Tag: education

Jason Arday: A Case Study in Academic Witch‑Hunting and Institutional Cowardice

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The death of Jason Arday, discovered at his London residence on August 14, cannot be separated from the eleven-day media frenzy that preceded it, nor from the long-standing political backlash that this frenzy reflects. What gets overlooked amid the flood of commentary—whether from those trying to defend Nathan Cofnas or from those reducing the incident to a morality tale about racism—is the influence of the institutions involved: Cambridge University, the media which produced 188 stories in nine days, and the political environment that has made the revival of hereditarian pseudoscience acceptable again in reputable academic fields. This is not a story about two individuals. It is a story about a system.

The Function of “Race Realism”

Cofnas’s intellectual initiative is rooted in a longstanding tradition. The resurgence of the hereditarian argument—asserting that genetics account for group differences in intelligence—has a troubling history. Its roots trace back to Francis Galton’s eugenics movement, the racialist propaganda of the Pioneer Fund, and the post-World War II revival of biological determinism through behavioural genetics. Leading figures today—such as Richard Lynn, Emil Kirkegaard, Heiner Rindermann, Charles Murray, and Cofnas himself—are not isolated individuals, but part of an interconnected ideological network.

Nathan Cofnas holds a unique place in modern academia: he is a trained philosopher whose career is closely linked to the resurgence of hereditarian “race realism,” an ideology with a long-standing tradition of offering pseudo-scientific support for social inequality. His journey—from Columbia to Cambridge, Oxford, and ultimately Ghent—reflects not genuine intellectual curiosity but the re-emergence of biological determinism as a respected mainstream academic viewpoint.

Cofnas argues that racial differences in intelligence are largely genetic, echoing historical eugenics and the Pioneer Fund. She claims this defends ‘science’ from political meddling, but in truth, it advances a political agenda. Hereditarian ideas historically justify inequality by framing historical injustices like colonialism and segregation as biological fate. Cofnas’s assertion that Black academics would have ‘approach[ed] zero per cent ‘ at top universities under meritocracy is not a scientific claim but an ideological stance.

Hereditarianism has historically functioned to justify inequality as natural rather than created. It acts as a reactionary ideological tool, used whenever capitalism faces crisis and needs pseudoscientific backing for social stratification. The appointment of a Ghent University scholar claiming that Black academics would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions” under a meritocratic system reflects not academic freedom but the decline — or lack — of institutional barriers against pseudoscientific race theories in European academia. This is not the protection of unpopular opinion. It is the mainstreaming of a body of thought whose historical function has been to prepare the ideological ground for attacks on the working class.

His rise has been enabled by institutions that accept race science as a valid area of research. Cambridge awarded him a prestigious fellowship, and Ghent University hired him despite his public support for genetic racial hierarchy. These choices show not academic bravery but the weakening of any ethical boundary against pseudoscience when it aligns with the broader right-wing movement for “academic freedom,” aiming to restore reactionary ideas under the guise of intellectual diversity.

The controversy involving Jason Arday brought Cofnas’s work into the spotlight. His blog post accusing Arday of plagiarism in his PhD thesis sparked a massive media frenzy—188 articles in just nine days—that ended with Arday’s resignation and death. Cofnas briefly became a symbol: to his supporters, a martyr for truth; to critics, a promoter of racial hostility. However, focusing on his personality masks a larger issue. Cofnas is not an anomaly but a sign of a political environment where hereditarian ideas have found renewed institutional backing, and universities, driven more by reputational risk than core principles, vacillate between tolerance and rejection based on public pressure.

Nathan Cofnas matters not because his ideas are new — they are not — but because their reappearance in respectable academic settings signals a broader social reaction. His career marks the return of an ideology that has historically prepared the ground for exclusion, repression, and worse. To understand Cofnas is to understand the conditions that allow such ideas to flourish: a university system hollowed out by market logic, a media apparatus eager for spectacle, and a political order increasingly receptive to biological explanations for social crisis. In that sense, Cofnas is less a philosopher than a weather vane. His prominence tells us not where science is going, but where society is drifting.

Cambridge’s Cowardice — and Its Class Function

Cofnas’s defenders argue that Cambridge allowed alleged plagiarism by Arday but expelled Cofnas for his opinions. However, this overlooks a broader issue: Cambridge’s actions were driven by institutional risk rather than principles. When Cofnas risked damaging the university’s reputation, the university quietly pushed him out. Similarly, when Arday became a liability, the university quickly distanced itself, removing web pages and ending investigations after his resignation. Cambridge did not protect either individual; it prioritised its own reputation.

This is not an inconsistency; it illustrates the consistent logic of the modern university, shaped by reputation and market interests. The university usually does not protect academic freedom or individuals—whether they face right-wing hostility or student protests—if defending them would cost it. Calling this ‘cowardice’ moralises the issue, but the reality is structural. The modern university operates as a corporation within the capitalist state, with research priorities, admissions, and intellectual culture shaped by capital accumulation and imperialist goals. Its treatment of individuals shifts based on the changing needs of class dominance.

The Press as an Instrument, Not a Check

The story is about how an academic integrity issue turned into a nine-day, 188-article spectacle. While multiple outlets backed some allegations of plagiarism, the extensive coverage went beyond reporting and became a form of public humiliation. This included marathon claims, personal details, and relentless daily coverage. This illustrates the typical modern media pile-on: it usually ignores the human at its centre and becomes hostile when political goals are involved. The same outlets that discredited Arday defended Noah Carl, publishing editorials praising his research linking crime to ethnic groups. They also rallied to defend Carl’s academic freedom while ignoring attacks on democratic rights, such as the persecution of Julian Assange. The media frenzy is not accidental; it’s a political tactic—aimed at destroying individuals as a substitute for honest debate.

Individualising a Systemic Failure

Labelling this conflict as “Cofnas versus Arday” or portraying it as a clash between “the right and DEI” oversimplifies the situation and ignores underlying structural issues. Personal explanations—such as blaming a vindictive blogger, a dishonest professor, a woke establishment, or a racist backlash—often replace systemic causes with individual blame. The real issue is understanding what kind of university and press tend to produce such outcomes. In reality, these institutions are motivated not by the pursuit of truth but by managing reputational risks. Their loyalties are more aligned with donors, government policies, and market goals than with genuine scholarship. Their intellectual environment is shaped more by capital interests than by societal needs.

The pseudo-left’s focus on identity politics acts as a reactionary force in itself. By turning every social conflict into a matter of racial or gender identity, it gives the right wing an effective opposition. It keeps the working class, which could challenge the current order—responsible for tragedies like Arday’s death—disarmed and divided. A conflict between “race realism” and “anti-racism” within bourgeois academia doesn’t threaten the capitalist system that sustains both.

The public discourse surrounding Arday’s death — the moral panic, the fixation on individual virtue and villainy, the refusal to interrogate structural causes — serves a precise social interest. It keeps the population politically demobilised, morally panicked, and convinced that the great questions of social life are matters of personal conduct rather than class struggle.

Jason Arday’s tragedy is rooted in the institutions that made such conflicts between academics unavoidable and deadly. His death reflects a systemic issue that harms individuals to protect itself. The solution isn’t better risk management, improved DEI efforts, or a more courteous media. Instead, it lies in building a large, international socialist movement within the working class that aims to overthrow capitalist institutions and establish a society where human needs take precedence over profit, reputation, or spectacle.

The Hounding of Jason Arday: Media Complicity and the Racial Politics of Academic Scandal

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Jason Arday’s death on August 14, just a week after resigning from his Cambridge professorship, highlights a broader systemic problem rather than an isolated tragedy. It reveals a media environment that sensationalises racial scandals for profit, an academic world that views minority scholars as interchangeable symbols, and a political climate where issues of diversity are passionately debated. Although media outlets now offer condolences and publish reflective editorials, these gestures seem superficial given the extensive coverage before his death. Since then, over 249 articles have appeared, many of which previously contributed to months of speculation, mockery, and personal attacks against Arday, reflecting a purposeful ideological bias.

To understand what happened to Arday, it is essential to analyse not just the allegations themselves, but also the mechanisms that amplified them, the racialised dynamics influencing how they were received, and the wider political economy of scandal journalism within the neoliberal university.

Scandal as Commodity: The Political Economy of Media Harassment

The charges against Arday—related to his doctoral thesis, athletic achievements, and academic schedule—warranted investigation due to their seriousness. Yet, seriousness alone isn’t enough to justify the level of coverage. Over time, proportionality was abandoned, transforming the coverage into a spectacle. This change is deliberate and built into the media system itself. Today’s media functions on a straightforward profit motive: scandals draw audiences.

This boosts engagement, drives more traffic, and bolsters the ad-based revenue that most outlets depend on. In this system: more prominent figures attract greater scandal; racialised individuals enhance ideological appeal; and prestigious institutions profit from their downfall. As the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history, Arday was uniquely situated at this intersection of incentives. His rise carried symbolic weight, making his decline commercially lucrative. Instead of critically scrutinising Arday, the media consumed his story.

Cambridge University’s conduct throughout the incident exposes the superficiality of elite institutions’ claims of commitment to diversity. Such universities, including Cambridge, have refined a dual approach: publicly elevating minority scholars to showcase progress, then quickly distancing themselves when these scholars become politically problematic. Araday’s appointment was celebrated as a sign of change, yet when media scrutiny grew intense, Cambridge defaulted to minimal procedural responses. They carried out their investigation, released a report citing “honest and reasonable errors,” and then remained silent as media criticism escalated. This silence was not neutral; it was complicity.

In the neoliberal university model, diversity serves more as a marketing ploy than a genuine principle. Institutions that have historically upheld elite privilege now promote inclusion not through structural change, but because diversity has become a profitable commodity in higher education. The logic is clear: universities vie for students, donors, partnerships, and global reputation. In this race, diversity acts as a branding tool—symbolising modernity, progress, and moral virtue. Brochures are filled with images of diverse student groups; announcements highlight appointments of minority scholars; strategic documents emphasise themes of equity and belonging. Ultimately, representation becomes a form of advertising.

But branding is not transformation. The neoliberal university’s commitment to diversity rarely extends beyond the symbolic. It is diversity without redistribution, inclusion without power, representation without structural change. The institution remains governed by the same hierarchies of wealth, class and patronage that have defined it for centuries. What changes is the imagery.

This dynamic produces a familiar pattern. Minority scholars are elevated as proof of institutional progress, yet their position is precarious. They are celebrated when they serve the university’s public relations needs, and abandoned when they become politically inconvenient. Diversity hires are treated as emblems, not colleagues — symbols of institutional virtue rather than participants in institutional governance. Their presence is instrumentalised, not protected.

The result is a system in which diversity initiatives coexist comfortably with widening inequality, casualised labour, collapsing student support services and the financialisaton of university governance. Diversity becomes a way to mask these contradictions, to present the institution as socially progressive while its underlying structures remain untouched.

This is the essence of neoliberal diversity: representation deployed to legitimise an institution that has not changed. It is not a challenge to hierarchy but a supplement to it — a way of modernising the university’s image while preserving its class character.

The tragedy, as recent events have shown, is that individuals placed at the centre of this branding exercise bear the human cost when the image fractures. Diversity is celebrated when it flatters the institution, and discarded when it threatens it. In this sense, the neoliberal university does not simply fail to protect minority scholars; it places them in the line of fire. Elite institutions embrace diversity only insofar as it enhances their public image. When that image becomes threatened, the individual is discarded. Arday was celebrated as a symbol; he was abandoned as a liability.

