Unless they imported all their professors from another country… There might be nations that do that. I’d be shocked if that included the UK, though.
…this isn’t a story about Cambridge.
This is a story about a culture war. You are citing a story from the Spectator, written by one of the authors who took part in the campaign to attack Jason Arday, who if you checked out his most recent articles, if he isn’t attacking Muslims he is attacking the Greens.
And the article you cite is full of cherry picked quotes that omit the larger context. For example this quote:
Omits the context of this quote and the disclaimer: its a table that shows “Examples of potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture” and the full quote says this:
Bolding mine.
Andrew Gilligan isn’t an unbiased journalist doing good work. Charitably, we could call him an editorial writer. I’d call him a bigoted hack. He was former special advisor to one conservative Prime Minister and an advisor to another.
Here are some of Andrew Gilligan’s greatest hits:
Oh, what a surprise. Andrew Gilligan hates trans people as well.
Gilligan is a liar and a hack, and we shouldn’t be taking him seriously. In fact I’d take it even further: I think Andrew Gilligan deserves exactly the same scrutiny that Jason Arday got here. Because Arday obviously wasn’t perfect and made many mistakes in his life. But the difference between Arday and Gilligan is that Gilligan is a hateful person that appears to have a bigoted agenda to drive groups of people he doesn’t like out of the public arena. He isn’t above writing lies and defamatory statements himself, and we shouldn’t be listening to what he has to say about other people. He has no credibility.
I can’t say this enough: the British tabloid press is evil. From 2023:
This is how they work. Jason Arday wasn’t a person to them. He was the “DEI hire.” That was his role here. They published over a hundred stories about him in two weeks, and they are still going even though he’s dead. They are a pack of hypocritical vultures.
Did you miss that the quote you cite mentions “the common modern biological assumption that humans
have common ancestry with other life forms”.
Evolution is a “modern biological assumption”? 
That phrase alone heavily supports The Spectator’s analysis of the project’s “educational” goals.
Attacking sources is a common tactic used to avoid dealing with uncomfortable facts they present.
…did you miss the bit where Andrew Gilligan is a lying scumbag with a history of writing defamatory articles and has an obvious political agenda that includes attacking Muslims, Black people and trans people?
Did you miss the context I showed you where it clearly said "This is
not to say that there is a consensus among Muslims and Muslim
thinkers as to whether there are conflicts, and as to what those
are?"
It wasn’t endorsing this view. The article didn’t make this argument. It was citing another paper in a list and then said that this view isn’t universal among Muslim thinkers.
The analysis was flawed because it wasn’t analysis it was a hit piece.
The Spectator and Gilligan don’t get a pass for activist rants disguised as “journalism.” There were no “uncomfortable facts” exposed here. And Gilligan is a grown man. He can take a little bit of mild criticism on an obscure platform that barely anybody reads. That’s the difference between him and me. Unlike him everything I’ve said here is true.
The argument that the Spectator article took the questioned paper “out of context” is demolished by reference to the paper itself.
Calling your attention, for instance to the author’s “Three approaches to countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” - one is:
That’s the kind of science education Cambridge should be proud of associating with, yes?
The author warns of Muslim high school students learning chemistry, physics etc. who are “exposed to uncritically presented ideas that potentially conflict with Islamic world views…it may result in loss of faith due to hegemonic narrative exposure in schools”
Oh no!
There’s a lot more glurge about "Eurocentric monoculture and “coloniality” which reinforces that this person and their ideas should be kept miles from any science classroom.
You may not be aware that opposition to teaching evolutionary theory among devout Muslims was documented long before the Evil Gilligan (and the Skipper, too?) reported on this paper and its connection to Cambridge.
It isn’t just a Western Hegemonic View that religion shouldn’t slop over into science.
Oh, I’m sure he would be devastated if he knew of your take. 
…so now you are cherry-picking?
There is much wider context here, and we can’t ignore the context. This was from a table about countering colonial hegemony: it isn’t about the science; it’s about how the science is taught. One of those approaches is “Teaching the internal limitations of theories themselves” and the example that was given was your quote that was citing another paper.
The table then outlined the problem with this approach:
The original source was this:
This is all rather boring intellectual academia stuff that devoid of context and distilled down to just segment fragments and talking points can very easily distort what the article was trying to say.
I won’t pretend to understand everything the author was trying to say: but that’s very much the point. That’s why the Spectator’s and the tabloids’ strategies are so successful. They don’t have to critique the article. They just have to cherry-pick a sentence and make that sentence representative of the article. That’s a disingenuous tactic, and it’s why we shouldn’t take the article, Gilligan or anything the tabloid press publishes seriously.
As for the rest of this stuff, again, you are largely cherry-picking an academic text and removing the specific context. But personally speaking, I don’t appreciate your glib dismissal of the impact of colonialism, which highlights the fact that perhaps we need MORE discussion papers on this than less.
