On the Jason Arday Saga

Jason Arday, 1985-2026

Curmie is a little late to the feeding frenzy around the case of Jason Arday.  Arday is, or rather was, a Cambridge University professor of sociology of education (whatever that means), and a lightning rod for allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation in one direction and racism in the other.  He resigned from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion on August 5 after the university re-opened the plagiarism investigation, and he was found dead in his apartment on the 14th.  As of this writing, no cause of death has been released, but of course there is the unspoken likelihood of suicide.

Back in 2023, when Cambridge made Arday the youngest black professor to be hired in that venerable institution’s over 800-year history, a couple of things became clear.  First, the university was really interested in bragging about their new hire as an effort “to do everything it can to address this [“the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education and especially at leading universities”] by creating academic spaces where everyone feels they belong.”

Second, even usually responsible news outlets bought Arday’s tales of perseverance and extraordinary accomplishments without the slightest hint of skepticism.  The Guardian, for example, breathlessly exclaimed that “he did not learn to speak until he was 11” and that he was “unable to read or write until the age of 18.”  (Both of these assertions have subsequently been at least challenged if not outright disproven.)  Shortly before Arday’s resignation, The Guardian was calling him a “superstar academic.”

But, as they say in the infomercials, That’s Not All! 

Tyler Austin Harper, a former academic currently writing for The Atlantic, describes a pattern of “systemic, ritualized, dishonesty.”  In an interview with NPR’s Michel Martin, Harper says, 

He lied about a number of elements of his background, his medical history.  He plagiarized a number of his various academic works.  On the athletic achievements front, he claims to have run 600 miles in six days, which would put him 50 miles shy of the world record, which would make him a really world-class endurance athlete.  He claims to have been mute until age eleven and then had a miraculous turn-around, an illiterate until age 18….  So, any one of these things may have perhaps been believable, but the sheer accumulation of implausibilities made it pretty apparent that he was a serial fabulist.

“Fabulist” has got to be the classiest term for “liar” that Curmie has heard in a long time.  There are, by the way, a host of other claims that rather strain credulity, enumerated in the Times of London, and the New York Times, as well as The Guardian.  Asked by that newspaper about some of his more outrageous assertions, Arday responded, “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.  Why would I lie?” 

The answer to that question is rather obvious; Occam’s Razor would seem to apply.  He wanted the adulation and the benefits of someone who had actually done those great things.  If, Gentle Reader, you think that sounds rather like an obese octogenarian currently living in this country’s most expensive public housing, you are not alone.

Harper notes that the initial accusations regarding the alleged plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral dissertation were set in motion someone whom Harper says “is fairly described as a racist.”  That would be Nathan Cofnas, whose comment that in a true meritocracy, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” would seem to provide sufficient evidence for that assertion. 

Cofnas, who was fired by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024, has now been suspended from his research position at Ghent University, who must, of course, have known of his views when they hired him.  But Arday’s death somehow changes things in the minds of cowardly university administrators.  (Curmie offers the usual apologies for redundancy).

Importantly, however, whatever motivated Cofnas’s allegations, he seems to have had a case.  Just as Mark Fuhrman may have been a bad cop but that didn’t make OJ innocent (as opposed to “not guilty”), the allegations against Arday cannot be ignored just because he’s black and the accuser is a racist.  Viewed with skepticism, yes; automatically rejected, no. 

It is true that Arday’s PhD school, Liverpool John Moores University, cleared him of plagiarism charges, but if the New York Times is correct that “Dr. Arday’s published papers and his thesis had dozens of grammatical errors, along with identical quotes attributed to different people,” then anything that university says should be disregarded in its entirety.  The thesis is available here; you’re welcome to check it out for yourself, Gentle Reader.  Curmie has neither the disciplinary expertise to evaluate the originality or validity of Arday’s arguments nor the time to search out those grammatical errors.

