Instead it was the story du jour for weeks and he was hounded, and now he isn’t here any more
Meanwhile how many white academics are actual criminals? How many white guys have used their status in academia to ruin lives? To victimise? How much academic fraud actually happens that we don’t make a big deal out of? Even when academic fraud does get attention, it doesn’t get this amount of scrutiny.
And it is because he had the temerity to use his lies to “pollute” a symbol of whiteness with his blackness, and that was his actual crime. Being black and thinking he bad a right to be at Cambridge. The lies were secondary.
Fuck the press, fuck academia, and fuck social media
Anyone knows what sort of “plaigiarism” he was accused of? The BBC article I read said that the accusations were started by a honkie academic who describes himself as race realist and was himself disgraced for plagiarism. So I cannot fathom how this person’s harrassment got so out of hand. (I can actually. It’s because of racism. But you know.)
His PhD thesis was as I understand it accused of being heavily copied more or less directly from an existing article. What he did was academic fraud, the press cared because he was black.
The level to which his actual malfeasance is not the issue is hard to express.
It does seem that he was a plagiarist, but that simply isn’t the point. That’s a matter to be dealt with within his academic discipline/institution. The trial by media he was subjected to was absolutely disgusting and unnecessary. Plagiarism in academia is happening all. the. time. (the website retraction watch was a guilty pleasure of mine while I was at school, and now I’m gonna go see if they have anything to say about this) I cannot think of another instance that was reported on in mainstream media, let alone so widely. It also seems like it was widely reported before the investigation was carried out which is doubly disturbing imo.
Jan Hendrick Schön almost faked his way to a nobel prize. He faked hundreds of papers. He got nothing approaching this.
The naked racism on display is wild.
I just remembered that Joe Biden had a plagiarism scandal in 1988. If only that had ended his career.
Doris Kearns Goodwin had a plagiarism news cycle. If I recall correctly she blamed it on a research assistant and she was immediately back on every Sunday news show that needed a historian.
Claudine Gay being driven out of Harvard’s presidency is somewhat comparable, since it was so obviously fueled by racism and Zionism rather than academic dishonesty.
The real test of that was Boris Johnson. A man who was fired for lying, committed plagiarism both before and during his time in office, and at no point faced this even as prime fucking minister.
I never even heard about his plagiarism scandals, despite reading, both when he was on the rise and in power, a bunch of essays from classicists saying “We disavow!”