The New York Times: Liberalism’s Complicity in Racialised Ridicule

The New York Times’ involvement in the incident is especially telling, as it reveals the ideological role of the liberal press. The Times published an article ridiculing Arday’s personal life with the headline: “Jason Arday may want to get himself a nice pair of orange trousers.” This was not genuine journalism; it was contemptuous mockery disguised as commentary. Moreover, it carried racial undertones that would be unimaginable if directed at a white scholar accused of similar misconduct. The Times later removed the article, replacing it with an Error 410 where the satire once was. This removal does not indicate remorse but appears to be damage control—an editorial acknowledgement, only made after Arday’s death, that the piece should never have been published. The Times’ behaviour mirrors its role in the Claudine Gay affair: performative concern for academic standards masking a deeper hostility to the presence of Black scholars in elite institutions.

Simon Baron-Cohen’s description of Arday’s final hours is deeply troubling. Arday spoke of experiencing “relentless scrutiny,” “ridicule,” and the discrediting of “absolutely every detail of his life.” He believed he was being targeted by a “racist playbook”—a pattern recognisable to anyone familiar with how Black academics are often treated in elite settings. This playbook typically involves: identifying a prominent Black scholar, scrutinising their credentials in detail, exaggerating minor mistakes into moral failings, framing the situation as a sign of institutional decline, and then using the scandal to undermine diversity efforts. This approach is not equally applied to white academics; it’s mainly used against those whose presence in elite institutions is already contested by ideological opponents. Arday’s case clearly exemplifies this pattern.

The Family’s Statement: The Reality of Sustained Abuse

Arday’s family expressed it bluntly: “Jason endured over three years of relentless abuse… The persistent misinformation overwhelmed Jason.” This is not exaggeration but a depiction of the ongoing psychological harm caused by years of hostile coverage, insinuation, and public shame. The press tends to avoid scrutinising its own actions. Editors have resumed their normal activities. While Hacked Off’s demand for an inquiry is justified, it will likely be disregarded. The British press does not oversee itself; it safeguards its interests.

Arday’s death is part of a broader political agenda: using academic scandals as a weapon in cultural battles over diversity, equity, and representation. The ideological right presents these incidents as evidence that diversity compromises merit, minority scholars are promoted beyond their abilities, and elite institutions are failing due to ‘wokeness.”

The liberal press performs a softer version of the same narrative: concern for standards, hand‑wringing about academic integrity, and a refusal to confront the racialised dynamics of scrutiny. Both converge on the same outcome: the destruction of individual scholars and the reinforcement of institutional whiteness.

The rapid shift in media coverage—with outlets softening or deleting their previous reporting—does not reflect remorse but signals institutional panic. The story has already transitioned from scandal to tragedy, from demanding scrutiny to seeking sympathy, and from holding accountability to forgetting it altogether. This is not a moment of reckoning; it’s a retreat. The press is not expressing grief over Arday; it is safeguarding its own interests.

The Chronicle of a System, Not an Exception

Jason Arday’s death isn’t random; it’s a foreseeable result of a society that treats Black scholars as symbols rather than equals, uses diversity for show instead of genuine inclusion, profits from scandal, and relies on an unregulated press that fuels humiliation. What happened to Arday isn’t an isolated incident but reflects how personal destruction is normalised in a media system where racialised stories are lucrative and elite institutions delegate their disciplinary roles to the media. His death highlights media complicity and serves as a warning—without addressing the underlying structural incentives, such tragedies are bound to happen again.

Sources and Bibliography

1. Neoliberalism and Higher Education

  • Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015.
  • Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.
  • Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
  • Collini, Stefan. Speaking of Universities. Verso, 2017.
  • Marginson, Simon. “The Worldwide Trend to Higher Participation in Higher Education.” Higher Education, vol. 72, 2016.

2. Diversity as Branding / Diversity Regimes

  • Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.
  • Ahmed, Sara. What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use. Duke University Press, 2019.
  • Berrey, Ellen. The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
  • Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalising Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
  • Hylton, Kevin. “Institutionalised Whiteness, Racial Microaggressions and Black Bodies Out of Place in Higher Education.” Whiteness and Education, 2016.

3. The Neoliberal University and Marketisation

  • Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Harvard University Press, 1996.
  • Canaan, Joyce, and Wesley Shumar (eds.). Structure and Agency in the Neoliberal University. Routledge, 2008.
  • Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright. “Audit Culture and Anthropology: Neoliberalism in British Higher Education.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1999.
  • Lynch, Kathleen. Equality and Power in Schools: Redistribution, Recognition, and Representation. Routledge, 2019 (esp. chapters on higher education).

4. Critical Race Theory and Academic Gatekeeping

  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour.” Stanford Law Review, 1991.
  • Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Basic Books, 1992.
  • Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. Free Press, 1998 (original 1935).
  • Hall, Stuart. The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Harvard University Press, 2017.

5. Diversity, Meritocracy, and Institutional Legitimacy

  • Bhopal, Kalwant. White Privilege: The Myth of a Post-Racial Society. Policy Press, 2018.
  • Bhopal, Kalwant, and Clare Pitkin. “Diversity and Inequality in Higher Education: A Critical Examination.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2020.
  • Boliver, Vikki. “How Fair Is Access to More Prestigious UK Universities?” British Journal of Sociology, 2015.
  • Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. Routledge, 2014.

6. Media, Representation, and Institutional Image

  • Couldry, Nick. The Culture of Media: The Politics of Representation. Sage, 2000.
  • Davis, Aeron. Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment. Manchester University Press, 2018.
  • Hall, Stuart et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Macmillan, 1978 (for the ideological function of media narratives).

A Study in Method: The SWP’s Treatment of the Jason Arday Case

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The Socialist Workers Party’s response to Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday’s tragic death reflects more than just poor journalism. It embodies the party’s deeper political approach—one influenced by years of ideological decline, adaptation to identity politics, and a move away from traditional Marxist class analysis. The article in the Socialist Worker, branded as an “exclusive,” relies almost entirely on a single friend’s memories. It lacks documentary proof, institutional context, or engagement with thorough reporting from other sources. Essentially, it isn’t an investigation but a moralistic story.

The SWP’s narrative is designed to reach a specific conclusion: Arday “died because of a racist witch-hunt.” The article is structured to back this assertion, with any complicating details either ignored or downplayed. As a result, it exposes more about the SWP’s political decay than about the social factors behind Arday’s crisis.

The Suppression of Material Facts

The SWP claims that Arday’s death was directly caused by racist persecution, but this is not evidenced; it is stated. The article overlooks key facts: Arday resigned after plagiarism allegations, and Cambridge had initiated an investigation into new information about his academic credentials and honorary roles. These issues were central to the crisis. A Marxist perspective starts from the factual details—questioning what the allegations were, how the university responded, which interests were involved, and how the media reacted. The SWP avoids these questions, which would require examining how elite universities operate amid global competition, the commodification of academic labour, and the political economy of prestige.

Even the article’s only source admits that “some of the claims about Jason were misquoted or exaggerated by other people,” and that Arday “may have felt under pressure to exaggerate.” This acknowledgement—which prompts important questions about how personal narratives, institutional scrutiny, and media sensationalism interact—is hidden in just one paragraph. The SWP quickly resumes its fixed conclusion.

Identity Politics as the SWP’s Analytical Framework

The SWP attributes the case solely to race. Cambridge is said to have promoted Arday as a symbol of diversity, equality, and inclusion, sparking resentment among less accomplished academics. The intricate workings of a modern university—its funding, ideological function, government ties, and internal hierarchy—are oversimplified as a psychological conflict rooted in racial jealousy.

This is not genuine Marxism but petty-bourgeois identity politics. Racism is viewed not as a social relation inherent to capitalism but as a detached moral issue. Institutions function not on their material interests but on individual prejudices. The SWP’s story aligns closely with corporate diversity initiatives and the academic field of “equity and inclusion.’ Decades ago, the SWP abandoned Trotsky’s analysis of imperialism and class struggle. Instead, it embraced a politics centred on race, gender, and other categories as independent determinants of society. The Arday article exemplifies this approach: a moralised, individual-centric narrative that omits class relations, institutional interests, and capitalist academic dynamics.

Journalism Reduced to Hagiography

The Socialist Worker article reads as a eulogy, conveying sincere emotion and genuine grief. However, grief is not political analysis. The piece lacks counterarguments, institutional insights, examination of Cambridge’s investigation, and engagement with wider media coverage. Instead, readers are shown only one perspective and are told to accept it as the authoritative account.

This is not genuine journalism; it resembles hagiography. Its purpose is not to clarify the social factors behind Arday’s crisis but to evoke emotional resonance with the SWP’s political stance. Instead of offering analysis, it appeals to sentiment and replaces historical insight with moral outrage. This approach isn’t accidental; it stems from a long-standing tendency to prioritise moralism over materialism. The organisation’s portrayal of Arday’s death isn’t an anomaly but the expected result of a worldview in which political clarity gives way to emotional immediacy, and the complex workings of capitalist institutions are simplified to personal resentments.

The Real Issues the SWP Refuses to Confront

The Arday case prompts important questions. He faced an intense media backlash, with hundreds of articles questioning his credibility. Public figures called the coverage a “hounding.” Examining the links between institutional scrutiny, sensationalist media, and racialised narratives is a valid area for further investigation.

However, investigation demands a materialist approach. This involves examining the university as an institution intertwined with capitalism, viewing media as a political tool, and understanding race as a social relation inherently linked to class. The SWP cannot perform such analysis. Its political stance, rooted in the middle-class protest politics of the late 1960s, closes its eyes to the class dynamics of today’s society.

The modern university is no longer a space where “mediocre academics” vent their frustrations. Instead, it is a globalised institution competing for prestige, funding, and market share. Its evolution is driven by the commodification of research, the casualisation of academic jobs, and the ideological pressures from the state. The media’s role in spreading accusations against Arday can only be understood within the broader context of journalism’s transformation under capitalism—characterised by the decline of investigative reporting, the rise of sensationalism, and the media’s integration into corporate and political interests. These are the issues a Marxist analysis needs to consider, yet the SWP fails to address any of them.

The SWP’s Method and Its Political Degeneration

The SWP’s approach to the Arday case exemplifies a political style that replaces class analysis with identity politics, substitutes moral judgments for investigation, prioritises anecdotes over solid evidence, and treats institutions as biased individuals rather than products of capitalist social relations. This approach fails to account for the complexities of the modern university, media, or the interplay of race and class. It crafts only sentimental stories that mask underlying social realities. Arday’s death calls for thorough examination, but the SWP offers none. Instead, its article highlights the political decline of a faction that has long abandoned Marxism in favour of bourgeois academic ideology.

Podcast Episode: The Death of Jason Arday: A Manufactured Scandal and the Class Politics Behind I

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: A Cambridge professor is celebrated, then destroyed, then dead — and the British press is already turning his death into content. Welcome to A Trumpet of Sedition.

Mara: This episode covers one story, and freerein61 makes the case that it isn't really about one man — it's about how media, class power, and institutional symbolism interact to produce a foreseeable tragedy.

Pip: Let's start with the manufactured scandal itself, and what the post argues was actually driving it.

The Death of Jason Arday: Media, Class, and the Machinery of Destruction

Mara: The post opens with a straightforward claim: Arday's downfall wasn't personal failure. It was structural. The question the piece is asking is whether what happened to him was journalism at all, or something else entirely.

Pip: The post is direct about what that something else was. The setup is the tabloid press recycling the same limited allegations across dozens of outlets, and the conclusion drawn is this: "This was not journalism; it was a political tactic."

Mara: And the stakes follow immediately from that framing. If it's a political tactic, then the resignation that preceded any formal inquiry wasn't a consequence of wrongdoing being proven — it was the tactic working.

Pip: The post is careful to say the plagiarism allegations were serious enough to warrant formal academic investigation. Those processes exist precisely because they're slow and careful. The media didn't wait.

