Tag: universities

US Academic Who Exposed Plagiarist Jason Arday Is Suspended After Arday Commits Suicide

American academic Nathan Cofnas has been suspended by Belgium’s Ghent University after he helped expose explosive plagiarism allegations involving the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday.

Cofnas announced the suspension on X on Thursday.

“I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me,” Cofnas wrote.

“The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.”

Hours earlier, Cofnas said the university was investigating him for allegedly “discriminating against Arday.”

Ghent University confirmed that Cofnas had been suspended “as a precautionary measure” while officials conduct a preliminary disciplinary investigation.

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After Cambridge Academic Commits Suicide Over Being Exposed as Fraud, Activists Call for ‘Arday’s Law’ to Limit Free Speech and Honest Reporting

The passing of Jason Arday is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of his own making.

This is true in both a literal sense, in that his death was apparently a suicide, and figuratively, in that the events that drove the former Cambridge sociology professor to suicide were fabulism and fabrication in the service of a career of academic stardom.

He made a Faustian bargain with the truth to achieve academic stardom — one that was so absurd that anyone who bothered to fact-check it would discover it to be a farrago of lies — and could not bring himself to face the consequences of his prevarications when they were brought to light, quite belatedly.

Now that he has killed himself because someone finally reported on his misdoings, some in the United Kingdom want to change the law so that you can’t tell the truth about someone who isn’t telling the truth, or who is doing other things they shouldn’t be doing.

In other words, your free speech should end where a famous person’s feelings might theoretically begin.

A petition on Change.org to enact something called “Arday’s Law” — which would limit the amount of coverage the media could devote to a person over a certain period of time in the United Kingdom — had garnered over 4,300 verified signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

This comes amid a similar petition from the Good Law Project, which calls for an inquiry into Arday’s death, albeit without proposing concrete limits on speech. However, it does call his death “the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” which leads to obvious conclusions about what they might want that inquiry to recommend. That petition had 121,649 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

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‘Ghoulish’: Harvard paying $53 million for selling ‘heads, faces, brains and hands’ from corpses on black market

A court settlement has been reached in a “ghoulish class-action” lawsuit over the sale of body parts – from bodies donated for medical research – by a former morgue manager at Harvard.

And it has the school paying out $53 million to the families of the deceased.

A report from the New York Post explains a state court judge in Boston has preliminarily approved the deal in the legal action that resulted from the schemes of Cedric Lodge, the disgraced former Harvard morgue manager.

He was arrested back in 2023 and later was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling organs and body parts of cadavers donated to the school.

“As far back as 2018, Lodge had been stealing body parts — including ‘heads, faces, brains, skin and hands’ — which he’d then bring to his home in New Hampshire and sell with his wife, prosecutors said, shipping them to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” the report explained.

His wife, Denise, was given a year in jail for her role.

School officials called Lodge’s actions “despicable abhorrent, and a flagrant betrayal of our values as a medical community.”

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OF COURSE: Abdul El-Sayed’s Half-Sister is a Radical Professor at the University of Chicago Who Allegedly Assaulted a Police Officer

Being a radical, leftist lunatic apparently runs in Abdul El-Sayed’s family. The half-sister of the Michigan senate candidate is a professor at the University of Chicago who has participated in anti-ICE protests and even allegedly assaulted a police officer.

What a charming family they must be. Don’t you want to elevate them to the United States Senate after hearing this?

This is just another warning sign about El-Sayed as a candidate.

FOX News reported:

Controversial socialist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing fresh scrutiny after it was revealed that his close relative is a far-left professor who was arrested on a felony charge last year for her role in an anti-ICE riot.

Eman Abdelhadi is a polarizing figure. She works as an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development, and has a years-long history of landing in the national spotlight for radical activism and inflammatory statements.

She’s also El-Sayed’s half sister.

Last fall, as leftist zealots spent months protesting, sometimes violently, outside an ICE detention facility in suburban Chicago, Abdelhadi was booked after allegedly spitting on an Illinois state trooper. She was charged on Oct. 3 with two counts of aggravated battery to a government employee, a Class 3 felony, and two counts of resisting/obstructing peace, a Class A misdemeanor.

A day before her arrest, she appeared on a podcast called “Movement Memos,” which is affiliated with the far-left publication Truthout. During that interview, she recalled her previous experiences at the riots at the Broadview facility.

She seems nice.

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The Decline Of Higher Education Continues

During my second career teaching high school English, I noticed several darkly funny but disturbing trends in “higher” education.  They were fueled by three primary drivers: abandoning merit, the federal government taking over the student loan industry, and DEI hysteria.

