiest money you’ll ever make as a professor (yep, I was one of those guys, not University of Phoenix but similar, and y’all, I have stories … oh, how I have stories. Everything you think about “online ed” is true, in spades. If you’re a few credits shy of that AA degree and just need a rubber stamp, then by all means go that route. If not, the University of YouTube has you covered).

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-01.

July 14, 2026

QotD: Subaltern Studies

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, India, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Thinking more about the Stupid Smart Guy, I took a quick peek at Salon.com, because nobody is dumber than a Salon writer … and no one thinks he’s smarter. Fully acknowledging it’s sufficient to say “Dunning-Krugerrand: The Website” and move on, nonetheless I persisted, and I came up with a theory I want to run by y’all: The Left are externalizers.

You can come at this in a few different ways. In the History biz, a big buzzword used to be “agency”. Not as in “three letter”, but as in “ability to meaningfully affect your environment”. One has “agency” insofar as one is able to get one’s way. It’s a big deal in the ivory tower, because if the grand sweep of History since the Middle Ages tells us anything, it’s that White guys tend to get their way, while brown guys do not. There are entire continents (and Subcontinents) full of millions of people, run by a handful of honkies.

Obviously that’s very very bad for them … but very very good for you if you want tenure, providing you can find some way to prove that the honkies weren’t really in charge. Subaltern Studies, for instance, is a field where, at its worst, literally anything a brown person does, or doesn’t do, is an example of “agency”, because it’s an example of “resistance” — doing exactly what Whitey says is really sticking it to Whitey, because extremely dense polysyllabic theory-laden reasons.

The stated goal of all this being, to give “agency” to the subaltern. But that’s the funny thing: While explaining at enormous length why “doing exactly what Whitey says” is somehow “resistance”, these folks were in fact acknowledging the massive agency — no quotation marks — of the British. They said “Jump, frog!” and seven hundred fifty million people asked “How high?” There’s only so much jargon can do to disguise that basic power dynamic, which is why “Subaltern Studies” isn’t the hot new thing anymore.

Severian, “Externalizing”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-14.

July 7, 2026

Clankers in higher education

Filed under: Education, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the impact of AI on university exams:

    Professor Roberto Serrano, who is the Harrison S. Kravis University Professor of Economics at Brown University, has detected a massive fraud in one of the classes he teaches, ECON 1170, an advanced undergraduate course in mathematical economics. He has conclusive evidence that at least 50 students cheated on the March midterm exam, making it the biggest known scandal at Brown and in the entire Ivy League

    …

    “Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor … (El Pais)

It was a closed book take-home exam; the problems were designed to test the student’s ability but proved doable by an AI. After Serrano changed the final from take-home to in-person about half the students who had gotten perfect scores on the midterm chose not to take the final.

The existence of AI, like the earlier problem of students buying papers online, reduces the ability of teachers to test their students but does not eliminate it, is inconvenient but not catastrophic. It makes some kinds of testing more difficult but not impossible; Serrano could have asked students whose midterms were suspiciously good to explain some of their answers and failed any obviously unable to do so. That would have been additional work for him and, judging by the article, not a policy Brown would have endorsed. Unwilling or unable to do that that he can base his future grading on work done in-person and adequately monitored.

[…]

It is not immediately obvious what is wrong with using AI on a test. If the purpose of the test is to generate information for potential future employers, why should they want the student tested without a tool that, if they hire him, he will have? A basketball coach does not evaluate potential team members by how well they can play with one hand tied behind their back.

Arguably the skills the employer wants tested are those that an AI cannot replace and it was up to Professor Serrano to find ways of testing for them. His take-home midterm, taken without the assistance of AI, might have provided information for him and his students about how far they had come along a path that would eventually produce skills an AI could not substitute for but not information for a future employer about the skills of the students taking the exam.