Mara: Cambridge didn't wait either, and the post holds the university directly responsible. It describes a pattern: institutions adopt the symbolism of diversity, then withdraw protection the moment that symbol becomes inconvenient. The phrase used is that the human toll is "paid by the person whose identity is exploited for institutional advantage."

Pip: Which is a fairly precise description of how symbolic politics functions as a shield for the institution rather than a support for the individual.

Mara: The post extends this to the so-called quality press. Broadsheets and public broadcasters aren't let off the hook — their coverage "differed mainly in tone, not substance," repeating the same allegations and the same framing of Arday's downfall as inevitable.

Pip: One unified ideological system with better grammar.

Mara: The psychological dimension gets its own section. Arday's family described years of public abuse, and the post treats that seriously — arguing that prolonged media exposure creates conditions of isolation and collective condemnation that carry direct psychological consequences. The media, it says, is responsible for fostering those conditions.

Pip: And then, after his death, the same outlets ran live updates. The acceleration of the news cycle consuming the person before any process could conclude, and then consuming the death itself.

Mara: The post ties all of this to class structure — a press controlled by a small number of billionaires, serving ruling-class interests by making visibility feel dangerous and dissent feel perilous. The Arday case, in that reading, is less a scandal and more a demonstration.

Pip: The closing argument is that identity politics, as practiced by elite institutions, doesn't address inequality — it rebrands it. And when the symbolic figure stops being useful, the same machinery turns.

Mara: The post ends by arguing that only working-class political action, guided by a socialist program, can challenge the conditions that made this outcome foreseeable. That's where it lands.

Pip: A story about one person that the post insists is about a system — and the argument is hard to dismiss when the system's behavior is this consistent.

Mara: The next episode will tell us whether that argument extends further. The conditions it describes aren't unique to this case.

The Death of Jason Arday: A Manufactured Scandal and the Class Politics Behind It

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The death of Jason Arday, announced on 14 August 2026, marks a deeply troubling moment in British society. Celebrated as Cambridge University’s youngest Black professor in 2023, Arday was last week removed from his role amid intense media attention over allegations of plagiarism and false claims about his athletic and fundraising history. He was found dead in South London on Friday afternoon. His family links this tragedy to years of public abuse. Regardless of what the coroner concludes, one thing is clear: Arday’s downfall was not due to personal failings, but resulted from a coordinated political and media campaign driven by the class interests of Britain’s ruling elite.

A Manufactured Scandal

The allegations against Arday involved parts of his doctoral thesis—serious enough to trigger formal academic investigations. Such processes tend to be slow, careful, and largely unseen by the public. They lack spectacle, headlines, or opportunities for political manipulation. Instead, the British media orchestrated a public trial over several weeks, recycling the same few claims across many outlets, all vying for clicks and ad revenue. The tabloid press, along with supposedly reputable outlets, turned Arday into a daily target of mockery. Even before any official inquiry started, he was forced to resign. This was not journalism; it was a political tactic.

Cambridge University’s Role

Cambridge University directly bears responsibility for the circumstances that resulted in Arday’s death. For many years, the university showcased his appointment as a sign of its “progressive” change—a symbolic act intended to hide its core role as a training ground for Britain’s ruling class. However, when the media turned hostile, Cambridge failed to defend him, demand due process, or contest the tabloids’ hysteria. Instead, the university let the spectacle unfold, distancing itself from the person it had once promoted. This pattern is all too familiar: elite institutions gladly adopt the symbolism of “diversity” but disregard individuals when their visibility becomes inconvenient, leaving the human toll to be paid by the person whose identity is exploited for institutional advantage.

The Media Pile‑On as a Social Phenomenon

The intense media campaign surrounding Jason Arday in the weeks before his death is a key part of the case, not just an incidental detail. It functions as the main force driving the tragedy. To grasp what happened, we must see the media not merely as individual outlets or journalists but as a social institution deeply linked to the class system of capitalist society. Arday’s destruction was not due to “press excess” or editorial mistakes alone. It was a foreseeable result of a system in which media commercial interests, ruling-class political goals, and the ideological needs of elite institutions interact to create cycles of symbolic glorification and public destruction.

The Tabloid Mode of Production

The British media follows a logic Marxists have long critiqued: turning human beings into commodities. In tabloids — now largely merging with mainstream outlets — the core content is personal scandal, humiliation, and reputation destruction. Their circulation and online ad revenue rely on a steady stream of such stories. The Arday case exemplified this formula by featuring a prominent academic from an elite university, allegations of misconduct, a “fall from grace” narrative, and racialised framing that British tabloids have exploited for decades.

Once the story emerged, the machinery kicked in automatically. All outlets echoed the same limited claims, each presented with a new headline. The content was interchangeable; the goal was not to inform but to attract engagement. This media behaviour was not unusual; it was the standard operation of a profit-oriented system.

The Political Function of Scandal

These scandals serve a political function by providing a spectacle that distracts from Britain’s social crisis, which includes collapsing public services, growing inequality, militarism, and the erosion of democratic rights. The destruction of an individual acts as a surrogate drama, allowing a society in decline to project its anxieties and frustrations. The media’s focus on Arday’s alleged plagiarism — a matter ideally addressed through academic processes — was not driven by concern for scholarly integrity. Instead, it aimed to craft a narrative of moral failure, creating a personal drama for millions to consume. Its political importance lies in shifting attention away from the systemic failures of British capitalism.

The Role of “Respectable” Media

It would be a mistake to blame only the tabloid press for the pile-on. The so-called “quality” outlets—such as broadsheets, public broadcasters, and liberal publications—also participated fully. Their coverage differed mainly in tone, not substance, as they repeated the same allegations, insinuations, and framing of Arday as a figure whose downfall was both inevitable and deserved. This shared approach is notable because it reveals how the media functions as a unified ideological system, despite internal differences. The line between tabloid sensationalism and liberal respectability disappears when attacking someone whose symbolic value has shifted from an asset to a liability. The media’s role is not to investigate but to uphold the ideological limits of acceptable public discussion.

The Psychology of the Pile‑On

The media pile-on is more than just a structural issue; it is deeply psychological. It isolates the target, removes their institutional support, and subjects them to constant public scrutiny. The individual becomes the focus of a collective condemnation ritual, leading to intense psychological strain. Arday’s family stated there were “years of public abuse,” which is not an exaggeration. The media’s coverage was not limited to the weeks before his death; it was part of a longer pattern in which his initial fame turned into vulnerability. Such prolonged exposure has a significant psychological impact, and the media is directly responsible for fostering the conditions that lead individuals to despair.

The Acceleration of the News Cycle

The rapid progression of the Arday story highlights a broader crisis in modern media. The 24-hour news cycle thrives on constant updates, with scandals serving as endless sources. Once Arday resigned, the story swiftly shifted from “investigation” to “collapse.” When he passed away, media outlets that had pursued him relentlessly turned his death into breaking news, featuring live updates and sensational headlines. This acceleration of news is not neutral; it hinders thoughtful reflection, bypasses due process, and consumes individuals before any legal or institutional action can occur. The media’s response after Arday’s death—recycling existing facts, speculating on causes, and exploiting the tragedy as content—was a natural extension of the same logic that ended his career.

The media’s involvement in the Arday case can only be understood within the framework of class dominance. The British press, controlled by a small group of billionaires and corporate giants, serves the ruling elite’s interests. Its role is to influence public perception in ways that uphold the current social hierarchy. Targeting symbolic figures—whether celebrities, academics, or political critics—bolsters the idea that individuals are powerless against the machinery of publicity. This fosters cynicism, resignation, and fear among the public. It sends the message that visibility is dangerous, dissent is perilous, and institutions will not defend those who lose favour. Thus, the Arday case is more than a media scandal; it reflects broader authoritarian trends in modern capitalism.

Identity Politics and the Class Function of Symbolic Elevation

Arday’s academic work is shaped by critical race theory, which has gained prominence in elite universities over the last decade. This ideology, rooted in postmodernism and racial essentialism, aims to incorporate privileged upper-middle-class individuals into the state and corporate sectors based on identity rather than class. Cambridge did not promote Arday because he represented working-class interests; instead, they supported him because his scholarship aligned with the university’s ideological goals—providing a racialized viewpoint that allowed the institution to appear progressive while preserving its class hierarchy. Identity politics does not address inequality; it rebrands it. When the symbolic figure becomes politically inconvenient, the same system that champions him is used to undermine him.Predictably, pseudo-left groups—such as NGOs, academic diversity bureaus, and Labour Party affiliates—have reacted to Arday’s death by calling for more of the same politics that contributed to this tragedy. They claim the lesson is to increase “representation,” expand diversity programs, and adopt more racialised analytical frameworks.

The Arday case exposes a significant contradiction in modern liberal politics. While elite institutions leverage identity to legitimize themselves, they neither genuinely protect nor support those they elevate. Their view on identity is driven by necessity rather than solidarity. The working class must develop its own understanding. Racial oppression exists but is fundamentally linked to capitalism, which generates it. Tackling racism can’t rely on critical race theory’s racial essentialism or mere political symbolism. Instead, it requires a concerted effort by the working class to dismantle the social system that maintains inequality, exploitation, and the destructive media.

Jason Arday’s death is tragic but understandable. It stems from a society that devalues human beings, distorts identities, and sees elite institutions as self-serving. Meanwhile, the media acts as an unchecked source of humiliation and harm. The issue isn’t that universities should treat symbolic figures with more care; rather, the politics surrounding symbolism itself is a trap. It obscures the class realities of capitalist society and exposes individuals to media and institutional abuse. Only the independent actions of the working class, guided by a socialist program, can challenge these conditions and prevent future tragedies.

The Arday Affair: How Cambridge’s Branding Machine, Marketised Higher Education, and the Pseudo‑Left Produced a Crisis Eight Centuries in the Making

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The resignation of Professor Jason Arday from the University of Cambridge has sparked widespread comment in British media and politics. However, the issue isn’t just about personal misconduct or admin flaws. It reflects a deeper, systemic crisis in British higher education—shaped by Cambridge and Oxbridge’s long-standing class role, decades of market influences, and protected by the pseudo-left’s focus on identity politics. This analysis explores the historical, political, and economic factors that made the Arday case both unavoidable and inevitable.

Cambridge: Eight Centuries of Class Rule

To understand Cambridge’s behaviour, it’s important to look at its origins. Founded in 1209, Cambridge has long served the ruling class, with its architecture, rituals, and governance acting as tools to perpetuate elite dominance. Historically, Oxford and Cambridge have functioned as training grounds for clergy, civil servants, judges, and political leaders. They also serve as gatekeepers of cultural capital, shaping standards of ‘merit,” and as networks that strengthen aristocratic and bourgeois influence. The colleges were endowed by monarchs, bishops, and wealthy patrons, with governance structures — led by fellows, donors, and senior administrators — designed to maintain privilege rather than democratize knowledge.

The 2019 Sutton Trust report highlighted this continuity: 71% of senior judges, 56% of Permanent Secretaries, 38% of Lords, and 24% of MPs had been educated at Oxford or Cambridge. The elite are twenty-four times more likely to have attended Oxbridge compared to the general population. This pattern is deliberate, as Oxbridge’s prestige functions as a political asset, legitimizing the authority of the ruling class by portraying privilege as merit. It is this prestige—rather than academic quality—that Cambridge aimed to protect in the Arday case.

Marketisation: How Policy Turned Universities into Corporations

The Arday scandal is closely linked to the changes in UK higher education over the last 30 years. Starting with the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act and advancing with the Browne Review in 2010, successive governments reduced public funding and promoted market competition. Between 2011–12 and 2017–18, government funding for universities decreased by 74 per cent in real terms. Currently, 80 per cent of the sector’s income comes from private sources, mainly student fees and commercial activities.

