What began as farce has ended in tragedy. The strange and fraudulent academic career of Jason Arday, the black sociology professor at Cambridge University who was found to have fabricated much of life’s record, ended with his recent resignation from his prestigious faculty position, but then took an even darker turn as he apparently took his own life.
Suicide is a very personal thing, but Arday’s alleged action has played out like his career, very much in the public eye and a thing of much open discussion, and already the narratives are beginning to form. According to Ibrahim X. Kendi, the one time “race guru” who had his own fall from grace, Arday was a great and legitimate scholar who was the victim of a racist lynch mob that drove him out of Cambridge and to his death. Kendi wrote:
As a prominent Black scholar, you know the attacks haunt and hunt you like a lynch mob.
And then, one day, the attacks are at your door.
The attacks are wielded by racist propagandists, resenting you for shining a light on anti-Black racism. They hope everyone finally picks up their baseless claims. They know that to dim your light is to dim the light on their anti-Blackness.
The attacks come from centrist and progressive White scholars and writers, resenting your positions and honors and pay. They believe the great replacement theory that you’ve taken their spots, their honors, their money, like the followers of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.
To Kendi, Arday was a genuine intellectual who was set upon by jealous whites who would never let themselves believe that a black person could gain such a position in academe through superior intelligence and writing. Thus, they had to bring him down – just as they had done to Kendi himself when his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University closed in controversy, with Kendi moving on to Howard University.
Likewise, thousands of young Britons rallied in Trafalgar Square to demand an official investigation of the “racist” press they claim drove Arday to suicide. Interestingly, the British police in the name of fighting racism already had “investigated” a journalist who helped break the original story of Arday’s plagiarism and fraud. And as for the “racist” media, the BBC originally doubled down in its defense of Arday when the news broke, as its journalists refused to admit what was obvious.
Unfortunately, Arday became the proverbial blank slate upon which others write whatever they want to see. Journalist Matt Taibbi writes:
It will be claimed preserving the feel-good story of Cambridge’s “youngest black professor” was about defending the values of racial progressivism, but it wasn’t that. It couldn’t have been that, because it was very clearly the opposite. Anyone reading about how Cambridge promoted someone whose plagiarism was so sloppy he repeatedly carried over a grammatical error from pilfered text while simultaneously claiming he ran 600 miles in six days and overcame “autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor” before age thirty would either conclude that a) Britain produced the black Barry Allen in a lab accident, or b) academia made a deliberate choice to call fabulism accomplishment.
There were other enablers who have not been willing to face the truth of what Cambridge’s academic leadership had done. Cambridge Chancellor Lord Chris Smith claimed that the criticisms of Arday’s fictitious record had turned into a “racist feeding frenzy.” Perhaps it isn’t surprising that Smith has tried to deflect legitimate criticism of Arday’s hiring at Cambridge, given that it should have been obvious to anyone that Arday’s work – even before his massive plagiarism was discovered – was mediocre and certainly not fit for a university of Cambridge’s standards. Wrote John McWhorter (before the suicide):
Arday had no original ideas. He can’t teach someone how to write because his writing consists of, well, “mimicry.” (Even his resignation letter seems likely to have been generated by AI.) There are reports that—big surprise—Arday had no idea what actual teaching was and couldn’t be bothered with supervising students’ work, probably because he had never done any himself. People taught by versions of this type end up occupying an alternative academic universe, where cultural fellowship and advocacy are the North Star, and learning and curiosity get lip service but are beside the point.
To put it bluntly, Arday was a fraud, but the joke was not just on him but also the people who hired him and placed him in a situation he was incapable of handling. At this point we should add that there is no shame in not being qualified for a professorship at one of the world’s most prestigious universities. Unfortunately, elite higher education in the western world has been on a destructive path for more than a half-century, driven by guilt and a desire to “atone” for the “sins” of racism, sexism, and colonialism. Arday was a product of that movement in which the barbarians are not just at the gate but instead control the whole city.
This sorry saga began in earnest in the late 1960s with the establishment of the various “studies” programs at major US colleges and universities, including programs like women’s studies, black (or African American) studies, queer studies, and so on. Although couched in academic rhetoric, these programs were an affront to everything institutional higher education had supposedly stood for.
During the various cultural revolutions of the 1960s in which students protested everything from the Vietnam War to racism to single sex dormitories. Student activists occupied the administration building, including the president’s office, at Columbia University. To appease student radicals, black and white, several colleges and universities began programs in what would be called identity studies, including black studies, women’s studies, and the like. By 1970, the Grievance Industry had firmly taken hold in higher education.
At the time, college faculties were dominated by white males and there was pressure from the federal government, the Supreme Court, and the foundation and non-profit sectors to hire more women and racial minorities. While discriminatory policies kept some qualified people from both faculty hiring and graduate programs, institutions of higher learning were in a quandary when it came to trying to make up for past policies. One of the “solutions” was to create new academic disciplines such as black studies and women’s studies and have those faculties dominated by racial minorities and women.
