There have been a million essays on JA since this whole thing started. I haven’t read any of them because I feel, right or wrong, that I know what they’re going to say.
Yours, I had to read. It was a fresh take. You are one of the most honest and open writers here, and this essay proves it. You lay it out, what you’re thinking. You explore, in your writing. I feel like we’re having a few beers, and this is what you have to say.
Great article. You have inspired me to be at least a little more temperate. I find victim narcissist race hustler types very hard to tolerate. I wanted to be more sympathetic to Arday at first, but the more I learned about him, the less I could muster it.
People feel like they know people they read about. We don’t know him. The people who knew him knew him. We know about SOME traits. Ugly ones. You seem to not include that he sent the police after someone investigating his plagiarism. Is that evil? No. It’s not good hearted and it’s quite an abuse of power within the system that allowed for this. I’m sad someone died and has a family without him over something that shouldn’t have been life ending. But you can’t pretend that it’s not a story of macabre irony. He went all in on attention, ego, cultivated persona, and it ended up doing him in. It was the academy version of sunset boulevard. I thought you aimed to be compassionate and targeted the system as much if not more. Someone posted a clip of an old Andy Griffith Elia Kazan movie and it seems to have some astounding parallels. In the trailer (didn’t see the film) the Griffith character calls himself an influencer of all things. What Andy Warhol never foresaw was how insufficient the fifteen minutes would be for such a large mass of people
Great essay. Thanks. As I see footage of the Trafalgar Square rally today, I’m struck by how this absurd situation has spiralled into sheer lunacy. This man quite literally martyred himself for DEI and, like Arday himself, progressives would rather believe in what he represented to them symbolically than face reality. I’m just losing any hope for experiencing any sense of shared reality with the left.
Arday had no future because he was an empty shell. There was nothing real there. Claudine Gay was a weak academic who plagarized but her entire life story was not fake. Arday had no center. He was all myth. And he never believed anyone would challenge him. That was part of the fairy tale.
It's unfortunate that one person is dominating the comments here with totalising and unoriginal observations that don't address the essay. So I'll address the essay, because the sentiments are shared with what I wrote last week. Arday could have been redeemed and earned a lot of respect in the process. This seems to be overlooked in most discussions. There was a way out for Arday and I can only assume that he was receiving either very poor advice or no advice at all. From the way people on the cultural left keep arguing that there was nothing unusual about the Arday story, because plagiarism and exageration are commonplace (ergo racism) my interpretation is that they didn't care about the man, only their project. The left blames a media witch hunt, but I blame leftishist bigotry in refusing to acknowledge a real problem that Arday’s life and death has now painfully exposed.
We got here because no one cared that Black guy had no credentials and was a liar. He was there as their little virtue signal and he played his part just the way he was supposed to. He was their pet at Cambridge. Most of the blame lies with that ridiculous ‘institution which showed the deepest form of racism.
David Volodzko’s essay tries to offer a secular version of grace—suggesting that Jason Arday could have pulled through the scandal, faced his critics "palms up," and redeemed himself through sheer work, much like others who have survived public disgrace.
It is a well-meaning reflection, but it misses the core psychological and institutional reality of the tragedy.
When an individual's entire career is built on a high-stakes, ideologically charged pedestal, redemption isn't just a matter of "keeping your shoulder to the wheel."
The Fallacy of the "Comeback": Figures like Freddie deBoer or Richard Hanania were able to weather public storms because their work—whatever one thinks of it—was grounded in their own raw intellectual production. They had an independent footing, but when a career is elevated primarily as an institutional symbol of moral progress, exposure doesn't just damage a reputation; it collapses the entire foundation upon which the person was placed.
The Illusion of Moral Redemption: Comparing Arday to Claudine Gay actually exposes the fundamental cynicism of the system. Gay’s soft landing with an $800k salary wasn't a story of personal redemption or intellectual rehabilitation; it was institutional self-preservation. Harvard protected its own brand. For an individual who lacks that institutional armour, the psychological weight of public exposure isn't just an administrative inconvenience, it is an overwhelming existential crisis.
This brings us right back to what Glenn Loury calls the "cruelty of low expectations."
When elite universities elevate someone beyond their actual work to secure a flattering headline, they don't give that person a secure foundation. They give them a fragile pedestal without a safety net. Telling a man in the midst of that collapse that he simply needed "a finer shovel" underestimates the profound, devastating psychological toll that occurs when the institutional illusion finally shatters.
We can wish Arday had found a way through the darkness without pretending that the path to redemption was simple, or that the elite institutions that used him as a symbol bare no responsibility for the height from which he fell.