July 3, 2026

QotD: Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The catalyst for this negative view of American entrepreneurs was historian Matthew Josephson, who wrote a landmark book, The Robber Barons. Josephson, the son of a Jewish banker, grew up in New York and graduated from Columbia University, where he was inspired in the classroom by Charles Beard, America’s foremost progressive historian — and a man sympathetic to socialism. “Beard was nothing less than a spellbinder”, Josephson recalled, and Beard’s lectures helped guide him on a path to radical politics.

During the 1920s, after graduation, Josephson became a journalist, an expatriate to France, and, after his return, a part of New York’s literary elite. He and Beard reconnected in 1930, and the mentor urged his student to write a book denouncing the men who had launched America’s industrial power. “Oh! those respectable ones”, Beard said of America’s capitalists, “oh! their temples of respectability — how I detest them, how I would love to pull them all down!” Happily for Beard, Josephson was handy to do the job for him. Josephson dedicated The Robber Barons to Beard, the historian most responsible for the book’s contents.

Josephson began research for his book in 1932, the nadir of the Great Depression. Businessmen were a handy scapegoat for that crisis, and Josephson embraced a Marxist view that the Great Depression was perhaps the last phase in the fall of capitalism and the triumph of communism. In a written interview for Pravda, the Soviet newspaper, Josephson said he enjoyed watching “the breakdown of our cult of business success and optimism”. He added, “The freedom of the U.S.S.R. from our cycles of insanity is the strongest argument in the world for the reconstruction of our society in a new form that is as highly centralized as Russia’s …”

Though not a member of the Communist Party, Josephson co-authored an open letter of support for the Communist Party candidates for President of the United States in 1932. “We believe”, the letter said, “that the only effective way to protest against the chaos, the appalling wastefulness, and the indescribable misery inherent in the present economic system is to vote for the Communist candidates”.

Josephson traced the troubled capitalist system of the 1930s back to the entrepreneurs of the late 1800s. Thus, by explaining what he thought was the wasteful, greedy, and corrupt development of steel, oil, and other industries under capitalism, Josephson was explaining to readers why the Great Depression was occurring. “I am not a complete Marxist”, Josephson insisted, “But what I took to heart for my own project was his theory of the process of industrial concentration, in Vol. 1 of [Marx’s] Capital, which underlay my book”.

Josephson never intended to write an objective view of American economic life in the Gilded Age. He did little research and mainly used secondary sources that supported his Marxist viewpoint. As he had written in the New Republic, “Far from shunning propaganda, we must use it more nobly, more skillfully than our predecessors, and speak through it in the local language and slogans.” Thus he wrote The Robber Barons with dramatic stories, anecdotes, and innuendos that demeaned corporate America and made the case for massive government intervention.

Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.

July 1, 2026

Scholarship replaced by elitist gatekeeping and bad faith

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It is possible — in fact, essential — to discover and disseminate the facts about Indian Residential Schools. Repeating the unproven (and to many, deeply discredited) narrative and denouncing those seeking the facts as “denialists” has nothing to do with scholarship but it’s very much in line with gatekeeping:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s be honest about what is happening in this video.

This is not academic debate. It is a character attack dressed up as scholarship.

Dr. Travis Hay’s presentation at Mount Royal University, uploaded by Frances Widdowson under the title “Bad Faith: Residential School Denialism and the Academy”, is deeply disappointing. I expected a serious lecture. I expected evidence, argument, and a careful dismantling of claims he believes are wrong.

Instead, what we get is a bad faith lecture.

So yes, Bad Faith is a good title. Just not for the reason Hay thinks.

The real bad faith is pretending to defend scholarship while avoiding the hard work of open debate.

Hay spends much of the lecture drawing a line between “good faith” and “bad faith” criticism. But his standard for good faith appears to be simple: you may disagree only inside the boundaries of the approved framework. You can quibble over details. You can adjust the margins. You can offer polite corrections.

But if you challenge the premise itself, suddenly you are no longer mistaken. You are morally defective. You are a “denialist”, a “grievance merchant”, or some broken person who must be pushed outside respectable academic life.

That is not scholarship. That is gatekeeping.

