Plagiarism is the worst possible academic offence. This man was the youngest black professor ever at Cambridge, and had been widely publicised as such.
Add to that the extraordinary claims he made - non-verbal until 12, illiterate until 18, ran 600 miles in 6 days for charity, dug wells in South America, ran 30 marathons in 30 days, the last few with a hairline leg fracture. His debut book, an autobiography, is to be published this month for which he claimed he was paid an astonishing advance of 1.4 million.
It raises important questions for academia, which has had a race problem - he had been investigated for plagiarism at Cambridge before, but because the accusations originated from racist journalists and academics, the claims were dismissed seemingly without due diligence. And now it’s come back to bite the institution in a big way. Big questions about how institutions handle complaints and investigations.
And the field of sociology he works in - the study of race issues - is currently under fire in the culture wars. Its a heavy blow to the subject to have such a prominent member brought into question.
Zombie@feddit.uk 4 days ago
It’s a remarkable story that was likely to garner a decent amount of attention anyway if it were an old, white, neurotypical, short haired, tweed elbow patch jacket wearing professor of long tenure.
But he’s black, autistic, young (for an academic), makeup wearing, long haired, and gained his position after supposed “woke” BLM pressure. This story is a bigot’s wet dream because it reinforces all of their prejudices and proves they were “right” all along.
A scandal of this scale would likely get a few days of national press, die down, and then get another brief mention a few weeks later if a conclusion or something significant happens. But capitalist press feeds on the engagement and enragement of bigots to get clicks, so they’ll ride this story as long as they can and keep pumping out more about it until the clicks die down.