Wilder On Jason Arday's Demise

John Wilder's latest is "Narcissism And Jason Arday." If you don't know who is Arday, he was appointed as the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University based on what turned out to be plagiarized academic papers and an unbelievable background. And after it was all exposed, he committed suicide. Wilder goes into more detail on all this, but I think he hit the nail on the head in his explanation of why Arday was able to pull the wool over eyes of Cambridge, the BBC, et al.: "... it appears that the only impact [Arday] had, at all, was in allowing liberal white ladies over the age of 40 to virtue signal when they were around him." 

    But we are not supposed to notice any of this because Arday was black, and, therefore, to notice his fraud was racist. Thus, we have this headline from Breitbart: "Cambridge Scandal: American Academic Who Exposed Alleged Jason Arday Plagiarism Suspended by Own University Over ‘Discrimination’ Probe." The Breitbart article relates:

Philosopher Dr Nathan Cofnas has been suspended by Ghent University in Flanders, Belgium as they launch a “preliminary disciplinary investigation” and decide whether there are sufficient grounds to refer him “to the competent disciplinary body” after the death of former Professor Jason Arday, who died last week at his London home days after he resigned from the University of Cambridge over a plagiarism scandal.

Making the University’s position clear, Ghent said:

    Over the past few days, Ghent University has received many enquiries following the death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday… we wish to be clear about the values we uphold as a university.

    Ghent University stands for respect for human dignity and opposes discrimination, hatred and racism. We attach great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial. However, that freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.

While the allegations of academic misconduct including plagiarism, embellishment, and even claimed authorship of non-existent books are understood to have been reported to Cambridge years ago, from the time in 2023 when Arday was proclaimed as the University’s youngest-ever black Professor, they weren’t widely publicly known until they were published by Cofnas this year. It is alleged that until the matter entered the public sphere Cambridge had moved to prevent discussion about their hire, that those looking into the matter were smeared as racists, and that police were even set onto journalists working on the story. 

Arday is the archtype of DEI--"Didn't Earn It"--where his research and backstory was a complete fabrication, but we were all supposed to ignore that the emperor had no clothes. Except in this case, rather than the conmen perpetrating their fraud because no one wanted to be thought a fool for pointing out the obvious, the conman here succeeded because no one wanted to be thought "racist" for pointing out the obvious. 

    Thus we have articles like this op-ed by Afua Hirsch at the Guardian entitled "Jason Arday is now the stick the right will use to beat back racial equality. Don’t let that happen." Hirsch acknowledges that Arday fabricated much of his qualifications, and that it had already raised concerns with other scholars, but still blames the press for noticing:

The media cannot conceal its excitement about his transgressions. Arday doesn’t need to be a fantasist to be the kind of man commentators would rather not see at a university like Cambridge – being black is enough. For them, the fact that he made stuff up is simply a massive bonus. Which explains why they have moved so quickly from identifying mistakes he has made to indulging in an orgy of delight at the prospect of smearing all black academics. 

This is a theme picked up in other media. For instance, this article from Al Jazeera: "Thousands mourn Jason Arday in London, blaming ‘racist’ press for his death." The BBC reports that Cambridge University's chancellor, Lord Chris Smith, also condemned what he described as a media "feeding frenzy." It also relates that  more than 90,000 people "signed a Good Law Project petition seeking an inquiry into media coverage of Arday." In other words, make sure that the media never again reports on something like this.