It was Barack Obama who federalized the student loan industry, pushing the idea that everyone should go to college.

To make that idea a reality, it was necessary for the government to guarantee student loans.

That had plenty of unfortunate and foreseeable effects. Because Colleges no longer had any financial skin in the game, they went on a mad administrator-hiring binge, which required enormous amounts of money, which required unprecedented numbers of students. 

Combined with a faux-religious devotion to DEI, colleges admitted all manner of people who in past years would have reasonably been found to be poorly suited to do college-level work. To cover this, it was necessary to do away with any sort of predictive testing like the SAT. All that was required for college admission was a student loan, unless one was a white male applying at an Ivy League school. Those guys, regardless of academic qualification, were often denied.

Enormous DEI departments with all manner of administrators and functionaries were established, and hundreds of millions were wasted on DEI gurus imported to inspire them.

So unprepared were so many, colleges were forced to establish remedial high schools on campus. It was a great scam. Full tuition for no credit, and blame students’ lack of ability on high school teachers like me, who could have told them who wasn’t academically capable if anyone had bothered to ask.

Grade inflation was a direct result of these disasters. It was necessary to hide the scams, so professors were required not only to dumb down the content of their classes and to require far less work, but to award unearned grades. An entire generation of college students was conditioned to expect maximum grades for minimum and poor work. And God help any professor who gave a minority student the grade their lack of work deserved.

As a result, innumerable students took 6-7 years to get a 4-year degree at enormous cost, but many simply dropped out without a degree, bearing enormous debt they had no credentials or ability to pay off.

I’m certainly not arguing college should be denied to anyone. I’ve known many people who struggled greatly but managed to earn a degree and were better and more productive people for it. I am arguing for rational decision-making and fiscally sound, ethical colleges.

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Outrage! UMich offers 15-credit LGBT credentials amid grade-covering plan

In the latest manifestation of Woke Inc Campus Reform is reporting “The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor will begin covering first-semester letter grades for first-year students in its College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) in fall 2027, while the college continues to offer 15-credit undergraduate and graduate credentials in LGBTQ studies.”

This is both unfair to other students academically, as well as unfairly and immorally promoting “alternative lifestyles”.

LGBT students should not be given an advantage in academia.

The emphasis in school should be on reading, math, and history, not on left-wing agendas.

“Under the university’s First-Semester Grade Covering Pilot Program, all first-year LSA students will have their first-semester grades displayed on transcripts as pass (P) or no credit (NC). The pilot does not apply to first-year students enrolled in the university’s other colleges.”

This is outrageous and is unfair to students who earn higher scores.

“Dean Rosario Ceballo, who proposed grade covering during her 2025 State of the College address, said the change would encourage students “to try a course in a field they know nothing about” and “to embrace the joy of learning.”

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House Committees Detail Harvard Ties With Chinese Entities In New Report

A report released by House committees on Aug. 13 alleged that Harvard University prioritized financial ties over American national security and received more than $600 million from China, the most of any U.S. university.

The report, released by the House Select Committee on China and the House Education and Workforce Committee, alleged that Harvard created a nonprofit called Harvard Global to circumvent federal requirements for disclosing foreign donations to higher education.

According to the report, Harvard Global initially stated on its website that it could serve as a “proposal applicant and awardee” for awards the university was unable to accept for legal or financial reasons. The nonprofit later removed the language after the committees sent Harvard a draft of the report.

“Harvard created an entity in a blatant attempt to get around federal foreign funding disclosure laws. That’s unacceptable, especially given Harvard’s history of failing to comply with these requirements,” Education and Workforce Committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement.

The committees identified 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and researchers affiliated with Chinese universities, including a “Seven Sons” university, the report stated.

The “Seven Sons of National Defense” is a group of elite Chinese universities directly subordinate to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates China’s defense sector.

The House committees alleged that Harvard-affiliated researchers have worked with “Chinese universities that, as a matter of policy, conduct extensive weapons research and development and hold top-secret security clearances with the PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”

The report cited a 2023 research paper on magnetic materials co-authored by a Harvard-affiliated researcher and a researcher at China’s National University of Defense Technology – which the U.S. government has placed on its entity list as a threat to American national security.

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UK Left Blames Death of Ex-Cambridge Professor Arday on ‘Racism’, Media Scrutiny of Plagiarism Claims

British leftists have attempted to blame racism and media scrutiny for the untimely death of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who sensationally resigned last week amid plagiarism allegations and accusations of fabricating his backstory.