These policies allowed colleges and universities that could afford to enlarge their faculties in ways that allowed them to escape some U.S. Department of Education scrutiny for having too few minorities in the teaching ranks. The problem with this strategy came soon enough, as it became clear that the real purpose of these departments was not to promote traditional academic scholarship but rather to promote activism. It became a regular occurrence for members of these departments to denounce their own employers for racism or sexism, all the while producing very little in the name of both research and teaching.
I saw this amplified during the Duke Lacrosse Case when the loudest voices on campus at Duke University that falsely proclaimed the lacrosse players were guilty of raping a black woman came from these identity studies departments. I wrote:
As an academically elite university, Duke’s leadership sought to raise its profile to compete with the Ivies, Stanford, Northwestern, and other prestigious institutions. But, as KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor explained in Until Proven Innocent, Duke’s leadership decided to build up its faculty not with scholars in the science fields, since that also would have required huge capital investments in labs and other research facilities. Instead, Duke decided to bolster departments in what one might call identity studies, including African Studies, Women’s Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and other areas of academics that revolved around hiring faculty members who doubled as social activists.
Before the case ended with North Carolina’s Attorney General Roy Cooper, after an exhaustive investigation into the accusations, these activist members of the Duke faculty, along with both white and black political radicals in Durham, North Carolina, drove the false charges forward with faculty members always assuming guilt no matter the evidence always pointing toward innocence. The damage they did to innocent people, not to mention Duke University itself, was incalculable, yet Duke’s administrative and academic leadership bent backwards in heaping praise on people who didn’t deserve it. These were faculty members who bullied anyone who might contradict them – and they got away with actions that would certainly have resulted in firings had they been employed in departments where actual scholarship takes place.
Moreover, as I examined the academic qualifications of these activists, I found that their academic records were extremely thin, especially when compared with the resumes of full-time faculty in the traditional areas of study:
Several years ago, I looked at the academic resumes of some of Duke’s activist faculty and found the lack of serious scholarship to be the norm. Members of the identity studies departments had to meet a much lower set of standards than their faculty counterparts in academic disciplines such as chemistry or economics. For example, one outspoken Duke professor has listed a book for more than 10 years which she claimed was “forthcoming.” It never was published, but she got credit all the same.
While Arday was employed in the more traditional sociology department, Cambridge applied the same standards to him that institutions like Duke, Harvard, and Columbia applied to faculty members in identity studies. That was bad enough, but what made things worse was that from the beginning, it was obvious that Arday’s record both as a teacher and researcher was deficient and certainly not at the level required for tenure at one of the world’s top universities. Yet, Cambridge’s leadership still insisted that Arday’s research “was the best in the world.”
So, why did so many people fall for what was clearly a scam, and why do many people still insist that Arday’s critics were in the wrong? Coleman Hughes has some answers, writing:
Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world, or he was a liar. It turned out to be the latter.
All this has revealed many unflattering things about academia: DEI invites fraud by lowering standards, the bigotry of low expectations is alive and well, and a disturbing number of “experts”—not just Arday but all the Cambridge professors and BBC journalists who co-signed him—are compromised by ideology, cowardice, or both.
But the Arday scandal has also revealed something else: White liberals in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes on to achieve greatness. In fact, they want to believe in this sort of story so badly that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.
But Hughes makes another point, one that the media and most of academe has missed:
The irony, however, is that we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turn out to be conservatives—or if not conservatives, then at least out-of-step with the left-wing religion of racial justice.
Arday’s “scholarship” was based upon the usual left-wing canards of there being permanent social harm due to racism and colonialism. At that point, it didn’t matter if his research was true or not, since it repeated the antiracist mantra that grips pretty much all western higher education. John McWhorter pulled no punches in his condemnation of the white academics and journalists who enabled – and ultimately destroyed – Arday:
The only reason people would believe all this damnable foolishness—and remember, across the pond they’re not wowed by his lovely accent the way Americans are—is that they see Arday as a Magic Negro. The kindly, antiracist white academics think suspending their judgment when it comes to a black man makes them good people. We don’t even need to speculate whether sometime in the near future, Arday will use critical race theory to justify his inventions, on the premise that his anecdotes represent a “common black narrative.” In this, he will be backed by people devoted to that school of thought who say that we need to understand him “on a certain level.”
What level is that? A low one—bigotry.
Where do we go from here? Tyler Austin Harper, who quit a tenure track position at a prestigious New England college because he no longer could take the hypocritical nonsense that both elevated black scholars like himself all the while seeing him only as academically fit to deal with “black” subjects, writes that maybe we should recognize the tragedy of a life lost and the inanity of the DEI mentality in higher education:
What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.
Unfortunately, people are unlikely to heed Harper’s excellent advice. Instead, people will double down where they already are. Cambridge’s faculty and administration will blame everyone but themselves, while Kendi will blame racism. The mindless mobs of Trafalgar Square will blame the press.
What no one in a position of academic leadership or the media will do, however, is to take a hard look at how applying DEI to higher education has corrupted everything. Black academics who engage in mediocre work will continue to be feted as geniuses, while blacks doing excellent academic research will face hostility, false accusations, and limited opportunities because their teaching and research do not square with the elite’s current racial zeitgeist. As for the DEI express, it will continue to roll along.