Race, since the 1960s, has been the thermonuclear weapon of American discourse, and has only grown more potent since 2020s Summer of Hate and Riot. Once deployed, the enemy is dead; you can never miss. For Kendi and others of his ilk, race is the only issue, period. Everything is about race, and if you don't agree, you're a racist. End of argument; there's the door, you racist; security will see you out.
Arday had the enhancement of being identified as having been identified as being on the autism spectrum, which is quite a wide categorization. How he would have got married and had children is, to this analyst, puzzling and rare, but possible. That does not excuse his plagiarism.
As for your observations about his photo...ah, he looks much more like a deer in the headlights; surprised to be there.
Who can say that Arday was or wasn’t “evil,” but he also wasn’t a sweet as everyone is saying now that he’s dead. Repeatedly we’ve heard from people who said he was pleasant and lovely, banging on about weaving love through the world, until he was challenged. By all accounts, he became quite nasty when challenged. It’s clear that Arday was a profoundly unwell man.
Thank you for upbraiding Kendi for his appalling lynching analogy—that was beyond the pale.
What makes Kendi’s take so egregious is that lynching is meaningless in the British context: lynching is not nor has ever been a thing in the Uk. This is a comment intended for an American progressive audience to drive collective outrage and sympathy and adds only negative input.
The comment around Icarus is amusing. Icarus was a metaphor regarding talent rising too high via hubris. Arguably the problem with Arday is that it wasn’t his talent that propelled him to fly too close to the sun. It was the absolute intent of corrupted institutions to lift him above his somewhat mediocre (at best) ability. Thus the frantic attempts of the institutions and fellow travellers to try and exculpate themselves.
I don't think Arday was good-hearted. He called the called rhe police and filed a complaint of racism against a young journalist who queried his qualifications. In modern Britain, such an accusation coming from a black man can destroy your career. Or kill you, as Henry Nowak discovered at the cost of his life.
Arday appears to be a grinning nail, but inderneath the weird smile he was a thug, prepared to use accusations of racism to further his ends whenever it suited him.
Arday was far less benign than you describe him. He sicced an army of police officers and high priced lawyers on the journalists who were investigating him. He was in fact an evil man. He was not worthy of redemption.
Very thoughtful and compassionate essay on a great tragedy in the history of DEI run amok.
This is exactly what I thought about this whole mess: the crime was “noticing” or trying to have a discourse about this. Scary stuff.
There have been a million essays on JA since this whole thing started. I haven’t read any of them because I feel, right or wrong, that I know what they’re going to say.
Yours, I had to read. It was a fresh take. You are one of the most honest and open writers here, and this essay proves it. You lay it out, what you’re thinking. You explore, in your writing. I feel like we’re having a few beers, and this is what you have to say.
Thank you.
Much appreciated, brother. Thanks for listening as I think out loud. Here’s to the next round.
Great article. You have inspired me to be at least a little more temperate. I find victim narcissist race hustler types very hard to tolerate. I wanted to be more sympathetic to Arday at first, but the more I learned about him, the less I could muster it.
Kendi is a shameless grifter.
The story is tragic and the woke are to blame, not the people who spoke up about this mountain of lies.
People feel like they know people they read about. We don’t know him. The people who knew him knew him. We know about SOME traits. Ugly ones. You seem to not include that he sent the police after someone investigating his plagiarism. Is that evil? No. It’s not good hearted and it’s quite an abuse of power within the system that allowed for this. I’m sad someone died and has a family without him over something that shouldn’t have been life ending. But you can’t pretend that it’s not a story of macabre irony. He went all in on attention, ego, cultivated persona, and it ended up doing him in. It was the academy version of sunset boulevard. I thought you aimed to be compassionate and targeted the system as much if not more. Someone posted a clip of an old Andy Griffith Elia Kazan movie and it seems to have some astounding parallels. In the trailer (didn’t see the film) the Griffith character calls himself an influencer of all things. What Andy Warhol never foresaw was how insufficient the fifteen minutes would be for such a large mass of people
Great essay. Thanks. As I see footage of the Trafalgar Square rally today, I’m struck by how this absurd situation has spiralled into sheer lunacy. This man quite literally martyred himself for DEI and, like Arday himself, progressives would rather believe in what he represented to them symbolically than face reality. I’m just losing any hope for experiencing any sense of shared reality with the left.
Arday had no future because he was an empty shell. There was nothing real there. Claudine Gay was a weak academic who plagarized but her entire life story was not fake. Arday had no center. He was all myth. And he never believed anyone would challenge him. That was part of the fairy tale.
It's unfortunate that one person is dominating the comments here with totalising and unoriginal observations that don't address the essay. So I'll address the essay, because the sentiments are shared with what I wrote last week. Arday could have been redeemed and earned a lot of respect in the process. This seems to be overlooked in most discussions. There was a way out for Arday and I can only assume that he was receiving either very poor advice or no advice at all. From the way people on the cultural left keep arguing that there was nothing unusual about the Arday story, because plagiarism and exageration are commonplace (ergo racism) my interpretation is that they didn't care about the man, only their project. The left blames a media witch hunt, but I blame leftishist bigotry in refusing to acknowledge a real problem that Arday’s life and death has now painfully exposed.
