Unfortunately, there is much more to say about the Jason Arday affair, because it exposed a level of corruption at Cambridge University, in academia, among cultural and media elites, and on the left that cannot be ignored.
Unfortunately, that discussion must be had in the shadow of Arday’s apparent suicide, which I hope we can all agree was a disproportionate and very sad response and ending to his remarkable story.
In the wake of Arday’s death, the DEI-obsessed left is trying to use his suicide to assert that cruel conservatives hounded him to death for mere peccadillos that barely merited mention, which is an inversion of the truth in more ways than one.
You enabled his lies. You elevated a wholly unqualified man. This is on YOU, Sangita. https://t.co/hoV8xq3zg4
— Amy Curtis (@RantyAmyCurtis) August 15, 2026
There are, of course, ridiculous accusations of racism, which are merely a recapitulation of the original defenses of Arday when his qualifications were being examined. The accusations are an attempt to use a (no longer) shiny object to distract from the facts right before our eyes, and they are totally baseless. In fact, the left has repeatedly hounded white academics with accusations of racism that were totally unfounded, resulting in their own suicides.
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An investigator with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) of Ontario wrote:
“Based on the information on file, I am satisfied that the conduct of the speaker … was abusive, egregious and vexatious, and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying,” and…
— Jake 🇺🇸 (@omni_american) August 15, 2026
I think what happened to Jason Arday is tragic and heartbreaking, but this counterfactual did actually take place in the United States, involving a professor and right-wing jokester who I became friends with over the years of having to defend his free speech rights. Mike Adams was mobbed and cancelled in 2020, and he killed himself shortly thereafter, and the American press largely treated it like he had it coming. Also, some commenters on the Internet seemed almost gleeful about his death. That was wrong then and it would be wrong now.
An investigator with the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) of Ontario wrote:“Based on the information on file, I am satisfied that the conduct of the speaker … was abusive, egregious and vexatious, and rises to the level of workplace harassment and bullying,” and that the facilitator intended to “cause reputational damage and to ‘make an example [of Richard].’”
DEI was used as a tool to elevate Jason Arday and turn him into a symbol, which put him in the position of being exposed as a fabulist and plagiarist, and it appears that either Arday or Cambridge set the police to intimidate anybody who questioned the lies they were selling to the public.
The guy was a fraud and a liar. This relentless push to remove all human agency from black people (and women, see: Lindsay Clancy etc) is pathetic. It’s funny that the people most likely to shout about “white supremacy” also believe that white men are the only humans on Earth… https://t.co/leI4PVn5Us
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 15, 2026
And DEI has been used to destroy the lives of ordinary people who say what ought to be the most anodyne and uncontroversial things. It is a form of ideological bullying, used to force people to accept lies and worship the DEI gods or be destroyed. They are trying to do the same thing right now, using an unearned moral authority to bludgeon people into compliance.
There is also an attempt to claim that if Arday were white, there would have been little interest in this story. Arday was, after all, just some obscure academic, but he was a useful foil for racists, to make our invidious comparisons between white and black scholars.
“Jason Arday was given wildly disproportionate press coverage”
Tell me about it.. https://t.co/i4aIVOA65F pic.twitter.com/jtzaBC3ipm
— HowlingToad (@HowlingToad) August 15, 2026
That is absurd. Cambridge, the BBC, and even the Olympics used Arday as a mascot. Did you know that, based on his fabulism, he carried the Olympic torch to celebrate his accomplishments? To argue that the spotlight was put on Arday by the right simply ignores the fact that every major cultural institution relied on him to be their racial mascot to prove a point about the success of DEI.
It’s pretty hard to complain that people noticed, and that they noticed the fraud they were perpetrating. The New York Times put it well, believe it or not:
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.
And it’s not like the underlying issue is resolved. DEI/”diversity is our strength” ideology continues to ruin these institutions. Arday was not an exception; his story is the rule, actually, which is the point. Richard Dawkins, no academic slouch, pointed us to this story:
A project hosted by Cambridge University promotes a paper by a researcher at Cambridge’s education faculty, demanding children be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution. It’s another sign of deep problems at the former home of Jason Arday. https://t.co/0LgPD2ICrw
— Andrew Gilligan (@mragilligan) August 15, 2026
Cambridge has elevated a Muslim scholar whose project is to destroy Western education standards and replace them with Islamic standards, which are anti-science. Literal medievalist theories.
Extracts from a further Spectator article (Aug 15) by Andrew Gilligan:
An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to…
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 15, 2026
Extracts from a further Spectator article (Aug 15) by Andrew Gilligan:
An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution.
At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.”
It is the latest sign of fundamental problems at Cambridge’s education faculty, the same department which hired Jason Arday.
The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir..
IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree.
IELC publishes on its website, with a Camtree address, a paper on “Islamic scientific critical consciousness” . . .
The paper says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.”
On Tuesday, in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal, The Spectator revealed that Ahmed had been given the prestigious assistant professorship. We noted that in a 2002 pamphlet, republished in 2017, she attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching that child marriage is wrong. Like the paper’s author, Mirza, Ahmed has also said that modern science is a problem, because in the “teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam.”
After that story created a storm, the education faculty took decisive action. It removed the names of all its staff from its website, presumably to stop anyone who doesn’t know about web archive tools checking to see if they’ve hired any more wrong’uns (spoiler alert: they have
Other action has been less forthcoming. The faculty clearly hopes to ride this one out, issuing a statement that it is “committed to academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law.” Well, we must reluctantly agree that Ahmed – benefiting from the democracy she condemns – should have the freedom to say that English is “one of the most damaging subjects” a school can teach, or (while teaching at Cambridge) write that Muslim students shouldn’t have to worry about “gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications.”
But that’s quite different from believing that Cambridge University should fund her to promote her ideas to the future leaders of the country.
Still more indisputable is that a university subject, even one as debased as Education at Cambridge, should not promote baseless, anti-scientific twaddle in the name of academic research.
But it does.
The left is deploying the same tactic they have used in promoting alphabet ideology: shut up or people will die.
To which I respond: don’t promote insanely dangerous practices, try to destroy Western science and culture, and quit promoting mental illness as something to be deeply admired instead of treated appropriately. Jason Arday needed help getting beyond his delusions, as he clearly was mentally ill; elevating him into a fake ‘best scholar in the world’ at Cambridge University was bad for him, obviously, and destructive to society as a whole.
Unless you believe that Cambridge University exists not to further knowledge and elevate the truth but rather to pat people on the back and promote delusional people as the best among us, you have to see that promoting this idiocy is incredibly destructive.
Cambridge betrayed itself, the truth, and even Jason Arday, all in the name of DEI. They are trying to weaponize accusations of racism in order to protect an ideology they know to be based on lies. Again, they sent the POLICE after journalists to hide reality.
This is just so damning pic.twitter.com/DcACiXuTfm
— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) August 15, 2026
These are people who are in no position to shame us. Each of them should be drummed out of academia, and no doubt none of them will be. Instead, they will try to bully us into feeling guilty for pointing out their fraud.
No, thank you, I don’t think I will.
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