Fake, Gay, and DIEing of AIDS

The year we realized the universities can’t be saved, and shouldn’t be.

Vance Kovacs

Academia has had a rough year, and it’s ending on a sour note.

As you might imagine, this brings me no end of schadenfreude.

I got my start on Substack conducting a post-mortem on the spasming carcass of the university system.

It’s a story I’ve returned to periodically, for example diving into the factors that destroyed the academic job market:

Or discussing the prestige-laundering credentialization system of the universities, which serves as a key, and extremely vulnerable, node in our systems of power, due to the crowning role it plays in the regime’s claim to legitimacy:

During the summer, we saw the DIEvy League¹ take a giant L in the Supreme Court, which spanked them for their affirmative action admissions policies:

Shortly after the Supreme Court decision, a Gallup study revealed that the Marxcissist mania that has demented higher ed is finally starting to catch up to it, with an increasing fraction of the population losing faith in the value of the institution and the credentials it bestows, leading to the entirely foreseeable consequence that enrolment is dropping like a C-130 loaded down with palettes of TNT, three smoking engines, and an empty fuel tank:

In October, Hamas attacked Israel, Israel responded in the predictable fashion to Hamas, campuses across the country exploded with protests chanting From the river to the sea, and the girlbosses running the DIEvies were hauled in front of Congress to explain how, exactly, an antisemitic and arguably genocidal slogan was consistent with their campus speech codes. They weren’t terribly convincing in their non-explanations (“It, uh, depends on context....”), and it’s now looking like billionaire Jewish donors are going to be a lot less generous with their contributions to their alma maters’ slush funds endowments.

For the record, I don’t personally care all that much about the anti-Israel protests. Their conflict has nothing to do with me. I’m neither Israeli nor Palestinian, neither Jewish nor Muslim, and the Holiness Spiral Land means about as much to me as any equivalently sized patch of sand and rock in the Gobi Desert. From my elevated perspective of sublime indifference, both sides have valid reasons to hate the other; both have done horrible things to the other; both, to be blunt, suck. The two tribes should be left alone to brutalize one another until either one emerges as the clear victor, or they kiss and make up. Just leave me out of it.

It’s also more than a little infuriating that the political class has treated the festering poison of institutionalized hostility towards Whites, sorry “whiteness”, with insouciant complacence for decades now, but suddenly discovers its capacity for moral outrage the moment America’s wealthiest and most privileged victim group has to endure insults to their fragile dignity. It’s especially unsympathetic given that Jewish academics have for generations played an outsize role in fostering the anti-White, anti-Western, anti-male, and anti-civilizational bigotry animating the post-enlightenment progressivist ideology of antisocial injustice. Now that they’ve belatedly realized that the multicultural melanated master race they’ve lovingly cultivated as a battering ram against heritage Amerikaners sees Jews as just another group of White supremacists, they suddenly have a problem with their rampaging golem. Excuse me while I dig around in my closet, I’ve got the world’s tiniest shofar packed away somewhere, and I’m going to play it just for them.

All that said, I want to be fair here. It’s worth acknowledging that the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who has made it his personal mission to hold the universities accountable for their third-worldist antisemitism, has so far refused a special Jewish carve-out in the diversity bureaucracy. Not good enough, he says. No more hate against Jews, and no more hate against Whites. DEI must DIE.

Here’s looking at you, Bill.

Anyhow. My personal feelings about squabbling Abrahamics in the Middle East aside, that Congressional testimony was extremely embarrassing, and all on its own is costing the DIEvies billions in lost endowments from alienated Jewish alumni.

But it all got so much worse².

A few weeks ago, my boy Christopher Brunethad what I’m pretty sure is the biggest break in his career when he teamed up with Christopher Rufo to reveal that Harvard’s diversity hire president Claudine Gay had plagiarized at least half of the papers in her extremely meagre academic oeuvre: of the scant 11 publications she has to her name, 4³ include substantial uncredited excerpts from the work of other more talented⁴ scholars. For Brunet, collecting Claudine Gay’s scalp was a personal passion project: he tried breaking the story when he was still a stringer for The Daily Caller, only to have the brave and based conservative warriors for freeze peach and apple pie cave under spurious threats from Harvard’s legal department:

for me, this was personal

Unlike the Daily Caller, Chris doesn’t care about lawerly nastygrams. So much the worse for Harvard. And the Daily Caller.

