The fall of Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday began six weeks ago in mid July but I didn’t hear about it until early August, when suddenly it was everywhere - a national scandal.
In terms of his “expertise”, Arday was the standard Black “academic”. I will let someone else summarise:
he pushed the same anti-white ideology that led to Henry Nowak’s death.
He wrote about how higher education is institutionally racist, even though his own fraudulent career is a living contradiction to this pernicious claim.
He was the child of African immigrants who was given a better life in this country than he could ever have expected in his homeland. Yet he chose to attack the native population and the institutions that gave him every unearned opportunity
That would all have been fine - nay, terrific - in today’s academia… except that he did it with plagiarism. This was his (literally) fatal mistake which, once discovered and shown to the public, led to revelations of much wider, even compulsive, dishonesty. It turned out that, over the years, Arday had made countless fanciful claims. They covered his childhood, disabilities, misfortunes, as well as many incredible achievements in sport, charity and of course his academic career. (A comprehensive list is being maintained here.)
Then video clips surfaced of him, a Cambridge professor, voicing bland platitudes and trite slogans, apparently without an original thought in his head, very clearly “a DEI hire” - but one who, it turns out, even cheated at that most dishonest game.
At first, leftists denied his wrongdoing, made excuses, called his accusers racist and the evidence against him fake or flimsy or exaggerated. But, as it continued mounting, they began giving in, one by one.
The scandal had torn a great gash in the collective reputation of Britain’s academics. A great number of them were involved in stewarding Arday to Cambridge. And then:
In the two years after receiving his Cambridge position, Arday was awarded honorary doctorates from Anglia Ruskin University, Southampton Solent University, the University of Westminster, South Bank Colleges, and St Mary’s University, Twickenham. In 2023, he received the “Most Inspirational Person of the Year Award” at the MBCC (Multicultural Business and Community Champion) Awards, was placed fourth in the Shaw Trust’s list of the 100 most influential disabled people in the UK, and was awarded an honorary fellowship by the British Science Association.
So a great number of academics had pretended, or even believed, that a midwit was a genius, a pathological liar was a beacon of integrity, and a serial fraudster was an angel.
While the scandal raged, the man himself received a lot of mockery and contempt - deservedly, in my opinion then and now. With each passing day, the elaborate (but farcical) world of lies that he had constructed was steadily dismantled by one new allegation after another. Someone opined that even his dreadlocks were fake. He was not a laughing stock, because no-one was laughing. This was too serious, too significant, so instead he was the focal point of anger, at his audacity and at the stupidity of others which had enabled it.
And then he committed suicide.
Suddenly the stream of allegations stopped, as did the many opinion pieces describing him as a fraudster and detailing the sheer extent of his deceit, as did the articles speculating on whether DEI has gone too far, and whether wokery should be dialled back, etc. Everyone just fell silent.
Arday was certainly a pathological liar. He found he could make an easy living (being a Black man) in progressive academia.
I am uncertain as to how ideologically anti-white he was. He certainly said and wrote anti-white things, but that might have been simply because he perceived (correctly) that that is what works in the water he had found himself swimming in.
I am also uncertain as to whether he was addicted to sympathy/pity. It might be that he simply found he could obtain material benefits by soliciting sympathy/pity from White people, so went ahead and did it, in pursuit not of the sympathy, but of the material benefits. Maybe the sympathy was really for the pleasure of those idiot White people who dispensed it. This was a mutually beneficial transaction: he got “stuff”, they got the pleasure of feeling good about themselves.
But he didn’t just seek sympathy. He also lied that he was a much more accomplished person than he was, by fabricating hardships he had suffered early in life, which had thwarted his progress until he heroically overcame them. You can’t be a hero unless you overcome adversity, after all. But did he do this because he wanted praise or pity? It is difficult to tell, and probably irrelevant at this stage.
Whatever the cause of his pathological lying and shamelessly dishonest self-promotion, it got him made the youngest-ever Black professor at Cambridge University.
That happened in 2023 so there has been speculation that some of the academics’ motivation for promoting him was a desire to bulletproof their department against crazed BLM guilt-mongering (by then at its zenith, three years after the Summer of Floyd). This is plausible but seems too prosaic an explanation, ignoring the psychology of the female academics concerned. And after all, you could employ a man without making a hero out of him. You could promote him without heaping diarrhoetic praise upon him. Also, academia was promoting men like this long before 2023. Years before any of us heard of Arday, Tony Hayers coined the term “skintellectual”. This refers to a non-white academic whose career is entirely predicated on their writing endless screeds bolstering the anti-white narrative, and serving, by default, as an avatar of non-white triumph over White oppression. All such an “academic” has in the way of thought is anti-white grievance-mongering and endless whining about inequalities (“structural” or otherwise) in how the races are treated (by White people). Such academics have existed for decades now, and if Cambridge University were seeking yet another one to keep BLM at bay, there were far more plausible candidates than Jason Arday, whose lies about his academic record could easily have been checked, and who seems to have been a complete airhead. His only original thoughts were lies about himself.
