To put the answer simply, no it’s not isolated at all, including in the context of very recent news stories. I commented on that at Townhall.
From, “This American Academic Fabrication Story Has Nothing to Do With Race“:
The tragic death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, accused fabulist, has been widely cited as a parable about race. But the story tells us something broader about academia, where skin color plays zero role. That’s the lesson of another example of scholarly fabrication, unfolding now with a book from elite New York University Press.
The book, “Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America,” by C. W. Howell, pivots on a supposed quote from Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, a figure of controversy in top science journals. The case is so serious that NYU Press Senior Editor Jennifer Hammer agreed to take action: “We are pulling the current edition from the market and destroying all existing inventory.”
Even with publishers in crisis over other things, like authors’ use of AI, this move was dramatic. The publisher is also deleting two key passages and issuing a corrected edition. They could have gone further only by placing the book atop a Viking funeral pyre.
The falsehood about Behe was no mere “misquote,” as the website Retraction Watch inaccurately phrased it. Howell put in quotation marks something the man never said — or came close to saying — that could have been checked from courtroom transcripts, and that common sense suggested no one would say about himself.
But as with Dr. Arday, the invention by Dr. Howell, identified on the dust jacket as a religion scholar at Duke University with a Duke PhD, was too confirming of biases to check. Much of opinion at places like NYU, Duke, and Arday’s University of Cambridge is driven by favored narratives. If a story matches the narrative, skepticism dissolves.
The conclusion:
There’s another parable here, larger than Arday’s. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” wrote the essayist Joan Didion. Misleading stories from academia, instances of narrative-driven scholarly misconduct, are beyond count.
There are tales readily believed by scholars, “in order to live” — because the ideological campus discourse is beyond question. In the Age of Arday and of C. W. Howell, the discourse is due for a genuine scholarly review.