Academia and Jason Arday

From Richard Hanania's Newsletter: They're the Ones Who Told Us to Pay Attention to Jason Arday

Jason Arday was a professor at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. He was lauded as the “youngest black professor at Cambridge.” He had been guilty of excessive plagiarism, and when he had been called out, in a way that no one could dispute, he killed himself.

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 have seen several folks on the Left blaming the people who exposed the plagiarism for his death. As far as I'm concerned, that is just self-delusion. No one is to blame for his actions but himself. While you can make a case that the Left that celebrated him without bothering to validate any of his claims for some of the blame, in my estimation he is responsible for his own actions.

Still people are looking at academia over this issue. (Academia is under scrutiny for many reasons, but I'm just focusing on one thing.)

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.

And this didn't happen at some 3rd rate college in the middle of nowhere. Cambridge University is one of the premiere universities in the UK, or Europe, or the world.

This may be the ultimate DEI fable.