So why were these female academics taken in by him? I think John Carter has the answer:
In every photograph he’s wearing this open, angelic, sincere expression that presses every sainted magical negro button in the AWFL’s emotionally conditioned brainstem.
Carter elaborated elsewhere but so did Aureus, after seeing this photo:
This photo really demonstrates the trick he played over his career. He manufactured a “modern Star Trek alien” look, as we can see here with his “brain canopy” hair formation. Combined with the distracting gleaming of his vaselined forehead and the unblinking homo-gaze (suggesting “we mean you no harm”) there is a feeling of “I am not just a signalling token but a celestial eunuch here to forgive your sins”.
I find this a far more convincing explanation for his success than mere diversity pandering by silly menopausal women. No doubt that played a part, especially when those women had to persuade their male colleagues to promote Arday, but there were reasons specific to him why they were so inclined towards him in particular.
It is a phenomenon that I have perceived (perhaps incorrectly) elsewhere. I think the popularity of Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau and even Andy Burnham can be explained by a boyish child-like quality which triggers in women the powerful maternal instinct: “The boy is innocent and vulnerable, like a baby, and other boys have it in for him, but I can protect him!”
It is notable, in the widely-shared BBC report from March 2023 about Arday’s promotion to Cambridge, that he “cannot” look a man in the eye, yet effortlessly holds a woman’s gaze for extended periods, and even caresses her hands when they meet. His shyness around men was clearly affected, part of a persona he fabricated.
His child-like innocence was also a mirage. In truth he was ruthless, cunning, shameless and paranoid. He reported various people to police for questioning his academic record, and told various students they were racist for questioning his judgement of their work. He advanced by lying, and by threatening anyone who doubted his lies.
But, as explained by Uubzu, one of his more obscure lies could easily have brought dire consequences upon innocent people. He claimed that a masked man had twice broken into his office, the second time threatening him with a knife. If, when scouring CCTV footage, the police had found a viable candidate for this “masked man”, Arday, in order to maintain his story and thereby his reputation, would have had to keep quiet as some innocent man was imprisoned. He surely would have done so. But what makes this even more egregious is that the lie was entirely unnecessary in the first place, dreamed up by him apparently at random one day. How did it benefit him? What was his motive? It would reinforce protective feelings in his female colleagues by showing them that their star negro really was in danger, and thus reinvigorate their concern for him so that, when he needed something from them in future, he could manipulate them more easily.
Jason Arday was despicable.
One Black chancer is a trivial thing to get worked up about. There are plenty of them, after all. There is a wider story here. The vitriolic press coverage was motivated not by racism against Black people, but by the fact that Arday’s case clearly shows there is deep corruption in British academia. The corruption happens to be premised on DEI, but even without that cause, it has implications for our entire society, now and in the future.
Cambridge professors hold positions of great responsibility, with influence over government policy, corporate ideology, national cultural orientation, and the life chances of promising young students. If those positions are being given to incompetent people, people who should never have been entrusted with such power and influence, who cannot handle but can certainly abuse it… that bodes badly for all of us. How can we trust them after this? Who would incur huge debt to get “educated” at Jesus College now?
The real issue is not Arday himself, but the people who promoted him and lavished praise upon him. In doing so, these academics have shown that they themselves are incompetent and shouldn’t be in those positions. The case has made a mockery of British academia in general, because we all know that the policies and attitudes which facilitated Arday’s rise are in place all over the country, and in fact, that institutions are rewarded the more they enact these policies and voice these attitudes. The flaw, therefore, is not incidental but systemic. Therefore, Arday’s case will not be unique and might even be typical.
We have to remark on the sheer gullibility of those middle-aged female academics to believe Arday’s lies and projected persona. Is this a micro example of “mass formation psychosis”? Then again, did they really believe him, or did they actually know he was average (at best) but conclude that facilitating him would look good for them, professionally and among their equally dream-headed friends? But then, why are dream-headed people, silly indulgent women, in academia in the first place?
And we can’t let the male academics off, either. They too are implicated, if only for appeasing their female colleagues. We know that two male academics did raise concerns, but these went unheeded and the two men dropped the matter. Thereafter, did no male academic, rigorous and intelligent and sensible, ever speak with Arday and realise he was an airhead? Or did that happen, and the male academic concluded it was best to keep quiet, for the sake of his own career? Just how toxic and dysfunctional has academia become?
We begin to discern a grim picture. It threatens the whole idea that academics are smarter (in any way) than ordinary people. After this, they seem like fools.
And also corrupt. The woman in charge of promoting Arday, Hilary Cremin, was told two months after his appointment that a 2018 paper by him contained plagiarism and data distortion. Cremin asked Arday about this. He knew exactly what to do: tell her “about his experiences with ‘direct and indirect racism’ and poor health conditions” while writing that 2018 paper. For Cremin, that was all she needed to hear. Indeed, I’m sure it was what she desperately wanted to hear, because it put her, once again, in a position to protect this huge Black child. She pledged to the plagiarist her “full support”.
