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Posts: 10

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Extracts from article in Spectator 16th August by Brendan O’Neill: Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of ‘decolonisation’ and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unravelled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. . . This is the poison chalice of the state religion of diversity. It lays traps for the very people it celebrates. It handpicks members of ‘the oppressed’ for moral anointment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials. That’s the toxic bargain of identity politics: it builds teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace is often twice as fatal. And what a pedestal they made for Arday. They worshipped him as ‘the best in the world’. They beatified him as a black wunderkind whose very presence in a place like Cambridge might help to wash away its sins of whiteness. They canonised him as a living monument to ‘decolonisation’. It was precisely this, their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black saviour, that made them turn a blind eye to the questionable elements of Arday’s CV and life story. They sacrificed their due diligence to the god of decolonisation. And Arday suffered. He was both poster boy and sacrificial lamb of the diversity crusade. Even as he gained from it – reaching the dizzying heights of a Cambridge professorship – he was being damned by it. The foundation of myth and sand his starry career was built on was untenable. Its collapse was a given. It is a testament to the ideological blindness of the inhabitants of our ivory towers that none of them foresaw it. . . . The Faustian ruthlessness of it all is mindblowing. . . . The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it. I and others have been arguing for years that the politics of identity is a disaster for all, black and white alike. White kids are overlooked, black kids are patronised. Whites are branded ‘privileged’, blacks ‘oppressed’. Whites are seen as the beneficiaries of historic crimes who must atone for past sins, blacks as history’s perma-victims who require the gracious helping hand of the state. We are demonised or infantilised according to the accident of our race. Enough. Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.

https://nitter.poast.org/RichardDawkins/status/2088855662503546898#m

Published: August 16, 2026 05:09

Extracts from article in Spectator 16th August by Brendan O’Neill: Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and


Extracts from a further Spectator article (Aug 15) by Andrew Gilligan: An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution. At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.” It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday. The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir.. IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on “Islamic scientific critical consciousness” . . . The paper says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.” On Tuesday, in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal, The Spectator revealed that Ahmed had been given the prestigious assistant professorship. We noted that in a 2002 pamphlet, republished in 2017, she attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching that child marriage is wrong. Like the paper’s author, Mirza, Ahmed has also said that modern science is a problem, because in the “teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam.” After that story created a storm, the education faculty took decisive action. It removed the names of all its staff from its website, presumably to stop anyone who doesn’t know about web archive tools checking to see if they’ve hired any more wrong’uns (spoiler alert: they have Other action has been less forthcoming. The faculty clearly hopes to ride this one out, issuing a statement that it is “committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law.” Well, we must reluctantly agree that Ahmed – benefiting from the democracy she condemns – should have the freedom to say that English is “one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach, or (while teaching at Cambridge) write that Muslim students shouldn’t have to worry about “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.” But that’s quite different from believing that Cambridge University should fund her to promote her ideas to the future leaders of the country. Still more indisputable is that a university subject, even one as debased as Education at Cambridge, should not promote baseless, anti-scientific twaddle in the name of academic research. But it does.

https://nitter.poast.org/RichardDawkins/status/2088514414425043341#m

Published: August 15, 2026 06:33

Extracts from a further Spectator article (Aug 15) by Andrew Gilligan: An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that


Extracts from 11 Aug article in Spectator by Andrew Gilligan: After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University. We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday. Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’ Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’. She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam
 if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’ Worst of all, ‘religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education’, meaning that ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.’ Science is a problem too, because in the ‘teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’. And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together.

https://nitter.poast.org/RichardDawkins/status/2087566167942529289#m

Published: August 12, 2026 15:45

Extracts from 11 Aug article in Spectator by Andrew Gilligan: After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University. We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror


SUPERB monologue by Neil deGrasse Tyson, science's most brilliantly eloquent spokesman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYiUI6y1nKg

https://nitter.poast.org/RichardDawkins/status/2086376506389831863#m

Published: August 9, 2026 08:58

SUPERB monologue by Neil deGrasse Tyson, science's most brilliantly eloquent spokesman. youtube.com/watch?v=dYiUI6y1


Did Jason Arday’s PhD examiners actually read his thesis? And did the electors who appointed him to a Cambridge professorship read his work? The questions raised by this affair go well beyond plagiarism. My latest for UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2026/08/jason-arday-a-question-of-academic-standards/

https://nitter.poast.org/RichardDawkins/status/2086213544689725821#m

Published: August 8, 2026 22:10

Did Jason Arday’s PhD examiners actually read his thesis? And did the electors who appointed him to a Cambridge professorship read his work? The questions raised by this affair go well beyond plagiarism. My latest for UnHerd:


The following little gems were not spewed out by The Postmodernism Generator, nor are they part of an Alan Sokal hoax. They are a representative selection from Jason Arday’s thesis, which earned him a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University. The University of Cambridge was mightily impressed, and they elected him to a professorship at the young age of 37. His thesis is now under suspicion of plagiarism, but plagiarism, if proved, would seem to be among that document’s lesser problems. “Throughout the process, at critical junctures the researcher was conscious that with regards to providing knowledge to the participants regarding reflection and mentoring, a contradictory position was being adopted, with regards to eliminating anything that may resemble a hierarchical structure.” “As the researcher, there was an awareness that the legitimacy of such suggestions regarding reliability are open to critique, however, this research study adopted these principles in attempting to maintain reliability through a qualitative research design.” “As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.” “As with other forms of discourse inquiry, narrative inquiry is underpinned by a social constructivist paradigm, in which behaviours and their meanings are socially situated and socially interpreted.” “This process allowed the researcher to immerse themself in the data collated.” “References were made with regards to the benefits that were gained from the peer-mentoring experience, with regards to developing pedagogically and working as part of a collegial environment to support each other during teacher training.” “An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognised that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”

https://nitter.poast.org/RichardDawkins/status/2083800184585163259#m

Published: August 2, 2026 06:20

The following little gems were not spewed out by The Postmodernism Generator, nor are they part of an Alan Sokal hoax. They are a representative selection from Jason Arday’s thesis, which earned him a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University. The


Natural selection is a blind watchmaker, yet the forms it produces can be astonishingly beautiful. Ernst Haeckel captured that beauty in his extraordinary illustrations. They accompany my forthcoming book, 42 Tales from Life: A Modern Bestiary. Published this November, it tells 42 stories of the ingenious, curious and bizarre products of evolution. Waterstones is offering 25% off pre-orders with code SUMMER26 until Friday, 24 July. https://www.waterstones.com/book/42-tales-from-life/richard-dawkins/9781035924356

https://nitter.poast.org/RichardDawkins/status/2079469590103425151#m

Published: July 21, 2026 07:32

Natural selection is a blind watchmaker, yet the forms it produces can be astonishingly beautiful. Ernst Haeckel captured that beauty in his extraordinary illustrations. They accompany my forthcoming book, 42 Tales from Life: A Modern Bestiary. Published


From time to time I remark, as an evolutionist, on the evolution of language. Mutations are especially interesting if they precisely REVERSE the former meaning. CNN headline today: “BeyoncĂ© drops new music.” “Drops” used to mean “gives up.” Here it means the exact opposite.

https://nitter.poast.org/RichardDawkins/status/2073674116779958707#m

Published: July 5, 2026 07:43

From time to time I remark, as an evolutionist, on the evolution of language. Mutations are especially interesting if they precisely REVERSE the former meaning. CNN headline today: “BeyoncĂ© drops new music.” “Drops” used to mean “gives up.” Here it means