In a story out of England that has gotten a lot of attention online a Cambridge professor named Jason Arday resigned last week after it turned out that he had plagiarized some of his work, including his Ph. D. thesis, and was a fantasist in telling the story of his life.
There’s no good way to spin this story for Cambridge University. Arday is both Black and claims to be neurodivergent, though I doubt the latter diagnosis. (I’ve used this site as a soapbox in the past to point to the shameless way that autism, a very real affliction and disability, has been turned into a scam by grifters.) As a dual threat in the game of victim credentialism, these were used by Arday to advance his career in a predictable way that I still found a bit surprising. I hadn’t thought the rot had progressed this far.
From the accounts I’ve read, Arday’s research was thin and he wasn’t highly regarded as a teacher. In the video clips I’ve watched he either talks in jargon or seems lost. And yet he impressed the faculty at Cambridge so much with his unimpressive qualifications (unimpressive even if true) that he became the youngest Black professor in the university’s history and went on to receive several honorary doctorates (!). Then, when exposed, Arday made things worse for himself by claiming he was the victim of racism in all this. Apparently calling people out on their bullshit is white privilege.
As an aside, and lest anyone think this is a left-wing mind virus, the playbook here was written by the Whiner-in-Chief with his incessant cries of “witch hunt.” Avoiding responsibility for one’s actions is an imperative today, no matter what your politics.
It seems academia is intent on digging its own grave by doubling down on all of the worst excesses that its critics (mainly on the right) have been accusing it of. What was the hiring and celebration of Arday but virtue signaling? And to what end? What I’ve never been able to understand about the death spiral higher education has gone into is why they are following this course when there isn’t any public or student demand for it. I’ve nothing against teaching critical race theory if that’s what students want to learn about. But it isn’t. In a long essay appearing in The Atlantic, “Why I Quit the Tenure Track,” Tyler Austin Harper observes “I had long privately believed that the specter of student demand was being used as justification to pass legislation that only senior administrators and a few tenured radicals were excited to see put in place.” Exactly, and it’s been that way since this started.
Things were already going downhill when I was in university, back in what I think of as the first wave of political correctness. The old guard of the professoriate, stuffy white men who fell asleep sometimes in seminars (honest!), were being replaced by modish tenure-hungry radicals who were, like Arday, seen as “stars” because they were media-friendly and always said the right things. Professionally, they may not have been great scholars but what they were good at was networking and exploiting the academic spoils system. Gender, race, or (now) neurodiversity were just part of their toolkit for getting ahead and milking higher education for its few remaining rewards.
If you have a system that rewards this kind of thing, more of this kind of thing is what you’re going to get. Which, in turn, makes universities look even worse at a time when their public reputation is already in free fall. It also smears the otherwise commendable goal of achieving diversity, inclusion, and equity with the taint of wokeism.
Arday, once the poster boy for diversity, has now become “professor plagiarism”: the poster boy for the sort of cynical careerism that, always a part of academia, has metastasized in universities everywhere under the false flag of progressivism. This is what end-stage higher education looks like: as the ship goes down the last on board will be the worst products of the system, trying to grab anything that’s left of value and still be on the last lifeboat. I don’t like saying it, or reading about it, but there’s no turning away from the miserable sight.
(The title for this post derives from the book Lowering Higher Education, which I reviewed here.)
Alex Good 
I let this sit in my brain for a bit, to see if I had anything intelligent to add. Still got nothing…
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This was a big story online, for all the obvious reasons. I mean, it even pushed my buttons. But you’re excused from commenting duties for the day!
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I looked at a couple of other stories about this Arday controversy after visiting here. Pretty crazy stuff. To be sure, higher education is twisting itself into knots in the US over all sorts of political, social, and economical issues. Lower education is more like it these days.
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I think it was such a big story because it was Cambridge and Arday was a figure who really stood out. But the sad thing is that this sort of careerism has long been rife in academia. He was just a more extreme example of the kind of thing that’s been going on for a while.
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I’m surprised you were surprised, this being one of your particular interests. I’m not just making things up whenever I complain about the progressive rot in our universities.
What do you think about this (see link), which is one of the programs that the Arday business brought to light (for me, anyway). There are no majors here; that is, it’s all the same major leading to a B.A. in liberal arts, but the books also ground students in science and philosophy.
https://www.sjc.edu/
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SJC, just at first reading, seems like a traditional liberal arts college. Good for them if they’re doing well. A lot of those colleges have been having trouble recently. I don’t know anything about them.
There are some online “great books” discussion groups that have apparently found a niche recently as well. The Catherine Project is one that I’ve heard good things about, and I think it was inspired by St. John’s.
As for my being surprised, what mainly got me here was how extreme an example this was. That a school like Cambridge got snowed by such an obvious con is something they should be (and reportedly are) looking into. (How hard they’re going to look into it is another question, since the answer to the question of why he got hired and lionized is both obvious and embarrassing.) But as I said to Bruce, this game has been playing for a while. I personally know of several examples, though not as egregious. I just thought some places had higher standards.
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It’s funny this happened in England, where the same institutional rot is being uncovered in respect to the rape gangs. It’s way too big to be passed off as “careerism.” That’s as dismissive as AOC passing off “Woke 1” as “crazy.”
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But I think in cases like this (and others I’ve seen in academia) it is careerism in that the people involved don’t care about any of the values or virtues they are signaling but are just using progressive language to get ahead. They see this all as a game.
The impression I get (you probably disagree) is that AOC actually has principles that she believes in, at least to some degree. But politics may change her, as it changes many people.
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Well I hate to be obvious but it’s not a game to those girls and it’s not a game to students who are indoctrinated into this ideology. My objection to the careerist label is that it puts the focus on individuals instead of the systemic corruption they exposed. It’s a comfortable distraction from the real problem.
As for AOC, I admit that it’s now very difficult to take her seriously. But sure she probably believes some of what she says.
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I assume he lost his position at Cambridge? I bet there’s some chaos behind closed doors regarding how they vetted his work too.
I think it’s true the whole modern education system is too political now and business oriented, which you got at with the virtue signalling. I work in a secondary school and the thing I like least is often dealing with superiors who operate in the school as part of a business, not as it pertains as a place to educate and otherwise assist children. But, at the same time, it’s part of the reality of how it is right now.
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He resigned, which was pretty much what he had to do. Fighting it would have been a losing cause.
Surprised that the business ethos is being felt at the secondary school level, but then I don’t know much about what goes on there. I don’t see how that’s going to lead to anything good. Life in general is just getting so much uglier. But for me at least I think that’s part of getting older.
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