On Friday, former Cambridge scholar Jason Arday died. The reason for his passing hasn’t been released, but given the circumstances surrounding the last few weeks of his life, one can make certain assumptions.
Police are saying that “his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious,” which sounds as close to confirmation of some form of suicide as can be ascertained at this point.
This is indeed a tragedy, but it was authored by Arday’s lies and the institution, the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, that pretended to believe them and thus enabled his fall. He was an academic star not just because he was the youngest black professor in the institution’s history, but he was also apparently an elite, world-class athlete who was non-verbal until 11, couldn’t read until age 18, and yet had earned a Ph.D. and raised millions of dollars for charity.
All of this was verifiably false, and that verification came (publicly, anyhow) just weeks before his memoir containing all this falsity in the form of an easy-to-fact-check compendium was to be released.
His academic work, such as it was, was thin, sloppy, and plagiarized, something that could have been easily discovered years ago — and was, incidentally, but suppressed by Arday’s lawyers. Cambridge, for its part, defended him vigorously until it realistically couldn’t, making the fall both a fait accompli and that much more devastating when it came.
In short, Arday was a self-evidently unwell man, and Cambridge his enthusiastic enabler. The fault lies there, and only there.
But not to another antiracist educator, Ibram X. Kendi, a man who we also thought had shrunk into the mire of mid-level academia after his own scandals. The title of his essay in The Emancipator, an outlet he co-founded, speaks for itself: “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.”
Was Jason Arday “lynched,” as Ibram X. Kendi claims?
Yes: 0% (0 Votes)
No: 100% (1 Votes)
“His death left me so devastated I had no words when the news broke,” Kendi began his Saturday piece. “But I woke up this morning with words.”
Those words, such as they were, will surprise no one familiar with Kendi’s work:
To be a prominent antiracist Black scholar is to know you are a target, almost totally surrounded by resentments…
The attacks are wielded by racist propagandists, resenting you for shining a light on anti-Black racism. They hope everyone finally picks up their baseless claims. They know that to dim your light is to dim the light on their anti-Blackness.
The attacks come from centrist and progressive White scholars and writers, resenting your positions and honors and pay. They believe the great replacement theory that you’ve taken their spots, their honors, their money, like the followers of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.
The piece only gets around to mentioning “plagiarism” in the 18th paragraph — and it’s not even about Arday’s plagiarism! Instead, it mentions that only one outlet had covered the plagiarism of William O’Reilly, a white Cambridge professor, back in 2023.
Arday, Kendi said, “endured 249 times more media coverage” for what he called a mere “accusation of plagiarism.” (Emphasis Kendi’s. Also, here’s where the “Arrested Development” voiceover interjects: “It was definitely plagiarism.”)
He then transitions into making Arday’s story his own, noting that his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University also had to endure media coverage for mysteriously receiving tons of money and doing next to nothing with it.
“I’ve seen other prominent Black scholars face these attacks time and again,” Kendi said. “And if you die from all the attacks, the media still calls the attacks on you ‘accusations’ to wash their hands of the blood. Your lynchers announce your death as if they had no role in your lynching.”
Right. So, question: Who had even heard of William O’Reilly before his plagiarism scandal? He’s a man so unimportant he doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry. (To put this into perspective, a girl I went to high school with who had a mediocre collegiate swimming career with a Division I university has her own page on the free encyclopedia. The fact O’Reilly couldn’t even merit that, even after the plagiarism scandal, indicates something about his profile.)
Arday and Kendi, meanwhile, were both omnipresent on English-language TV globally, and not in spite of the fact that they were “antiracist black scholars,” but because of it.
Kendi still is a presence, to some extent, although the fact that he’s a grifter whose Center for Antiracist Research and side-projects like the proposed Netflix animated series “Antiracist Baby” (no, seriously) made him millions while producing no tangible results has dimmed his star somewhat.
However, Kendi is at least an honest grifter. His work is thin, astringent intellectual gruel, but at least it’s his.
As The New York Times pointed out in an admirably (for them, anyhow) Saturday piece on just how much academic malpractice happened in the Arday case, and how the media was actively chased off by Cambridge and (in some cases) the police from reporting on Arday’s serial dissimulation before it invariably escaped containment, this was a scandal of Brobdingnagian proportions.
Aside from a boilerplate line about how “conservative commentators seized” upon Arday’s prevarications, The New York Times’ article is quite thorough and scorching in how it lays out the relatively thin and inadequate nature of Arday’s scholarship, the preposterous elements of his backstory, and Cambridge’s active indifference to both these things.
When Cambridge University interviewed Jason Arday for one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world, he was an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards.
Cambridge’s requirements, reviewed by The New York Times, called for “an outstanding research record of international stature” and a “proven successful track record” supervising Ph.D. students. Dr. Arday had a modest publication record and had bounced from one university to the next — not staying long enough to oversee a full three-year-or-more doctorate.
Cambridge hired him anyway in 2023, making him, at 37, the university’s youngest Black professor at a time when the school was under pressure to diversify. In doing so, Cambridge thrust him into the international limelight, giving him a platform at one of the world’s elite universities to champion academic diversity and making him a target for critics.
In fact, the only time Cambridge could rouse itself to concern and indignation over Arday and his history was when people started questioning all of this. Then they became posh pit bulls, running interference for a man they knew to be a fraud and a totemic hire.
“If, in hindsight, elements of Dr. Arday’s story seemed too good to be true, Cambridge ignored repeated warning signs,” the outlet continued. “A review of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work. They declined to investigate plagiarism concerns and accused his critics of a ‘vile campaign’ to discredit him.”
“Dr. Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him told The New York Times,” the article continues.
“His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had done research on autism, experts said.”
And when Arday “worked hard to silence any questioning of his credentials,” including sending lawyers after media outlets and academics which poked around about his academic history and allegations of plagiarism, it was “clear from interviews and public records… that elements of the story would have been easy for Cambridge to check.”
There’s no evidence they did, obviously.
But no: To Kendi, it’s the media’s fault that Jason Arday is dead, all for pointing out what should have been self-evident from the start: He was a fraud.
Whether or not Cambridge protected him because he was specifically a black fraud — and there is some question about whether or not that part of the story was a question of DEI run amok or simply an unfortunate modern tendency of virtually every academic institution to protect their own progressive ilk at all costs, especially at the cost of the truth — it’s quite obvious he got his foot in the door because he was black and nobody bothered to check his bona fides.
No “lynching” happened here, in other words, and to the extent Arday’s death can be blamed on any institution, it’s Cambridge.
But Kendi knows better than to bite the hand that feeds him — academia — even if he will chide it mildly for not giving him and his antiracist confederates enough credit and clout.
The media, in the end, is a much simpler culprit for Kendi, even when it fawned on Arday and was actively impeded from asking even the mildest inquiries about Jason Arday’s fabulism. But facts have never gotten in his way before, and Saturday was not the day he was going to start letting them trip him up.
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