Jason Arday, the youngest black professor ever appointed at Cambridge was found dead in his home last month, following a media frenzy over allegations Arday was a fabulist and a plagiarist who undeservedly rose to his position because of “wokeness.”
Throughout the ordeal, it seemed that everyone involved treated Jason Arday as less of a person and more of a pawn for their own agenda to either advance or defeat DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion).
The frenzy began in July when Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher of biology at Ghent University, publicly accused Arday of plagiarizing portions of his PhD thesis. Further investigation found that more of his work showed similar signs of plagiarism.
Doubt was also cast on many of Arday’s claims about his life story; the scandal broke as his memoir was set to be published in August. Among the most scrutinized were his claims about his charitable work and unbelievable athletic feats like claims to have run 600 miles in six days.
Amid the firestorm, Arday resigned on August 5. On August 14, he died.
While online discourse has split into rival factions seeking to blame select people or institutions for all of this, the fact is this is a tragic story where there is plenty of blame to go around and nuance to keep in mind.
Arday’s blameworthiness and Cofnas’ motives
To be clear, Arday was blameworthy for his compulsive dishonesty. But he was also clearly neurodivergent; diagnosed autistic, Arday claimed to have been non-verbal for much of his early life. While some have raised doubts about his disabilities, childhood friends and a speech professional corroborated the fact that he had learning disabilities and experienced language delay.
This on its own does not absolve Arday of blame, but it should remind us that lives are complex, that mistakes are made. How much shame and humiliation does one deserve for plagiarizing and lying about accomplishments? The problem for Arday was that his particular infraction made him a prime target to be used by a deeply divided public and therefore, a recipient of much more humiliation than he deserved.
Although Nathan Cofnas claims that he has been attacked for just telling the truth, it’s hard to believe that Arday’s race played no part in his motivation for focusing on Arday in the first place. Cofnas is known for having racist and controversial views about race and genetics and, in fact, he was dismissed from Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2024 over his views.
For example, Cofnas has argued numerous times that black people are on average less intelligent than white people because of genetics. In ethics, he has argued that, all else held equal, unintelligent people have less moral or human worth than intelligent people.
Of course, just because he has racist views doesn’t mean that he was wrong about Arday’s dishonesty. But in this case, it seems Cofnas treated Arday as a pawn in his fight against DEI and “wokeness.”
Arday’s unreasonable defenders
Arday defenders – those who blindly defended him from the allegations even with plentiful evidence of his wrongdoing – have only further poisoned the discourse around the situation.
Some, like American academic Ibram X. Kendi, have gone so far as to compare Arday’s fate to a lynching. Others have downplayed the significance of plagiarism in an academic context.
Yes, of course, many of Arday’s defenders were primed by the fact that Cofnas has stated such things as, without DEI, black people would, “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”
Nevertheless, as soon as they launched their blind defences, they too transformed Arday into a chess piece in their culture war – a chess piece that is incapable of wrongdoing in virtue of their race, where treating Arday like a person would be to understand that all humans are fallible.
When winning the war is all that matters, the interests of the individual are sacrificed. In this case, a blind defense of Arday only encouraged hate and scrutiny.
Cambridge’s failures
It may sound bizarre to claim that Cambridge also harmed Arday, but the university failed him, too.
Afterall, the university gave Arday a chaired professorship and so much opportunity, without the sort of scrutiny that should come with such a prestigious push. Given how much scrutiny elite universities typically apply to faculty hires, it’s clear that Cambridge did not properly screen Arday.
As the New York Times reported, “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.”
Warnings about Arday’s plagiarism going back years were also apparently rebuffed by Cambridge, which chose to back Arday anyway, opening him up to later, less charitable scrutiny.
Will we learn anything from this?
Irrespective of whether one thinks that DEI should influence hiring decisions, clearly it cannot entail a complete lack of standards, otherwise, the university’s self-interested desire to look like bastions of progressivism end up setting minorities up for failure, and in this case, public humiliation.
There are plenty of extremely qualified black PhDs that Cambridge could have hired, but perhaps Arday’s fantastic backstory proved too difficult for them to resist claiming for themselves.
It seems that Arday was someone who had high aspirations and much to overcome. Through no fault of his own, he was born with disabilities that made it nearly impossible for him to achieve his dreams – through fault of his own, he lied to achieve them.
As he became a pawn in the DEI wars, he saw his world crumble and his life torn to shreds. The public shaming he was subjected to was not proportional to the harm he caused and would not have been as brutal without each side of the culture war motivating the other’s vitriol.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Write to him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com