Cambridge has chosen a cover-up, most likely to save half the Education Department from public disgrace.
The fall has been a season of depressingly inexorable denouements (for one thing, the forecast calls for impending November rains), but few endings were more predictable in their cowardice than Cambridge University’s decision to wait out the Jason Arday scandal, until the hubbub died down and the spotlight shifted, and then quietly abandon even the slightest pretense of intellectual accountability or professional reckoning. The people who hired an obviously incompetent plagiarist and fabulist and shepherded him into a position where he was guaranteed to fail will be allowed to skate.
Oh, but it gets far worse than that. You see, the nature of the inquiry has shifted . . . to whether Cambridge offered Arday enough psychological help before he killed himself. Yes, instead of accountability, we get ritually woke self-flagellation.
The University of Cambridge has abandoned plans to fully investigate its hiring of Jason Arday, the professor who became a lightning rod in the debate over diversity-and-inclusion efforts in higher education, following his abrupt death last month.
Instead, the university said, the inquiry will examine whether the school offered him sufficient support amid accusations that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis and embellished his personal narrative. Dr. Arday may come up as part of a broader look at university hiring practices, but he will not be a focus.
Even the New York Times’ straight news reporting exudes a sense of bewilderment and barely concealed disgust. After noting that authorities are still withholding Arday’s cause of death, the Times points out the complete volte-face from the Cambridge administration’s original tone:
The change in investigative focus means that Cambridge may never publicly address questions about how it vetted Dr. Arday for a senior teaching job and why it repeatedly downplayed concerns about his work and biography.
That has upset some professors, who are circulating a letter demanding full institutional accountability and an examination of how the university promoted Dr. Arday’s personal story, according to a draft seen by The New York Times.
It ought to be the end for Cambridge’s credibility. Realistically, we know it will not be. But once more I am reminded of emeritus Cambridge don (and former chair of the school’s Politics department) David Runciman’s archly resigned take on the scandal, written back in August: Of course Arday was a transparent fraud who deserved exposure, Runciman writes, but all in all nothing of great value was lost by him holding his position because nothing of value has ever been created by departments like Arday’s; it’s merely a question of who wins the lottery and gets to fill out the academic position. (Somebody is going to do it.)
In other words — and Runciman goes there — the vast majority of the modern humanities were called into being by political imperatives, not intellectual ones; the rest are, if not entirely fraudulent, then at best wholly irrelevant. Strikingly sour sentiments from an authority in the field, but apparently they are shared by Cambridge’s administration as well. Cambridge has chosen a cover-up, most likely to save half the Education Department from public disgrace. Remember that, and value their degree accordingly.