On Friday afternoon, Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor, Jason Arday, was found dead at a London address at the age of 41, just days after resigning from his post as professor of sociology of education amid swirling controversy and claims that he had engaged in plagiarism.

According to a Substack article last month from University of Ghent philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who was fired from Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after expressing race-realist views on IQ differences, Arday’s thesis had been flagged by plagiarism-detection software.

It then emerged that Cambridge had been alerted to potential plagiarism in his thesis and in other papers by Plymouth Marjon University Emeritus Professor Dave Harris in 2023, yet the university only launched an investigation into the matter earlier this month.

London’s Daily Telegraph reported that it had “identified more than 100 passages that are identical or nearly identical to a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student.”

On top of allegations of plagiarism, questions were also raised over Arday’s supposedly remarkable early life, as he claimed to have risen to the top of academia despite allegedly being unable to talk until the age of 11 and being unable to read or write until he was 18 as a supposed result of autism. Arday also previously boasted of having run 30 marathons in 35 days, partly while suffering from a leg fracture.

Amid the controversy, the previous media darling resigned on August 5th, claiming that the “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.”

Less than ten days later, he was found dead. A spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police said on Friday that his “death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.” The left-wing Guardian newspaper reported that the force is “understood not to believe anyone else was involved in the death.”

Despite limited information about the circumstances of his death, prominent left-wing figures were quick to blame the media scrutiny and “racism” for Arday’s death. For example, far-left Labour MP Nadia Whittome said that Arday was “hounded by the British press in a way that went far beyond scrutiny, was disproportionate, and simply would not have happened to a white, middle class person in the same position.”

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Who Killed Jason Arday?

The strange and fascinating tale of the greatest con-man and fantasist of the twenty-first century has come to a macabre and shocking end. On Friday, Jason Arday was found dead in his London home. Police said that while his death was “unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious,” which, whatever else it may mean, indicates that he wasn’t murdered, and apparently that he committed suicide. Yet the question of who really killed him, in a moral if not in a criminal sense, is still very much on the table.

Arday’s family immediately went into aggrieved victimhood mode, issuing a statement that clearly put the onus on those who had ridiculed and mocked Arday in the wake of the exposure of his truly breathtaking web of lies: “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse” the family claimed, referring not simply to when his lies and plagiarism were exposed, but to his becoming the youngest black professor ever at Cambridge University four years ago. “The campaign of misinformation,” they added, “was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”

Wait a minute. Whose “campaign of misinformation”? Jason Arday was in no conceivable sense a victim of any “campaign of misinformation.” The only “campaign of misinformation” in the entire bizarre story of Jason Arday was the one he waged himself, in spinning what The Atlantic dubbed “a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.”

Hard to believe is an understatement. The Atlantic provides a helpful summary: “He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days.”

Interestingly, The Atlantic then continues this list with examples of how rapturously the academic world received Arday, as if these were more examples of his “hard-to-believe” life story, when actually these are examples of how supposedly rational, evidence-based academics react when they encounter an obvious mountebank who just happens to confirm everything they want to believe about the world: “Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was ‘the best in the world,’ according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.”

Yes, and it was a meteoric rise, and a spectacular fall, not because of Arday’s talents, or lack thereof, or because of the skillfulness of his lies and plagiarism. In fact, he wasn’t actually very good at either. His purloining of other people’s work was clumsy and obvious, and his autobiographical claims strained credulity well beyond the breaking point for anyone who dared to ponder them rationally, but clearly, no one around him was willing to do so. He was more powerful than a locomotive? Okay. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound? Sure.

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Insanity! Oregon State Requires Two Woke Courses Examining ‘Systems of Oppression’

In the latest college madness Campus Reform is reporting “Oregon State University requires undergraduate students who enrolled in summer 2025 or later to complete two “Difference, Power & Oppression” (DPO) courses as part of its Core Education curriculum.”

In other words, as far as Oregon State is concerned, they remain a woke outpost of political correctness.

This insane course is focused on WOKE indoctrination.

“In addition to “difference, power, and oppression,” participants in the DPO Academy learn about “feminist and critical pedagogies” and “fundamentals of curriculum transformation.”

Its yet to be explained how oppression and feminist studies help advance a student’s education and prepare them for the workforce.

The reason they give for requiring these courses is even more outrageous.

“The inequitable distribution of social, economic, and political power in the United States and globally is sustained through systems of oppression, which represent a variety of discriminatory institutional beliefs and practices,” the description states. “These beliefs and practices obscure the origins and operations of systemic oppression in daily life, such that this inequitable power distribution is assumed to be the natural order.”

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