Breakpoint
Earlier this week, an estimated 30,000 people gathered in London to mourn Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who took his own life after revelations that much of his academic record and personal biography was plagiarized or simply made up. Despite these facts, many who gathered directed blame at media for covering what an Al Jazeera opinion writer called an “institutional murder.” Ibram X Kendi even claimed in an essay that “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.”
In 2023, Arday became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge, a school over 800 years old that is, along with Oxford and Harvard, considered one of the top three universities in the English-speaking world. Immediately, he was hailed by colleagues for his brilliance in the field of sociology. His success seemed more impressive because of what he overcame as a black man subject to discrimination and systemic oppression, including being non-verbal until age 11 and illiterate until age 18.
It sounded too good to be true and, unfortunately, it was. On August 5, Arday resigned from Cambridge after a former colleague found evidence that his PhD thesis and several academic papers “closely resembled, and in some cases copied, the work of other scholars without proper attribution.” A childhood classmate then denied Arday’s claim that he couldn’t talk as a child. Arday also claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, to have completed 30 marathons in 35 days—much of it with a fractured, swollen leg—and to have been on a TV show that came out decades before he was born.
Rather than admit wrongdoing, Arday wrote in his resignation letter that “talent, perseverance and hope can triumph over even the greatest adversity,” adding that his years at Cambridge were “marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack.” According to detection software, the letter was mostly, if not fully, written by AI.
Rather than blame Arday and those who hid and enabled his lies, protestors directed attacks at the man who exposed them. According to the mayor of London, Arday was “the victim of a pernicious public shaming." Others insisted that a white academic would not have faced the same level of scrutiny.
Before news broke of Arday's death, respected academic and linguist John McWhorter (who happens to be black) suggested that he was indeed a victim, but of an academic paternalism often directed toward minorities. According to McWhorter, “The kindly, antiracist white academics think suspending their judgment when it comes to a black man makes them good people.” In reality, he continued, they are guilty of the same racism they’re claiming to oppose. As he bluntly put it, “Arday’s elevation at Cambridge was founded in racism no less overt.”
In other words, just as it is racist to assume that someone is morally inferior because of their race, it is racist to assume that someone is morally superior because of it. But that is the consequence of the spirit of our age, the critical theory mood that dominates academia and dehumanizes those it claims to help.
In the 1950’s, another Cambridge professor argued for a different moral vision, a higher moral law that transcended time, place, era, and culture and to which every person is accountable. What C.S. Lewis called “the Tao” is “the doctrine that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” Those who deny it are, he continued, “like men who should commit patricide in order to be free and live on the vitality of the father they had killed.”
In the same way, dismissing universal moral norms based on certain external characteristics of some will never deliver the dignity people deserve. This “soft bigotry of low expectations” does not respect people; it infantilizes them.
Ideas have consequences. Bad ideas have victims. Some of the world’s worst ideas are those that cause people to imagine themselves as only victims. Arday was as much a victim of his own ideas as he was the victim of other’s good intentions.