Jason Arday is not a fake. He's exactly what higher ed wanted.

The Cambridge scandal is the perfect culmination of a decade of DEI policy.

In 2023, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge University. People at the time called him a diversity hire and said he only got the job because he was black. The responses to this were hostile. “He is still very accomplished and the rest of what you’re saying is a gross misunderstanding of academic research,” one Reddit commenter said. “For him to teach at Cambridge,” another replied, “he had to have his work accepted by the highest quality journals in his field.”

History almost never allows it, but this once, everyone was right. Arday was, in the fullest sense of the term, a diversity hire. Also, he is still very accomplished, albeit mostly at lying about his accomplishments. Also, he did have his work accepted by the highest journals in his field, though at this stage, that only raises doubts about such journals themselves. That’s because we now know that in less than three years at Cambridge, Arday has made a mockery of the institution and resigned last week in disgrace after becoming the single biggest story in the news cycle by lying so brazenly and so spectacularly that he makes even the likes of Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke, and Jussie Smollett look like honest brokers.

The Wizard of Oxbridge

To begin, Arday wants you to know he’s not just disabled. He’s the most disabled. Diagnosed with autism at 3, he was mute until 11, illiterate until 18, partially deaf, epileptic after an attack, the survivor of a catastrophic teenage car crash that left him in a coma for months, on life support, with locked-in syndrome, as well as the survivor of a brain tumor that erased his memory two weeks before his PhD defense (but he just tried really hard and passed anyway), as well as a cancer survivor. In his free time, Arday likes to do charity work, and has personally raised millions for more than 70 or 80 charities, although apparently there’s a bookkeeping crisis in the nonprofit sector because none of those charities has heard of him. He also installed water pumps in Africa with WaterAid, except WaterAid says it doesn’t send volunteers abroad. He once appeared on the British documentary show Seven Up!, except that the show aired two decades before he was born.

Arday is also a world-class athlete — in multiple sports. He says he was an elite snooker player as a child, and later became a semi-professional football player. He likes to run too. He once ran 400 miles in five days. Another time, he ran 600 miles in six days, almost matching the world record. Another time, he ran 30 marathons in 35 days. He probably could’ve run all 30 marathons in 30 days, but he fractured his fibula and had to run the last nine marathons on one good leg. Writing for The Telegraph, Leaf Arbuthnot and Janet Eastham review Arday’s upcoming memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, in these terms:

Characters in the book, by and large, fall into two camps: the evil idiots who are cruel to Arday and fail to grasp his potential, and the angels who help him, mentor him, and express their ardent certainty that he is extraordinary.

This division of the cast into angels and enemies is established early on, when Arday’s mother, Giff, is treated to a powerful prophecy by the South Asian midwife who has delivered him. “This boy is destined for great things,” the midwife tells Arday’s mother, looking into her eyes. “You hear? You take care of this child.”

On a relief mission in Brazil, a local aid worker sees Arday help a child and says, “You have a very beautiful heart. I can tell you’re destined to do great things.”

Arday’s first girlfriend, Debbie, reportedly “seems to regard him as a kind of messiah” and tells her father, “There’s something about him that’s so special. I can’t put my finger on it. One day he’s gonna do something, and the whole world will see.”

Lest we be in doubt about Debbie’s “unwavering belief” in him, we are told that she writes him “over a hundred handwritten cards,” all bearing the same message: “You’re going to be great. You’re going to do something, and everyone will see.”

Perhaps the most painful moment in which a character expresses their conviction that Arday is superior to the hoi polloi comes when Arday gets a job at Sainsbury’s, and becomes friendly with a fellow worker named Sam. “Jason, I want you to listen to me,” Sam tells him. “I see something in you: you’re fearless. Yes, you’re having to do this job now, but one day you’ll scale Mount Everest, whether anyone thinks you can or not.” This truth duly truth-bombed, Sam conveniently melts away, never to be heard from again.

Better still, Benjamin Ryan has reported that the title of the memoir itself is taken from the title of episode seven of the first season of “Spartacus: Blood and Sand,” which broadcast in 2010, about the ancient Thracian gladiator who led a slave uprising in Ancient Rome. Arday also takes his own origin story from the TV episode, Ryan explains, and not only that, but also, “dialogue that overlaps with not one but two prophesies about his destiny uttered in the prologue of Mr. Arday’s book.”

The prophecy comes from Spartacus’ wife, who says, “You are destined for great and unfortunate things,” and this does appear twice in Arday’s book. Once, when a midwife says Arday’s mother, “This boy is destined for great things.” And later, when Arday claims to be volunteering in Brazil and an aid worker tells him, “I can tell you’re destined to do great things. But I also believe you’re destined for very sad and difficult things as well.”

