This guy claimed:
- To be autistic and not able to speak until 11 years old
- To be illiterate in his teens
- To have a severed pig's head delivered to his home as a child
- To have run 600 miles in 6 days with a hairline fracture in his leg
- To have raised 5 million pounds for charity
- To have held multiple past visiting scholar roles that turned out to be fake
- To have at least one degree that turned out to be fake
Turns out no one can verify any of these claims. The institutions where he supposedly worked in the past and got his degrees from say they have no record of him. His dissertation turned out to be plagiarized. And now his resignation letter is being accused of being 100% AI written.
Yet, he was appointed a prestigious professorship at Cambridge and has been working there for the past 3 years, until he resigned this week after the accusations became untenable.
Does anyone check anything these days?
Why check, when somebody else probably already did?
Well, when someone checks they get accused of running a racial smear campaign.
"If a Chinese man tells you he's a community college Spanish professor, it's not racist to check." -Dean Craig Pelton
The fake degree (from a major school, even) is the one that gets me - I work in academia, and even in my non-professor role, every employer did a basic background check which included verifying my education. I can see how other things slipped by (many of these are literally uncheckable), but this one is just baffling.
The thing that bugs me the most is that the oppression olympics has gotten out of hand to the point that genuinely disadvantaged people are getting hurt by fakers. I can't tell you how many cover letters I've read where the candidate is highlighting some disadvantage they had to overcome. It's to the point where whether it's real or not, I literally just ignore that information.
Kicker: all this was found out by using AI. Haha.