I think that the narratives around his suicide are also a bit too sympathetic. Jason Arday chose to kill himself. He wasn't forced into it, nobody held a gun to his head. I'm certain the media would've leapt on genuine instances of hate crime, but there weren't any, so I think it's safe to assume the guy wasn't afraid for his or his family's life.
He lied, then he got caught. He chose to tell those lies, he chose to accept a position at Cambridge, he chose to threaten people who were trying to expose him with lawyers. Then he got caught. Sure, you can claim that the reaction was disproportionate, it probably was. But implying that a disproportionate reaction and a social media shitstorm is *tantamount to killing someone* is absurd. It's a bit of a sad story, but it's sad because of the actions of one person.
It's also sad because it harshly damages the DEI movement for people who counted on it as part of the mission to solve the problems of inequality, when it, and affirmative action, quite often makes things worse for everyone it purports to help.
Today Vaclev Havel would’ve set his play “The Garden Party” at a university like Cambridge. The lies they live by and institutional numbing are something to behold. Excellent piece.
If Arday was never meant to be taken seriously as a scholar….then neither is the Cambridge sociology department….nor Cambridge generally.
The Arday apologists can’t have it both ways. And if they contest that Arday was only exposed because of his race, and that such bullcrap “scholarship” is in fact pervasive, they are welcome to unearth similar bases that undermine the academic credentials of non-black academics.
It's quite possible for a university to have high standards in some fields (usually including math/physics/chemistry) & disgracefully low standards in others. (Note that I haven't been to Cambridge & don't know for sure if that's what's happening there, but it does seem more likely to me.)
I agree. I’m not impugning the Cambridge math department (for example) per se. I’m just invoking the principle that Cambridge is accountable for what happens there, including the apparent BS at their sociology dept.
“Schools of education” are fake. The research is bad. Like, Stanford’s ed school popped out the finding that algebra is racist, and partly because it came from an arm of Stanford(TM) people took it seriously, like with SF banning middle school algebra. More generally, ed schools’ haven’t reformed post reproducibility crisis and a lot of their work is “pedogogy of the oppressed” level. So, even setting aside the DEI angle, we shouldn’t be surprised that Ardy emerged at a School of education.
This reminds of an interaction I had as an engineering grad student in the late 2000s. I ended up digging through a bunch of papers in my field that had been written in the 60s and reviewing some insights with my supervisor. I observed that it was interesting how many journal articles at that time had multiple reply comments published afterwards, often quite brief, pointing out small errors or an additional idea that built upon the original article. This was in the period when peer review was still becoming more formalized. Sometimes the commentators were profs at the same university as the author.
My supervisor made a face and said that this was sort of “embarrassing”. That this “wasn’t done anymore”. She then proceeded to tell me a story of how our research group had once discovered a meaningful error in a published paper. Rather than directly call the other group out, she and a few others published a paper in a different journal (she emphasized that this was important) and referenced the offending paper in a convoluted way. If you read carefully you would understand that they had shown this other paper was mistaken, but they never directly said that. It seemed rather bizarre to me at the time (likely why I remember it), but it was clear that she wanted me to know that this was now the right way to address this issue.
The field I was studying in was not a hot area where you would ever expect any public interest. Available funding was modest and the number of researchers small. My sense was that people in the field had developed exactly the attitude Hanania describes above: let’s all get along and avoid attracting outside scrutiny. Unspoken was the assumption that, if we don’t aggressive challenge others work, then our work won’t be challenged directly in turn. I suspect a lot of fields in academia look like this now. On campus, I witnessed mass student engagement on matters of politics, TA pay and causes of all sorts (climate change, foreign wars, etc.). I never once witnessed mass student engagement on an intellectual question of the day. I honestly struggle to even identify what a widespread intellectual question of the day was in the period in question.
Richard, you've done a lot of work thinking through how to combat and defang wokeness. It would be interesting to hear similar policy prescriptions for how Universities could be reformed in order to 1) restore academic rigour and 2) address ideological bias. Can these problems be addressed by legislation? Could the government ban/defund certain subjects and turf out far left professors and administrators?
Many would bulk at intruding on academic freedom, but in my view, giving Universities a defacto monopoly over issuing the certificates necessary to access societies most prestigious and well paying jobs means they perform such a broad and important public role that ensuring institutional rigour and neutrality must come ahead of such issues.
I don’t disagree (the guy even guest edited the Today programme) but I struggle to get too mad about it.
A decent chunk of education academics churn out borderline nonsense, I’m not sure society is losing that much by having him rather than ‘real’ academic in his place. If having a few nonsense fields (which no one takes particularly seriously) is the price to be paid for allowing real work in other areas then it’s not the worst thing in the world.
Find it much more frustrating when it seeps into traditionally more serious subjects - e.g. Alzheimer’s research fraud or the pressure Nigel Biggar came under for his more positive portrayal of the history of the British Empire.
Would also note the surprisingly anti Arday positions taken by the media. A guardian article seemed to be what led to his resignation - you get the sense after looking into it they couldn’t bring themselves to back him, even if in some ways sympathetic. Nice to feel facts still matter.
A much-needed response to all the accusations of 'mobbing'. Indeed, academia, the media and publishing industry all elevated Arday's profile and called out attention to him. Now they can't accuse us of paying too much attention to him.
“ Thanks in part to the uselessness of the so-called scholarship he produced, in death Arday might make a contribution to the advancement of human knowledge after all.”
I think that the narratives around his suicide are also a bit too sympathetic. Jason Arday chose to kill himself. He wasn't forced into it, nobody held a gun to his head. I'm certain the media would've leapt on genuine instances of hate crime, but there weren't any, so I think it's safe to assume the guy wasn't afraid for his or his family's life.
