PRIYAMVADA GOPAL, THE PROFESSOR OF Postcolonial Studies in the English faculty at Cambridge University, is best known to the wider public as a Brahmin purveyor of highly personal abuse against those, particularly ethnic minorities, who disagree with her view of her adopted country as a racist hellhole that is full, unfortunately, of white people — as well as bigoted college porters who will not address her by her proper academic title.
But until very recently, readers of her Wikipedia page would have known none of this. For years, a particularly devoted fan of Professor Gopal, going by the evocative nom de plume PostcolonialLitNerd, has been tenderly editing her Wikipedia article, removing anything that might be offensive to the reputation of her (I take the liberty of assuming their anonymous gender) scholarly idol.
Instead of an article about an inexplicably highly-promoted academic with a paper-thin scholarly publication record (three books, only one at a top-tier academic press, but many tweets) and a potty mouth, the reader would have learned that Professor Gopal was voted “one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine”, had contributed to no fewer than 12 publications as a public intellectual, and so on.
Negative information about Gopal, and there is a lot of it, was systematically erased or twisted. When she compared Tony (now Lord) Sewell to Joseph