What Curmie can tell you is that when he submitted his dissertation, the committee did their jobs.  In a study of late 20th-century Irish adaptations of Greek tragedies, Curmie had made a passing reference to a play by a Nigerian playwright, and seemed to imply that it was written by someone other than the actual dramatist.  A committee member pointed out the error. 

Curmie had also quoted one of the classical Greek tragedians.  He provided the English translation for the entire passage he wanted to cite, but inadvertently left out a few words of the original Greek.  The classicist on the committee caught that one.  Needless to say, the corrections were made before the document was printed and bound.  That dissertation represented not just Curmie, but the department and the university.  It was going to be accurate.  Apparently, the standards at Liverpool John Moores are a little more… erm… lax.

Fact is, no one looks good here.  Not Arday, not Liverpool John Moores, and certainly not Cambridge, who chose Arday over more senior scholars, including other “global majority” finalists with apparently better credentials, both qualitatively and quantitatively.  Arday was, in the words of the New York Times article linked above, “underqualified, by the school’s own standards.”  Ah, but hiring any old black scholar wouldn’t make headlines the way The Youngest Ever would.  The search committee included someone whose research into autism and related conditions should have set off alarms about just how unlikely Arday’s claims about his medical history truly were.

Plus, of course, the university immediately rushed to his defense even after they themselves re-opened the investigation into his alleged transgressions.  It’s understandable that a university of Cambridge’s stature wouldn’t want to admit they’d been taken in, but that sure looks like what happened.  Jason Arday may indeed have been a brilliant man, an outstanding lecturer, and a researcher capable of cutting-edge work.  He may have had colleagues, students, and friends who liked and admired him.  But, beyond the proverbial reasonable doubt, he was also a fraud, a liar, and a plagiarist.

In that NPR interview, Harper also argues that recent efforts to achieve a more inclusive professoriate “in some cases has led to a lowering of standards, but also has led to the sense that black and brown folks are on campuses to be black and brown first and foremost, and scholars and educators second.”  He then describes “what is often being described as cancel culture is actually a culture of cowardice…. No one has the stomach to say something that’s going to get them yelled at.” He’s referring here to hiring Arday, to the George Santos affair, and to his own experience as the “token black professor” at Bates College.

Curmie has occasionally mentioned that his views are not uniformly “liberal.”  He tends towards a Confucian belief that every case is different, and towards what is often regarded as a traditional conservative view that people are individuals first and representatives of a group second.  From this perspective, the situation Harper describes is doubly problematic in that it tends to isolate black scholars, making them akin to mascots, uncomfortable in their roles in the academy, and that a single incident like Arday’s apparent unfitness is taken as representative of other members of his demographic, thereby questioning the credentials of hundreds (at least) other black academics who got their positions simply by excelling.

This latter phenomenon, suggesting that most if not all black (or brown, or female, or LGBTQ+, or…) scholars got ahead simply by DEI or some variation on the theme, has been propagated not merely by racist idiots like Cofnas (or, in a different area, by buffoons like Pete Hegseth), but by far too many everyday conservatives.  (Curmie antiphrastically does not mention that most of the whiners had no objections when those who got unearned benefits were straight white males.) 

Let’s be real for a moment.  If Curmie were to identify the three academics he has known whose example he hoped to follow, people whose scholarship, integrity, and interest in helping those lower on the proverbial totem pole were all exemplary, there would be a black man on the list.  If he were to identify three academics he least wanted to emulate, there’d be a black man on that list, too.  And, of course, there are others at about every point along the continuum.  Something similar could be said for any other demographic.  None of this ought to surprise anyone.  Individuals are individuals.

Arday’s misrepresentation of himself in terms of medical history and athleticism tells us something about him as a person, not as an academic per se.  But other than serious abuse of students, there is no greater offense committed by a professor qua professor than serial plagiarism.  There is no excuse.  None.