But Arday’s greatest accomplishments are in academia. He received his master’s in psychodynamic practice, as well as his counseling license, at Birkbeck College, University of London. Although Birkbeck says it has no record of him going there. He was also a visiting professor at Ohio State. But the school says this is false. He wrote a book with Palgrave Macmillan. But Palgrave says the book project never got past the proposal stage. He attended Liverpool John Moores University — where, remember, he miraculously relearned his thesis in just two weeks following brain surgery — and got his doctorate degree in education. This bit seems to actually be true, but it’s worth noting that his thesis — An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring among Student Teachers’ to Inform Reflective Practice within the Context of Action Research — is horseshit.

Arday’s thesis argues that having teachers-in-training mentor each other is good because it replaces the hierarchical teacher-student model, which sounds okay, I suppose, except the reason he wants to get rid of experts is rooted in Marxism. He invokes Marxist philosopher Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) repeatedly, including Freire’s notion that the teacher-student dynamic is inherently oppressive — in Marxist analysis, power is often understood as domination and so anyone with power of any kind is potentially an oppressor — and Freire’s ideas of conscientisation, or indoctrinating children with Marxist class consciousness through “active learning.”

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In the study itself, Arday met four PE teachers-in-training once a month for a year, asked them to discuss their teaching, give each other feedback, and think about whether doing this was helpful. That’s it. No large comparison group, no random assignment, no objective test showing their teaching became any better than teachers who did not practice Marxist pedagogy. Even the writing itself is embarrassingly stupid. Richard Dawkins recently wrote about this, describing the thesis as written in an obscurantist, “gobbledygook” style that’s packed with basic grammatical errors:

Key findings illuminated posit that there are also several challenges inherent in the enactment of peer-mentoring, more specifically trust, power and time.

Excuse me, “key findings illuminated posit”? Arday also doesn’t know how commas work, or apostrophes — check the title of his thesis again for one glaring example of this — something Dawkins hilariously rails against to make a simple point: even the man’s grammar gives him away as a fraud, never mind his childish ideas.

The central plagiarism allegation in this tale concerns the work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, whose earlier doctoral thesis also concerned reflective practice among student teachers. The Guardian reported that more than 100 passages in Arday’s thesis resemble Zwozdiak-Myers’s. Some passages were lifted almost verbatim, even retaining typos. And yet, Liverpool John Moores previously investigated the thesis and found no misconduct. But rather than exonerate him, this only makes the school look suspicious. But it gets worse, because Retraction Watch reported that in one article, Arday claimed to have interviewed people for his research when, in fact, those interviews answers were also lifted from previously published scholarship. But it gets worse, because when Times Higher Education journalist Jack Grove investigated the story, Arday complained and British police investigated Grove. Grove said an officer told him not to contact Arday again because the journalist’s actions had affected Arday’s mental health. Then Arday hired a defamation law firm and the Times killed their own bombshell story. Meanwhile, the University of Cambridge itself responded to the allegations against Arday by saying he was the victim of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.”

The new coded n-word

But go back to the beginning, back to the announcement by Cambridge that Arday was joining their faculty, and the pearl-clutching by some people at the notion that Arday might be a diversity hire. Once again, the people with their noticing hats on have been vindicated. But we should pause to reflect on the fact that there has, sadly, been so much effort put into diversity hiring that it rationally casts a pall of doubt over any black person’s success, unless one chooses to pretends that we didn’t spend so much time and effort getting people into higher roles whose primary, or sole, qualification was being black, female, or what have you. Black people should be angriest of all about this, and about the gross patting on the head by liberal whites such as the Cambridge admins who welcomed Arday, preferring not to look too closely at who he was, so they could wash themselves in his blackness.

John McWhorter has much to say, with eloquent and righteous anger, about academia’s willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity from black scholars so they can ornament themselves in this manner. Yet, partly because President Trump has done a lot to beat back DEI policies — he abolished DEI throughout the federal government, targeted illegal DEI-based discrimination, and ordered agencies to stop using “disparate impact” theory — people now assume diversity hires are no longer a thing, if they ever were. And yes, Trump’s anti-DEI attacks have produced a corporate rollback. Google famously abandoned its diversity hiring targets, while Meta, Amazon, McDonald’s, Walmart, and numerous other large firms scaled back or cut theirs too. But the damage had already been done. In 2020, Google said it would increase minorities in leadership by 30%, Pinterest guaranteed interviews for minorities in at least 80% of U.S. openings, Intel reported over 45% diverse hires, and that’s just a taste. Race consciousness became so embedded in hiring that 74% of U.S. organizations surveyed in 2021 tracked the “diversity” of new hires, while 30% of recruiters in 2022 said they have specific goals for racial diversity in hiring. These efforts “paid off.” In 2024, black employees were 18.5% of the federal workforce, despite being only 13% of the relevant civilian labor force. A Washington Post analysis this year found that minority faculty at U.S. research universities rose from roughly 9% to 12% between 2015 and 2024.