Once the story was out, the Internet resounded with calls for Claudine the Fake and Gay to resign. Being possessed of the full measure of integrity characterizing the contemporary academic class, which is to say having none whatsoever, she naturally dug in her heels and refused outright. Harvard’s Board, who after all had hired her, backed her up completely. Harvard’s senior fellows assured everyone that they’d looked into the matter of her academic writings, and found that everything was fine (while also hilariously affirming their commitment to academic freedom and open discourse). Five hundred Harvard professors published an open letter defending Fake and Gay. Actually make that seven hundred professors, just shy of a third of the university’s entire professoriate.

The message from the DIEvies is clear: they do not care that they have appointed a stuttering fraud to the highest office of America’s (formerly) most prestigious scholarly enclave. To the contrary, they’re proud of it. They are united in their unanimous and unqualified support of an affirmative action hire elevated far beyond her extremely limited talents. Moreover, they don’t care the smallest bit what the dirty, ignorant, uneducated rubes, who have probably never even heard of Lacan, think of the matter.

Nothing could surprise me less than this reaction. At this point the professoriate, especially the younger and more energetic fraction, has been saturated with soft-spoken yet sanpaku-eyed politically motivated hirelings whose sole claim to original scholarship is finding a novel means of excavating misogynoir from between the lines of Dickens’ deconstructed Christmas Carol⁵. They were admitted as undergraduate students on the basis of their sex and skin colour, got into graduate school because they learned to say the correct things about sex and skin colour, and slimed their way into tenure because they figured out how to interpret every phenomenon in the universe on the exclusive basis of sex and skin colour. Imposter syndrome is a way of life for them. They know full well that the only reason they have their privileged positions is the sweet rot of the DIElectical matrix within which they have grown like mold proliferating in a neglected vegetable crisper.

Claudine the Fake and Gay is one of them. She is, in a sense, all of them, the distilled essence of their entire class, the embodied avatar of the modern academy.

I mean, just look at her.

She’s got the look down pat. The giant, square-rimmed glasses, reminding you that she is in fact, an intellectual, that you are required to address her as Doctor. The aggressively ugly black woman buzz cut, which proclaims proudly to the world, “I don’t care about the beauty standards of cisheteronormative whiteness”. The power shoulder blazer, so you know she means business.

Her surname is redolent of the rainbow banner, and while that seems on the one hand like plucking the low hanging fruit of a cheap joke, it’s also powerfully aptronymic – you can practically hear the magic of that name working on the subconscious minds of the hiring committee, their inner voices squealing in delight as they reviewed her application. “A black woman named Gay!? HIRED!”

I suspect that one-two punch of a black-woman-named-Gay has had at least something to do with her meteoric rise through the ranks of academic administration. Her contributions to the scholarly literature certainly haven’t fuelled it. That said, her publication history could not be any more exquisitely well-suited to her role as the living icon of affirmative action. First, and as is now well-known, it is fraudulent, right down to the level of her doctoral dissertation. How fitting for the era of the replication crisis, in which that which is not plagiarized can be assumed to be simply made up. Second, what little she has published has been written exclusively on exactly the subject matter you would expect. Here’s a taste from ResearchGate:

She is a professional black woman, writing about black woman things, and therefore a perfect figurehead for a narcissistic academy filled to its frothy brim with professional sodomities writing about sodomy things, professional women writing about woman things, professional Muslims writing about Muslim people things, and professional trannies writing about things you really wish they’d keep to themselves.

Some have expressed bewildered amazement that Harvard could not have found a black woman of actual academic accomplishment, rather than, you know, her. I have no doubt that such black women must exist, but this complaint misses the point. Fake and Gay was appointed to her position not in spite of her pathetic scholarly record, but because of it. For the legions of posers and frauds occupying the offices of Harvard’s department, her unimpressive contributions make them feel safe. She’s just like them. She won’t make them look bad. By ostentatiously lowering the bar so far it drops into the dirt, she reaffirms that the rest of them can carry on doing what they’ve been doing – which is to say, nothing that matters to anyone. Including themselves.

Essentially everything in the universities is now at best irrelevant, at worst openly fraudulent.