Shaun Harper (not to be confused with Tyler Austin Harper) writes in Inside Higher Ed, “Even if he plagiarized his work, how can we best extend support to him as the investigation carries on and his reputation is being ruined across continents?”  Sorry, that’s utter nonsense.  It’s pretty clear that Arday did indeed plagiarize, and it’s more than a little smug to say that “Death should not be the price of academic celebrity” as if not everyone believed that.  Give me a damned break.

The whataboutism argument that white academics have gotten away with plagiarism in the past is simultaneously (often) true and irrelevant.  There’s at least one well-known white scholar in Curmie’s field whose career did indeed blow up after a plagiarism charge, but Curmie also knows about some pretty unethical behavior that went largely unpunished.  That said, what should happen is that there are serious consequences for all plagiarists regardless of race.

And don’t get Curmie started on arguments like “there are things he himself may have felt under pressure to exaggerate. But you have to remember always that he was trying to say, ‘Look what we can achieve. Look what black people can achieve and do.’”  Sorry, to talk legitimately about what you can accomplish requires you to actually accomplish something, not just say you did.  Such excuses do more to de-legitimize Arday than to defend him.

There are, in fact, plenty of reasons to suggest that Cambridge has a lot to answer for.  They were certainly lazy, craven, and predictably hypocritical.  But the more profound problem for Jason Arday was… Jason Arday.  It may be a bit much to call him a “turbo-fraudulent serial fabulist whose crime spree has discredited one of the world’s oldest academic institutions, as Tyler Austin Harper  does, but, frankly, not by much.

The coda to all this is that there’s apparently software that says that the chances Arday’s resignation letter was AI generated are 100%.  You may recall, Gentle Reader, that last year Curmie asked ChatGPT to write an essay about Elon Musk in Curmie’s own style.  It did so rather frighteningly well.  Some time later, Curmie fed that composition to one of those programs that purports to determine whether an actual person wrote something.  He was assured that it was 100% certain that it was written by a human.  Oops.  Maybe we ought not to be too trusting of computers’ conclusions?

Another program says that it’s only 3.5% likely that Arday’s resignation was computer-generated.  That’s a pretty wide range!  If the allegation is correct, it provides a sadly ironic conclusion to the whole affair.  If not, it serves as a reminder that whatever his faults, Dr. Arday was also an injured party.

Actually, he’s both perp and victim, however that letter was created.

Thoughts on the First Anniversary of the Death of George Floyd

Curmie makes no promises, but it may be that he’ll be returning to writing more blog pieces in the future.  He’s teaching a single course this summer, and it not only has no meetings on Fridays, but it ends in late June.  He’s officially retiring effective August 31, although he’ll be teaching a couple of courses as an “adjunct” in the fall, will keep the small cadre of advisees he now has (but add no more), and will supervise a student production of a play he acted in several years before the student director in question was born.  <Sigh.>  I hope to maintain at least my current level of scholarly activity—there’s a book chapter awaiting my revision, two conference presentations for later this summer, and at least two conference papers that I’d like to turn into articles.  And I’ll continue my presidency of a national honor society for another year or two, at least.

But it’s already clear that giving up the multitudinous service activities undertaken for the department, college, and university will free up literally dozens of hours of time; taken in conjunction with the required reduction in teaching load, I’ll definitely be able to devote myself to some other things.  A friend who retired from university teaching some years ago  remains a more active scholar than I’ll ever be; he describes his current life as “less of the same, and without the boring bits.”  I’m hoping for a similar experience.  One of the manifestations of such an eventuality would be at least a weekly blog post.  On y verra, as they say en France.

So, where to begin after such spotty blogging activity for several years?  There are a lot of potential topics vying for attention right now, but what comes first to Curmie’s mind is the anniversary earlier this week of the death of George Floyd.  I approach this topic, curiously enough, in the spirit of moderation. 