He lied, then he got caught. He chose to tell those lies, he chose to accept a position at Cambridge, he chose to threaten people who were trying to expose him with lawyers. Then he got caught. Sure, you can claim that the reaction was disproportionate, it probably was. But implying that a disproportionate reaction and a social media shitstorm is *tantamount to killing someone* is absurd. It's a bit of a sad story, but it's sad because of the actions of one person.
I don’t consider the reaction disproportionate, for all the reasons articulated in OP
It's also sad because it harshly damages the DEI movement for people who counted on it as part of the mission to solve the problems of inequality, when it, and affirmative action, quite often makes things worse for everyone it purports to help.
Today Vaclev Havel would’ve set his play “The Garden Party” at a university like Cambridge. The lies they live by and institutional numbing are something to behold. Excellent piece.
If Arday was never meant to be taken seriously as a scholar….then neither is the Cambridge sociology department….nor Cambridge generally.
The Arday apologists can’t have it both ways. And if they contest that Arday was only exposed because of his race, and that such bullcrap “scholarship” is in fact pervasive, they are welcome to unearth similar bases that undermine the academic credentials of non-black academics.
It's quite possible for a university to have high standards in some fields (usually including math/physics/chemistry) & disgracefully low standards in others. (Note that I haven't been to Cambridge & don't know for sure if that's what's happening there, but it does seem more likely to me.)
I agree. I’m not impugning the Cambridge math department (for example) per se. I’m just invoking the principle that Cambridge is accountable for what happens there, including the apparent BS at their sociology dept.
“Schools of education” are fake. The research is bad. Like, Stanford’s ed school popped out the finding that algebra is racist, and partly because it came from an arm of Stanford(TM) people took it seriously, like with SF banning middle school algebra. More generally, ed schools’ haven’t reformed post reproducibility crisis and a lot of their work is “pedogogy of the oppressed” level. So, even setting aside the DEI angle, we shouldn’t be surprised that Ardy emerged at a School of education.
This reminds of an interaction I had as an engineering grad student in the late 2000s. I ended up digging through a bunch of papers in my field that had been written in the 60s and reviewing some insights with my supervisor. I observed that it was interesting how many journal articles at that time had multiple reply comments published afterwards, often quite brief, pointing out small errors or an additional idea that built upon the original article. This was in the period when peer review was still becoming more formalized. Sometimes the commentators were profs at the same university as the author.
My supervisor made a face and said that this was sort of “embarrassing”. That this “wasn’t done anymore”. She then proceeded to tell me a story of how our research group had once discovered a meaningful error in a published paper. Rather than directly call the other group out, she and a few others published a paper in a different journal (she emphasized that this was important) and referenced the offending paper in a convoluted way. If you read carefully you would understand that they had shown this other paper was mistaken, but they never directly said that. It seemed rather bizarre to me at the time (likely why I remember it), but it was clear that she wanted me to know that this was now the right way to address this issue.
The field I was studying in was not a hot area where you would ever expect any public interest. Available funding was modest and the number of researchers small. My sense was that people in the field had developed exactly the attitude Hanania describes above: let’s all get along and avoid attracting outside scrutiny. Unspoken was the assumption that, if we don’t aggressive challenge others work, then our work won’t be challenged directly in turn. I suspect a lot of fields in academia look like this now. On campus, I witnessed mass student engagement on matters of politics, TA pay and causes of all sorts (climate change, foreign wars, etc.). I never once witnessed mass student engagement on an intellectual question of the day. I honestly struggle to even identify what a widespread intellectual question of the day was in the period in question.
Richard, you've done a lot of work thinking through how to combat and defang wokeness. It would be interesting to hear similar policy prescriptions for how Universities could be reformed in order to 1) restore academic rigour and 2) address ideological bias. Can these problems be addressed by legislation? Could the government ban/defund certain subjects and turf out far left professors and administrators?
Many would bulk at intruding on academic freedom, but in my view, giving Universities a defacto monopoly over issuing the certificates necessary to access societies most prestigious and well paying jobs means they perform such a broad and important public role that ensuring institutional rigour and neutrality must come ahead of such issues.
I don’t disagree (the guy even guest edited the Today programme) but I struggle to get too mad about it.
A decent chunk of education academics churn out borderline nonsense, I’m not sure society is losing that much by having him rather than ‘real’ academic in his place. If having a few nonsense fields (which no one takes particularly seriously) is the price to be paid for allowing real work in other areas then it’s not the worst thing in the world.
Find it much more frustrating when it seeps into traditionally more serious subjects - e.g. Alzheimer’s research fraud or the pressure Nigel Biggar came under for his more positive portrayal of the history of the British Empire.
Would also note the surprisingly anti Arday positions taken by the media. A guardian article seemed to be what led to his resignation - you get the sense after looking into it they couldn’t bring themselves to back him, even if in some ways sympathetic. Nice to feel facts still matter.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/aug/01/playbooks-plagiarism-pigs-head-new-claims-surrounding-cambridge-professor-jason-arday
A much-needed response to all the accusations of 'mobbing'. Indeed, academia, the media and publishing industry all elevated Arday's profile and called out attention to him. Now they can't accuse us of paying too much attention to him.
“ Thanks in part to the uselessness of the so-called scholarship he produced, in death Arday might make a contribution to the advancement of human knowledge after all.”
Shot! No chaser
Tough article. But correct.
Owen Jones is using ChatGPT to write his tweets for him. Pathetic.
Owen Jones has been pathetic since long before ChatGPT was ever invented.