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| Jason Arday, 1985-2026 |
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.