Universities now operate like corporations: they issue bonds worth hundreds of millions of pounds, hold credit ratings from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, and have vice-chancellors acting as CEOs earning over £400,000. Marketing departments have grown to rival academic faculties in size and influence. Students are viewed as customers rather than learners. Academic staff often work on insecure, casualised contracts. This market-driven approach has transformed university life: research is prioritised for grant attraction, teaching for attracting fee-paying students, and public relations for drawing donors and international applicants.

In this context, “diversity” branding functions more as a market strategy than a moral stance. Universities vie for lucrative international students, mainly from China, India, and the Gulf, who pay between £25,000 and £40,000 annually. A professor with a biography that attracts positive media coverage becomes a valuable asset. Arday’s rapid ascent—from a PE lecturer to a Cambridge professor in just seven years—was not an isolated case. Instead, it exemplifies a system where personal stories are commercialised to serve institutional interests.

Arday’s background—overcoming adversity, late literacy, racial uplift—aligned well with Cambridge’s marketing goals. His appointment received extensive positive press, boosted social-media engagement, and increased international recognition. Multiple sources report that concerns about his doctoral thesis were dismissed as issues ‘predating his arrival.’ Senior staff prioritised positive media images over detailed academic review. The university’s communications team promoted Arday’s story worldwide. This pattern is not unusual; systemic incentives drive it. In a market-based system: prestige brings in revenue, visibility attracts students, and narratives enhance brand value. Conversely, academic integrity rarely generates revenue and can even threaten financial interests.

The Pseudo‑Left: Identity Politics as an Ideological Shield

The pseudo-left—comprising academics, commentators, and activists advocating for identity politics while neglecting class issues—plays a significant role in maintaining the ideological structure of market-driven higher education. In universities, identity politics acts as a form of institutional cover: it offers a low-cost alternative to increasing access for the working class, helps elite institutions project progressive credentials, boosts individuals whose profiles can be commodified, and shifts focus away from academic labour exploitation. The pseudo-left celebrated Arday’s appointment as a victory for representation, overlooking the fact that Cambridge’s student body remains predominantly privileged and its governance retains an aristocratic character.

Right‑Wing Reaction: Meritocracy as a Myth

The right-wing campaign against Arday, led by individuals who openly promote racist pseudoscience, isn’t driven by a genuine concern for academic standards. Instead, it’s fuelled by hostility toward any hiring practices that challenge traditional class privilege. However, the right and the pseudo-left are not truly opponents; they represent two facets of petty-bourgeois politics. The pseudo-left hides its class privilege through identity branding, while the right criticises that branding to defend their own class interests. Both factions support the marketisation of higher education, uphold the authority of elite institutions, and ignore capitalism’s role in fostering corruption, inequality, and intellectual decline. The working class faces a false dichotomy: embracing DEI branding or subscribing to right-wing meritocracy. Both are illusions.

The Real Issue: The Corruption of Higher Education Under Capitalism

The Arday scandal does not highlight failures in vetting but instead reveals a deeper systemic issue where education has become a commodity, universities are part of global financial markets, academic labour is increasingly casualised and degraded, bureaucracy employs identity politics to conceal class privilege, and both the right and pseudo-left manipulate DEI controversies — the right to reinforce privilege and the pseudo-left to defend branding. Both sides uphold the university as a means of maintaining class dominance.

Workers and students must oppose both the pseudo-left, which defends university branding, and the right-wing, which criticises DEI. The fight for academic integrity is fundamentally connected to the broader struggle for socialism. A truly democratic and academically rigorous university system depends on: public funding as the basis for higher education, democratic control by staff and students, the elimination of managerial bureaucracies, an end to market competition and private investment, and the socialist transformation of society where education is viewed as a social right. Only through such a transformation can universities stop serving as instruments of class privilege and become what they are meant to be: institutions committed to the cultural and scientific progress of humanity.

Podcast Episode: The Jason Arday Affair and the Crisis of the University: Identity Politics, the

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

Pip: Cambridge University has, once again, demonstrated its unerring instinct for self-preservation — freerein61's latest piece on A Trumpet of Sedition makes sure we notice exactly what that costs.

Mara: The episode covers one major case: the compelled resignation of Professor Jason Arday from Cambridge, and what it reveals about universities, identity politics, the far right, and class power. Let's start with the affair itself and the crisis it exposes.

The Jason Arday Affair: Universities, Identity, and Class

Pip: The central tension here is a familiar one dressed in new clothes — an institution celebrates a symbolic appointment, then abandons the symbol the moment defending it becomes expensive. The question the post forces is: what does that pattern actually tell us about how universities work?

Mara: The post is direct about the political logic driving the attack. Nathan Cofnas launched it, and his writing is rooted in scientific racism and eugenics. The post quotes Christopher Rufo, who ran the parallel campaign against Harvard's Claudine Gay, describing plagiarism accusations as a "weapon of war."

Pip: So the tool is plagiarism, but the project is something larger — remaking the ideological landscape of institutions that the far right sees as hostile territory.

Mara: Exactly, and the post draws the Harvard parallel in detail. In both cases a symbolic figure elevated through identity-politics discourse was targeted. Initial ideological attacks failed. Plagiarism allegations followed. The institution defended, then capitulated. The post calls this pattern deliberate — a coordinated effort to suppress intellectual activity and shift universities toward authoritarian and nationalist agendas.

Pip: Cambridge's first move was to condemn the campaign against Arday as a "vile" one — which sounds principled until you read what came next.

Mara: The post is precise on this. Cambridge's initial defence was not principle; it was institutional reflex. The post argues elite universities operate by three priorities: protecting prestige, avoiding political exposure that threatens donors or government relationships, and projecting moral leadership without structural reform. Once defending Arday cost more than celebrating him, Cambridge withdrew.

Pip: Identity politics as institutional branding — which is a fine strategy right up until the brand becomes a liability.

Mara: The post pushes further than that critique. It argues identity politics functions as a mechanism of class rule: deflecting demands for real redistribution into symbolic representation, containing calls for equality within manageable gestures, and fragmenting the working class along racialised lines. Arday was Cambridge's "youngest ever black professor" — the framing was about branding, not structural change.

Mara: Working-class students, regardless of race, remain excluded by cost. Academic staff face casualisation and low pay. The university's social role, the post argues, has not shifted.

Pip: Symbolic elevation, the post notes, also produces symbolic vulnerability — institutions that promote people on PR logic cannot mount a class-based defence when the far right attacks, because they do not operate on class principles.

Mara: The post's conclusion is that defending democratic rights on campus requires independent working-class mobilisation — not reliance on administrations that have repeatedly sacrificed individuals to protect financial interests. The fight against racism, it argues, is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, because racism is a structural feature used to divide workers, not an anomaly to be managed by diversity initiatives.

Pip: The cycle the post describes — institutions need identity politics for legitimacy, the far right weaponises the symbols, institutions sacrifice the individuals — keeps turning precisely because the underlying class conflict stays unresolved.

Mara: Which is where the post lands: the university cannot be transformed by diversity initiatives alone. That requires dismantling the conditions that shape what universities are for in the first place.

Pip: The deeper question, then, isn't really about Cambridge or Harvard — it's about what any institution built to serve capital can actually defend when defending it becomes costly.

Mara: The Arday case sits at the intersection of everything the post maps — far-right strategy, liberal fragility, and the limits of symbolic politics as a substitute for class solidarity.

Pip: Next time, we'll see what else is coming through on the trumpet. Stay tuned.

The Jason Arday Affair and the Crisis of the University: Identity Politics, the Far Right, and the Class Struggle in the Epoch of Capitalist Breakdown

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

The compelled resignation of Professor Jason Arday from the University of Cambridge is more than just an academic scandal or a British equivalent of the Claudine Gay controversy at Harvard. It vividly illustrates the political, ideological, and social conflicts tearing apart bourgeois institutions in advanced capitalist nations. The attack on Arday, driven by far-right extremists and enabled by a cowardly university administration, exposes the failure of identity politics, the rising confidence of reactionary forces, and the inability of liberal institutions to uphold their own principles. This event highlights the ongoing crisis of the university under capitalism and emphasises the urgent need for independent, socialist intervention by the working class.

The far‑right offensive and the political logic of the attack

Nathan Cofnas launched the attack on Arday, with writings rooted in scientific racism and eugenics. Cofnas’s claim that, under a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions” is more of a political statement than an academic argument. It reflects the worldview of a social segment that the right-wing radicalisation of some parts of the petty bourgeoisie and ruling class has empowered.

Cofnas’s use of plagiarism-detection tools was motivated more by political motives than academic rigour. It reflects a strategy described as a “weapon of war” by Christopher Rufo, who spearheaded the campaign against Claudine Gay. The far right has recognised that accusations of plagiarism can be highly damaging: they are sensational, difficult to disprove publicly, and can harm reputations over time. This method serves as a contemporary adaptation of McCarthyite tactics, tailored to the modern bureaucratic and media environment.

The situation with Harvard is precisely analogous. In both instances, a symbolic figure promoted through identity-politics discourse was targeted. Initial ideological critiques did not succeed in removing the individual. Subsequently, plagiarism allegations were used as the key weapon. The institution initially defended the individual but eventually capitulated due to political pressure. This pattern is deliberate, representing a coordinated effort by far-right groups to undermine universities, suppress intellectual activity, and alter the ideological landscape to support authoritarian and nationalist agendas.

The university as a bourgeois institution: prestige without principle

Cambridge’s first response to Arday—condemning the attack as a “vile campaign”—was not a matter of principle. It was a defensive impulse rooted in protecting the institution’s own interests. Elite universities are guided by three main goals: safeguarding their prestige, which underpins their financial and political influence; avoiding political issues that could jeopardise relationships with donors, government support, or the media; and projecting moral leadership without implementing any meaningful structural reforms that could threaten their social role.

Once defending Arday politically outweighed the benefits of celebrating him as a diversity milestone, Cambridge withdrew. A similar pattern occurred at Harvard: Gay was a useful symbol—Harvard’s “first Black president”—until she became a liability, after which the symbolism was abandoned. This behaviour does not stem from hypocrisy but reflects the logic of institutions whose main goal is preserving elite privilege. Universities are not advocates for democratic rights; they serve the ruling class, and their focus on “diversity” is secondary to their allegiance to capital.

Identity politics as a mechanism of class rule

The Arday affair highlights a key contradiction in identity politics. Rather than being a genuine movement for social equality, identity politics serves as a political tool used by the ruling class to manage racial and social tensions without changing the fundamental class hierarchy. Its main functions include deflection—allowing institutions to appear progressive while keeping wealth and power distribution the same; containment—redirecting calls for equality into symbolic acts instead of real change; and fragmentation—splitting the working class into racialised groups, weakening solidarity and hiding shared material interests.

Arday’s appointment was highlighted in explicitly racial terms—as Cambridge’s “youngest ever black professor.” However, this celebration was more about branding than a real commitment to racial equality. Cambridge remains largely an institution filled with the children of the British elite. Youth from the working class, regardless of race, are excluded from higher education due to cost. Academic staff face casual employment, excessive workloads, and low pay. Overall, the university’s social role has not shifted.

Identity politics elevates individuals as symbols while leaving the social reality untouched. But symbolic elevation produces symbolic vulnerability. When the far right attacks these individuals, the institutions that elevated them cannot mount a class‑based defence—because they do not operate on class principles. They operate on PR.

The far right and the crisis of liberalism

The far-right attacks on academia go beyond a mere cultural issue. They stem from the larger crisis in liberal capitalism. With social inequality at extreme levels, democratic institutions weakening, and geopolitical tensions rising, parts of the ruling class are inclined to adopt authoritarian approaches. The far right offers ideological support for these approaches by criticising universities, scholars, and democratic principles.

