A random cat

The extensive comparisons, the two papers already corrected, the defamation firm used to kill a Times Higher Education investigation, and Cambridge's indefensible refusal to commission an independent inquiry all speak for themselves. None of that is in dispute here. The question is what explains it. DEI is the "answer" being offered. So test it. William O'Reilly is Associate Professor in Early Modern History at Cambridge this morning. In February 2023 a University tribunal upheld a complaint that he had lifted more than twelve pages, close to half an article, from two essays by an undergraduate he supervised, whose originals carried his own handwritten notes of praise. Cambridge policy calls plagiarism gross misconduct that will normally merit dismissal. The tribunal called it negligent rather than deliberate. The journal pulled the article. He returned to work, and PubPeer contributors have since flagged verbatim overlap in three further articles of his published between 2006 and 2016. hist.cam.ac.uk/people/dr-wil… varsity.co.uk/news/26105 varsity.co.uk/news/27433 UCL's investigation reports found David Latchman's failure to manage his laboratory, combined with his authorship, amounted to recklessness which facilitated the misconduct, and that this qualified as misconduct on his part. He was cleared at the disciplinary hearing and remained Master of Birkbeck. The PubPeer record on that lab stands at 68 papers. buzzfeednews.com/article/pet… Manchester reached a finding of research misconduct in 2018 and published a statement declining to name the senior academic it found against, who by then had left the university. cen.acs.org/research-integri… Now name the diversity target that protected those three. The mechanism is in the sector's own audit. In 2023/24, 115 UK institutions recorded 228 misconduct allegations between them, and 45% recorded none at all. Formal investigations have fallen from 65% of allegations in 2019/20 to 46%. Plagiarism is the largest single category. In the entire dataset, the only cases where consequences were described in any detail involved two research students, one withdrawn before graduating, one whose candidature was terminated over unattributed material in a thesis. ukcori.org/wp-content/upload… There is no national regulator, no body able to check whether a university investigated properly, and UKRIO is advisory with no formal legal powers. Employers mark their own work. Parliament recommended fixing exactly this in 2018, calling it worrying that universities ran so few investigations. Nothing was built. enrio.eu/country-reports/uni… publications.parliament.uk/p… And the boring explanation fits the whole pattern, not one case of it. British universities are funded on assessed output. Careers are built on volume, and institutional income depends on it. Under that pressure the incentive to publish more than you can properly do is universal, which is why plagiarism is the largest single category of allegation in the sector's own data. Meanwhile a senior academic with grants, rankings value and a public profile is an asset on the books. Arday was a named collaborator on more than $10m of UKRI and NIHR funding. Investigating an asset is a write-down, and no external body exists to force it, so the rational institutional move is not to look. That is why the variable predicting who survives a misconduct finding is seniority and market value, and why Arday is being defended. Class, funding competition and output targets. Unglamorous, and it explains Arday, O'Reilly, Latchman and Manchester with one mechanism. A theory that stops working the moment the accused changes colour is not a theory, it is paparia medoles.