Jason Arday made global headlines when appointed as Cambridge University’s youngest black professor in 2023. On August 5, he resigned just hours after Cambridge announced it was investigating accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty about his life story. Nine days later he was found dead at his home. It isn’t confirmed whether he took his own life, but it sure looks that way.
According to Arday, he couldn’t speak until eleven, couldn’t read until 18, earned a PhD by age 30, raised millions for charity, and was such a prolific distance runner that he was basically a world-record contender. As Coleman Hughes put it, “Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world or he was a liar. It turned out to be the latter.”
Arday’s fantastical claims about his life have largely been proven outright false or at least highly misleading, but the rubber really meets the road when it comes to his academic career. He recently faced extensive allegations of plagiarism, including in his PhD dissertation. Many of his allies are still clinging to denial, but it’s enough to say the story sold to the public was not the whole story, and Cambridge wanted that story badly.
Whatever else is true about Arday, he seems to have been a sweet person who genuinely struggled with mental disability, and the dead deserve a moment of silence before we start arguing about politics.
Regardless of Arday’s personal failings, we shouldn’t underestimate the intensity of an internet mob. Most normal people can’t be expected to psychologically handle it when they become the target, rightly or wrongly. We live in a really weird time, where any individual’s mistakes can become global news for unpredictable reasons.
Did Jason Arday behave dishonestly in pursuit of success? Yes, he did. Did Cambridge jump at the opportunity to have a token rags-to-riches black professor? Yes, it did. How responsible is he as an individual for the scale of the public praise at first and the intense criticism now? Without Cambridge enthusiastically capitalizing on his clearly suspect story, he wouldn’t have advanced to such heights where his downfall could be this catastrophic.
Cambridge wanted a mascot to prove how progressive it was. Whenever you hear of a “historic first…” or “historic youngest insert identity and job title,” you’re looking at a manufactured milestone that only matters because the institution has arbitrarily declared that it matters. That’s the actual scandal.
When an institution puts identity and victimhood narratives above proven merit, it invites grifters like Arday. It also undermines the members of “protected classes” who’ve earned their positions honestly. Reasonable people will inevitably view their legitimacy with at least a degree of default skepticism.
This is just one symptom of the phenomenon Thomas Sowell calls “mismatch.” Place a student not at the school that matches his level of preparation, but at the most prestigious school that will admit him under a lowered bar, and you’ve set him up to fail. More than 30 years ago, Sowell pointed out that, “At MIT, the average black student is at the top 10% nationwide in mathematics and in the bottom 10% at MIT,“ and a quarter of them didn’t make it to graduation. After the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023, black admissions at MIT fell from 13% to 5%. A student capable of a first rate education at a good college was instead handed a third rate education at an elite college, because the point was never his success. The point was the institution’s optics.
There is a proven solution to racial disparities in education, and it comes from one of the poorest states in the country. Mississippi, the state with the highest percentage of black residents, was 49th in the nation in reading in 2013. It is now ninth, with fourth grade black students ranking third in the country in both math and reading. They didn’t invent anything new. They just threw out the failing teaching methods introduced in the late 90s and went back to what had worked for decades. That’s the whole miracle. It’s just what works, applied honestly, for over a decade now.
Following the “cutting-edge” teaching methods has failed, but that’s no problem for ideologues. If the goal were outcomes, Mississippi already handed everyone a blueprint. Cambridge clearly wasn’t interested in outcomes. It didn’t need Jason Arday to produce high-quality work. It needed him to exist, as proof the institution had reckoned with its past. The people running Cambridge, MIT, and every DEI office in between are not, for the most part, driven by malice. They’re driven by so-called “white guilt.”
Shelby Steele’s analysis, and I think it’s correct, is that white guilt isn’t really guilt at all. It’s the loss of moral authority that follows an institution admitting it was wrong, and the desperate effort to buy that authority back. Once white America reckoned with the wrong of segregation, it lost the standing to simply assert its own legitimacy.
The problem with perpetually trying to prove that you’re not racist is that you’re trying to prove a negative, which is impossible. If a university or company doesn’t visibly have enough of the right kind of diversity, it risks being branded illegitimate, and once branded, everything else it does can be waved away.
In Steele’s words, the Great Society actually was, “designed not to solve racial problems but to dissociate our institutions and our government from its racist past.“ It obviously failed to end poverty, with the perverse side effect of hollowing out the black family in the process.
So here is where I land, as a white American who is done with all of it. I don’t feel white guilt. I don’t acknowledge it as legitimate. It has no place in a Christian or an American understanding of the individual. Thomas Aquinas defined love as willing the good of the other. That’s the standard I try to hold myself to, and it applies to every person regardless of what they look like. It’s the standard Cambridge failed when it turned a troubled man into a mascot instead of asking the hard questions that might have set him on a better path.
Jason Arday’s death is a tragedy. But it should also be the last straw for institutions that have been performing virtue instead of practicing it.
Fabulous Substack John!
Thank you….