None of this requires minimizing the real harm done by residential schools. It simply means historical claims should be open to examination. Evidence should be tested. Terms should be defined. Numbers should be scrutinized. Arguments should be answered.

Instead, Hay leans heavily on moral outrage, personal denunciation, and guilt by association. Rather than carefully taking apart Widdowson’s arguments, he drags in old controversies involving other people, uses emotional anecdotes, and builds a mood where the audience is being told what to feel before they are allowed to think.

The most revealing part is the conclusion. Hay says people like Widdowson do not belong in the academy. In other words, the answer to uncomfortable academic work is not better evidence, better reasoning, or open debate. It is expulsion.

That should bother everyone.

A university that cannot tolerate dissent is not protecting knowledge. It is protecting doctrine.

If Widdowson is wrong, prove it. Debate her. Bring the evidence. Take her claims apart in public. That is what serious scholars are supposed to do.

But when the response is censorship, exclusion, and personal insult, it starts to look less like confidence and more like fear.

I came away from viewing this lecture disappointed. Not because Hay disagrees with Widdowson. Disagreement is the whole point of academic life. I was disappointed because the lecture showed so little faith in the public’s ability to hear competing arguments and judge the evidence for themselves.

This lecture does not prove that Widdowson’s arguments are wrong. It proves that parts of the academy no longer know how to handle a serious challenge without reaching for moral panic and professional exile.

June 27, 2026

QotD: When Marxism went mainstream in higher education

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On October 25, 1989, a mere two months after Poland’s pivotal election, the New York Times published an article, headlined “The Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges“, describing a strange and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon. Even as the world’s great experiment in Marxism was collapsing for all to see, Marxist ideas were taking root and becoming mainstream in the halls of American universities.

“As Karl Marx’s ideological heirs in Communist nations struggle to transform his political legacy, his intellectual heirs on American campuses have virtually completed their own transformation from brash, beleaguered outsiders to assimilated academic insiders”, wrote Felicity Barringer.

There were notable differences, however. The stark, unmistakable contrast between the grinding poverty of the Communist nations and the prosperity of Western economies had obliterated socialism’s claim to economic superiority.

As a result, orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on economics, was no longer in vogue. Traditional Marxism was “retreating” and had become “unfashionable”, the Times reported.

“There are a lot of people who don’t want to call themselves Marxist,” Eugene D. Genovese, an eminent Marxist academic, told the Times. (Genovese, who died in 2012, later abandoned socialism and embraced traditional conservatism after rediscovering Catholicism.)

Marxism wasn’t truly retreating, however. It was simply adapting to survive. Watching the upheaval in Poland and other Eastern bloc nations had convinced even Marxists that capitalism would not “give way to socialism” anytime soon. But this would cause an evolution of Marxist ideas, not an abandonment of them.

“Marx has become relativized”, Loren Graham, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Times.

Graham was just one of a dozen of the scholars the Times spoke to, a mix of economists, legal scholars, historians, sociologists, and literary critics. Most of them seemed to reach the same conclusion as Graham.

Marxism was not dying, it was mutating.

“Marxism and feminism, Marxism and deconstruction, Marxism and race – this is where the exciting debates are”, Jonathan M. Wiener, a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, told the paper.

Marxism was still thriving, Barringer concluded, but not in the social sciences, “where there is a possibility of practical application”, but in abstract fields such as literary criticism.

Kristian Niemietz, “The New York Times Reported ‘the Mainstreaming of Marxism in US Colleges’ 30 Years Ago. Today, We See the Results”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2020-09-18.

June 22, 2026

Progressive intellectual arrogance

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Konrad tries to explain the apparently universal intellectual snobbery of progressives, which has brought pretty much every western country into the era of the expert:

Why is the left so arrogant?

Because they put their trust in a global elite. Not directly, but through the media and the universities the elite manipulate.

My dad always said it the other way around: privilege comes with responsibility. But responsibility is hard. Responsibility requires knowledge.

And in a world growing more complex and unpredictable by the year, understanding what’s happening around you takes more and more of it.