The campaigns targeting Gay and Arday reflect a broader trend: attacks on “critical race theory” across the United States, efforts to purge universities of left-leaning faculty, and campaigns against trans rights, LGBTQ+ students, and progressive curricula. They also include demonising student protests against war, genocide, and austerity. These initiatives serve two main purposes: mobilising reactionary segments of the petty bourgeoisie and intimidating institutions that might oppose authoritarian policies. The universities’ surrender highlights the fragility of liberalism in confronting this offensive.

The working class and the defence of democratic rights

The working class has no real stake in this intra-elite conflict, whether on the far right’s campaign against Arday or other factions. The far-right’s reactionary stance must be resisted. However, the identity-politics framework that elevated Arday as a symbol is a tool of the ruling class. It causes division among workers, replaces demands for redistribution with representation, and leads opposition into the dead end of bourgeois liberalism. Defending democratic rights on campus cannot rely on university administrations, which have repeatedly shown they will sacrifice individuals and principles to protect their financial interests.

A working-class perspective entails defending academic freedom and opposing politically motivated purges. It calls for unity among workers against racialised frameworks that hide common material interests. Universities should be transformed into institutions that serve social needs rather than corporate or state power. It also emphasises independent mobilisation of students, academic staff, and broader worker groups. The fight against racism is inseparable from the fight against capitalism, as racism is not an anomaly but a structural aspect of capitalist societies, used to divide workers and legitimise exploitation.

The deeper historical contradiction

The Arday and Gay cases highlight a core instability in elite liberal institutions: they depend on identity politics for legitimacy. This approach creates symbolic figures that attract the far right, which then weaponises these symbols to attack the institution. In response, the institution sacrifices individuals to defend itself. This recurring cycle persists because the fundamental class conflict remains unresolved. The university cannot be fundamentally changed by diversity initiatives alone; true transformation requires dismantling the capitalist system that informs its operations.

Conclusion: Toward a socialist transformation of the university

The Arday incident serves as a warning, highlighting the rise in confidence among the far right, the timidity of liberal institutions, and the failure of identity politics. It exposes the fragility of intellectual life within capitalism and emphasises the need for socialist intervention. The working class must defend democratic rights, not merely as a supplement to liberalism but as part of a larger effort to rebuild society based on equality, rational planning, and human needs. The university should be revitalised as a centre for critical thinking, scientific research, and cultural progress—rather than becoming a tool for the ruling class’s branding or a battleground for reactionary forces. Only through organised, independent action by the working class can the university be restored to fulfil its true historical purpose.

Sources and Bibliography

I. Primary Sources: Statements, Writings, and Documents

  • Cofnas, Nathan. Various blog posts and essays on “race realism” and meritocracy, 2018–2024. (Includes statements on racial hierarchy and academic meritocracy.)
  • Rufo, Christopher. Public statements and social‑media posts on DEI, Claudine Gay, and “plagiarism as a weapon of war”, 2023–2024.
  • Harvard University. Official statements regarding Claudine Gay’s presidency and resignation, December 2023 – January 2024.
  • University of Cambridge. Press releases and public statements regarding Jason Arday and responses to plagiarism allegations, 2024.
  • Good Law Project. Public commentary on the Arday case and Cambridge’s handling of the allegations, 2024.
  • St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. Statement on the termination of Noah Carl’s fellowship, 2019.

II. Secondary Sources: Journalism, Investigations, and Analysis

  • The Guardian. Coverage of the Jason Arday case, Cambridge’s response, and broader debates on academic integrity and DEI, 2024.
  • The New York Times. Reporting on Claudine Gay, plagiarism allegations, and the political campaign surrounding her resignation, 2023–2024.
  • The Washington Post. Analysis of the far‑right network targeting universities and DEI initiatives, 2023–2024.
  • Times Higher Education. Articles on academic labour conditions, casualisation, and the political pressures on universities, 2020–2024.
  • BBC News. Coverage of the Arday case and Cambridge’s initial defence, 2024.
  • Chronicle of Higher Education. Reporting on plagiarism controversies, DEI politics, and far‑right interventions in academia, 2023–2024.

III. Scholarly Works on Identity Politics, Universities, and Class

Identity Politics and Its Critique

  • Reed, Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New Press, 2000.
  • Reed, Adolph & Karn, Walter Benn Michaels. “The Trouble with Disparity.” Nonsite, 2021.
  • Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. Metropolitan Books, 2006.
  • Fraser, Nancy. The Old Is Dying, and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond. Verso, 2019.

Universities under Capitalism

  • Collini, Stefan. Speaking of Universities. Verso, 2017.
  • Newfield, Christopher. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016.
  • Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation. NYU Press, 2008.
  • Giroux, Henry A. Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education. Haymarket Books, 2014.

Academic Labour and Casualisation

  • UCU (University and College Union). Reports on casualisation, pay erosion, and working conditions in UK higher education, 2018–2024.
  • Berg, Maggie. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. University of Toronto Press, 2016.

IV. Historical and Theoretical Works on the Far Right, McCarthyism, and Ideological Struggle

Far‑Right Movements and Ideology

  • Mudde, Cas. The Far Right Today. Polity Press, 2019.
  • Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Pan Macmillan, 2001. (For historical context on scientific racism and eugenics.)
  • Camus, Renaud & the “Great Replacement” discourse. (Primary texts for understanding contemporary far‑right racial ideology.)

McCarthyism and Academic Purges

  • Schrecker, Ellen. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. Oxford University Press, 1986.
  • Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford University Press, 2004. (Useful for understanding political intimidation in intellectual life.)

Marxist Theory and Class Analysis

  • Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I–III. (Foundational analysis of class, exploitation, and capitalist social relations.)
  • Lenin, V.I. State and Revolution. (On the role of the state and institutions under capitalism.)
  • Trotsky, Leon. The Revolution Betrayed. (On bureaucracy, class power, and institutional degeneration.)
  • Trotsky, Leon. In Defence of Marxism. (On political method and class analysis.)
  • International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Various statements on identity politics, the far right, and the crisis of capitalism, 2015–2024.

V. Contextual Sources: Cambridge, Harvard, and Elite Institutions

  • Cambridge University Equality & Diversity Office. Reports on diversity initiatives and representation, 2015–2024.
  • Harvard Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion. DEI frameworks and institutional mission statements, 2018–2024.
  • Sutton Trust. Reports on social mobility, elite universities, and class stratification in UK higher education, 2010–2024.
  • OECD. Education at a Glance (annual reports). (Data on access, inequality, and funding structures.)

VI. Additional Sources on Plagiarism, Academic Integrity, and Media Dynamics

  • Bretag, Tracey. “Challenges in Addressing Plagiarism in Higher Education.” Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 2019.
  • Posner, Richard. The Little Book of Plagiarism. Pantheon, 2007.
  • Marwick, Alice. Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online. Data & Society Research Institute, 2017. (On far‑right media ecosystems.)
  • Phillips, Whitney. The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists. Data & Society, 2018.

The rise of fake academic essays: a Marxist analysis

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

According to journalist Robin McKie, writing recently in the Guardian, over 10,000 fake research papers have been published in journals, and these are the ones that have been caught. He believes this figure is just the tip of the iceberg.[1]

“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields, it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse. People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science.’ 

Professor Alison Avenell of Aberdeen University said, “ Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money. “It is deeply worrying.”

The majority of these fake essays are being produced on an industrial scale by large-scale paper mills. An academic paper mill is a commercial operation that produces and sells fraudulent academic work — essays, term papers, theses, cover letters, peer‑reviewed articles, or entire datasets — to students, researchers, or institutions for a fee. Paper mills range from individual ghostwriters offering single essays to large, organised firms that produce fabricated research, manipulate authorship and citations, and systematically target journals and evaluation systems for profit. They are a symptom of the marketisation and commodification of higher education under capitalism.

Ivan Oransky believes “Part of what’s happening is that there’s an entire industry now, one might say an illicit industry or at least a black market, of paper mills,” he said. “A paper mill, and I heard a really good definition recently, is an organisation, a for-profit company, really, set up to falsify the scientific record somehow.”

The problem has become so vast that a growing number of websites, such as Retraction Watch, have been established to monitor this alarming situation. According to a study published in the magazine Nature, there were just over 1,000 retractions in 2013. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.

Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University was quoted as saying, “If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm. That is exactly what we have now.” The use of generative AI to produce fraudulent academic work is not merely an individual moral failing or a technical problem; it is a social and political issue rooted in the commodification of education, the erosion of serious study, and the pressures imposed by capitalist labour markets, rather than providing instructions for misusing technology.

Passing off machine-generated text as one’s own substitutes appearance for understanding. The cheapening of academic credentials serves employers and the market, not the working class. From a Marxist standpoint, the proliferation of machine‑generated “fake” academic essays is not primarily a technical or ethical quirk of individual students: it is an outgrowth of the deeper social relations of capitalist education. Under capitalism, higher education is progressively commodified—turned into a service to be bought and sold, a pipeline for profitable labour and, increasingly, a supplier of research and skills to the military‑industrial complex. The phenomenon of fake essays, therefore, expresses class relations, market pressures and the crisis of public education.

Degrees have been transformed into commodities that certify employability. Many students, under debt and time pressures, view essays as means to an end, not as instruments of critical thought. The unequal access to quality instruction further pushes those under the greatest economic strain toward any available shortcut.

The erosion of collective knowledge and democratic control. When learning is reduced to transactional credentialing, the broadening of independent critical thought—essential for democratic working‑class organisation—is weakened. The result is a depoliticised cohort more vulnerable to managerial control and right‑wing reaction.

Historically, education has been both a terrain of class struggle and a crucible for political radicalisation. The bourgeoisie once used schooling to consolidate its rule; today, capital uses education to reproduce labour power for profit and war. The current trajectory—marketised universities, casualised labour, and the deployment of AI for managerial ends—mirrors earlier phases of capitalist restructuring that required a political response rooted in class organisation rather than technocratic fixes.

Notes

1.   retractionwatch.com

2.   More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 — a new record-Richard Van Noorden-Nature 12 December 2023

[1] www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point

On: Why I Write and How I Write by Ruth Hutchinson

~ freerein61 ~ Leave a comment

I have been asked by Keith Livesey to contribute to this series as he must believe or think I’ve something worth saying despite not being a Historian. Keith and I are very old friends, and I remember the first day we met. It was sometime in the spring of 1996 and I was walking down Oxford Road close to All Saints Campus of M.M.U. He was flogging a political paper at the time, standing outside the Student Union and asked me to sign a petition. He used the word “antidemocratic”, and I didn’t know what that meant exactly, so I asked, “What do you mean by this?”  He then explained, had a nice way about him, and I signed my name; I found myself in agreement, wanting to defend democratic rights against antidemocratic practices. He looked at my signature and commented with a smile: “It’s interesting to know what a fellow Livesey thinks?”  We started a correspondence, he changed my life and the rest is history. I owe a lot to Keith and as we’re not spring chickens anymore, I’d like to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude despite our differences. Tomorrow is not a given; too much in life is taken for granted. Time passes and we wish we’d said more to those who passed on when they were alive. This is my opportunity to give thanks openly and honestly to a good friend while there’s time.

With all of that being said, I would like to tell the reader what I am. I’m not a Historian, as already mentioned, but I am an artist, gardener, mother, sister, daughter, crafter, scientist, retired C.A.B Generalist Adviser, revolutionary thinker and an Allied Health Professional. I have a B.A. with (Hons) and a BSc with (Hons). In the latter, I attained the highest first out of my entire cohort. I worked hard for that degree whilst bringing up my daughter single handed so I am not bereft of having experienced many struggles of everyday life. I am a humble human and write this essay to help anyone who struggles to put pen to paper. God knows how I have struggled, but I sometimes found a way through and succeeded. I will share my struggles, what caused them and how I overcame them; the rest will be up to you.

