Daniel Defoe observed that plague victims ‘never perceiv’d that they were infected’ until they discovered the ‘tokens’ on their skin. By that point, ‘nothing could follow but certain Death’.

Something similar might be said of Britain’s universities. In recent days, the Jason Arday affair has captured the world’s attention because of its absurdity. But the humiliation of Cambridge is not an early sign of infection. It is just a particularly visible bubo.

At one level, Arday’s fall reveals how, even in our most elite universities, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) dogma has warped intellectual standards to the point of madness. Yet a deeper examination reveals poor Jason to be merely a poster boy for the increasingly fetid system that is British higher education.

Take the London School of Economics (LSE), which has produced 21 Nobel Prize winners, was ranked number one in the UK by the Times Good University Guide last year and is internationally acclaimed for its teaching on economics, finance and politics. However, all first-year students must now take LSE100, the university’s ‘flagship interdisciplinary course’. Students may choose to study one of three modest questions: ‘How can we transform our climate futures?’; ‘How can we control AI?’; or ‘How can we create a fair society?’. One student described the course as ‘famous for being a massive waste of time’. What is lost in academic discipline is made up for in ideological indoctrination.

Participants constructed walls, ladders and bridges out of Lego as metaphors for racism

Participants constructed walls, ladders and bridges out of Lego as metaphors for racism

LSE students who opt to study ‘How can we create a fair society?’ discover a course description asserting: ‘As the expanding billionaire class increasingly dominates political systems, while gender and ethnicity gaps widen, the question of how to reach a fairer world is both urgent and contentious.’ Even stranger than the courses are the people who teach them. Among them is Dr Alex Frankovitch, whose PhD thesis was entitled ‘Fucking and Being Fucked: Towards a Sexual Ethics of Sex on Drugs’. One student recalls asking Frankovitch about Warren Buffett, only to discover that they (to use Dr Frankovitch’s preferred pronoun) had never heard of him.

Dr Carolina Are is, according to LSE’s website, a ‘digital criminologist… researcher-activist and content creator’ who won a Sexual Freedom Award in 2019. She gives lectures on reducing ‘online harms’ and ‘how we can control AI’. When not contemplating man’s struggle against machine, she is a pole-dancer and instructor. The website linked to her university profile contains her showreel and invites visitors to ‘learn a pole dance choreography, pole tricks, floorwork or twerk with me via Zoom!’ Sadly, Friedrich Hayek, the father of modern free-market economics, did not offer similar services when he taught at LSE.

Are is entitled to do what she wants in her free time. But what sets alarm bells ringing about her academic standing is that pole-dancing seems to be not just an outlet for relaxation, but the focal point of her research.

One of her most recent papers is called ‘“Sexy jail” and performative transparency: Evaluating shadowbanning notifications and appeals in Instagram’s Account Status amongst pole dancing content........

© The Spectator