In the BBC report, Cremin comes across as bright, but certainly nothing special. It is disappointing and very concerning that this is what passes for a senior Cambridge academic nowadays. Moreover she is dressed in an unserious way for a woman of her age and position, wearing a short skirt that makes her look frivolous (which I am certain she is).
We must think of the damage done to academia by having people like Arday there, especially in commanding positions. But we must also think of the damage done by having people like Hilary Cremin there, or indeed anywhere. If she had any sense or any shame, she would have resigned by now.
At first, it seemed that this scandal might be a “reality check” moment for “the regime”. Maybe they would now have to face up to the fallacy of their worldview, and finally “put the woke away”?
Arday’s suicide nixed that.
When the news broke, everyone fell silent… but only for a few hours.
Then the Left, who had been so meek over the previous ten days, found their direction, their momentum. They struck back with “righteous” anger at the Right and the mainstream media (which they claim kowtows to the Right) for attacking Arday, for conducting what they now called a “witch-hunt” against him. It was perfect for the Left, because they could now tell themselves they were indeed the underdog, not the hegemon corrupting all of British society, but the brave rebels fighting a hegemonic right-wing state and media apparatus.
Of course the centre-right buckled immediately. Numerous commentators found they now agreed that the media had gone too far, that Arday didn’t do anything seriously bad, and after all, don’t we all lie in order to get ahead?
With the ever-reliable cowardice of the centre-right, the Left has been able to effortlessly re-frame the scandal. No longer is it about a fraudulent import, his feckless enablers and the corrupted academic environment which fosters and promotes those enablers… now it is about a vicious (racist) media and a hateful (racist) Right. Once again, the miasma plaguing our society is that much-loved classic: racism.
So… after a Black man did a lifetime of wrongs, got found out and killed himself, White Brits are the villains. Arday gets to be a victim in perpetuity, the Left gets to be “on the right side of history”, and the regime gets to continue destroying Britain.
Before Arday’s death, some in our circles were speculating that the scandal was engineered by the regime itself, to cause public outrage and obtain the “justification” it needed to “put the woke away”. That speculation has of course been completely disproven, and I remain convinced that the regime has no intention whatsoever to “put the woke away”.
So useful was Arday’s death for the regime, I suspect that, had he not done it himself, they might have eventually done it for him.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.
Millennial Woes writes: "We must think of the damage done to academia by having people like Arday there, especially in commanding positions. But we must also think of the damage done by having people like Hilary Cremin there, or indeed anywhere. If she had any sense or any shame, she would have resigned by now."
I just had a post-teaching observation meeting with a female administrator wearing a walking boot with a WATERMELON STICKER on it.
This is inappropriate. There was leftist coding all over the bulletin board behind her as we discussed methodology.
It made me "uncomfortable." I didn't feel...."safe."
Anyway, I have had plenty of opportunity to watch academia sink to tragic lows over the past twenty-odd years. For this I credit the influx of black "academics" and immigrants for whose benefit the blathering female administrators insist we teach literature about immigrants feeling like they don't belong even though they chose to immigrate. Woe is them. They feel "marginalized," but heaven forbid they should assimilate! The mere suggestion is akin to terrorism!
Standards have declined across the board in fealty to the AWFL's proxy children: blacks and immigrants.
Some years ago, a middle eastern professor RIDICULED ME for teaching students how to paraphrase properly. "Not even native speakers do that," he opined.
Never mind that we teach ESL, and that paraphrasing is an excellent exercise in rewriting text and ensuring that the content is understood and accurately replicated. O no, I was making them do something that is too hard and utterly unnecessary. Just let them copy and paste!
I also witnessed "research papers" without a shred of analysis. Because I insisted upon analysis and no other professors did, I was the "bad" teacher.
So here we are. And don't get me started on the word salad that some grad students brought in, a co-authored paper (by black "academics") titled "Cotton, Whiteness, and Other Poisons." The students told me that the authors were friends of a professor, who brought them into class to speak about this paper. They said that their advisors had told them that there were too many dissertations on how horrible white people are that year, so they had to pivot to writing about how horrible white people are for developing pesticides.
We tried a close reading of some paragraphs that the students could not understand. I finally just had to tell them that the paper made no sense. It truly made no sense.
Regardless, all these people know to write about is racism. They have nothing else going on in their heads. And the powers that be keep bringing these people in, so that the faculty is comprised of one anti-white racist after another. And so now this is what passes for an "education."
But more to the point... it is impossible to correct these people, to direct them towards loftier thinking and production. We are being held hostage by idiots. The ship is sinking.
Seeing the "hate rally" for the man who revealed Arday's narcissistic grift is disheartening indeed. But if I've learned anything in my many years in academia, these are not bright people. They just aren't. They are craven fools.
Another belter of an essay. And you didn’t even plagiarise the funniest line about his Star Trek brain canopy hair formation and Vaseline’d forehead. If only Arday were alive to read this essay and learn, maybe he would have reformed his character, but alas.