It would be really easy to write a mechanical piece about the A, B, and C’s of writing. It might go along the following lines: first you do this, then you do that, etc, and bingo! Before you know it, you’re a writer. That would be as dull as dishwater and would not begin to highlight anything insightful for me. It would be a one-sided list of tips that you could probably get off the internet, and if I did do this, it would beg the following question: Would I be bringing anything new to this series? Writing and thought are far more complex, and although tips are useful, we’d all have become writers years ago if all that was needed were tips! It also needs to be said that I can think of many more reasons why most people don’t write than do. This essay will, therefore, be far longer than others in the series and is aimed at a much broader audience. I am not pitching this to academia; it is aimed at the many and not the few. People will make up their minds as to whether they find this work helpful. 

My family of origin is pretty messed up and complicated, but certainly not unique. I am the middle child with two brothers, one on either side of me. I was born to an Electronics Engineer who was brought up by an R.A.F Warrant Officer and a cleaner/lollipop lady who left school at 14 without formal qualifications. They are from very different class backgrounds, with an age gap of 7 years. This is more significant than it ought to be because one was born one year into the Second World War, and the other was born 3 years post-war. They were born into very different worlds. They had completely different outlooks, psychologies, expectations and attitudes to children and their rearing. The home slowly descended into chaos and a battleground after my younger brother was born. I forgive them for I understand them; only living in chaos neither provides the conditions to sit down with mum and dad to read nor have your mum or dad read to you. My dad’s attitude was if, “It’s in them, it’s in them!” a very passive attitude that smacks of biological determinism. My dad had no interest in how his acorns would grow into mighty oaks and believed it was all to be done by the school system as he’d done his bit, which wasn’t his job. I read very little as a child before starting school and preferred picture books and watching television. Thankfully for my dad, the 1970s had superb educational children’s programmes. I loved the 1970s children’s programmes from Tony Hart Oliver Postgate and productions from Cosgrove Hall. This is where and how my love of drawing and being creative sprang from, as well as watching my mother knit and sew. 

My family life was difficult at times. My older brother was a bully and perceived me as a threat or a target for humiliation, so there was quite a lot of anguish at times in my everyday life. There are only 22 months between us, and when I came along, I’m sure his little world was turned a bit “topsy turvy”, shall we say. He was never disciplined for his behaviour, and I often felt cheated and invisible. Feeling injustice and having no voice from such a young age affects you. Having parents who fought (clashes could be quite violent at times) created a hostile environment, and I became a bit shy.

It soon became apparent that by the time I was 7, my needs wouldn’t be met half the time (emotional and intellectual needs), so I started looking elsewhere and escaping into school and playing out virtually all the time with my few friends. I wasn’t brave enough to make my friends’ and the friends I had would choose me and not the other way around. I was extremely passive in this area and ended up with friends who would later show they were no good for me. Not because they were delinquents but because of their issues and upbringing. My primary school was amazing as it was progressive and naturally didn’t focus on the “3 R’s” traditionally and formally. So, although I was a bright child, the school didn’t pressure us or give us an imposed rigid structure from above. The teacher wasn’t an authoritarian character that was dictating to us. The teachers in this school were more of guides and facilitators to our learning. They embodied healthy authority and provided us with leadership. This meant that the child led and decided their learning activities for the day and let me explain how this went down. I don’t know any other person who went to a primary school like the one I did, and I would be extremely interested to hear if anyone did. We were the only school in the area out of 6 others nearby and were called “Wheelockians”. It was very amusing in retrospect, but at the time, it left me feeling less than my counterparts from other schools. We were known to be different, and this labelling was very telling.

Some teachers at secondary school saw us differently and weren’t behind this type of school, probably because they measured success by whether we passed the stupid Richmond Test or not. Absolute Bullshit, in my opinion, because what did it measure? We had such a rich learning experience and were free of fear, and this quasi-11 plus exam couldn’t measure that. If a teacher measures success by the limited yardstick of the Richmond Test then they are extremely limited as human beings. Education shouldn’t be about filling the child with pointless facts and figures but surely to develop them into well rounded human beings that can face the world and contribute to it, and even impart some wisdom. In this endeavour, our education system truly fails. Still, a different philosophy once existed, tested in reality and moved on from a theoretical hypothesis developed by Piaget and Montessori. This type of teaching and school has been strangled to death by every single government since 1979. 

I started primary school in April of 1979 at age four, and I recall sitting on the floor cross-legged in a home bay as the school was completely open-planned. For a good number of weeks, we were given free milk at a set time each day, which I later learned had been taken away by none other than Maggie Thatcher, the infamous “Milk Snatcher”. 

The school was great, and we had there Sheep, hens, ducks, hamsters, terrapins, clay, glazes, kilns, a large library, and a large practical area where you could make a mess and paint all day. We had an incubator where the eggs from the hens were placed to hatch. We had a woodland area, a massive playing field, the best school dinners, book fairs, Christmas fairs, a nit nurse, Sport’s day, a cookery area, a mobile building, a greenhouse, and I could go on. We had teachers who could play the guitar and the piano and believed in their profession and that a child learns through play and instruction. We were taught how to read music and play the recorder. We also had spinning wheels where the fleece from the sheep was spun into yarn after being carded. I recall bookbinding and covering our handmade books with paper that we decorated with marbling.

We watched the sheep being shorn and had a pond that we would dip into with nets and examine the water boatmen from our “haul”. Looking back, we had huge human and material resources, which was a great place to be. However, this is not a criticism: it didn’t turn me into a great “writer/reader” other than Judy Blume at age 11. That’s the level I got to, which is perfectly respectable and age-appropriate. Blume deals with themes that a young girl like me would soon come to encounter and it was forearming oneself. She spoke to me, and her books were devoured by those of us living in the bloody real world. Those of us who were being and not striving to be what our parents wanted (mine didn’t seem that bothered) nor what some freaky teacher thought we should be. I enjoyed a wonderful primary school education. I had a very happy time at primary school and can recall so much of it, like yesterday. No trauma happened that I’ve ever needed to block out, and there wasn’t a competitive atmosphere except on Sports Day. We were allowed to grow organically, but by 1986, that was about to change dramatically, which I will come to later.

So, at my primary school with so much great stuff to do and be allowed to do, reading and writing wasn’t some activity that we were bullied into mastering. We were taught through the breakthrough method, which gave us a great foundation. I remember real excitement after I’d learnt a new word as it was put into our dictionary booklets and I remember taking to it quite easily. I must have been about five years old, and one day, I desperately and excitedly asked my dad if I could read to him. He said “No,” and I never asked again. I was quietly upset and shocked, a little like I’d done something wrong, and children are generally acquiescent and I found myself accepting that it was just something he wouldn’t do for me. Development of my reading and writing skills wasn’t being nurtured at home, and my dad would watch B.B.C. Open University lectures that were way over our heads. We left him to it. He did his own thing and had his reasons and attitudes that I would learn about later. I got the maximum of input around reading and writing from school, it would have been more, but they rightly focused on so much other stuff. Even our P.E. lessons were great. After climbing the ropes, I recall the delight and glowing sense of achievement the first time I touched the main hall ceiling.

So, I went to an all-girls secondary school where I failed the “Richmond Test” beforehand and was put into a lower band form. This might be unfamiliar to some as I’m 50 soon, and things were different back then. But this is how things were. It was before the internet, mobile phones, and society believed in the right to a childhood. There was no sexualisation of children or at least no outward display of it in the community. This is not to say that nefarious and sinister activity wasn’t happening behind closed doors somewhere, but I certainly wasn’t aware or privy to it. Self-harming and eating disorders were non-existent. There was no single case of this at primary school (1979-1986) or the odd case at secondary school (1986-1991).   I had a tiny tears doll and not a dreaded B.R.A.T.Z. Doll, for example, and we dressed appropriately for our age and did age-appropriate things like not taking drugs or carrying knives. Children were children and weren’t tried as adults in a court of law either. Different for sure! I think giving  context to the time I’m talking about is important. So much has changed and that change has neither been in the right direction nor for the right reasons. Examining this would require a lot of work and is for another time. Still, it is safe to say that education across all levels has suffered due to the interference and policies of every single government since 1979! A lot has been lost.

I believe the breakthrough method of teaching a child to write and read will always be above the phonics system. I have a child who is a millennial who was taught via phonics. How did anyone ever learn before this revolutionary phonics system, I might ask? I believe my child learnt despite it and not because of it, and phonics is a reactionary and cheap way of teaching a class that is so heterogeneous there’s no other option. This was applied to all schools, even if the class demographic was more homogenous. This is why you get outraged parents who don’t agree with trying to be all things to everyone, as what was worth conserving (breakthrough method, for example) gets diluted or completely lost and cast aside. It also creates a chasm between some children and parents like me who learn in a completely different way. It’s hard to bridge sometimes. What working-class person has the time to learn a whole new system when the one they had worked perfectly fine? It raises more questions than it answers.

Working-class parents have become so bogged down by these new radical teaching methods that faith in our education has waned for a long time. Is it any wonder that homeschooling started to become a viable option? Of course, this isn’t the only reason for homeschooling, but it is for some, and there are more homeschooled kids, most notably because the parents reject the school for some reason.

At secondary school, things completely changed but I still didn’t develop into a writer! Certainly not a good one. There was no confidence in my writing and a resignation. Essentially, although I digress at times, the picture here is of a working-class kid (me) living in a fairly affluent area but struggling with a chaotic home life whilst surrounded by kids with more harmony outside of school. I bumbled along, not knowing any different, and the conditions weren’t there at that time to improve. The books in my house were either my dad’s advanced technical books with two fiction books thrown in, “The Swiss Family Robinson” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. I only found those after I was 18. My mum’s small collection consisted of Mill’s and Boon’s romantic paperbacks, cookery books and knitting/sewing patterns. My mum is a wonderful woman and hid the fact that she has dyslexia as best she could. And I was so ashamed due to living in the area I did that when she wrote a note to secondary school about an absence or the need to be let out of school to go into town at lunchtime to buy fabric for a Home Economics project for example, that I would rewrite it and forge her signature the shame was so bad. 

My dad was unapproachable and saw his daughter as her mother’s problem. I am trying to explain here the atmosphere around writing and books. I thought that because my mum couldn’t do it very well, I would never be that great at it. I wasn’t pushed, stretched or encouraged to improve as I was a woman who would marry and make babies anyway, so what need was there to put much effort in with me? God, how wrong my parents were, and I’m sure I’ve been a major disappointment at times, but I was able to forge my paths and change my trajectory where writing was concerned, but this change didn’t happen until my 20s. Even though I can pinpoint the shift (meeting Keith) in my reading materials (a qualitative and quantitative change), the writing didn’t develop until years later; it was not until I was 39 that I put my new skills, knowledge and attitudes into action. I could read at secondary school, don’t get me wrong, but it was for escapism and I skipped any words I didn’t understand and gave little attention to them. I paid no attention to the format of the writing either.

Punctuation for me was capitals at the beginning of a sentence, a few commas and a full stop at the end. There was no mastery of colons, semi-colons or correct paragraphing. I got by (badly), and any manuscript I submitted was covered in red ink, shouting constantly at my many mistakes. I just thought I was my mother’s daughter, which was normal. I realised I’d had major writing problems in my early 20s and was even more confused. So confused that trying to express thoughts and feelings articulately was like pulling teeth without anaesthetic; agonising, time-consuming and a losing game. I didn’t even know what a metaphor or literary device was until my daughter asked me when I was around 36. The internet is a truly wonderful thing in the right hands. We move on if we can have the courage to admit our short comings and want to do better. First, confess what you don’t know and not be ashamed of where you are. It most likely wasn’t your fault but a combination of factors beyond your control. It certainly was for me.