Here, it might be valuable to tease out the differences in meaning between two often conflated concepts: vagueness and ambiguity.  The former suggests that there is no clearly identifiable meaning; the latter implies that different, perhaps even opposed, implications might exist simultaneously.  The George Floyd case is vague only in terms of details we don’t yet know and probably never will.  It is ambiguous or even multivalent in virtually everything else.  Of course, it’s sometimes difficult to disentangle the strands.  In Curmie’s world, a B student might have gotten there with 3 B’s, or with 2 A’s and a D, etc.  In the Floyd case, as with that hypothetical B student, what is difficult to find is anything approaching a complete picture.

What we see in most of the “mainstream” press coverage of both the death of Mr. Floyd and its aftermath—the BLM protests, the trial, etc.—is a sort of gasping idolatry of a petty criminal, for that’s what Floyd was.  (Curmie gets it: he wasn’t only that.)  We barely hear about the medical examiner’s report that drug use and an underlying heart condition were contributing causes of Floyd’s death, albeit his ultimate conclusion was that the restraint by police, specifically by Derek Chauvin, was the primary cause.  And the presumed racial motivation of Chauvin’s actions has been taken as given from the outset, without any evidence, let alone proof.

Nor is it possible to deny that some of the literally billions of dollars of damage from riots was caused by those who used BLM as a justification—or perhaps as a cover—for their actions.  (Note: Curmie was seeing the catch-phrase “Black Lives Matter” long before the death of Mr. Floyd, but it didn’t achieve the spotlight until last year.)

So let’s get this straight.  Were Chauvin’s actions appropriate?  No.  Criminal?  Yes.  Murder 1?  Doubtful at best.  Felony murder or Murder 2?  Maybe.  Manslaughter?  In all likelihood.  Was Chauvin a bad cop?  Yes.  Should he have been removed from the police force long before this incident?  Apparently so.  Was the system that kept Chauvin on the job racist?  Somewhere between “perhaps” and “probably.”  Did Floyd’s race have anything to do with Chauvin’s actions?  Maybe, but there has been literally no actual evidence adduced to support that conclusion.  Let me repeat that: none. 

The fact that Chauvin is white and Floyd was black might, of course, be relevant, but it strikes me that this is ultimately a problem one encounters early in a course in formal logic: the fact that A implies B does not mean that B implies A.  That is, all racists are inherently bad cops, but not all bad cops are racists.  (Spare me the “all white people are racist” dogma.  It gets us nowhere.)  And, as Curmie noted in the aftermath, cops across the country, presumably aware of increased scrutiny, responded not by toning down the violence against black people, but evening the score by abusing a few white folks.  The problem is bad cops, and a system that covers up for them; many, but nowhere near all, manifestations of these people’s unfitness involve racism.

So, were the protests legitimate?  Yes, in the sense that the widely viewed video seemed to tell us everything we needed to know (although it now appears that perhaps it didn’t).  Yes, in the sense that racism certainly exists in this country and police forces are particularly rife with it.  Yes, in the sense that protests are nearly always legitimate, using that term to mean legally, morally, and ethically responsible.  No, in the sense that this was not the event that should be the watershed moment.  (Had it been the killing of Breonna Taylor or the death of Sandra Bland, Curmie would be more on board.)  No, in the sense that not all of the protests were non-violent.  Which leads us to…

Was a good deal of the violence and property damage resulting from protests that turned into riots perpetrated by BLM activists, or at least by those claiming that affiliation with no denials by BLM leaders?  Yes.  Was a good deal of that violence and property damage perpetrated by white racists seeking to undermine the credibility of the BLM movement, or simply by violence-prone assholes using BLM as an excuse?  Yes.  Was a good deal of the violence in particular initiated by the toxic masculinity, arrogance, and irresponsibility of police forces… and in at least isolated cases, by federally-funded mercenaries?  Yes.

So, is the introspection precipitated by the reaction to the Chauvin/Floyd case a good thing?  Yes, in that honest self-evaluation is an inherent positive.  Yes, to the extent that it brought about in unprecedented ways an examination of the power structures in American society and the extent to which that hegemony is exclusionary along racial lines.  No, in that what started as a positive desire to recognize and celebrate diversity has morphed into witch hunts, quotas, and frankly Stalinistic thought control. 

