Sorry folks, but the whole Arday thing is absolutely breaking me.

Sorry folks, but the whole Arday thing is absolutely breaking me. While many lament the loss of trust in higher education or the media, the bigger issue is clearly the loss of our trustworthiness.

Regular people are not supposed to do their own research on things like masks, plagiarism, or racism—they should just be able to take what institutions like Harvard, Cambridge, or BBC tell them for granted. But now they can't. And they seek populist alternatives on social media that are even worse.

I mean, I'm not sure I'd trust Cambridge administrators and many other universities myself now. And it's not just the replication crisis or DEI scandals—there are some disciplines like education where the standards are so low it's not even clear whether anything they produce can be replicated or falsified at all by design.

I'm still a professor though, because I believe universities can be valuable and because I see a lot of great people around me doing serious work in the pursuit of truth and the public interest, even within social sciences. But to change course for the better and restore trust, we should start by restoring trustworthiness and calling out bullshit on our own side even when bad people on the other side exist and attack higher ed for the wrong reasons.