At G.C.S.E., I took Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography, French, Maths and English. Out of all of those subjects, I hated English. I hated English, and it made me physically sick. The stress I would feel at trying to answer the essay question and understand Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Miller, or Orwell was just crippling, and I felt tremendous shame at not understanding it or being able to formulate ideas around the question. I didn’t understand and was too unsupported by my teachers, parents and friends to develop further. Because I thrived in the sciences, they thought I was fine. I wasn’t fine and I didn’t have the skill or inclination to seek the right books to guide me to improve. I didn’t know they even existed! I just felt stupid when English was concerned and resigned myself to suffering. I was a kid, and nobody taught me any better. 

In this area, I seriously underachieved. Out of 17 assignments for G.C.S.E. English, I submitted 11. I would not produce the work as the stress and shame I had around this was incapacitating. I struggled with writing and thinking and it was totally in silence. Somehow, I evaded being pursued by teachers for the missing assignments. It just got swept under the rug. I was never disciplined with the threat of detention, nor was I threatened with parental involvement. No teacher told me, “We’ll have to inform your parents of this”. Nothing happened about it other than my internal stress and shame engulfed me at times with English assignments. And I, too, hid it, just like my mum’s dyslexia went on without much detection, or it was passively accepted as the inevitable outcome of poor genes or poor education. Either way, my crappy-quality essays weren’t earmarked as something to address. 

Although I kept quiet, looking back, there were very subtle expressions of my disquiet, but they were slight and still within the scale of what was normal for someone my age. I was always clean and well-dressed, so no one thought I was neglected. Materially, in most areas, my needs were met (except the books), I was nourished, I had dental care, and I didn’t freeze as I had a warm, clean bed. Still, I was neglected emotionally and intellectually without a shadow of a doubt. I never tried to talk about it; I didn’t have a voice at home and didn’t believe my parent could find a solution even if I had. I hadn’t much of a voice anywhere else except with friends my age.

Looking back, we were taught English G.C.S.E. badly. I would go as far as to say that it was appalling. When we read “Animal Farm” it was delivered to us as this is a political satire. Stalin’s and Trotsky’s names were mentioned briefly, but I had no idea who they were, what they did, and what political satire meant. At 14, I had no idea of this or way of finding out. I think this was one of the assignments I just ignored. The teacher didn’t go on to explain anything about the Russian Revolution. As I didn’t take history but chose geography, I couldn’t rely on any knowledge I may have acquired elsewhere. I didn’t have any books at home that I could paw over. There were no encyclopaedias or anything like that. Shakespeare, I, too, hated.

I didn’t relate to the language as many don’t. I didn’t know you could buy books that walk you through what is being expressed, so I neither developed an understanding nor an appreciation. I drew a blank, moved on and the same with Arthur Miller to an extent. We read The Crucible, and I was disturbed by it. My only reaction to this novel was: “What the hell happened to innocent until proven guilty?” None of my peers responded similarly to it, and I felt completely isolated, and there was something wrong with me. Again, we weren’t given any historical context to these novels. Somehow, at 14 years of age, I was expected to know all about “McCarthyism” and “The Salem Witch Hunts” and discuss all of Miller’s literary devices, motifs, and themes and do it all with perfect spelling, a broad vocabulary and perfect grammar. I had no cat in hell’s chance at delivering on this, so I repeatedly swerved on such a demand.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t conscious of this at the time, but I’m certainly mindful of it now and have been since my late 20s after I started to try and grapple with improving my writing. On reflection, the only essay I ever wrote for my English G.C.S.E. confidently and competently was “The Chrysalids” by John Wyndham. For a change, I wanted to read this book and having prior scientific knowledge was my saviour. Here, I could scrape a B grade for once, but because that was unusual for me, I wrote it off as a fluke. It wasn’t a fluke at all. I understood because I could see what he was driving at because I knew the scientific field. Not studying history at G.C.S.E. was a big mistake looking back, especially as it had always been my best subject. It would have been the candle in the dark I so desperately needed to see and be able to write. I’m not good at writing and bullshitting my way through anything I don’t understand. We are what we are, and I’d rather have integrity than peddle another version of the “Emperor’s New Clothes”. 

I would also like to add that I had three jobs at the time of my G.C.S.E.. On Thursday and Friday evenings I would collect milk money for three hours. I’d walk about 4-5 miles in this time each evening. I had a Saturday job working from 12 pm -5 pm, and I would babysit Saturday nights until midnight. Money was tight, and my brothers and I were made to get jobs. Looking back, money wasn’t tight. It was badly managed due to the discord in my parent’s marriage. The reason this pisses me off is because I secretly wanted to be a Doctor. I concluded that I wasn’t bright enough and was from the wrong side of the street. My parents never knew this; I don’t think they know it today. Getting into Medical School would have required absolute dedication, commitment and the right conditions for serious study. I had none of these. Arguments could erupt in the blink of an eye, and although sporadic in rhythm, they showed no signs of abating. Having gotten all B’s at G.C.S.E without any revision and a C for the English language, such grades, from my perspective, were just more nails in the coffin of my dream. My dream was then buried and went on to present itself as an utter fantasy. Due to this, I went on to align myself to a completely different path.

I want to come back to the matter of the Richmond test that I talked briefly about earlier in this essay. I briefly remember the day it happened. It was a rather uneventful and business-as-usual morning until year 7 (as it was called back then) was ushered into the main hall and directed to one of the many single desks. We weren’t warned or told about what would happen beforehand in any way, shape or form. I don’t recall any letters being sent home or mum and dad wishing me well. I remember nothing surrounding this event but the event itself. There was an exam paper on each desk, and we were asked to answer the questions in a set amount of time. I wasn’t stressed, worried or anything. I did my best, and we all walked away and it was forgotten as far as I was concerned. I don’t recall talking to friends about it or exchanging anything with anybody. No teachers brought it up, and we moved on. We were all going to secondary school and didn’t know there was a rite of passage to this so I never put the two and two together.

The only question I remember was about a map and being asked about coordinates. I was 10, had never read a map, and had no idea what coordinates were. I wasn’t even bothered that I didn’t know. I was a summer baby born in July, so I accepted, not knowing as much as a September or winter baby. This gap between different children is played down, but it matters. Put a summer baby alongside a September baby, and they will have 9 months of knowledge and experience, if not more. You’re always at a disadvantage under what month you were born, whether you like it or not. It can only be bridged for the average child if all things were equal by concerted effort.

It would only be later in life that I would realise what the “Richmond Test” was for and its significance. I bombed that test and I know this because I was put into a “lower band” form at high school. I didn’t think I was in a lower band form until the end of the first year as I was the brightest in my “lower band” class and got top in every exam. I was moved into an “upper band” form and cried with sadness when I heard the news. I was happy where I was, liked my normal, nice friends who were quite pleased and didn’t feel like I didn’t fit in. I was, therefore, moved from a predominately working-class cohort to a lower-middle-class/middle-class cohort. I hated it, and believe me, this layer was far more competitive and bitchy than I’d ever have thought. I got the piss taken out of me by a particularly arrogant and entitled individual because I once said that L.Cornes was my “best” friend. Bestest isn’t exactly correct, I know (who cares at 11 years old anyway?), but it was the venom with which she desired to humiliate me that caused me alarm. I had no issue with being corrected, only how it was done. This is what they were like. I was called “thick” to my face by what I thought was a close friend, and another so-called friend would like to say such things as “Wow, that’s a big word for you”. It was a climate of less than. I was made to feel less than by these people, and it unfortunately gained a lot of traction and worked.

The new cohort was not nice. I didn’t relate well; I identified myself as working class and quite normal. I didn’t have a horse or a Pilot for a “daddy”. I couldn’t play the clarinet, flute or piano to grade 6,7 or 8, and I lived in a modest three-bed house and not a five-bed house on a posh housing estate, for example. I was placed there because I did okay in exams but didn’t like being there. Being moved also impacted my English as I felt less than in this context. I survived, but I wasn’t at home, shall we say. The Richmond test was a little like an 11-plus exam. The Girl’s School was once a modern secondary school, and there was a grammar school, too, at the same time. The Grammar School ceased to be such when I moved up and was just a boy’s school. However, after the secondary modern model was ditched and my secondary school became a single-sex school, the “Richmond Test” was used to stream kids. Based on the results, it couldn’t be excluded, but it sure enjoyed sieving through “ability” and grouping “similar” together instead of making a mixed ability class.

I continued to get my head down and was good in some areas. My education from 11-15 ( remember, I’m a summer baby and have sat my G.C.S.E.’s before turning 16) was all about passing exams. It was pretty boring towards the end, and we just went through the motions of it. I enjoyed science the most because it taught me something new and useful, and I grasped it. I wasn’t competitive, so I wouldn’t say I liked sports even though I was okay. Art was also dull because of the girls I had to take this class with and how it was taught. The resources were also a bit thin on the ground here. Luckily, I had one friend in this class, and we were not strictly outcasts, but we did not swim effortlessly with the stream. It was the competitive climate that drew me in. Cooperation and collaboration are more superior orientations and one of my mum’s refrains is: “Two heads are always better than one!”  She had many a saying, and so did my dad. They have stuck with me to this day. They weren’t perfect, but they weren’t intrinsically bad people. Just two people struggling a lot of the time like everyone else in the lower middle/ working class. But they didn’t overcome their limitations and work towards solutions. That’s the crime and failure as it made life far more difficult than it needed to have been and needless suffering resulted.

So far, this essay should be called On: Not Being Able to Write. I make no excuses or wish to spin it in any other way. I had huge struggles with writing and comprehension where English was concerned, and I’m sure I’ll never be alone in this. However, it stopped me from doing what I wanted, so after gaining my secondary education, I studied “A level” chemistry, biology and art. There was no essay writing here and I deliberately dropped general studies as I didn’t want to write any essays. Unfortunately for me, level art required a dissertation, and my woes came back with a vengeance, and I played truant. I always felt ill as I went to a posh sixth form college where lots had been privately educated and had the arrogance that goes with that. I suffered in this period, and from my report, it is documented that I had 84 absences in the lower sixth. Despite this, I got my A levels, which weren’t that remarkable. I did manage to get an A grade in art, the only A grade I’d ever had, so I threw myself into this and went to Art College, thinking it would be easier. It wasn’t any easier, and I was lost, not having a clear idea of where I was going and what I wanted to do.

Eventually, two years after my A levels, I got a place at University for an arts degree. Three months into this bloody shite show, I knew I’d made a big mistake. Not knowing how to remedy this, I carried on in a state of depression. Other reasons in the background also affected me, but I had no idea how to solve them. I endured this and suffered. There was writing on this degree, much more than I’d anticipated and I was met again with myself and my inadequacy around writing. At the time, I did not know just how bad things were regarding the degree itself. I thought it was just me due to the less-than mentality that I’d developed being educated alongside “mean girls” and originating from humble beginnings. After the first year of this degree 33% had dropped out! I later learnt that the degree I was enrolled on had had more complaints than any other degree in the entire University. I was shocked by this, but particularly shocked at learning it was possible to complain to someone. I had no knowledge of this or anyone in my life who could have heard my concerns and signposted me to a place that might listen. I hadn’t a clue. Some people referred to some of our tutors as witches! 