Lest you think this is isolated to the departments of grievance studies, I assure you, there is no succour to be found in the austere Apollonian hallways of STEM.

To start with, the science departments devote oceans of research funding to subjects with no basis in reality.

Carbon-driven anthropogenic climate change, a model that has been falsified empirically and theoretically so thoroughly that it now stands on a level with the celestial firmament and phlogiston, reigns supreme for reasons that everyone who isn’t purely and cynically political (or, you know, tarded) understands are purely and cynically political.

Astronomy departments obsess over the fruitless search for dark matter particles, which they’ll find any day now, while virulently resisting any alternative.

Physics departments have disappeared up their own behinds in the abstruse mathematics of string theory, M-branes, and the cosmological landscape of a multiverse that cannot even in principle be detected, but whose existence they can intuit in the hypnotic rotatations of Calabi-Yau manifolds through hypothesized hyperdimensions.

Biomedical faculties operate as the marketing departments for Big Pharma, pushing placebos and poisons for profit.

And then, of course, there is the COVID-19 scamdemic, in which every element of the academy was an enthusiastic participant. What can you say about an institution that abandoned centuries of epidemiological knowledge to slobber at the clay feet of the ill-considered mandates of power? That demanded everyone wear masks, socially distance, and isolate at home, in the absence of any evidence that any of this did any good at all to prevent the spread of a virus that wasn’t even dangerous, and in the face of abundant evidence that all of this did a great deal of harm to the economy, to human psychology, and to the development of children? A community that insisted that everyone, young, old, at high risk or none whatsoever, be injected multiple times with experimental gene therapies⁶, in the absence of any evidence that they provided any benefit at all, and in the face of growing evidence that they were savagely harmful to the neurological, cardiovascular, immunological, oncological, and reproductive health of the people they were forcing them on? Most especially including their own young and at least previously healthy students? What can you say about a scientific community that wasn’t merely silent in the face of this monstrous and psychotic tyranny, but fanatically in support of all of it?

So much for the value of academic scientific research.

But it’s in the hiring and admissions where we see the true decay, the Claudineness of it all.

In the name of fostering diversity, hiring at STEM departments is increasingly done on the basis of identity, it being far more important to showcase Women of Colour Doing Science than to actually do science. The result of course is that the junior faculties of most science departments are now filled with half-smart ideologues more skilled at telling the diversity committee what it wants to hear (and of course, very skilled at being themselves diverse) than they are at long division. But then, since most research is fake, it doesn’t matter very much how skilled the researchers are at faking it.

It is the same story in admissions. Supreme Court decisions about affirmative action notwithstanding⁷, admissions are now almost entirely on the basis of identity rather than ability. The inevitable result is that the undergraduate population can’t handle the curriculum, and the inevitable result of that is that the curriculum is progressively diluted in order to patch the ‘leaky pipeline’ funnelling diverse students towards diverse associate professorships. But then, since most research is fake, it doesn’t matter very much if the students preparing for careers doing it are too dim to understand the fundamentals underpinning it.

Some think that the universities can be saved. There are valiant efforts to do so: to force hiring committees to stop requiring ‘diversity statements’ in faculty job applications; to force universities to adopt codes guaranteeing academic freedom and respect for freedom of speech; to force the resignations of professors caught in the most egregious academic fraud; even to close the most obviously polluted departments, gender studies being an egregious example.

This is noble, but a bit like trying to defibrillate a man who has just been shot in the chest. It isn’t so much a medical intervention as one of the stages of grief.

An example. Say you live in a red state, and your Republican senate has just passed a bill forbidding the land grant university from requiring diversity statements in faculty applications, these being compelled speech, an ideological litmus test, and thus a clear violation of the First Amendment. Problem solved, right? Dissenters can now squeeze into faculty positions, and once again we can enjoy a Diversity of Viewpoints in the Marketplace of Ideas!

Lol. No.

The faculty – who, you must remember, are all very much on board with diversity statements – will simply, and without fanfare, expect applicants to work their statements of faith in the civic religion into their teaching statements, their cover letters, their curricula vitae, and (for bonus points) their research plans. The true believers and the cynical will know to do this without being told. Those who conspicuously fail to do so will simply be denied interviews (there is never any explanation as to why one has not gotten an interview), since the only reason they would fail to rub antisocial injustice all over their applications would be because they are, in fact, dissenters.

