NO. NEXT QUESTION? Will mortarboards roll after the Jason Arday allegations?

I am reminded of two examples of showing the threat to the university’s core tenets. One involves a famous little book by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, entitled On Bullshit. There he explored the idea that more harmful than liars to the intellectual health of a nation, or its subdivisions, are ‘those who are almost entirely unconcerned with the truth’. Liars are at least actively aware that the truth exists and are trying to conceal its whereabouts. Bullshitters just don’t care.

Everyone loved that little book and knew exactly the sort of thing Frankfurt was talking about. Yet like intellectual knotweed, this indifference to the truth has proved not only resilient but anti-fragile. It has a few dauntless foes, but from every bloody stump of neck, two or three new heads seem to spring every day.

The second is a quote from 2022 attributed to Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR and former head of the Wikimedia Foundation: ‘Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.’ I say attributed to – I saw her say it and you can, too. It’s from her TED Talk and she seems to be in no hurry to distance herself from it. She might, of course, argue that the context was important, and she was not talking about the criteria by which we appoint professors to one of the great seats of learning in the history of the world. And maybe she’s right. But honestly, why should I care?

Stay focussed. Demand action in our universities. If not heads, then mortarboards at least must surely roll. And if that suggests an impossibility, given their geometrical properties – well, then I think we know just the man for the job.

As Gareth Roberts writes at the London Spectator on “Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday,” “Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the whole shebang of progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.”