Although there were problems with this degree course, I didn’t help myself being so depressed. I, too, was to blame a bit here because I never attended a single art history lecture in my first year. I didn’t believe it was useful and that I would even understand it, so I skived them all. It may have helped me, but I was at where as was at. Despite not attending the lectures, I still had to submit an essay for this module and earn credits. We were given five titles, which I ignored for a long time. I ignored it until the night before and painted myself into a corner. There was no way out of this other than putting pen to paper. I just wrote and did the best I could. It was by hand, written in a black fountain pen on lined A4 paper. There was no editing or reworking of this piece whatsoever. I handed it in, forgot about it, and expected to perform quite badly and took a bit of solace in the fact that at least I’d tried. Our essays were returned a couple of weeks later, and something really strange happened, and I developed quite a profound cognitive dissonance. I was only three marks off the first despite grammatical and spelling errors. I didn’t get it.

I was so concerned, alarmed and doubtful that I made an appointment with the assessor of my essay. She was taken aback as students would usually come to her asking for it to be reassessed because they weren’t happy with their grades. After all, it was thought to be too low. I was pleased but confused as I didn’t believe it was correct, and she’d marked me higher than I deserved. I was so confused that I cried in her office, and she didn’t know what to do with me. She said, ” even though there are mistakes that I’ve highlighted, your overall arguments are sound, compelling and showed more thought than any of the others”. I listened to what she had to say but still didn’t believe her. I thought it was just another fluke, a good day, and I was lucky enough to have something to say as I’d picked the correct essay title out of the five on offer. Despite this achievement that no one other than me knew about, having no one to celebrate this success with meant that I didn’t have a countering force to my already ingrained attitudes. It was a real success, but I continued with my fear of writing and still didn’t improve.

What changed for me was when I met Keith. Subscribing to the political paper and reading real stuff that was deeply interesting changed me. Nothing at University was all that interesting, but this stuff was gold. The fact that I didn’t understand everything didn’t matter. It showed me how little I knew and wanted to know and understand. I bought book after book after book. I remember my older brother commenting to my mum around this time. He said: “What’s wrong with her mum? She’s always got her head in a book?”  It wasn’t normal practice in my house, and it showed. But I carried on and would read into the early hours. There was no structure to this or guidance which could have helped, I just knew I knew nothing but as sure as hell wanted to. It was tough. I bought books on many subjects: economics, politics, art, history, film and philosophy. Some weren’t the best examples, but I trusted they were all sound because they’d been printed. This isn’t true of a book, but I didn’t understand this at the time, only having had children’s books at home. But when I look at the books I did have in childhood, they are fantastic examples of illustrated children’s literature. I was really lucky and privileged to have had those that I did. Hindsight is wonderful if you are willing to look back objectively, with honesty and humility, as then you can learn something unknown. 

The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for children’s books; I may write about this in the future. I have a strong desire to write and illustrate one of my own. I have a body of work and illustrations in my portfolio (that I’ve kept hidden away) that would lend themselves well to this sort of thing. Maybe it will be something I can pull off one day if I’m lucky and all the stars are aligned in my favour.

At this point, I’d like to say that if anyone is struggling to put pen to paper, please stop and think. Everyone can write, whether it’s a simple note, letter, or shopping list. Forget the formalities around writing for now, as that is something that can be gained later. If you get hung up on the slightest little things, they will become much bigger things that will stand in your way. Yes, writing has a form to it, depending on its function. A list is simply a list as an aide memoir and doesn’t need to be anything else. Depending on the audience and what it’s about and for, an essay will have a different form altogether. A short fictional story will have another form. Poetry has a different form altogether, but it is most certainly related to its function, and there are no hard and fast rules about content in any writing. Your audience will influence the content if you want to educate and inform them. The language will differ greatly if you write for a small, specialised audience. Who are you writing for matters a great deal? 

Most of my writing until now has been to pass exams and was a means to a definite end. Writing for pleasure, I’m sure, will be different again. For academic or “serious” writing, you must have ideas, a fairly reasonable vocabulary, and be willing to work on the conventions of how it’s presented. It will take work and effort, but there’s plenty of instruction in books or online. First, you will have to read and live to become a writer. Be picky about who you read and why. If possible, read those you identify with most, as this will strengthen you. Then read those you don’t. A lot of precious time can be wasted trying to make sense of rubbish. It can drive you insane if you are isolated and new to an area. Some books can leave you feeling profoundly dumb when they have deliberately been written so badly they are obscure and illusive. Books on art and postmodernism fall into this category and I may write about a couple I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure to experience.

First of all, read what you are interested in and pick accessible sources that are easier to comprehend. A saying sums things up quite nicely: average minds discuss people, good minds discuss events, but great minds discuss ideas! You can’t do anything without ideas other than reporting. Read and read and have a thesaurus and several dictionaries by your side. I have a medical dictionary, a Latin dictionary and a legal dictionary. I have a dictionary of proverbs, too. This is how your vocabulary and comprehension will grow and how you will come into contact with knowledge and ideas. It won’t be handed to you on a plate. Work needs to be done here, and there are no shortcuts unless you plagiarise. Not something I would recommend. You will only be cheating yourself, and you will be found out!! You might hold prejudices about yourself like I did. Believing I was less than others and not producing much evidence that spoke to the contrary left me in a state of non-progression for a very long time, and no one helped me out of that until I met Keith. 

By introducing me to a whole load of writing and ideas I was interested in, I was helped to start helping myself. Keith never did the work for me but opened up a path I was brave enough to follow. I had someone to bounce ideas off and discuss things with. Choose a patient, non-patronising or condescending type of person for this. He might have rolled his eyes on the odd occasion but was approachable. I also adhere to the belief that there is no such thing as a dumb question. You are where you are, and others will think the same thing. On my second degree, I received a wonderful compliment from a Muslim student after a lecture one day that came out of the blue. She told me how grateful she was that I often asked questions and appreciated how clear and straightforward I was when I spoke. Having a pretty flat accent and a bit of courage meant she easily understood me. Our foreign students do find it difficult to understand “Scousers”, “Brummies”, and “Gordies” because the accent is just too alien to someone who doesn’t have English as their first language. 

There’s a writer in everyone if you want it badly enough, but you must have something to say. You can’t write any essay without knowing something about the subject or having thoughts about it. Before becoming a writer, you become an ideas, knowledge and information gatherer. Keeping a notebook with a pencil and rubber in hand is quite useful. Jot down anything that resonates with you or a principle about something you fully understand. And this helped once I realised that when a book is your property, you can underline as much as you want to. You can scribble in the margins to highlight everything pertinent. It’s not a crime or disrespectful.

Academics and great thinkers have been doing it for eternity. Never in a million years would I have thought of doing this until I’d seen it done. Believe it or not, that was a breakthrough for me. Let me also tell you about something else I learnt after seeing it in my 30s. I was corresponding with a Hegelian/Marxist Philosopher from across the pond and he sent me an image via email of a fragment of Schelling’s work. The devil Schelling had scribbled on it and doodled the picture of a squirrel. It’s not precious until you decide it is and needs to be polished for ease of consumption. Your work is your work and should be as individual as you are.

Being mechanical and formulaic will not bring anything new, so be daring. No one has a monopoly on content unless you let them and cave in. There might be certain conventions to follow, but the content is entirely down to the author. You have complete control in this regard or ought to if the writing is to be free, authentic and originality. As Shakespeare said, “Be true to thyne own self”. We hold these published learned thinkers in such high regard at times and come to know them through pages and pages of the polished written word. These works will have gone through so many rounds of editing and proofreading before printing that I imagine they lost count, and we must never forget that. These thinkers were as fallible and human as you and I; they had to start somewhere like everyone else. We are never shown the entirety of their personalities, characters or mistakes but only the end product. We are never given the story of how they got there. The finished work is never the whole story!

I must confess that I have read Orwell’s essays and thoroughly enjoyed them. After reading “Why I Write”, I took one significant pearl of wisdom from it. If you care about your audience and wish to reach a wide one, write with as few words as possible. Don’t go overboard with long and fancy words that are unnecessary. It will dilute the message and make you look like a prick. If the idea is the most important thing, keep it simple and choose the most familiar words to describe and explain. I don’t write for academia but to impart knowledge or insight to as many people as possible. Knowing your audience and caring about them matters. 

I would also recommend that you look at your beliefs and how you feel and think about things. Ask why, who, what and when as often as you can.   What is your gut telling you? How does something sit with you? I remember being very attracted to what Einstein once said: “Peace cannot be created through force but through understanding”. Having respect for this genius meant it chimed, and I took it on board, applied it quite broadly, and sought to understand it before anything else. Once you comprehend you can set about good expression of it and not before. But it certainly helps to know yourself well and not be ashamed of where you are or have come from.

What I find very important is setting out your aims. This is usually crystalised in a title and should guide you. I have no exact idea about what the readership of this blog is like. I should imagine there are many history buffs or students and I can’t strictly help you with an academic historical essay other than look at your method. You will no doubt have to Harvard reference content and fulfil certain conventions to pay the correct respects to academics before you and show that you have assimilated the knowledge and worked intelligently with such material. This is academia and it has its role, but it can also serve to be like an intellectual straight jacket. You will come up against some trends in thought that are reactionary and purely fantastical, totally idealist and have very little robust theory to support them. Please remember that we live in a class society, and competing theories get censored, held back, drowned out, dragged through the mud, bastardised, deliberately misrepresented and buried.

The victors often write history, and it is extremely one-sided. Be aware of your sources and who they serve. Read far and wide to balance your views before you commit to something and take it as gospel. Don’t be loyal to ideas that do not serve your interests; you will be inauthentic and missing the bigger picture. You will be punished for not reiterating the most acceptable of ideas at times and will be marked down. This happened often to me in my first degree because I didn’t quite agree with the status quo. Sadly, this happens but it’s the world as it is and not as it should be. Completely accommodate yourself to this and you will not produce anything all that original, I guarantee that much. Whether you do this or not isn’t any of my business, but your work will have little originality and you will be just going through the motions to pass exams or make money. This satisfies some people, but it doesn’t satisfy me. I urge people to also read straight from the horse’s mouth.

Don’t read a book about Orwell. For example, read his works. Don’t read a book about Trotsky, read the works he wrote with his hand and that flowed from his thought. The same applies to anyone:  William Morris, Lenin, Marx, Freud, Nietzche, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Hegel, Aristotle or whoever. If you are struggling to understand them, and at times, you most certainly will go to a trusted, robust source to help walk you through it. A kind source that isn’t patronising or condescending and has the interest of empowering you rather than browbeating you. Then, you will start to grasp stuff and move forwards instead of being uncertain in your thinking. I’m sure this doesn’t happen to everyone, but it does happen nonetheless.

To summarise this contribution, I would say that writing is an art form and, essentially, like all the arts, is about expression. Skill and mastery of the conventions of this art form are a must but the content is down to you. You must have something to say and express before starting, even with limited skill. Like a painter, there must be something to paint that is yearning to find expression. Before starting, the artist sketches privately in a book and learns through exercise. Any mistakes made are hidden in this little private book. There must be mastery of mixing colours, knowing paints, an understanding of brushes, palette knives, sponges, and their mark making abilities and how to vary these at will to gain the desired effect. There must be an appreciation for composition, attention to how it looks on the page or canvas and how to manipulate and change this to make the expression of the content the best version of what it is trying to say or reveal. You may be laughed at and sneered at for your efforts, but an individual will never learn to swim if they don’t jump into the water.

Although I’m not a historian, I have certainly had to look at my own here, so perhaps I am one after all, and I say this with a wink! Whatever I have written has been done with the best of intention and I hope it urges anyone to improve and give yourself a try. This work will undoubtedly have some mistakes, but do you know what? I don’t care at this stage as it’s not an academic piece of writing ready to be published and published in print. It is simply to provoke thought from inertia into movement with momentum. I wish you well on this journey, and may your destination be a piece of work that you are proud of and that resonates with the many, not the few.