Streetwise Professor

I had two immediate reactions to the news of Jason Arday’s apparent suicide. The first was sadness, especially for his two children, wife, and parents. The second was to start a countdown to when the left would blame his decision to end his life on those who had uncovered his serial academic misconduct and fabulism. (Uncovering is not quite the right word: it was there in plain sight all along. Having the temerity to point it out is more accurate).

The countdown was a short one. The blaming started almost immediately.

But the blamers should look in the mirror. They are responsible for Arday’s unwarranted rise and are thus responsible for his inevitable fall. They are a necessary condition for the whole sorry tale.

The British academic establishment is the guilty party here. His thesis advisor(s) who granted him a doctorate based on a shoddy thesis: even putting plagiarism aside, its intellectual vacuity, borderline literateness, and sheer sloppiness (apostrophes go wild!) disqualify it even in a notoriously weak field like education. The universities that hired him, and used him to virtue signal despite his obvious lack of scholarly ability and flagrant fabulism: Cambridge is the most guilty here, because the gap between its scholarly reputation and Arday’s scholarly unfitness was the greatest. The university adjacent in media (the BBC in particular) and politics. Supposedly reputable publishers who advanced him seven figures for his Baron von Munchausen-esque autobiography.

Think of the likely effects of this on someone like Arday. What else could he conclude from his treatment other that there was no penalty for academic misconduct; that schlock research on racism got him treated like an academic superstar; and that there was an audience that not only suspended disbelief but avidly gulped down his tall tales? Given that feedback, the natural thing to do is more of it.

Which eventually and inevitably attracted the skeptical attention which brought it all crashing down. His failings were so immense that even his most ardent promoters found them indefensible.

Unless he was totally delusional, Arday must have awakened every day asking: “Is this the day I get called out?” I can only imagine the psychological toll that took. And when that day came, he decided he couldn’t go on.

Of course Jason Arday is ultimately responsible for his choices. But the “elite” enabled those choices, when at every step they should have given him a reality check. And they enabled not because they cared about Jason Arday. It was all about them. To advance their agendas. To validate their intellectual conceits. To feed their vanity.

Decent people would consider their role in Jason Arday’s rise and fall, and repent. But instead, they blame those who would not countenance misconduct–misconduct that they enabled, and indeed encouraged.