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So yes, it’s rational to assume many, if not most, minorities hired during that period were, to some degree, diversity hires — if what we mean is that their “diversity” was a determining factor in their getting the job. Or, simply put, that they benefited from systemic racism. What portion of new hires during this period? Well, possibly 30% to almost 75%, depending on how we define our terms. Yet the existence of diversity hires is not only frequently denied, but the term itself is treated as if it’s comparable to “nigger.” Last year, DEI strategist Arthur Chan shared a post that read, “Calling someone a diversity hire isn’t just reductive, it’s racist and oppressive. End of story.” The Canadian anti-racism organization Stop Race Based Hate has an explainer specifically titled, “Why is it racist to say, ‘They were hired for diversity?’” A few months ago, Care2 said, “‘Diversity Hire’ is just what bigoted racists say when a minority or other marginalized person achieves something they themselves could not.” And Theo EJ Wilson, the host of History’s “I Was There” series, has said, “‘Diversity Hire’ is the new coded N-Word. The children of slave masters saying the children of slaves ‘didn’t earn it’ is wild!!”

What’s wild, in my view, is that wokeness has reached the point where describing reality itself has become “the new n-word.” Meanwhile, there are still those among us who will scoff if you tried to explain why this is happening.

The great and unfortunate truth about Arday

There was a time when becoming a professor at so prestigious a university demanded brilliance. Now, we find, it demands little more than ideological conformity, and the “right” phenotype. But Arday is not really a fake. His scholarly output includes over 30 research works and books about racism, such as his 2019 article, “Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity: Negotiating Normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric Curriculum and Racial Micro-Aggressions within the Academy,” published in Whiteness and Education, and “Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy,” published in Educational Philosophy and Theory. (Also, “reimaging” and not “reimagining”?)

His “scholarship” includes saying there should be more black faculty and leaders at UK universities, schools should teach more about black people, black people should be paid more and given raises at a faster rate, being black and intellectually disabled is worse than just being black — or, as he might phrase it, intersectionality teaches us that race and neurodiversity integrate to form multiple marginalizations. He also used critical race theory to explain how Covid-19 affected black people more, especially because of George Floyd. Yes, he is writing bullshit papers about whiteness in education, but they’re being published in journals with names like Whiteness and Education. Yes, he writes about CRT, DEI, Marxist pedagogy, and obsesses over black experience with a Kendian lens. Yes, he’s as woke and dishonest as it gets, and his wokeness and dishonesty were not detriments in his rise. His wokeness is just as much a part of the package as his blackness. A black scholar whose work focuses on the threat from Muslim immigration would never have seen his star rise so far, so fast, with so few people questioning why. Arday is, within the hegemonic structure of wokeness that has overtaken universities in the West, simply responding to a chain of incentives in a rational way. He’s doing what the system has taught him will be rewarded. He’s adjusting to the facts in front of him, rather than abiding by some abstract moral standard. This isn’t good, but it is rational choice behavior. We can fault him morally, but the greater culprits are Cambridge, for helping set up the system in this way, and for defending him, as well as the journalists who dismissed his critics, and cowardly failed to report the truth when they had it in their hands, and all the smug pricks who roll their eyes every time someone uses the phrase “diversity hire” or “woke.”

When I spoke to gender expert Mia Hughes, she explained the concept of epistemic dependence. Modern knowledge depends on a division of epistemic labor. A general practitioner doesn’t personally reproduce every clinical trial. Scientists rely on specialists in other fields. We trust our institutions, or should. But if you corrupt the information cascade at the top through institutional capture, the whole network will propagate the error, and you will end up in a post-fact world where liars rise to the top in politics, academia, and everywhere else. In the simplest terms, if you’re wondering how anyone could ever get away with something as incredible as this, the answer is because people let them. Arday is the culmination of everything the DEI world has sought to achieve for over a decade by eroding standards, prioritizing race over merit, exhibiting little tolerance for “incorrect” speech on issues about race, dismissing things like facts and logic as “far-right” if not “white supremacy,” and generally lowering the bar to let unqualified minorities through the gates. Well, now they’re through. Hopefully, we’ll find the courage to return to a truly liberal ethic before higher education itself is also through.

From the feed

JD Vance@JDVance

The most important point about Claudine Gay's plagiarism isn't that she was fired, but that she had the job--the most prestigious job in higher education--after an extremely thin record of accomplishment. Claudine Gay has never published an article--even a plagiarized one--that

3:06 PM · Jan 4, 2024 · 1.59M Views

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