Get a Grant, Study Your Own Skull: The Self-Obsessed Rise of Academic ‘Me-Search’

Have you ever fancied becoming a well-paid academic in a cushy scholarly role, but been put off by the fact you aren’t really much of an expert in any given field? Worry not – leading Western university doors (but not Eastern university doors, as China and Japan’s universities are still real ones) will remain open to you nonetheless, for you are a world-leading expert in something, even if you don’t yet realise it: your own good self!

These days, it is genuinely possible to become a Scholar of Self, studying the simple fact of your own existence in return for a nice fat salary. It’s an easy role to fill, too, because, being yourself, unlike literally everybody else around you, who is to tell you that you are incorrect in your conclusions? If you write a long, learned, fully-footnoted treatise on how your favourite Quality Street chocolate is the one in the purple wrapper, is Professor David Irving really going to be able to emerge from his revisionist lair with definitive proof you truly prefer the green triangular ones?

This novel scholarly endeavour is called ‘Me-Search’, not ‘research’, and is basically an exercise in gazing naked into a mirror before inventing footnotes to authenticate the existence of your own navel. The whole solipsistic non-field is also at the very centre of the greatest and most high-profile single academic scandal of our times: that of Jason Arday.

Remembrance Arday

I notice that the autohagiography of Professor