And you keep missing the salient point here: that if we compare the societal impact that Jason Arday has had to what the author you cited Gilligan has had and it isn’t even close.
Gilligan is using his platform to attack Muslims and Black people and trans people and has a history of posting lies, disinformation, and defamatory posts. But you are fully prepared to give him a pass. We get a hundred articles in two weeks about Arday but nothing about Gilligan. We can rant about an obscure paper published on an open access platform, but we won’t rant about the tabloid press that literally wiretaps people for information.
I can’t even believe that this thread got any traction considering it was about a relative nobody who maybe told a few porkies, and now he is dead. But the guy whose publisher had to pay out three times because of his defamatory articles doesn’t even get named.
I think our priorities are all wrong.
The British establishment is full of horribly evil, terrible people, and they don’t get a fraction of the attention that Arday got. I want to see a hundred articles a week on how JK Rowling is funding a hate campaign on trans people. How many times has Gilligan wrote about that?
Instead he does stuff like this.
Remember the attacks Mermaids sustained at the time that got kicked off by the likes of Gilligan?
This is how the tabloids work. This is how Gilligan works. What they did to Mermaids is exactly what they did to Arday. That’s the real story here. This isn’t “journalism.” It’s activism.
Thanks BB for your far more rational take on this ”OMG Muslim antievolutionism!!” hysteria. The paper in question (peer-review published in the London Review of Education) is discussng how cultural contexts, including colonial history, Islamophobia and Eurocentrism, impact the teaching of modern science to some observant Muslim students, and how discussions about science could be framed without devaluing students’ religious beliefs or demanding adherence to atheistic-materialism worldviews. Nowhere is the author advocating for denying scientific evidence about scientifically established, but often religiously controversial, theories such as human evolution.
The article’s “challenges” language about evolution that seems to have got so many careless skimmers’ panties in a bunch is in fact describing how such “oppositional” presentations are unsatisfactory and unsuccessful “stopgaps” in trying to examine science in a more religiously tolerant way.
For example, the author points out that if educators try to “accommodate” antievolution religious beliefs by acknowledging, say, lack of total certainty due to gaps in the fossil record, that’s not a good strategy even for its stated purpose, because additional evidence in future can close those gaps and reinforce the theory! The author is not advocating that Islamic educators should make those kinds of simplistic, and unreliable, evolution-doubting arguments!
Rather, the framework being suggested is to take Muslim students’ beliefs seriously, and address the pervasive problems of textbooks inadvertently conflating Eurocentric perspectives with “objectivity”, by being transparent about interactions between faith and epistemology, for example. The author cogently observes that Islamic scientific traditions had a long history of incorporating and building upon scientific models created in non-Muslim cultures, and pursuing research collaborations among scholars of diverse faiths.
So no, this is not actually an article about encouraging Islamic educators to deny or attack evidence supporting the scientific consistency and effectiveness of evolutionary theory. 
I’m not surprised to see a publication like the Spectator trying to push such an interpretation, but I am rather surprised to see (some) Dopers swallowing it so credulously. Haven’t we learned by now that popular op-ed journalism is never a safe guide to what an academic article on a complicated subject is trying to say?
(And sorry about continuing the non-Arday hijack here, but it’s another example of journalistic irresponsibility ignorantly inflating some alleged Terrible Crisis in academia, so arguably relevant.)
It was the imminent publication of that memoir that led to all of this being exposed.
Academia is still pretty flexible on which hours are when here, unless it’s teaching a scheduled class (you can work any 80 hours in the week you want!). It’s just that a lot of the admin related to having PhD students has sort of slipped into the gaps where everyone knows it needs doing, but it’s not really part of any one project.
If you get a grant to run a project, it might include money for a PhD studentship, and you can try and list time allocated as mentoring hours in the grant application, though there’s a lot of pressure to keep this minimal and it’s typically nowhere near enough. However, a lot of studentships now come from training partnerships. If you take on a student from one of them, it’s purely voluntary, without any paid time included, but the student should have their own budget and some of the admin is done by the training partnership. Hopefully, the work the student does outweighs the time cost of having them, and having a good track record of successful PhD students means you are in with a better chance of getting future grants.
The other stuff like being on thesis committees- who are supposed to be an external check to confirm the student is on track- secondary supervisors, thesis examiners, none of this comes with any allocated time or compensation. You do it because that’s how the system works, and if you don’t, probably no-one else will help you out when your student needs one, also having been a secondary supervisor may be a requirement of being a primary supervisor.
I found out a lot of this when, during an absolute shitshow of a redundancy round, I lost both my primary and secondary supervisors at the same time, who had both been absolute go-to people for student support. The students[1] organised a petition to have all of this extra unpaid work they’d been doing taken into account before the decision was finalised. Didn’t work, but we tried.
