Don't just pick on Cambridge

By Brian Clegg

At the moment, the University of Cambridge is getting much (deserved) criticism, not just for awarding a professorship to the fantasist and fabulist Jason Arday, but for continuing to deny all allegations even when it became obvious they had made a serious mistake. But it would be unfair to single out Cambridge*.

Sadly, the reality is that many universities have such an uncritical attitude to far left politics and one side of the culture wars that they are prepared to let an awful lot of nonsense be treated as worthy academic studies where there is practically no attempt to check details or establish any logical basis for arguments. 

Arday was Professor of Sociology of Education – itself arguably something of a non-topic – but it is at least an ology (as the Maureen Lipman put it so delightfully in the old BT adverts), and arguably the soft sciences are the most likely to totally ignore academic rigour and let anything go.

There’s nothing new here, of course. Think, for instance, of the infamous Sokal hoax, when back in 1996 physics professor Alan Sokal had a deliberately meaningless paper Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity published by the journal Social Text. 

The worrying thing is that all of this has happened despite the supposed safety net of the peer review system, and despite universities being well aware that this kind of ‘work’ was totally lacking in academic value. It’s as if the university authorities were under a kind of spell that prevented them from seeing what was happening. Anderson’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes dates back to 1837, with predecessors of the story form dating back another 500 years or more. It’s not like this kind of self-deception to go along with the crowd is a new phenomenon. But surely we expect our universities to be better than this.

It’s time for some self-examination on many of our academic campuses – and perhaps a good clearing out of subjects and positions that are impossible to justify.

* A declaration of interest is probably required: I am a Cambridge graduate and I am very fond of the university, its physics department and Selwyn College – but in saying we shouldn’t single out Cambridge, I am not defending it, merely pointing out that it is certainly not alone in a total lack of sense.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.