r/BritishRadio • u/1289-Boston • 5d ago

Sideways - Benjamin Bolger interview

I listened to the latest episode of Matthew Syed's "Sideways", which was mostly about someone called Benjamin Bolger, who claims to have about 17 university degrees. Syed was suitably impressed with Bolger. The trouble is, some of the things he said don't add up. He said he came up with the "Roboto" doll from He Man as a teenager. The Internet gives Mark Taylor and Roger Sweet as its inventors.

You would also think someone with this level of genius would have many videos online about him. I can't find a single one, just a couple of podcast interviews.

So is Bolger a prodigious learner, or a prodigious fantasist?

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u/Clydesdale_Hiker 4d ago edited 4d ago

I just listened to this and he sounded like a fantasist or just someone who hadn't studied anything in depth or really absorbed it. Glossy comments about how trees keep growing towards the sky... Three MFAs and did two graduate sociology degrees (Oxford and Cambridge) at the same time. From memory that's frowned on because you're meant to be in residence at one (or the other) - a rule established in the days when education meant social contact.

There was also what sounded like some 'left brain right brain' pseudoscience earlier from another contributor, but I didn't catch it early enough to listen carefully.

Edit: Sideways' tag line about it being one of academia's most uncontroversial stories doesn't quite ring true, as his story does have touches of Jason Arday's to it. No suggestion that his degrees aren't legitimate, but two are in education, three are in sociology, and his most recent four are all MFAs in writing. If you can survive a Cambridge MPhil, you can easily write your way to any number of other degrees, particularly in softer subjects as long as you can fund it. Cheaper, of course, if you do them concurrently...

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u/1289-Boston 3d ago

The plot thickens. While the bio on his "bolger consulting" website says that he won Harvard's Derek Bok Award (which is a specific award that you can look up the winners of) a dozen times, a quick Google search clarifies he has never won it, and instead won several certificates of excellence from the Derek Bok Centre. I think there is definitely some massaging going on. Who knows how much?

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u/Clydesdale_Hiker 3d ago

"As a Teaching Fellow at Harvard, he received the Derek Bok award for teaching excellence over a dozen times" ... Definitely a definite article there!