That’s not a prediction, by the way. It’s a description of what has happened as red state legislatures have moved to force their state universities to drop diversity statements.

The academy cannot be saved. The rot is too deep. The problem is not a tiny stage 1 melanoma that can be excised with a bit of surgery and a pat on the hand, but a metastatic cancer that has spread to every tissue within the organism. To remove every infected cell would be to remove every cell. To cure the body would be to kill it.

Which is exactly what we should do.

Put the universities out of their misery.

That which is falling, should also be pushed.

Like monasteries isolated from but lavishly supported by the outside world, in which elaborate prayers are chanted only for the ears of the monks, the universities no longer serve any socially useful function. They serve only themselves. The young minds entrusted to them are not sharpened by intellectual training, but dulled by postmodern superstitions, and deranged with deliberately induced schizoid psychoses. Sinecures are provided to charlatans more suitable as janitors. Insofar as there are any talented intellects still within the ivory towers (and there are still a few), those minds are squandered on self-referential nonsense of no benefit and much harm to the species. The universities have become pointless concentrations of financial and intellectual capital locked away from any productive use for reasons that make sense to no one but themselves. They are cysts on the body politic, badly in need of popping.

As Helen Dale suggested, we should take our cue from Henry VIII, and dissolve the monasteries. Confiscate their endowments, cancel their tax breaks, bury them in lawsuits, end the student loan program, let them wither on the vine, and allow their academic and administrative personnel to find their way – or not, and it must be admitted, they mostly would not – on the open market. If we’re feeling merciful, we can throw a few clean needles their way, to enable their fentanyl habits.

The cordyceps that has been chewing its way through the innards of academia for the last few generations has now hollowed it out completely. The fungal parasite’s fruiting body has finally erupted from the host’s brittle and long-empty shell. The host’s behaviour has been disquietingly strange for some time; now, it no longer even resembles the original organism, and it is no longer possible to pretend that there is anything left but the parasite.

You can only trade on the reputation built by previous and better men for so long, before it becomes obvious to all that you are not them. The universities built their reputations because they were the places in which smart people gathered. For a long time, it has been assumed that those at universities must be smart, because they are at universities. I don’t think we’re making that assumption anymore.

This year, it finally became obvious to a great many people that the universities cannot be salvaged, and moreover, are no longer worth salvaging. It’s time for them to be decommissioned and broken down for spare parts.

Since it is the end of the year at the time of writing, and it is customary to make predictions for the coming year, I will go out on a limb and prophecy that 2024 will be the year in which that which has been DIEing will finally, mercifully, gracelessly, DIE.

Though the corpse will no doubt continue twitching for some time to come.

We’ll serve marshmallows at the funeral.

Burning College, John Edwin Usher

Thanks for reading this unhinged polemical diatribe. All the links at the front of the article notwithstanding, I don’t actually write about the DIEing Academy very often. I tend to be all over the place; you can get an idea of the breadth of subject matter I write about here, where I’ve collected some of my most popular and favourite pieces. I thought you should know that in case you were tempted to

so you don’t miss my next piece. I’d hate it if you subscribed hoping to read another rant dunking on academia’s faux nerds, and instead found yourself reading a meditation on the rise of the network state or something. Ahem. Whatever it will be, hopefully it comes out shortly. Although who knows really. One of the nice things about Substack is that I can take my time and really polish a piece, rather than churn out content every day for the sake of it. I hope my long-suffering supporters see it that way, too. I love you guys. Couldn’t do it without you. No, really. You’re amazing, and I don’t do nearly enough to justify your support.

As always, in between writing on Substack you can find me on Twitter @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active at Telegrams From Barsoom.

1. Hat tip to @Yuri Bezmenov for coining that term.

2. By which I mean, so much better.

3. Or 5, or 6 ... the number keeps growing as additional scrutiny gets applied.

4. None of them are talented.

5. Are there any black women in the Christmas Carol? No? I rest my case.

6. Which they insisted were not gene therapies, but rather vaccines, because the word ‘vaccine’ had been redefined, a redefinition which they all somehow managed to ignore.

7. And the universities were absolutely shameless in announcing their open intention to ignore that decision via the simple expedient of dispensing with objective measures such as standardized testing, and relying more or less exclusively on subjective measures such as essays.