First, the background by Nellie Bowles at The Free Press.
Jason Arday — professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, the youngest ever black professor there — has resigned amid scandal, and it is a doozy, folks.
He appears to have been a serial fabulist of the classic variety, but because he was black and had beautiful dreadlocks that fell below his hips, everyone around him just took what he said as The Truth. Those who looked askance at Arday and his dumbfounding achievements were clearly jealous and motivated by bigotry.
It was the easiest, silliest con of all time. His story began to unravel with simple plagiarism claims, which I didn’t care about last week because all sociology professors just copy-paste their fake studies, back and forth. For me, it doesn’t matter if “A history of the London fashion scene through a transracial lens, 1914–1916” was plagiarized because it actually doesn’t matter at all.
But this week things escalated: First, it looks like Arday truly just invented his research … Then it snowballed. People started looking into his super believable bio: He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university. Seems odd. Kind of miraculous. The claims go on. He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity (the charity says it never sends volunteers abroad). He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days. Oh! Also that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg. Right. Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University. All of these institutions have denied that he held such positions. The man is freestyling extracurriculars.
The cultural elite circled the wagons:
When people started to question all this, the defenses were robust, with a group of famous professors, politicians, and other luminaries writing indignantly: “We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.” I’m not sure you want to stake all of black academics on Jason Arday and these broken-leg marathons.
Our corrupt cultural elite, by David Strom at Hot Air:
There is a lot to unpack here, and little of it has to do with the man himself.
For Cambridge University and for academia as a whole, he was an empty vessel into whom they poured their ideology, self-delusion, pride, and sense of moral superiority.
Arday was merely a fabulist, of whom there are any number; that he succeeded in rising to the top of the academic ladder at the second-most prestigious academic institution in the world says little of interest about him, and lots about academia and the entire liberal cultural elite. ,,,
Arday embodied everything the cultural elite wants to see in a “victim” they can “save” to redeem themselves from their entirely unearned sense of being members of a class of “oppressors.” They can be the good guys; the civil rights heroes of the 1960s who, as white saviors, sacrificed themselves to the evil KKK so that black people could vote.
Of course, they don’t have to actually sacrifice anything but their self-respect and devotion to truth, and in return they get to lord it over the rest of us as Social Justice Warriors, right? …
Not only did Cambridge University cooperate on a BBC documentary about Arday in which his Department Chair called Arday the best scholar in the world in his field, despite his work being plagiarized from the similarly worthless work of others, but every single person in that crowd would nod along as Arday describes the most absurd experiences as if they might possibly be true. …
You have to admire Arday; he saw the desperation in the eyes of these people and decided that he could make his fortune giving them exactly what they wanted.
And they wanted it so badly that he kept inventing more and more absurd stories, and they just kept eating it up. Not only eating it up; the more absurd the story, the more they wrapped their own identities up in praising him and pushing him up the ladder of success.
The real story here is how corrupt the cultural elite has become, and how committed it is to creating ever more victims for them to save. Their entire identities are wrapped up in the project of saving fake victims. It requires no more work than inventing categories, writing in obscure and meaningless language, shouting “racism” and “transphobia” at people, and collecting virtue points and nice checks for doing so.
Universities sell a product and that product is PRESTIGE. The graduates paid for Isaac Newton prestige and all they have now is Jason Arday prestige. That’s fraud.
Reminds me of President Obama. Many people prided themselves on voting for him because he was black (there’s good racism and bad racism, I think they’re saying). For the ruling class and their media, Obama could do no wrong — which is why none of his obvious scandals stuck.