Lest you think Curmie is exaggerating the last point, allow me to direct your attention you to “socialist realism,” a policy which required Russian artists not merely to avoid saying or doing anything critical of the USSR or the Communist Party, but to actively advocate for those entities.  How is that different from universities which now base hiring and promotion/tenure decisions to a large degree not on proven abilities as a teacher or researcher, but on demonstrated, active, commitment to the Great Gods Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

At the very least, faculty are expected to participate in “workshops” on these issues.  Curmie has endured dozens of variations on this theme on many topics over the years.  There are two constants: there is never any useful information, only opinion masquerading as fact; and Curmie always leaves far more angry than enlightened... and actively resistant to the propaganda he's just withstood.  (Side note: many of the voluntary programs have, in fact, proved valuable.  I did a weekend-long workshop in Rape Crisis Intervention 30-ish years ago, for example.  I've only used it twice in the ensuing time... but I’ve used it twice in the ensuing time.)

Thirty years ago, Curmie got into trouble for saying that whereas there is much to be gained by applying a feminist lens to texts, not all feminist arguments are good arguments.  The cause du jour has changed, but the expectation of ideological compliance has not.  Alas.

Concentrating for a moment on the professional world Curmie inhabits: this enforced singularity of vision runs through universities and professional organizations alike.  Case in point: there’s an organization Curmie has belonged to for decades.  The committee structure has always worked like this: committee chairs are elected by the membership, subcommittee chairs are appointed by the chairs, and committee members… wait for it… simply volunteer to serve; no one is turned away.  Anyone willing to work is given a task.  But it turns out that a couple of committees have an “under-representation of people of color”… so white people, some of whom have specific expertise, are now being denied access to those committees on which POC folks have expressed no interest, and the organization is denied access to their skills, in the name of “diversity.”  We have to make those percentages work out, after all.

Of course, other power structures—state legislatures, boards of trustees, and the like—are reacting in precisely the opposite way: forbidding discussion of race-sensitive issues and attempting to enforce their own monomaniacal vision, in which American exceptionalism is to be taken as a given, but curricula must otherwise be “apolitical.”  One group wants Critical Race Theory to be mandatory; another wants it completely expunged.  The idea that it might be available, possibly required in certain specific disciplines in the sense of knowing its tenets, but with no expectation of having to agree with its conclusions: this doesn’t seem to be acceptable to the ideologues on either extreme… and it appears at first glance that virtually everyone indeed positions themselves at those opposing poles.  Curmie doubts this is actually true, but those positioned at both extremes demand absolute fidelity.

All of this messiness, this swirl of competing ideologies, this series of simultaneously “yes” and “no” responses, never seems to all come into focus at the same time in the same commenter.  On the one hand, we have the majority of the center-left news agencies and Democratic pols applauding George Floyd as some sort of messianic hero, the noble if accidental progenitor of Racial Justice, the Second Coming of MLK.  On the other side, we have the rightwing press and the GOP condemning all things BLM-related, labeling anyone remotely affiliated with the movement as thuggish, communist (!), anti-American, and probably responsible for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.  OK, maybe not that last one, but give them time.

At the moment, universities are more interested in pandering to leftwing claptrap than to rightwing claptrap.  That will probably change, especially in state institutions in red states, before long.  But the glorious concept of the university as the testing ground for opposing ideas, as the site where disputants recognize in each other the desire to seek the truth, as the vigilant guardian of intellectual curiosity and freedom of expression: this vision, the one Curmie believed in when he started out in the profession 40-odd years ago… this noble cause lies in the ICU, gasping for what may soon be its last breath.  

Do black lives matter?  Indubitably.  What about Black Lives Matter?  Sort of.  Any full-throated endorsement or condemnation will forever leave Curmie saying, “yeah, but…”