Cambridge Announces Review of Jason Arday’s Death

You may be thinking that the death of former Cambridge academic Jason Arday has had more than its share of the spotlight. Surely by this point we can’t still be talking about this?

Unfortunately, the progressive left has really refused to let this go. There have been demands for some kind of public inquiry from the group called the Good Law Project:

There cannot be any doubt that Dr Arday’s tragic death was the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment. A significant element in that harassment was the colour of his skin. Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed.

The same group has also demanded the resignation of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice:

The University initially defended Professor Arday against what it deemed a “vile smear campaign”. However, four days prior to his death, the Vice-Chancellor bowed to public pressure and launched an investigation into Professor Arday. Her statement was a screeching u-turn which abandoned an academic being attacked in connection with his appointment by the University, describing this as a “troubling case” and later an “aberration”.

Today, Professor Prentice announced a two-part independent review of the moves leading up to the death of Arday.

Announcing the review, Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice said: “The time since the tragic death of Professor Jason Arday has been a period of profound sadness and reflection for the University.

“We worked very hard to support Professor Arday during an appalling period of external criticism and focus, but given the devastating outcome, we are all asking ourselves whether we could have and should have done more. This review will answer that question.

There will be a three month investigation into “the support, interventions and protections available to Professor Arday during the period prior to his death.” A second six-month investigation will consider, “the wider context of Professor Arday’s time at the University, including the recruitment of senior academic staff, mentoring and support arrangements, the University’s response to allegations of research misconduct, and the support available to academics who are subject to extraordinary public and media scrutiny.”

You may have noticed that what does not seem to be under consideration by anyone is the possibility that Jason Arday was a fraud who should have been spotted earlier and never hired by Cambridge. On the contrary, progressives continue to pile on with opinion pieces like this one headlined, “The slow kind of lynching: When the media becomes the mob.” The tone of this piece is just as hysterical as the headline suggests:

You do not get to mourn him now.

Not after the headlines. Not after the pile on. Not after you spent three weeks deciding a man’s whole life was a crime scene before anyone proved a single thing. You do not get to call this a tragedy when you built the machine that did it, fed it, and stood back to watch it work.

I want you to understand what it actually costs a Black man to become the youngest professor in the history of a place like Cambridge. It is not talent alone. It is surviving every room that assumed you did not belong in it before you opened your mouth. It is answering for your existence in spaces that were never designed to hold you, twice as good, twice as clean, twice as careful, because you already know one slip will be treated as proof of everything they suspected about you from the start. Jason Arday paid that cost for years. He paid it in silence, in grace, in choosing to see the best in people who were already sharpening their knives behind his back.

As I’ve said weeks ago, I’m sorry Arday killed himself. It’s a very sad outcome for anyone. But the idea that people were demanding he be “twice as good, twice as clean, twice as careful” etc. is truly laughable. The fact is that Arday was a liar and a fraud who routinely fabricated stories about himself to boost his own public standing. If he had just been somewhat normal and told the truth about himself most of the time, none of this would have happened. The standards for him weren’t twice as high as compared to anyone else. On the contrary, they were clearly much lower. No one else telling similar stories could possibly have gotten hired at a prestigious university without being discovered.

Another article published this week which follows the same basic line, i.e. Arday was a victim hounded to his death by the media. What was most striking about this one is that it appeared in Nature. It’s titled “The death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflection.”

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?’…

Matt Walsh, head of journalism at Cardiff University, UK, did an initial analysis of UK media reporting of Arday between 25 July this year — when the latest wave of coverage of the plagiarism allegations started — and 20 August. He counted 242 substantive articles published in the print editions of UK national newspapers and concluded that there is strong evidence of racism. “Framing associated with race is present throughout the sample, and some articles explicitly accuse Cambridge of only appointing Arday as a professor because of the colour of his skin,” Walsh wrote in an article for The Conversation news website that describes his analysis.

Jesse Singal wrote a great response to this one.

“In February 2023,” the editorial notes, “when the University of Cambridge appointed Arday, it issued a statement that included a description of him as the youngest Black professor in its history, news that became a global media event.” Three paragraphs later it approvingly passes on the claim that because so much of the coverage centered on his race, with some stories questioning whether he was hired because of it, that coverage was racist! You’d expect professional journalists to have more object permanence than this.

In other words, Cambridge made this about race from the start. What we’re seeing now (in much of the media) is this absurd sequence of events playing out:

Cambridge: Look at this BLACK professor we hired. He is the youngest BLACK professor in our history. Another thing you should notice is the color of his skin. Aren’t we good people? Doesn’t this demonstrate our commitment to diversity?

Arday, for years: I’m cognitively disabled, and this has brought all sorts of challenges. My college application was filled out for me by my girlfriend and I got a 9% on my first exam there. Even years later I had massive difficulties performing basic academic tasks — in grad school I was reading at about the same level as my then-3-year-old daughter. At least some of these problems still plague me, as I can’t understand what’s said to me at work 90% of the time. (Yes, he said all of this — see above and here.)

Journalists: It appears Arday was not really qualified for his position and that his race may have been a factor in his hiring. He also seems to have lied about a lot of stuff, sometimes in truly audacious fashion.

Nature and a million other slacktivists piling onto journalists who covered this controversy and in some cases circulating enemies lists of them: How dare you make this about Jason Arday’s race or intellectual ability?

You can understand the level of almost unprecedented bullshit going on here, right? Even by the standards of online hysteria? You can understand how unfathomably bad-faith this is, and why, because it isn’t just random online crazies, but also journalists, professors, famous activists, and now one of the pinnacles of mainstream scientific respectability stoking this grotesque controversy, I keep getting sucked into writing about it?

As Singal also points out, it’s no longer hard to find evidence that Arday was a liar. Even the NY Times published some, eventually.

If, in hindsight, elements of Dr. Arday’s story seemed too good to be true, Cambridge ignored repeated warning signs. 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. 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.

It’s unpleasant to need to be this blunt but under the circumstances I don’t see any way around it. Arday killed himself because his lifetime of fraud had finally caught up to him days before his autobiography was about to be released. His job was gone and his life was ruined, not because he plagiarized some work years earlier but because he was lying to everyone about his entire life right up to that moment. And the lies were now being uncovered in the newspaper and he had no way to save himself from an extended time of humiliation. He couldn’t face it. He wanted to be the leading black scholar, not the leading black fabulist. That’s why he killed himself.

Given the scale of his fabulism, Arday’s fall from grace was inevitable, but his rise from obscurity wasn’t. The bad choices made along the way weren’t solely his own.

And that’s what the Cambridge investigation should conclude. Arday put himself in a terrible position and was allowed to do so because Cambridge didn’t bother to do any fact checking of his truly incredible stories. They wanted to believe him despite all the warning signs. He never should have been hired and wouldn’t have been apart from his race and the strong push for DEI which has permeated every university.

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