This past week ended with shock and sadness at the news that Jason Arday ended his own life in the midst of an investigation over his intellectual credibility. He was the vaunted education sociologist at Cambridge University, media darling and beneficiary of a big book contract, the toast of the town, and the subject of countless hagiographic profiles in media venues.
Plenty of people had whispered for years that he nowhere near qualified for all this celebration. He was not a genius. He was a fabulist. Saying it, however, was dangerous to one’s career. As a result, he kept getting away with it. His luck ran out when a U.S. academic pressed the issue. The tissue of lies collapsed.
The circumstances surrounding his absurd appointment to a full professorship with a named chair – the youngest black professor to enjoy such privilege – are hardly unique to him. When the full truth coming out about his plagiarism and autobiographical embellishments hit the international news, despair overwhelmed him in tragic ways.
It goes without saying that this young man had benefitted from what’s called DEI, which is the new term for what used to be called “affirmative action” but mutated into rampant privilege based on raw identity politics. Reverse racism doesn’t describe it fully. It is institutionalized discrimination that breeds deep resentment from those passed over and cultivates hidden contempt for those who ride this wave to unearned prestige and plaudits.
Something else has always bugged me about these systems that confer high titles and salaries on people solely on grounds of their race. It is deeply condescending and cruel to the point of being abusive of our fellow human beings. While it is easy to resent people who benefit from unearned exaltation, the plight of those who are its seeming beneficiaries also deserves some attention.
Years ago I had the opportunity to get to know a university administrator and his wife who occupied such a role. We met at a dinner party. He was the only black gentleman in the upper echelon of a major state university. His title was vice president for civil rights or some such made-up badge. It was a position invented to create the appearance of diversity. The position fell to him because he ticked all the boxes.
He was proud of his new position. But the more we spoke, the more he had doubts that he would express under his breath. He said that he has a large budget and staff but is rarely included as part of any serious planning team. He told me that he is mostly sent out on fundraising efforts to tell his story about how he grew up poor, overcame racism, and now has a prestigious position in university administration. But, he told me with frankness, he is tired of that story of himself.
We met up a few weeks later because I was curious to know more. He laid it all out to me. He came of age in an educational environment that was especially seeking blacks who performed above expectations which he always did. But instead of moving up a notch based on merit, he said he became aware early on that he was being accelerated and escalated beyond a level that was justified.
It became obvious in his college admissions, which pushed him into an institution far above that for which he was prepared. He found himself lost in a sea of high achievers. His privilege became a burden. He could not keep up in his classes and began to cut corners. It became obvious to him early that he was going to get away with this.
It seemed like the entire system was on his side. He tried to justify this to himself on grounds that every university has white kids on trust funds with legacy connections. They work less hard than a working-class kid who made it on his own so perhaps this is not unusual.
But, he said, he always felt burdened in multiple directions. It was sad enough that he grew up poor and black in the Deep South and was not expected to achieve. But it was far worse that he was given advancements beyond what he deserved when everyone knew it and considered him to be little more than a token of a compensatory system.
He described to me that choice he had to make. He could refuse the high grades, the advanced placements, the awards and attention that he knew were unmerited. But he was never sure what the point of that would be. Instead, he accepted them all as part of a game. He lost trust and respect in the system that he joined precisely because the system never really expected a high degree of performance from him.
He continued in this vein to tell me about graduate school and PhD studies which were more of the same. There was no point in this where he knew when to refuse, when to say no, when to call out the condescension and fakery of which he was presumably benefiting. In fact, he never saw himself as much of a beneficiary at all. He felt burdened by it all, and even robbed of what all the white kids faced: high expectations and the satisfaction of knowing that one climbed the ladder by virtue of his own efforts.
The story ends with his then appointment, which he knew to be fake at least on some level, though he believed that he truly did have something to contribute to university culture. It was that tag of having been marked by DEI that prevented it. He said he knew from childhood that in any endeavor in life, a title is easy but genuine respect from colleagues must be earned. He simply did not have that and did not know how to get it.
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