OK, mostly me, but I was the student rep anyway ↩︎
He doesn’t say it’s not a good strategy, just that “educators” could be thwarted in the future, “even if now it (evolution) can still be dismissed as inconclusive.”
So it’s OK to preach god-of-the-gaps theology to students currently but could be problematic later on. 
I’d love to hear your analysis of why this guy is correct about rooting out “coloniality” and “hegemonic monoculture” from, say, astronomy or physics courses. Is there a newsletter we could subscribe to?
Obviously, science education is damaged whenever fervent religious orthodoxy intrudes, as in the case of some Orthodox Jewish and fundamentalist Christian sects. If Cambridge has sponsored any of their blather, it would be embarrassing as well.
*social media posts the Twitter algorithm is throwing at me regarding the Arday affair are now running about 30% “ban all DEI academia sux!!!”, 50% “he did nothing wrong/we must institute curbs on the press” and the remainder “it’s sad”. Best contribution (from a guy who teaches college writing):
There’s that hegemony thing again. Guess it’s tough to enforce grammatical standards when your own are so lax.
Science education is not improved by conceited materialists sneering at students’ beliefs, however “fervent” they may be. Articles discussing ways to communicate knowledgeably and respectfully with students in minoritized groups are much more useful contributions than self-important and ill-informed pop journalism finger-wagging about such discussions as something the institutions involved ought to be “embarrassed” about.
What is your reasoning for why these hegemony arguments are wrong? So far, it just seems to be that it’s a word that doesn’t make sense to you.
Jason Arday’s takedown was primarily a work of “culture warriors” that saw in him a “poster child” in a campaign to get back at Cambridge (and academia in general) for rejecting them. His Too Bloody Good To Be True backstory narrative made it easy to pick at and painted a bigger target on the backs of all involved.
He was called out and faced the consequences, but people and organizations did not know when and where to stop the attack, did not want to stop, and many of them STILL won’t. That is the sign that it was not about academic integrity but about humiliating the man, the University, and Academia as a whole. The integrity questioning, however valid, was abused as an excuse.
Do explain the “hegemony” and “Western monoculture” inherent in modern astronomy and physics.
Inquiring minds are dying to know, as are “conceited materialists” who accept evolution and question whether “the Unseen (such as angels, jinns, other worlds)” should be incorporated into science classes, as Mirza, the lead author of the paper under discussion apparently wants.
Sometimes (but not often enough) our thought leaders can be embarrassed into pulling back from the embrace of pseudoscience, as when the University of Alberta planned to hold a workshop to show doctors how to bend spoons with their minds. Sadly, Conceited Materialists forced cancellation of this event.
Tyler Austin Harper in the Atlantic had a great take on this. He’s the same guy who wrote the article about leaving academia I mentioned upthread.
I have been dwelling on these two images—the theatrical interracial handclasp; the pages and pages of monomaniacal media coverage of what was ultimately a niche academic scandal—because together they speak to a terrible reality. Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.
…this confuses me. Apart from the fact that Arday used to work at Cambridge, what does this have to do with Arday again?
Nothing at all.
This is where the Thread went sideways.
All the two stories have in common is Cambridge.
One reason the attack didn’t stop was that even when confronted about the lies, Arday and his family were still denying a lot of it.
Anyhow, as Harper pointed out, per Spice Weasel’s link, Arday shouldn’t have been elevated to the high position he was because of race, and he shouldn’t have been savaged or knocked down as hard because of race, either.
…It’s not as if Arday were Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage. “Oh no, a random academic may or may not have run a few marathons; this is a matter of NATIONAL IMPORTANCE.”
I don’t even know what “lies” you are talking about. But I doubt any of them were big enough to write breathless articles about what some random student said many years ago or who his friends are. Over a hundred articles in two weeks is absolutely ridiculous considering his “crimes.”
The reason why they didn’t stop is because this is the British gutter press, and this is what they do. It isn’t any more complicated than that.
I went to a university in Arkansas where there are a good number of creationist and other evolution denialist. In my Biology 101 course, when we reached the chapter on evolution, the professor made a good faith effort to engage with the evolution deniers. He treated them with respect, he explained what a theory was as it relates to science, he talked about what could be obeserved/tested and would could not be obeserved/tested, and even said, “Maybe you’re right, but we can’t test that.”
I have no doubt he had a good deal of experience dealing with evolution deniers over the years, and there’s less doubt he’d been frustrated by them, but he was still willing to be respectful and do his part to teach them. But I don’t think it did a lot of good for that particular class as many students simply shut down and refused to engage with the chapter on evolution. A lot of people in my study group probably made a B in class because they simply refused to learn anything to do with evolution.