The Jason Arday scandal is a stunning indictment of the entire academic establishment. Here is a man who became a professor at Cambridge University, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, on the basis of the thinnest of academic records. He plagiarized his most substantial academic writings, and burnished his résumé with the most outlandish tall tales this side of Walter Mitty, and was rewarded handsomely for his efforts, all because he told leftists what they wanted to hear.
Cambridge officials and others either found his tales of overcoming racism, death threats, autism, illiteracy, cancer, tumors, a fractured leg and much more so mesmerizing that they swallowed his lies uncritically, or they were so afraid of racism that they let this poseur present himself as genuine, fearing charges of “racism” more than they feared the consequences of praising the emperor’s new clothes.
Now that Arday has resigned under fire, the whole DEI establishment is reeling and on the defensive. One of its brightest stars has turned out to be not just a liar and fantasist, but a total intellectual mediocrity, doing nothing more than parroting leftist platitudes about racism and victimhood even when he wasn’t stealing other people’s work. One of the most respected universities in the entire world has shown itself to have no serious academic standards at all when it comes to academics (and fakes such as Arday) who validate the leftist worldview.
And so the academic world has a massive image problem at the moment, but it also has billions of dollars, and is entrenched enough to know that it can ignore the whole Arday affair and still get a full crop of our nation’s youth to indoctrinate, at top-dollar prices, for the new academic year. Some academics, however, are responding to the Arday scandal, but their responses thus far have not exactly been characterized by any depth of thought, much less actual soul-searching.
Instead, in a fine example of having learned nothing whatsoever from a huge teaching moment, they’re crying racism.
The far-left Guardian reported Saturday that one black academic whined: “Jason has to take responsibility for what he did. But when a white person makes mistakes, it’s just a story about them as an individual. When a Black person makes a mistake, it’s treated as collective – and used to undermine the very principle that Black people should be in these spaces.” Note how the Guardian, demonstrating its commitment to equity, which is not equality, capitalizes “black” but not “white”: This is just the kind of thinking that allowed a dishonest but glib mediocrity such as Arday to go so far so fast.
The Guardian says that Arday himself complained that while he made “mistakes,” he has been falsely described as “this kind of liar and fantasist.” Yeah, that was me, and many others. Or would Arday still have us believe that he couldn’t speak until he was 11, couldn’t read or write until he was 18, and still got a PhD at age 30 and was a Cambridge professor by age 37? Does he still want us to swallow his claims that he once ran 30 marathons in 35 days and raised nearly 7.5 million dollars for various charities? Does he still expect us to buy his claim that he completed the last nine of those 30 marathons despite suffering from a fractured leg that had swollen “to twice its normal size”?
Yeah, pull my other swollen, fractured leg, Arday. The facts are clear: you are a liar and a fantasist. The Guardian, however, insists that “whatever the truth of the claims, days of reporting describing sociologist Arday as a ‘diversity poster boy’ have had a chilling effect on the UK’s Black academics, already demoralised by the impact of cuts on Black scholarship. Many compared the response to the academic criticism with accusations against white academics that have passed with little fanfare.”
This is a massive load of hooey for several reasons. One is that anyone of any race who was caught plagiarizing and lying on the scale of Jason Arday would be swiftly canned. Another is that if “white academics” were really favored in today’s colleges and universities, Jason Arday would never have been hired in the first place. The reality is that academic institutions all over Europe and North America today are avid to find young black academics such as Arday, and frequently advertise for openings in departments such as black studies, queer studies, and the like. “White academics” in traditional disciplines are just the opposite of favored and preferred.
Related: Say, Didja Happen to Notice the Total Implosion of the Academic World and DEI Industry?
Another black professor, however, says: “I think there’s a real question about whether these spaces are safe for us and whether we just have to start doing this outside universities.” Doing what? Lying and making up wild stories? Yes, you should do that outside universities. Meanwhile, however, this prof has nothing to worry about. Today’s universities are the safest of spaces for black professors if they’re leftists and toe the accepted line, and the Arday fiasco is not going to change that, even though it was that intellectual lockstep that caused this ridiculous situation in the first place.
Universities should be the quintessential meritocracies, where no one, black, white, or other, rises unless he or she deserves to do so on the basis of genuine academic work. But that would require a sane world, and we do not live in one of those.
