Jason Arday is no longer a professor at Britain’s prestigious Cambridge University, but that august institution is going to need some time to recover from the damage he has done. Indeed, the entire academic world, and the DEI industry as well, are reeling from Arday’s sudden and shocking unmasking and downfall. They had so very much invested in him as a living symbol of the success of their analysis, and of the correctness of their worldview, that now they are due for some serious soul-searching and reevaluation of their entire approach.
Will they engage in that thorough and honest self-examination that they so desperately need? Nah. They’ll just double down. In fact, they’re already doing so.
Up until his resignation under fire on Thursday, Jason Arday was a professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge, becoming the youngest black professor in the university’s history. He resigned after evidence of his massive plagiarism and otherwise embarrassingly skimpy academic record circulated so widely as to be impossible to ignore, but this is much, much more than just a plagiarism scandal.
The question of how and why Jason Arday was hired at Cambridge, and at several other universities before that, raises so many important questions about the academic establishment that in a sane world, the credibility of that establishment would be destroyed forever. Alas, we do not live in a sane world.
That’s clear from the fact that Jason Arday is a completely ridiculous figure, as he himself indirectly acknowledged when he asked: “Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told, if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he’s 30?” Well, yes, it would, and yet Jason Arday told it, and academics eagerly believed him.
Not only did Arday claim that he couldn’t read and write until he was 18. He also claimed that he couldn’t even speak at all until he was eleven years old. But once he got speaking, reading, and writing squared away, he took off with a bang, by his own account, running 30 marathons in 35 days and raising nearly 7.5 million dollars for various charities. He also says that he completed the last nine of those 30 marathons despite suffering from a fractured leg that had swollen “to twice its normal size.”
He also said that he had played professional soccer and snooker (a variation of billiards), that a man with a knife had threatened him at Cambridge, and that other racist yahoos sent his parents a pig’s head. There is, of course, no evidence of any of this.
And there is more still. He says that he had a brain tumor that caused him to lose his memory, and that he had to relearn everything. He had another brain tumor as well, and testicular cancer, and was in a coma. A gang of toughs beat him up, but he forgave them and argued against their prosecution, and ended up teaching and mentoring them.
Reading Jason Arday’s account of his own life is like reading a Superman comic book. He does everything and does it well. He overcomes adversity that would have destroyed a lesser man, no, five lesser men. He routinely performs feats and racks up achievements that most people don’t come close to attaining in a lifetime.
Jason Arday is, in short, a liar and a fantasist on a seismic scale. And whatever may have been his motivation for telling all these lies, and for committing plagiarism and all the rest, the larger question is why anyone believed him. His accumulated achievements are palpably unbelievable. If a white Christian in a traditional academic field had told all these lies in applying to Cambridge, he would have been thrown out on his ear.
Jason Arday, however, was young, black, and well-versed in the language of racial victimization. He reaffirmed the way the Cambridge dons and their peers wanted to see the world, and served as a living example of the correctness of their racial obsessions and commitment to DEI initiatives. He made them feel as if they were right, and for that, they were willing to overlook everything and give him the world.
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