Comical case of Cambridge U.’s fibbing prof tests academia’s deep DEI delusions
If The Onion or the Babylon Bee wanted to spoof the absurdity of DEI — the woke ideology of “diversity, equity and inclusion” — they couldn’t have invented a character as unbelievable as Jason Arday.
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But Arday is very real: Born in 1985, in 2023 he became the youngest black man ever to hold a professorship at Cambridge University.
Naturally, he had to overcome great adversity to do so.
Really great adversity — because Arday, the son of a Ghanaian immigrant to London, isn’t just black, he’s autistic and was nonverbal until the age of 11, according to the glowing media profiles he’s received.
And he’s epileptic, yet that didn’t stop him from “running 30 marathons in just 35 days,” as reported in Britain’s Independent.
Indeed, he’s a sports hero: The University of Bath even posted a blog on the “International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination” in 2021 presenting Arday’s claim that as a child he’d played both soccer and snooker (similar to billiards) at a professional level.
Though last week, the university amended the transcript of Arday’s conversation to say he’d only played soccer “semi professionally” and was “really good” but “not good enough to be professional” at snooker.
But never mind: He has so many other claims to fame that correcting that little misstatement takes very little away.
After all, Arday was also a star of the most famous documentary in British history, Michael Apted’s “Seven Up” series, which starting in 1964 followed the same group of subjects from childhood to old age at seven-year intervals.
Starting, that is, 21 years before the professor was born.
No, the series didn’t add new participants over time — its whole point was to track the very same people who took part in the first installment.
Truly, thanks to DEI anything is possible.
Arday now says that when he made the claim in 2022 (“I was part of a program, actually, which . . . was called ‘Seven Up’ . . . basically when they follow you over the duration of your life, so they follow you at 7, 14, 21”) he was talking about a totally different “Seven Up” documentary.
As with so much else in Arday’s almost superhuman biography, evidence for this, other than the professor’s say-so, is curiously lacking.
And there’s much, much more to Arday’s story — the brain tumor he overcame while completing his PhD, the 600 miles he ran in six days on a treadmill, the millions of pounds he’s raised for charity . . .
A miraculous individual like Arday might never even have been admitted as a student at Cambridge, let alone made “professor of the sociology of education,” if not for the spirit of affirmative action.
Yet now he’s facing accusations of plagiarism because more than 100 passages in his dissertation appear to be lifted from another academic’s work.
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He insists he’s a victim of racism and insufficient DEI — as the BBC notes: “Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, but defended himself by arguing that he had not received adequate supervision during his PhD given his autism and learning disabilities.”
Even the left-wing Guardian newspaper found Arday a mite less than truthful, when he claimed a campaign to get him fired from Cambridge included a man threatening him with a knife (the school’s video system showed no man and no knife) and a severed pig’s head sent anonymously to his parents (London butchers and police had no records to support Arday’s claim).
When the paper asked Arday about his tale after trying to fact-check it, he said, “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.”
The trouble is, too many in the media and the academy have been believing Arday all along.
He’s a poster child for the suspension of disbelief DEI requires of its advocates on both sides of the Atlantic.
It’s a comical story when it’s just about a professor of the sociology of education, even one at a university as prestigious as Cambridge.
But it’s no joke when DEI madness spreads from sociology or education departments to every other corner of the academy, including law and medical schools — and from there into the legal system and hospitals.
There’s no limit to how far DEI will go if left unchecked: It finds nothing too ridiculous to be laughed out of consideration.
If Jason Arday decided to call himself an airline pilot, who’s going to keep him out of the cockpit?
Honest and competent minority scholars wind up under suspicion when DEI lowers standards for everyone who fits the right racial profile.
Yet by fueling such suspicion, DEI creates a market for itself, as its purveyors claim only affirmative action can overcome the public’s doubts.
Professor Arday deserves his fame in one respect, at least: His tall tales reveal the appalling truth about DEI.
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Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
