Wow. Just saw this - disgusting.
I stand by my mild criticism of Cofnas - he should have posted the Substack and not said a word after - but I support his exposure of the Cambridge/Arday scandal and this sucks.
Moral: Don’t give your enemies ammo from your own holster.
PS Cofnas was suspended by the “Rector” of Ghent U, who is a trannie. I have a juvenile sense of humor.
I visited Dartmouth a few weeks ago — time sure does fly — and meant to write about it right after while my impressions were fresh, but didn’t because you get what you pay for (although you can always give money - here).
Since the dire situation in Higher Ed has reached a new boiling point, I thought I’d begin with those developments and end up with my fun school trip.1
First, here’s the text of the open letter the Berkeley profs sent to the Regents.
I note that the writers are both Eastern European women. The names of the signatories are also listen - many “foreign” names among them. Sorry not sorry for concluding that Kyriakos Komvapoulos is not American. Why, I’d probably have thought that Abdullah Hammoud isn’t American, had I seen his name as a Mechanical Engineering prof. But that’s me.
This is so not surprising I won’t belabor it, because my readers are intelligent people who don’t need the obvious explained to them.
Oh fuck, I will. It took a Bulgarian and a Ukrainian trained in the Soviet system to point out the obvious: if you scored 400 on your Math SAT you should'nt be studying calc under Zvezdelina Stankova.
She did not sign on to be a professor of calculus at Berkley to be a middle school teacher.
And right on cue, The Guardian has “exposed” Professor Stankova as a fraud, in their world, because she used AI to edit an op-ed she wrote:
It never stops. So fucking what? I’m positive that although she’s fluent in English, writing in English is tough for her. I’ve seen this: I used to do editing for a Danish woman whose spoken English was flawless but written she got very fussy and formal and needed someone to translate her work into colloquial American English.
“In response, Stankova admitted she had used AI software to “help edit the piece” but that the article was “the result of several hundred person-hours of intensive human work, of which about 80 hours are my own”.
Stankova said by email she had used AI to locate “numerous documents and articles related to the initiative” but that “all analysis is the result of the team members”.
Is any of Professor Stankova’s mathematical work stolen?
What about the ideas?
This is typical left-wing energy- and soul-sucking bullshit.
I blocked someone from this site because she scolded me for using Wikipedia as a source for a basic biographical fact. I don’t believe in writing: “I’m quoting this person because they make a good point here although I usually hate them. I’m using Wikipedia even though I hate it because it’s a neutral biographical fact.”
Do that in my face and you get banned.
Sadly, we can’t do that to the left. We have to neutralize them but we can’t just block them. Professor Stankova’s use of AI was perfectly kosher. They can’t fight her on the facts so they do this.
You really cannot hate the left enough.
Woke hasn’t gone anywhere - if anything, it’s more deadly and more entrenched than ever.
Foreign professors stand up for what’s right, and the leftist media industrial complex snipes at them for using AI to gather facts.
You can’t hate the left enough. They are completely worthless.
To reiterate my position about Jason Arday: Cambridge killed him. He wasn’t just mediocre. He was an absolute nullity, a fiction, a made up character created to satisfy the fantasies of a certain kind of white woman and that white woman is, I think, peculiar to the Anglosphere.
I don’t think that it’s an accident that the Berkeley letter was drafted by Bulgarian and Ukrainian women.2
This is the buffoon who promoted Arday:
I didn’t even know that Cambridge had a Department of Education. I didn’t think they had fluff fields like that.
My mother had a degree from a teacher’s training school and told me that it was all crap. Teachers, kids, and the world create the classroom. She was a teacher in the NYC public school system from the late 1930s (!) to the 1970s. She knew.
Cremin is the author of two gems:
Cremin, Hilary; Bevington, Terence (2017). Positive Peace in Schools: Tackling Conflict and Creating a Culture of Peace in the Classroom. Routledge. ISBN 9781138235649.
Cremin, Hilary (2026). Rewilding Education: Rethinking the Place of Schools Now and in the Future. Routledge. ISBN 9781041043157
Rewilding education? Tell that to my mother. Her last job was in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in the 1970s:
Actually it was a good job. She taught in a special remedial program that took place in a strict Catholic school. She also didn’t use the standard materials. She made up her own workbooks and got good progress.
It may surprise you to know that I’m not a huge fan of our educational system - I do think it fails a lot of kids. I think I could have gone much further in math than I did, but I was hustled along with a giant cohort and got zero personal attention.
That doesn’t mean I think I had any great mathematical skill that went undiscovered, or I should be in a class with kids studying multivariate analysis.3
So what was going on in that privileged white Englishwoman’s head as she led Jason Arday around Cambridge like a pet labradoodle?
We can’t know for sure, but I was struck by this painfully accurate line in John Updike’s otherwise execrable novel, The Coup: “She was the kind of white woman who could not leave black men alone.”4
I think Hilary Cremin, author of “Rewilding the Classroom,” was one such.
Don’t blame women! Blame Anglosphere women. (Except me.)
To me, Jason Arday’s tales don’t even rise to the level of lies. They were just stories he told. He didn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality.
That’s why I don’t agree with this.
Arday was dumb as a box of rocks and didn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality - the brilliant men and women of Cambridge hired him. How do we know that Cremin didn’t tell him to “call in the big guns”? How can someone who tells you he ran 600,000 miles in 6 days on a broken leg and a malfunctioning kidney be accused of manipulation?
He belonged in a psych ward, not a university.
Maybe he was in one.
A trip to Dartmouth upcoming. I saw some interesting stuff.
Next post.
It’s actually more. I don’t know who the others are. “Stankova and Jitomirskaya are two of the five professors — four in math, one in law — who led the open letter. All were motivated by what they describe as an observable decline in the lowest quartile’s math skills. The letter started spreading through math departments, then moved to related fields in science and engineering before breaking through into areas like business, social science, and the humanities.” My point stands.
Is that a real thing? I just made it up.
I thought the book was full of interesting ideas and a few devastating observations — Candy’s psychology chief among them — but on the whole, shit.
Jitomirskaya as in Zhitomir? That was a fine place before WW2. Thank goodness, some people survived! Anyway, the Chinese are laughing at the dreary state of the US education from K to 12, and on to the university.
By the way, multivariate statistics are easy peasy once you survived the first year university analysis and linear algebra in pure math. I remember that math students were kind of bored, while computer science kids who made most of the class and who needed it for machine learning, looked at it with starry eyes.