Twenty years ago you could walk through Manhattan around noon on a Sunday and watch half the city reading the Times. The thing was massive, but a fast, educated reader could come away with a decent picture of the whole world in a few hours.

Then two things happened.

Craigslist gutted newspaper revenue, and DEI mandates swapped great reporters for morally indignant j-school hacks. The quality and accuracy of information cratered.

At the same time, the internet roared to life and the world got radically more interconnected overnight.

So the elite grew less informed exactly as complexity exploded.

To cope, they borrowed a trick from NASA. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the best rocket scientist and the best navigator and the best flight surgeon all at once. So mission control compartmentalized. The best person in each silo got a desk. Thruster problem? Everyone turns to the engine expert. Someone’s hurt? Everyone turns to the flight surgeon. The rocket guy never had to learn a thing about medicine.

The elite copied the model. They switched their brains off for anything outside their lane. Everyone specialized inside their own bubble.

But compartmentalization runs on trust. Put one bad actor in mission control, and the moment everyone turns to him, bad things happen.

To guard against that, they doubled down on credentialism. They learned to trust only the experts minted by certain colleges and blessed by certain think tanks.

And the bad actors had a field day. Fraud, disinformation, theft, all of it could happen inside a silo, unseen. And it did.

Then came a mission control director who told them not to worry. Everything was fine. They didn’t know what was going on, but he did, and he was smarter than all of them. He said so, right there in the meetings.

Everyone loves a brilliant, competent boss, especially a charismatic one who seems kind, because it means they no longer have to worry. He’s got it handled. Just trust him.

And trust Obama they did.

But he had nothing handled except his own aura. And he let Marxist actors run loose inside the silos that mattered, education and HR chief among them.

The right was skeptical, so they kept reading, kept hunting for alternative sources, kept trying to make sense of the complexity themselves. Nobody cracked it completely. But they started seeing the big red anomaly lights blinking across the dashboard.

So the smart people on the right kept building broad knowledge while the left stayed siloed. Ten years passed, and the left’s elite fell far, far behind.

They’re starting to see that Obama was a fool. But they’re stuck. You can’t cram ten years of missed homework into a few months. And they’re rich and powerful and have no interest in going back to school.

They have two options. Admit they were wrong and put in months, maybe years, of hard work to take responsibility for their actions. Or keep acting like sheep. If the rewards weren’t there, some might choose the work.

But the system is so riddled with fraud, so many hollowed-out silos kept on life support, that there’s more than enough money sloshing around the NGOs to fund their posh lives.

They have the privilege with none of the responsibility. It’s a comfortable place to sit. They don’t want to change.

But holding that position requires one thing: they have to believe their mission control director has it all under control and is smarter than anyone on the right.

The bottom line is the have to be arrogant. Or the whole house of cards comes down.

June 14, 2026

The “Dissolution of the Universities” draws ever closer

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Steve McGuire reacts to more news about the conscious dumbing-down of modern university programs:

A Berkeley history professor said he’s gone from assigning 100 pages of reading per week to 35.

Another “said the earliest version of the … course he taught required seven full books, while his most recent iteration exclusively consisted of excerpts”.

“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught”, the first one said.

To which John Carter responds:

The academic death spiral is something to behold.

Demographics are steadily reducing the size of the student body, squeezing finances and driving bankruptcies.

At the same time, standards collapse is destroying the quality of the students the universities admit.

We’re already at the point where it’s common knowledge that a degree signals essentially nothing about intellectual ability. AI is exacerbating this, since cheating is so easy now.

Kids are already starting to forgo university, since they don’t think the cost of the credential is justified. That cuts even more deeply into the number of students universities can attract.

Universities respond by reducing standards even further (thereby accelerating brand destruction), by reducing tuition (which cuts even more deeply into budgets), and by firing professors in low-enrollment majors (reducing program variety, especially in the small seminars that are generally the most rewarding experiences for students).

[…]

“How can this be reversed?”

