They're the Ones Who Told Us to Pay Attention to Jason Arday
Don't let academia forget this story
When Jason Arday died, I thought those on the left would want to forget he ever existed. And while that is true for the most part, the top-level grifters are doing what they do. Here is Ibram X Kendi.
While some actually deny he was a plagiarist, it seems more common to acknowledge that Arday screwed up while saying that the media and conservatives on X should be condemned for paying too much attention to the story.
This reminds me of something an old professor told me when I was in graduate school. He was a historian who had grown disgusted with the direction in which academia had gone. In his class, we would dig deep into some of the work of prominent political scientists and expose the flaws in their papers and books. This was effective in puncturing the aura that surrounded high-status figures in academia, and we would wonder how they got away with producing such drivel. He told us that many academics saw their work “like a game.” You don’t care all that much if someone you know cheats in a board game. Who cares? Why start a conflict? We’ve all got a nice thing going here, and it’s better if we all just continue getting along.
I thought about this when seeing some of the reactions to Arday’s fall. What’s the big deal if this guy’s entire life story was a lie, he was a plagiarist, and in fact when you looked at his “legitimate” work it had no intellectually redeeming features at all? He’s just expressing himself. It’s tasteless to at this point pretend that he was doing anything serious.
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Our society pays academics in prestige. People care about the “youngest black professor at Cambridge” because there’s a belief that these institutions are serving an important function in society. Academics serve as our modern priesthood. A Cambridge professor speaking out on a topic is listened to in a way that a typical educated professional is not. Higher status and authority are assumed throughout the media coverage of universities, which one could argue as a general matter get too much attention.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Societies need some forms of gatekeeping, and in theory intellectual accomplishment is one of the best criteria for awarding status in public debates. But you can’t have it both ways. When someone is elevated, celebrated, and promoted by prestigious institutions, and it turns out that he is a fraud, you can’t turn around and act like Jason Arday wasn’t ever worth that much attention in the first place.
It’s become a cliché at this point to say that the Arday story is more interesting as an indictment of academia than of him as a person. The New York Times just ran a brutally frank article about how unqualified he was for his position, and how the committee that hired him at Cambridge had experts in autism who should have been aware that his story about being nonverbal until 11 and then becoming a scholar couldn’t have been true. They clearly never took their jobs that seriously. These academics want to continue pursuing their work, get treated with deference by society, and never take the heat that might come with upholding the alleged standards of their profession when it is threatened by frauds. This is how fake fields like women’s studies have come into being, and why others like sociology have turned into such jokes.
Yes, Arday is a symptom, and him getting away with his lies as long as he did indicates that Cambridge is in even worse shape than most of us thought. If universities don’t want the scrutiny that comes with being high-prestige institutions, they can no longer continue with the assumption that the rest of us should be deferring to them on intellectual, moral, or political issues. You’re the ones who told us that being the “youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge” was newsworthy. When Arday was being championed as an inspirational figure, being interviewed on major news programs, and getting a “1.4 million” advance for his book (according to Arday himself, for what that’s worth), none of the critics of the recent coverage of his fall were saying that society was paying too much attention to what was going on in academia. Now that it has become clear that Cambridge prioritized the ideology of diversity over academic rigor or a concern for truth, the rest of us are supposed to feel guilty for taking what Arday’s boosters within and outside the university said at face value.
As his last act, Arday temporarily made it more difficult to have a real discussion about what has gone wrong in Western intellectual life. But the degree to which Cambridge failed and the vividness of his lies – like my personal favorite, the story of the muggers who gave him epilepsy and then were won over by his compassion – will hopefully help this story serve a purpose. 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.
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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.
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.