Academic integrity matters.
The Jason Arday scandal was a tragedy because it resulted in the death, probably by suicide, of a disturbed man who lied and plagiarized his way to the highest levels of academic celebrity at Cambridge University. Everyone should mourn that outcome.
But too many among the liberal intelligentsia seem intent on conjuring the wrong causes for the mess their own attitudes created. Rather than recognizing the potentially dire individual, institutional, and societal consequences that can result from elevating people beyond their actual capabilities, the editors of Nature instead castigate Cambridge for turning on Arday when his fabulism and egregious academic wrongdoing became undeniable:
Arday’s fate is distressing, and especially so for Black scholars and those from other communities that are under-represented in academic research, many members of which report feeling vulnerable and unsupported at this time. There is systemic racism in academia. It is an unwelcoming place for many who enter it through hardship and struggle, as Arday’s story illustrates. It is not acceptable that these barriers persist. On top of this, scholars from Black and other under-represented communities fear that the intensity of attention Arday faced could one day be focused on them. The question many are asking is: ‘Could I be next?’
The editorial complains about procedural issues involved in Cambridge’s investigation into Arday and bemoan the media’s hyper-scrutiny of the scandal, which the editorial charges was tainted by racism.
There are indeed important lessons to learn. But based on Nature‘s editorial, “deep reflection” on true causes is the last thing in which the journal’s editors want to engage.
- Deep reflection would ponder why Cambridge placed a man into a high-visibility professorship and touted him as the world’s best in his field — when he was clearly not. At some point the pretense was bound to implode. Indeed, like NR’s Jeffrey Blehar, I believe that Cambridge administrators and Arday’s colleagues have much for which to answer in this debacle.
- Deep reflection would campaign for reform to ensure that all academic appointments — particularly those with great prestige and high visibility — are based on strict meritocratic principles.
- Deep reflection would focus on why accountability is so often deemed to be racist or otherwise invidiously motivated when favored minorities are investigated for wrongdoing.
- Deep reflection would focus on Arday’s own responsibilities for his academic downfall.
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Deep reflection would have Nature‘s editors forcefully repudiate the societally toxic assertion by an African-American professor — published at the New England Journal of Medicine website — that the debacle demonstrates academia and society’s desire to “kill” black academics.
- Deep reflection would also require the editors to look at how their constant push for political progressive ideological approaches to science policy and scholarly direction undermines the public’s belief in institutions’ integrity and the sectors’ trustworthiness.
Deep reflection would also induce the editors to reflect on a relevant recent Atlantic cover essay by a politically liberal, former tenured black professor named Tyler Austin Harper. Now a writer for the magazine, Harper recounts in devastating detail how he experienced the bigotry of low expectations over several years after he was made a tenured professor at Bates College in Maine and the consequences that flow from such pandering:
I never stopped believing in affirmative action in principle, but I slowly stopped believing in it in practice. I’d understood the spirit of affirmative action to be about recognizing that people from historically underrepresented groups often face additional barriers, about affirming that talented minorities who may be less connected and superficially less refined can nonetheless rise to the occasion if given the opportunity. It seemed to me that the Bates administration’s push to diversify at all costs had led some of my colleagues on the faculty to internalize the opposite idea: that it is not especially important to find minority candidates who are capable of being held to traditional academic norms. Justice and anti-racism required a two-tiered system, a sort of woke Jim Crow, in which radically separate standards were applied to white and nonwhite candidates. In short, I came to see Bates College, self-styled beacon of progress, as an institution that was deeply, incorrigibly racist.
Harper’s essay is important. I hope everyone will read it.
Arday’s apparent suicide makes this whole imbroglio particularly painful. But academic integrity matters. The real problem was not accountability but how fervently Cambridge administrators, academia, and institutional voices like Nature wanted to believe that the late fabulist’s lies were true.