Academia is a place where very awkward people impose strict standards on one another. But these standards are localized, imposed by disciplines and departments. One group’s standards might be opaque to the rest of the university, not to mention the outside world. What passes for good scholarship in one discipline might seem ridiculous in another.
The current crisis of the university can be traced partly to two types of attacks on these already precarious standards. The first has been the introduction of new disciplines that appear to have virtually no standards at all; the second is the relaxation of standards within the disciplines to accommodate new entrants and trendy topics. New interpersonal standards of emotional sensitivity and demographic inclusion have increasingly taken the place of intellectual standards of clever argumentation and strong evidence. But the enforcement of those new metrics turns out to be just as awkward and strict as what preceded them. Paradoxically, the harsh imposition of the new standards often is as insensitive and exclusionary as what came before.
The incompatibility of these two sets of standards accounts for at least some of the media firestorm around the late Jason Arday’s plagiarism and fabrications, and the subsequent focus on Nathan Cofnas, the Ghent University postdoc and whistleblower. Cofnas authored the initial article outlining apparently longstanding doubts about Arday’s scholarly and extramural accomplishments. Arday and Cofnas in some respects exemplify the broader shift in academic standards.