Tom Weidig

I studied in the academic department at Cambridge that later employed Jason Arday. Here's just some of the crap I learnt: For one module, I wrote a lengthy essay about how cultural products like kids’ cartoons and jazz songs serve as instruments of capitalist oppression. I got a top mark on that paper (despite knowing at the time that I was essentially regurgitating complete crap). While studying for another paper I had a debate with the professor, an eminent anthropologist, because she insisted that native tribes could fly through the trees - not metaphorically, but that they could literally fly because they believed they could fly. After all, who are we to question ‘indigenous ways of knowing’... For a different course, I read long ‘research papers’ which argued that the fact that black kids are excluded from schools more than white kids proves systemic racism exists in education. Crucially, they ignored the fact that white kids are excluded more than, e.g., Japanese kids, a statistic which, applying the exact same logic, would suggest that the education system is systemically biased in favour of, erm, Japanese kids (which obviously it isn’t). Something that was held up as proof of the existence of this largely imaginary racism was that teachers tell kids not to use booming voices in the classroom, and not to put up their hoods or wear their trousers down below their pants. On another occasion, my supervisor casually praised some students agitators who were trying to shut down a talk by someone they disagreed with. I said that I didn’t think this was something to celebrate, because I believed in freedom of speech. He got visibly angry, and proceeded to tell me that free speech was not worth protecting in a capitalist system (or something along those lines). In my all-important final year, a lecturer let me know that I shouldn’t worry too much about my exam results, because as someone who was not from an upper class background I should be more focussed on using my grasp of leftist revolutionary theory to further the interests of the proletariat. Writing this down, it strikes me that it’s so hilariously mental that some of you will presumably assume I’m lying. But there’s no way I’m leaving it out, because it happened. Unlike the academics who make a living from this stuff, I couldn’t bring myself to build a career pumping out whiney, divisive, intellectually incoherent rubbish. But others, as we’ve seen exposed in recent days, do so with gusto. And are lauded for it. Please read the full piece this is taken from, and give it a share. I've linked it in the tweet below.