Academic integrity

In the education space, I'm a professor here at Wake Forest University.

So very near and dear to my heart is academic integrity and academic honesty.

Well, in my classes, I, like most professors in the past, would give graded assignments that are meant to be done at home, brought in, completed, and then I would grade them.

And I would factor into the final grade We had some trouble with that, of course, over the years when Google came along and students were looking to Google and they were finding material online, putting it into their papers, and then passing it off as their own work.

Yeah.

So you're a- asking the right person in a sense, because one of the jobs I have at the university is as an academic integrity officer.

So if a marking tutor...

I know it sounds really, yeah.

Look at all of the demonstrable plain lies that he was telling Cambridge and they still gave him the permission and promoted those lies as truth.

And that is what got so many within the academy who still have a commitment to academic integrity.

That is what got them so on board with the Jason Arday case.

For once, it was something that we could actually show to the outside world that the outside world could understand for themselves and could see how outrageous it was.

This is around the death of Professor Jason Arday.

Uh, one thing of course is about academic integrity, the other is about race.

Who gets to be put under the microscope when they become successful? Arday, as you remember, was the youngest ever Black professor at Cambridge University when he was appointed in 2023.

Uh, from the beginning, I think there were questions about his work academically.

Um, I think it's quite important that the world that we live in is a world of binaries, right? Uh, you have straight, you have gay, you have white, you have Black, you have left-handed, right-handed, and the like.

And to a certain extent, when we're having certain conversations about certain issues, these binaries will tend to also come into the picture.

And this, uh, issue about, uh, race and also, also academic integrity, um, I think gains spotlight because of the way that issues around these same things have been discussed when other people, or especially when the white race has been concerned, right? So there's never been consistency in, um, discussions of academic integrity between Black academics and white academics.

They've never been treated as academics.

There are two truths here that shouldn't be forced to cancel each other out.

Academic integrity matters, and prestigious institutions are entitled to investigate any serious allegations.

Critics warn that a scandal can very quickly mutate into public sport.

Arday's rise was touted as an inspirational morality tale, and the people who heralded him used him as an example of the virtues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.