In the words of an eminent analytical philosopher of the contemporary academic scene . . .

. . . I’m losing my motherfucking mind here.

Jesse Singal on the apparently egregious confabulations of ex-Cambridge professor Jason Arday:

If interest in this story peters out, that would be unfortunate, because what’s needed now is genuine accountability. This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny. Their decisions were both wrong and further damaged the reputation of higher education at a time when it has come under withering and sometimes unfair attack.

This stirring critique reminded me of something from long ago and far away when things were so much better than they are today . . . Oh yeah, this:

 Jesse Singal’s latest defense of Goffman in New York Magazine is pretty shocking. Singal comes off as both remarkably credulous in regard to Goffman’s veracity, and even more remarkably indifferent to her admitted averred conduct. As to the first issue, Singal’s explanation for the awkward circumstance that some of the stories Goffman relates as simple fact are both incredible on their face and impossible to verify is that she sometimes gets sloppy about distinguishing between things she’s been told by her informants and things she confirmed actually happened:

Given that there’s no evidence Goffman lied or intentionally embellished in On the Run, the most likely explanation for these discrepancies is that she simply didn’t heed her own advice about credulously echoing sources’ stories; it might be that important details about how these events unfolded got lost along the way.

There are a couple of big problems with this defense, such as it is: (1) It would obviously be a huge breach of both basic journalistic and academic norms to present dubiously sourced or completely unsourced stories as representing incontrovertible fact, yet Goffman does just this in On the Run on numerous occasions. Singal seems to overlook that one “important detail about how these events unfolded” that may have “got lost along the way” is whether these events actually happened at all, which is something that can be asked about a number of incidents in the book.

(2) In several instances, Goffman presents herself as an eyewitness to such incidents, which potentially implicates a much more serious breach of academic and journalistic norms than reporting a poorly sourced story in a misleadingly credulous way (which is not meant to minimize the seriousness of lapses of the latter sort).

Singal simply glides over the distinction between (1) and (2), even though in at least one instance Lubet has questioned directly whether Goffman actually witnesses something she claims to have seen (Apparently, Singal doesn’t consider his own inability to verify any aspect of that particular story, despite his attempts to do so, as evidence that Goffman may be lying).

As for the second issue, Singal appears to be completely unconcerned with either Goffman’s frank admission claim in On the Run that she participated on several several separate occasions in a conspiracy to commit murder, or with her unconvincing (to put it mildly) attempt to walk that story back.

All this leads to Singal’s conclusion that On the Run “is, at the very least, mostly true,” which is a rather astonishing standard to apply to a work of either scholarship or journalism.

Note that I wrote this BEFORE I actually did the work that Jesse Singal didn’t do but presented himself to his readers as having done, which is to say to have investigated whether what appeared to be a bunch of very Jason Ardayesque fantasies in Goffman’s opus were in fact totally fabricated by Goffman. After having done that work — some might call those labors “journalism” — I concluded that Goffman was every bit as much of a fraud as Arday appears to be — a judgment that subsequent events have fully vindicated.

But Singal never bothered to check any of that out, before pronouncing his winsome upper class white interlocutor basically innocent of all the charges that what he characterized as “the internet” had levied against her. This startling level of completely unjustified credulity, to be fair, was not confined to Singal, though under current circumstances it seems particularly ironic, which is why I’m digging up this whole mess one more time, even after Alice Goffman was put away quietly by all the elite institutions that made sure that she and they, unlike Jason Arday and Cambrdige, didn’t get dragged on the editorial pages of the New York Times etc etc etc.