Jason Arday’s academic career was built on the wreckage of the lives of better men. By John Carter.
Arday’s entire schtick … was kvetching about racism in academia.
He didn’t even do so in a particularly clever way. So far as I can tell he did not find anything original to say about racism, nor was he especially talented as a literary popularizer. He was both unoriginal and untalented even by the vanishingly low standards of what academics are pleased to call his field of research.
Now, you have may noticed that racism has been a particularly fashionable subject matter in the halls of quackademe throughout the long and dismal era of the Cancelled Years, so you might not think it is any great mystery as to why or how Arday was hired at Cambridge, as he is (or rather, was) a black body talking blackness, which is surely sufficient explanation for how this particular turtle ended up on its particular post.
I’m not sure that it is, however. … While Wokeness explains why Cambridge found it necessary to hire a black man, it doesn’t explain why this black man, particularly, and not one of the many others they might have picked. eugyppius makes a stab at explaining this by the argument that even minimally presentable professional black people are so exceptionally rare that the institutions fight over them like South African mercenary armies over blood diamonds. …
The eyes — so appealing to the AWFLs:
There’s something to eugyppius’ argument, to be sure, but Arday’s writing was so incoherently terrible that I think we need to look for additional factors.
Personally, I suspect it was his eyes.
In every picture of Arday that I’ve seen he wears an open, beatific expression. His gentle gaze seems to say “I forgive you for your racism … I know you can’t help it … I know you regret it … Here, take my hand … it will all be okay.” He doesn’t actually have to say anything. He just has to look like that, radiating sincerity and acceptance, and that gaze hits that particular species of sexually frustrated middle-aged white woman who dominates every departmental hiring committee like a 2×4 right between their SSRIeyes. It stuns them into a sort of a jellied bliss. Arday possessed a kind of basilisk stare of friendliness.
Contrast that with the usual run of professional black people, who affect a haughty, aggressive, Black Panthers sort of countenance, and you can see why AWFLs would flock to him …. Arday hypnotized his way into the faculty lounge the same way Rasputin stared his way into the Czar’s court. …
Winners and losers:
Until a few days ago Arday was one of the game’s winners, and the outraged howls from the other winners have to be understood in this context, because if Arday can be brought low so quickly…
There have been many losers to this game. … Some of those stories involve suicide.
Professor Mike Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, shot himself after getting pressured to step down over offensive tweets.
Richard Bilkszto, a former principle with the Toronto District School Board, killed himself after getting fired for ‘bullying’ an anti-racism trainer (i.e. he politely pushed back on some of the more incendiary claims). Remember the soul-searching from the left when these men killed themselves after getting their names dragged through the mud in public, their livelihoods destroyed, their careers permanently ruined? The thoughtful op-eds and emotive think pieces asking “Did we go too far?” Of course you don’t. The most we’ve gotten is AOC cackling that “Woke 1 was craaaazy.” Though of course she doesn’t say why it was crazy, or how Woke 2 will differ….
Suicides are, thankfully, the exception. Most people don’t kill themselves when they get cancelled. They just suffer….
James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix and therefore one of the most significant scientific minds of the postwar era, was forced to step down from his position as director of the Cold Spring Harbour genetic research laboratory because he observed that evolutionary biology applies to the neurobiology of ancestral human populations, and was ultimately reduced to selling his Nobel prize to make ends meet. To his credit, Watson never recanted. …
Planetary scientist Matt Taylor was brought to blubbering tears by an outraged mob because he wore a loud shirt to the press conference announcing his crowning achievement, namely the landing of the Rosetta probe on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The shirt in question displayed Barbarella style images of scantily clad scifi bombshells, which outraged ugly feminists …
Astrophysict Geoff Marcy, who independently co-discovered the first exoplanet 51 Pegasus b, was forced to step down from his professorship over a MeToo scandal that involved literal rape such as placing his hand on the shoulders of grad students to provide them the reassurance of human contact, and escorting a drunk grad student back to her hotel room at a conference dinner. One of his accusers promptly stepped into his newly vacant position. When the Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of 51 Peg b, Marcy was completely unpersoned, his name going unmentioned, with the presenters going so far as to scrub his name from a figure lifted directly from his original paper. Even years after the fact there were efforts to cancel other scientists by association merely for allowing his name to be listed as a contributor on the author list of their papers, in recognition for the (pro bono) assistance he gave to their data collection and analysis. …
Theoretical particle physicist Alessandro Strumia was forced out of CERN because he gave a talk in which he examined hiring data and concluded that physics (a discipline which he maintained, accurately, had been developed overwhelmingly by men) did not discriminate against women but, to the contrary, if anything discriminated in their favour. Thousands of physicists signed a letter condemning him….
Evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying were forced to resign their positions at Evergreen College after Weinstein publicly objected to the ‘Day of Absence’ in which the diversitarians required students and faculty of whiteness to vacate campus. Weinstein’s objection led to vicious personal harassment and disruption of his classes. …
The first step is the cancellations, to terrorize the chattering class into submission:
The common element in all of these cases is cancellation for violation of some woke taboo or other. In some cases it was for repudiation of some aspect of the doctrine of absolute human equality. In others it was for stepping over the invisible and mobile boundaries of the new sexual mores of male purdah inflicted upon society by feminists worked up into a lather over a hallucinatory rape culture1. Many were men who made significant, even immense contributions to the natural sciences, none of which counted for a hill of beans once the lesser mediocrities mobbed up in an outraged mass. They were not cancelled for plagiarism, or for falsifying data, or for lying about their biographies. So far as anyone knows their scholarship was impeccable. It was their loose tongues and, on occasion, wandering hands that got them in trouble.
Notably, these were all established, mostly tenured professors — men who had already made their careers. The woke mob went after them specifically to cultivate a climate of terror within academia. If even Nobel laureates could be brought low for speaking out of turn, then everyone else had best be exceptionally cautious about what they said, even in private. The result of this was to remove any possibility of internal resistance to DEI imperatives. …
The second step was more effective — deny anyone who might disagree a place in the institutions, or any money:
By the time I was applying for faculty positions, “diversity statements” had become de rigeur with every application package. These were little ideological loyalty oaths, essays in which one was expected to explain what one had done in the service of diversity, how one would contribute to diversity in the future, and how one’s own theoretical understanding of the transcendant intellects of Crenshaw and Kendi influenced one’s personal and professional behaviour. In the University of California system diversity statements were effectively the most important part of the application: before the search committee would even see the applications, human resources would review the diversity statements, and pass on only those applications that met their expectations. That was an extreme example, but by 2022 these things were everywhere.
More recently, diversity statements have fallen out of fashion, in large part due to pressure from the Trump administration. Of course this pressure has been applied in the stupidest fashion possible. Diversity statements are banned, but the true believers who required them in the first place are still there. Instead of requiring applicants to write hosannahs to diversity, they now simply expect it. If your teaching statement, cover letter, and CV don’t hit the necessary notes, in the bin your application goes.
It is one thing to be expected to grovel by spouting cant you don’t believe. The humiliation ritual is made all the more degrading when you realize that it doesn’t matter how well you grovel, because the diversitarians are going out of their way to avoid hiring white men. …
This ‘soft cancellation’, as you might call it, did incalculably more damage than the high-profile firings. It was quiet and unremarked, apparent only as a statistical decline in the fraction of white men being hired into any and every field. For individual applicants there was no overt sign that they were being discriminated against. A rejection email would never say “Sorry, you’re a white male,” simply “We wish you luck in your future endeavors.” On one level you knew what was happening — all your colleagues chattered endlessly about how important it was to promote Women In STEM or to combat the scourge of whiteness — but on another, you simply felt that you weren’t good enough….
I don’t know if there were any suicides because of this, but I suspect that there were. Certainly, during this period, I was no stranger to suicidal ideation. Every night on end, as I drifted off to sleep, the black dog of depression would settle its hopeless paws on my chest and pant the fetid breath of doubt into my face. During the day I found that I could not even think about research, as the moment my thoughts turned to the subject they would invariably spiral down into darker paths. …
How many found themselves living in their parents’ basements? How many fell into alchoholism or drug addiction? How many never married, never had children, never passed on their high-IQ genetics? I don’t think statistics even exist on this. No one, so far as I know, has studied it. Certainly no one in academia would dare study it.
The third step is to propagate their outrageous narratives, naturally.
But back to topic, of Jason Arday’s academic career being built on the wreckage of the lives of better men.
Jason Arday was hired specifically because of this ideological climate, specifically to reinforce this climate. He owed his career to woke hysteria. His life was built on the wreckage of the lives of better men than him, actual scholars and scientists whose contributions counted for nought, because glassy-eyed middle-aged white women and cowardly old white men place a higher priority on venal careerism and the fellation of their political organs than they do on knowledge, truth, or ability.
Arday lived by the lie and died by the lie. Karma’s a bitch …
There is a certain resilience that emerges from the arrogance of talent. They don’t need the institutions to survive, because they — or rather, men like them — were the ones who built those institutions in the first place.
Creatures like Arday are not like this. They are much more fragile. … Once cast out, they are done. There is no real organic demand for their ‘intellectual output’. Everything about them is false and homosexual, an astroturfed simulacrum of scholarship that no one — including inside the academy -– is actually interested in engaging with. Left to their own devices, required to gather their own audiences, they wither. They know that they cannot survive on their own; this is why they cling to their perches with such tenacity; it is why, once removed, they despair.
Finally, Claire Lehmann notes that many of the journalists covering for Cambridge are defending their own status:
The press interest in Arday can be explained by the fact that ~40% of British journalists went to Oxbridge. It’s an elite protecting its own status. If Cambridge can no longer tell the difference between fraudand excellence then the status of an entire elite class is in question.