I’m not sure you can say that unless you actually know the truth, which Arday knew completely and we won’t have access to.
At this point I’m assuming every single thing we read about him was a lie. Liars lie. That’s what they do.
unique absolutism I think is how we got here in the first place
We got here because no one cared that Black guy had no credentials and was a liar. He was there as their little virtue signal and he played his part just the way he was supposed to. He was their pet at Cambridge. Most of the blame lies with that ridiculous ‘institution which showed the deepest form of racism.
David Volodzko’s essay tries to offer a secular version of grace—suggesting that Jason Arday could have pulled through the scandal, faced his critics "palms up," and redeemed himself through sheer work, much like others who have survived public disgrace.
It is a well-meaning reflection, but it misses the core psychological and institutional reality of the tragedy.
When an individual's entire career is built on a high-stakes, ideologically charged pedestal, redemption isn't just a matter of "keeping your shoulder to the wheel."
The Fallacy of the "Comeback": Figures like Freddie deBoer or Richard Hanania were able to weather public storms because their work—whatever one thinks of it—was grounded in their own raw intellectual production. They had an independent footing, but when a career is elevated primarily as an institutional symbol of moral progress, exposure doesn't just damage a reputation; it collapses the entire foundation upon which the person was placed.
The Illusion of Moral Redemption: Comparing Arday to Claudine Gay actually exposes the fundamental cynicism of the system. Gay’s soft landing with an $800k salary wasn't a story of personal redemption or intellectual rehabilitation; it was institutional self-preservation. Harvard protected its own brand. For an individual who lacks that institutional armour, the psychological weight of public exposure isn't just an administrative inconvenience, it is an overwhelming existential crisis.
This brings us right back to what Glenn Loury calls the "cruelty of low expectations."
When elite universities elevate someone beyond their actual work to secure a flattering headline, they don't give that person a secure foundation. They give them a fragile pedestal without a safety net. Telling a man in the midst of that collapse that he simply needed "a finer shovel" underestimates the profound, devastating psychological toll that occurs when the institutional illusion finally shatters.
We can wish Arday had found a way through the darkness without pretending that the path to redemption was simple, or that the elite institutions that used him as a symbol bare no responsibility for the height from which he fell.
Race, since the 1960s, has been the thermonuclear weapon of American discourse, and has only grown more potent since 2020s Summer of Hate and Riot. Once deployed, the enemy is dead; you can never miss. For Kendi and others of his ilk, race is the only issue, period. Everything is about race, and if you don't agree, you're a racist. End of argument; there's the door, you racist; security will see you out.
Arday had the enhancement of being identified as having been identified as being on the autism spectrum, which is quite a wide categorization. How he would have got married and had children is, to this analyst, puzzling and rare, but possible. That does not excuse his plagiarism.
As for your observations about his photo...ah, he looks much more like a deer in the headlights; surprised to be there.
Who can say that Arday was or wasn’t “evil,” but he also wasn’t a sweet as everyone is saying now that he’s dead. Repeatedly we’ve heard from people who said he was pleasant and lovely, banging on about weaving love through the world, until he was challenged. By all accounts, he became quite nasty when challenged. It’s clear that Arday was a profoundly unwell man.
Thank you for upbraiding Kendi for his appalling lynching analogy—that was beyond the pale.
Brilliant article. Thank you
What makes Kendi’s take so egregious is that lynching is meaningless in the British context: lynching is not nor has ever been a thing in the Uk. This is a comment intended for an American progressive audience to drive collective outrage and sympathy and adds only negative input.
The comment around Icarus is amusing. Icarus was a metaphor regarding talent rising too high via hubris. Arguably the problem with Arday is that it wasn’t his talent that propelled him to fly too close to the sun. It was the absolute intent of corrupted institutions to lift him above his somewhat mediocre (at best) ability. Thus the frantic attempts of the institutions and fellow travellers to try and exculpate themselves.
I don't think Arday was good-hearted. He called the called rhe police and filed a complaint of racism against a young journalist who queried his qualifications. In modern Britain, such an accusation coming from a black man can destroy your career. Or kill you, as Henry Nowak discovered at the cost of his life.
Arday appears to be a grinning nail, but inderneath the weird smile he was a thug, prepared to use accusations of racism to further his ends whenever it suited him.
Thank you - excellent piece.
Arday was far less benign than you describe him. He sicced an army of police officers and high priced lawyers on the journalists who were investigating him. He was in fact an evil man. He was not worthy of redemption.