The only people left with any share of blame in his death are those who credulously and patronizingly promoted and encouraged him.
Fraudulent former Cambridge University professor Jason Arday was found dead a little over a week ago, apparently by his own hand. And while it has been depressing to see how swiftly some of his sympathizers from the world of commentary — though notably not from the world of Cambridge — have instrumentalized his death for their own political ends, I would hardly call it surprising. In fact, I might even venture to suggest that an attention-chasing fabulist like Arday is precisely the sort of person who would take consolation in the thought that his death is now being used as a club to bludgeon those who brought his wrongdoing to light.
As some of you may have read by now, the first academic to be formally punished for the Jason Arday scandal is none other than Nathan Cofnas, the scholar who first discovered Arday’s (undisputed) history of plagiarism and invention. For his troubles, Cofnas has been (1) falsely tarred as a sinister “race-realist”; (2) denounced by name by various U.K. politicians; (3) suspended from his postdoctoral research program at Ghent University in Belgium (as a prelude to likely termination). Cofnas has ably accounted for himself in a piece cross-posted to the Wall Street Journal, but I feel like a paragraph I wrote last week sums the argument up tidily:
Those who noticed that Jason Arday was an academic fraud are not to blame for his death. Those who insisted Cambridge live up to its scholarly standards and investigate the legitimacy of Arday’s work are not the ones who should feel shame. The most obvious person to blame for Jason Arday’s suicide is Jason Arday himself — and yet he is no longer around to account for this sin, or any other.
No, Arday was destroyed by his own weaknesses — and at every step of the journey, including its end, he chose his fate. No one made him plagiarize his doctoral thesis, or large parts of his (skimpy) publication history. Nobody made him try to get the Metropolitan Police to threaten and investigate innocent scholars whose only sin was politely inquiring about his data sets. Nobody made him mistreat and fail to serve his students so appallingly that Cambridge now faces potential legal jeopardy due to his fraudulence. Nobody made Arday spin so many obviously fake, absurdly self-aggrandizing fables about his disadvantages and achievements in life — except perhaps the U.K. publishing industry, which offered him a 1,000,000 pound advance for a memoir of his ever-expanding inspirational life story.
And nobody made Arday commit suicide. I am disgusted at those who would unwittingly valorize the act by seeking to make it the fault of anyone else, and I refuse to waste any more time rehashing the moral or religious arguments against self-slaughter. I would instead emphasize, as I did last week, that the only people living left with any share of blame in Arday’s death are those who credulously and patronizingly promoted and encouraged him: A society that had reckoned honestly with intellectual impostures like Arday’s — a grift as old as the existence of carnies, card-cheats, and confidence men — would never have let him get so high, to fall so far.
Jason Arday was no more “hounded” to his death than any other man would have been whose life suddenly collapsed under the weight of so many spectacular, reputation-destroying lies. And Arday is not the first this has happened to. Some fallen angels, like Stephen Glass, do the hard work of quietly rebuilding their lives, out of the spotlight. Arday — after boasting about a lifetime of overcoming one improbable hardship after another — evidently chose a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Still, the media reaction to all of this has been fascinating. As noted above, Cambridge University — after initially supporting Arday (indeed, concealing knowledge of his wrongdoing dating to 2023) — seems now to be well aware of both the massive reputational hit it has suffered, and the concomitant liabilities (both legal and social) it has just incurred. Meanwhile, give this much to the New York Times: Whatever its countless deficiencies, it has offered good, tough coverage of the scandal.
And I find it interesting to end by comparing two recent essays on the topic, one from the American groves of academe and another from Britain. The first, from Dr. Kemi Doll of the University of Washington School of Medicine, is titled “Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia.” Its dubiously overwrought title fails to do justice to the calm, measured tone of the piece, which begins: “They are trying to kill us.”
After failing to provide evidence for this shocking claim, Dr. Doll eulogizes Arday thusly:
His publications specifically focused on race and racism in the British educational system, and he didn’t shy away from using his own life in his examples . . . I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career. And certainly not his life.
It’s difficult to indict one’s entire professional worldview more thoroughly in a single paragraph. So what if Arday’s entire record of “scholarship,” such as it is — based upon his “own life,” which we now know to have been largely imagined — is fraudulent? The good doctor — writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, no less — is proudly indifferent to academic standards. She doesn’t care! Nothing is worth a (black) man’s career, even his inability to conduct it with any standard of honesty or competence.
It is impossible not to get the sense from reactions like Dr. Doll’s — or the cloddishly self-defeating “allyship” of former Yale professor Jason Stanley — that Arday’s defenders regard a sinecure in academia much like earlier generations regarded the make-work jobs of the Works Progress Administration: as a glorified private employment program for activists disinclined to the dirty work of public organizing, and one not to be judged by the standards properly (or formerly) applied to other academic fields. These positions exist primarily because political imperatives brought them into existence, and as such are there largely to give a select set of people access to “academia” who otherwise would never be able to enjoy its elite pleasures.
So it was fascinating to read the venerable former Cambridge professor David Runciman basically agree with me, in his remarkably jaded take on l’affaire Arday:
When I ran the politics department I once called a meeting to remind my colleagues that because we studied politics we should be careful not to allow our own political views to become too visible if we wanted to be taken seriously. An academic discipline needs to be dispassionate, I suggested. The pushback was overwhelming, particularly from younger members of staff. Why, they wanted to know, should we do these poorly paid and frequently stressful jobs if we don’t get to use them to promote the things we think really matter? . . .
Professor Arday also seems to have neglected his teaching obligations, though in his case this may have been driven more by a sense of futility than of privilege. Some of his students claim they didn’t need supervising, which is hardly surprising from someone who must have known he had very little to teach them in academic terms. There are many extremely diligent and hard-working professors. Nonetheless, seen from the lower rungs of the pyramid, Arday is not the only one who looks like he was there just for show. And yet the lower rungs still get filled.
I recommend the piece — few are qualified to speak with more authority on Cambridge or its internal dynamics than Runciman — even as I find its tone to be revealingly sour. Runciman is an emeritus professor of politics, a man of the older school, and he’s safely “out of the game” now. His angle on the scandal is that (1) Arday was an obvious fraud, but (2) it matters less than you think because everything that you think of as “Cambridge” now matters less than you think: Outside of the sciences, everything that once made it prestigious is gone now.
Fair enough, but this is the sort of cynical negative take I might write — with the deep despair left merely implied — rather than the words of a Cambridge don. Runciman’s piece reads at times like the confession of a man who no longer believes in the academic relevance of his life’s work, or the public future of the humanities at all. And given his own profession’s failure to take its intellectual standards seriously, you know what? Maybe there’s something to that.