He was surely a plant, some kind of agent. Professor Jason Arday, who at 36 became the youngest black professor at Cambridge University, could only have been working for a secret cabal of meritocrats whose mission was to destroy diversity, equity, and inclusion. No one else has done half as much to expose the fools, frauds, and fanatics who run higher education.
Arday’s story was, in every sense, incredible. Born in London to Ghanaian immigrants, he was diagnosed as autistic and dyslexic. Unable to speak before age 11, he managed to get three degrees before winding up at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 2023.
Along the way, Arday did several things that can only be described as unbelievable. He ran 600 miles in six days, a feat that only the top marathon runners can manage. He also ran 30 marathons in 35 days, despite fracturing his leg on one of them after suffering an epileptic fit. His charity runs raised about $7 million, apparently, though records show only about $500. He also built wells in Africa and South America, though the charity concerned says it never sends volunteers overseas. He played semi-professional soccer — of which, again, there is no record.
I could go on, but you get the picture. He told an audience he had appeared in a documentary that shows no trace of him. He claims to have held visiting professorships at universities that have no knowledge of him. More recently, he informed the media that he had been on the receiving end of endless racist abuse, including two visits from masked men who threatened violence if he did not resign — he did not report the incidents, which were also not picked up by CCTV. When the left-wing newspaper to which he made these claims asked for evidence, it got a reply so beautiful that it ought to hang in the National Gallery: “To be honest, I thought you’d just believe me.”
That, indeed, had been the story of Arday’s life until that moment. In the aftermath of the demented Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, campus liberals swooned at the thought of a dreadlocked professor who had overcome so many hardships. He gave them what they wanted: unreadable bilge about critical race theory. When it turned out that the bilge was not even his own but was plagiarized, university authorities turned nasty. Critics were dismissed as racists. The heads of three Cambridge colleges were among hundreds of signatories to an open letter dismissing the evidence of plagiarism as “an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.”
Arday himself comes across as a bumbling fantasist, a cross between Forrest Gump and Walter Mitty. But at every turn, he was told by white, leftist, generally female academics that he was a genius. After a while, he started to behave accordingly, treating the random collections of buzzwords in his papers as profound.
Universities are supposed to be temples of the Enlightenment, dedicated to truth, logic, empiricism, and the scientific method. Yet some of the most famous academic institutions in the world threw all these things out of the window in pursuit of a superstitious racial theory. Not only universities, of course. When Arday was appointed, the BBC made five documentaries about him and gave him his own radio show. When his plagiarism emerged, it ignored the story for as long as it could before publishing a coy piece that avoided reference to his outlandish lies and dwelt on the fact that one of the men who had exposed his plagiarism, the American academic Nathan Cofnas, had been sacked by Cambridge for writing about race and IQ.
Why did it fall to Cofnas to do all the heavy lifting? Why did no one with centrist or leftist views react to the defilement of academic standards? We all know the answer: They valued groupthink over truth. Only someone who was already beyond polite society would emphasize inconvenient facts.
WE ARE CLOSER TO NUCLEAR WAR THAN AT ANY TIME SINCE 1962
Indeed, when a journalist from the respected Times Educational Supplement sent Arday a series of questions about his work, the response was a call from the police. Yes, you read that correctly. A journalist was told by a police officer to lay off because the subject of his inquiries did not like being investigated.
So many institutions have been left looking ridiculous. The damage to Cambridge is surely the most severe. A university’s reputation depends on the integrity of its admissions and appointments processes. Once it starts admitting liars and fantasists, and then itself goes along with their lies and fantasies rather than reconsider its prejudices, its good name has gone — possibly irretrievably.