It can’t. There are pathways for individual institutions to revive themselves, even to prosper, but the sector as a whole is cooked. The death spiral is driven by prestige collapse as well as the demographic cliff, and intellectual prestige is inversely correlated to the size of the student body. More students means lower standards. That is especially true with a demographic cliff.

The only way to survive this crisis is ruthless elitism. Stop trying to edutain the fat middle of the bell curve, and refocus on the right tail. Become a place where the smartest people gather, and from which anyone who isn’t a 2-sigma outlier is excluded. This makes the school an arena in which intellectual iron can sharpen against iron. Elitism restored, prestige follows.

Next, eliminate the 500 person intro lectures. Admin loves these, since the high student:teacher ratio makes them cash cows. But they’re functionally no better than watching YouTube videos. Refocus on small seminars. This offers value that the Internet can’t.

Schools that take this path will restore or build reputations that will enable them to survive. However, they won’t be large. There is no future in which huge institutions keep tens of thousands of professors and administrators on payroll.

Update, 15 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

June 13, 2026

QotD: Ecce BCG

Filed under: Education, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Seriously, you’re wondering if a young lady in your life is a BCG? Let’s go over the diagnostic criteria. Fully acknowledging that some folks don’t photograph well, appearing to be 10-15 years older than your chronological age is a strong tell. BCGs live hard, on a steady diet of half-caff pumpkin spice mocha latte frappucinos and cock. […]

Of course BCG stands for “Basic College Girl”, and thus she can be found at any institution of “higher” “learning”, but the most Basic ones of all go to colleges you’ve never heard of. Jonah Goldberg is a good example, and while I know he’s technically male, his act is classic BCG. He famously — or infamously — went to Goucher College, which is the kind of school that likes to pretend it’s a mini-Ivy, when in fact it’s the kind of school bright-enough but directionless young nouveau riche kids go to when they just can’t kick that drug habit.

[…]

Achieving shockingly high rank right out of the gate is another tell, and I know what you’re thinking, because of course I thought it too: Mark Meadows is 63 years old, and in the world we grew up in, there’s only one way for a straight-out-of-college girl to become a “close confidante” of a 63 year old man. In my experience, though, BCGs aren’t socially savvy enough to figure that out.

Yeah yeah, I know, but y’all, as primal as that is, these BCGs are just weird. They have no social skills whatsoever. Two data points. First, from Hutchinson’s wiki page:

    Identified as a “White House legislative aide”, Hutchinson was the subject of a nationally-syndicated AP photograph in which she was shown dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” alongside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the end of Trump’s September 21, 2020, campaign rally in Swanton, Ohio.

That is not grownup behavior. No woman who ever hoped to be taken seriously in politics would be caught dead doing that, as recently as 15 years ago. They have absolutely zero idea how they come off to other people.

Second data point: I once taught a night class in one of my Flyover State tours. I had this girl there who was just dying to get to Capitol Hill. She was involved in every possible Poli Sci club, the pre-law club, the Young Legislators (or whatever FNG shit it was), and so on. She emailed me once to say she’d be coming to class late, because she was representing Student Senate (or whatever) in some big to-do the college was hosting for the Governor.

When she shows up to my class, she’s wearing this tight red cocktail dress that would’ve looked trashy on a Vegas waitress. It was slit at the sides and back. and at the midriff. It had sequins, I shit you not. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. You went to a reception. With the Governor. Wearing that.

They have no savvy at all, y’all. None whatsoever. The invitation she got read “formal attire”, so she wore what she wore to the sorority formal. You could practically still see Chad Thundercock’s handprints on her ass.

And that’s the fourth and most diagnostic criterion: utter, complete, hilarious fucking cluelessness. About everything.

Severian, “Alt Thread: Diagnosing the BCG”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.

June 9, 2026

QotD: The temptations of totalitarianism

Filed under: Education, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 1977, the French essayist, Jean-François Revel, published a tract with the title The Totalitarian Temptation. In it, he condemned the western intelligentsia’s faiblesse, which was at the same time dishonest, posturing, stupid, and evil, for Stalinist-style dictatorships.

