The Arday affair is what everyone and his grandmother has been commenting on in the current news cycle, but it may accommodate a short digression. Jason Arday has received much sympathy for his fall from grace and eventual suicide. Even conservative author Jeffrey Tucker in an article titled "The Cruelty of DEI" struggles to commiserate with Arday, whom he believes must have suffered inwardly, for the travesty of his fake career. But Arday was no innocent, no mere victim of a corrupt and guilt-ridden white liberal culture and its various institutions. Arday was a nasty man who took advantage of his privileged and undeserved situation.
He had lied his way into a prestigious appointment, a six-figure salary, and a lavish book deal. He is alleged to have called a student racist for her petitioning to have her grade reviewed. According to The Telegraph, graduates are considering legal action after receiving lower marks than expected following ‘inadequate’ supervision by Arday. One thinks of the good teachers and scholars, all white, who were bullied out of the competition for professional success. Arday hired the pricey law firm Carter-Ruck to defend him against a Times Higher Education planned story regarding plagiarism allegations. The firm stated that a “very well orchestrated and co-ordinated campaign” had been organized to remove black academics under the guise of academic integrity. The issue faded for a time. Arday even attempted to have a fellow academic, Dr. David Harris, investigated for racial harassment after Harris wrote to the Cambridge administration with concern about Arday’s work.
Yet Tucker lets Arday off the hook, ostensibly for his “plight” as someone who knew he was a parasite and bore the pain for his self-acknowledged ineptitude and lack of merit. This is pure nonsense. Tucker is much better for his attack on DEI as rampant privilege and institutional discrimination “based on raw identity politics.” Indeed, one can see Arday as an unintentional torpedo slicing toward a ship that needed to be sunk along with its complement of white liberals engaged in a racket of “egalitarian gamesmanship.” This was not Arday’s intention, obviously, but it’s how things seem to have played out.
Even so, there is no excuse for Arday, who benefited, free of the discomfort of a nagging conscience, from the perks that came his way and from the harm he caused to others. Nonetheless, warm-hearted people like Tucker, it seems to me, often appear to fret not only about the fact of prejudice and discrimination on which DEI capitalizes for political and moral advantage. Rather, it appears to be a conservative trait to focus on the humiliation or opprobrium such “victims” are said to feel at receiving special accommodations, which most of those who experience unmotivated elevation likely do not. I have not seen, for example, Claudine Gay or Michelle Obama or Letitia James acting as if they felt an ethical stigma for their prosthetic rise to power and wealth.
The point is that no one should be given the opportunity to rise above their natural tier without impartial criteria, even those who, whether owing to the reductive extent of their native capacities or their punitive sociocultural backgrounds, are simply not ready to survive the rigors of higher performance and educational demands, no matter how unfortunate this may be. Such individuals may require legitimate remedial help, but we should not give credit to presumed targets of sexism, racism, ethnicism, misogyny, and what-have-you who may not have deserved or are unable to demonstrate the intellectual reason for the favors they have been accorded. The same applies to projected empathy for the ethical suffering these people may simply not feel. We live in the real world, not an ideological fantasy.
Physicist Neil Turok comments in The Universe Within, “What is needed is to open avenues for gifted young people to enter and contribute no matter what their background.” Everyone gets the chance but is not thereby entitled to a successful result. This is something we seem to have forgotten. It is a failure of our therapeutic age to extend compassionate and vicarious understanding to those who do not merit it and who have no compunction in exploiting it to their gain. Arday knew what he was doing with the eager complicity of the University. A plague on both their houses, one wants to say. A decadent Cambridge and a manipulative Arday are cozy bedfellows.
Tucker is right to perforate DEI and its clinging barnacles like the accessory University, its accomplices in the corporate world, in government, the colluding media, and across society in general. But he is out of court pitying a scoundrel and miscreant like Jason Arday who, like many who resemble him, was no less a moral truant than an active and conscious agent in the self-elective scheme he was promoting.
Recommended: Bronze or Gold
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy PJ Media's conservative reporting that takes on the radical Left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member