One might have thought — I certainly thought — that with the downfall of the Soviet Union, the totalitarian temptation had been exorcised once and for all. This, of course, was a very superficial view. Instead of disappearing, the temptation balkanised, so to speak, and was also repatriated. Totalitarianism had been shown almost as conclusively as anything in the sphere of human affairs to be inherently absurd, intellectually nugatory, and catastrophic in practice. This fact was not sufficient, however, to destroy its attractions — at least for those who desire a complete solution to all of life’s little problems such as how to live and what to live for. A solution in the mind is worth a thousand disasters in the world.

Naturally, it takes a certain level of education to feel the temptations of totalitarianism: they do not occur to the illiterate, for example, but only to the intelligentsia. The latter has increased in size almost exponentially with the expansion of tertiary education, or at least with attendance at institutions of tertiary instruction. In retrospect, it is not surprising that totalitarianism should continue to exert its siren-song in previously liberal societies, particularly when the young, always tempted by radical ideas, face genuine if intractable problems, seemingly worse than those of the previous generation.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Temptations of Power”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-06.

June 7, 2026

QotD: Undergrad writing

Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The other problem undergrads typically have is a concern with “style”. That’s almost harder to break than any other habit, because the fix sounds so robotic: Subject-verb-object; five sentences per paragraph; five paragraphs per paper. Back when I first started teaching, I had a lot of students just back from the Sandbox, giving college a try on the GI Bill. I enjoyed having them in class for lots of reasons, but a big one was that the military at that time still taught the basic five-paragraph essay (maybe they still do). Your basic After Action Report ain’t great literature, but it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, efficiently.

I would always tell students who genuinely wanted to improve that nobody is ever going to fail your term paper for style. Unless you really want to be a novelist — and you don’t; we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you did — pretty much all the writing you’re ever going to do is about efficient communication. Fuck literature, fuck all the tropes of rhetoric. Just lay it out there. Who cares if it’s not a page-turner?

But the few things students are taught about writing in grade school are not just useless, they’re counterproductive, because they focus – for some unfathomable reason — on style. So you end up with crap like this:

    This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.

Duuuuuuude … far out!!! It’s not quite as “cosmic” as some of the intro sentences I’ve gotten over the years (one kid said something like “Throughout history, there have been many historic events”), but it’s just filler, very obvious filler, and that’s the very first thing your reader sees. Give me Militarese any day: “At 0500 hours, patrolling near Checkpoint Bravo, 1st platoon encountered an enemy force of approximately platoon strength …” But back in sophomore English, Teacher said that all papers must have a Thesis Statement, and since xzhey never bothered to define “Thesis Statement” I keep getting stuff like this.

Same way with the other crap they teach. There’s the one about never using the same word twice, so I’d get papers with half the thesaurus cut-and-pasted. There’s stuff about alliteration and parallelism and metaphors and passive voice, oh God, the passive voice. I swear, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Passive voice on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Botched alliteration glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain, after I’ve had enough beers to endure grading another batch of midterms …

Yeah, you see what I did there. It’s all so, so unnecessary. The point of writing is communication, and in this instance what you are trying to communicate, above all else, is that you have read and understood the assignment. Every sentence I have to read about how deeply thought provoking you found the article is another moment of my life gone, like tears in the rain. The funny thing is, except for the far-out intro, this girl mostly doesn’t have the “style” problem. Her sentences are short and to the point, and most of them are in that nice subject-verb-object pattern that makes me suspect AI, especially coming from a Current Year undergrad.

In my experience, the Kids These Days either give you tweets — often literal bullet points, to the point where some colleagues actually had to specify complete sentences in their essay prompts — or these long, byzantine things that look like really bad parodies of Alexander Pope. If she really does write like that, good! I can work with that. Outline your response next time, making sure that each paragraph contains at least one direct citation from the assignment, and you’ll be fine.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-05.

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