Jason Arday and Academia’s Self-Seeking Pursuit of Virtue

Jason Arday has a tell. Making what he considers important points, he holds his palms out and widens his eyes. Like many gestures, it conveys something beyond the statement itself—a silent way of saying, “Isn’t it obvious?” or “What else can I tell you?” It’s an assumption that all would agree with what he’s saying, but don’t for some reason (as in, racism, classism, ism-ism).

Whether it was his ridiculing an Australian television show for not depicting aborigines or contributing the insight that dissolving the monarchy would change the tax bracket of Britain’s working class, he often has the palms out, the eyes wide with wrinkled brow, the air of “Come on!” In my own teaching, I rarely fall into this conversational gesture. My job is presenting what is new to students, not pointing to what is supposedly obvious.

This alone encapsulated the flaw not only in Arday’s training and scholarship, but the humanities and social science fields that celebrate people like him—a corrosive habit in academia, as Arday’s story of fraudulent scholarship at Cambridge University, and his subsequent resignation, have reminded us. Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.

The main theme of Arday’s work is that racism is grievously determinative in the lives of black Britons; his Ph.D. dissertation describes racism that black scholars must grapple with endlessly. In presentations, his manner, in his usual way, suggests that no decent person could disagree with this take, and that in a just world he wouldn’t even have to spell it out. Racism’s ubiquity and power is obvious, and anyone who questions this has an ulterior motive (maintaining power, inability to process The Other as fully human, etc.). In this, what Arday has in common with Ibram Kendi is not just dreadlocks but an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern.

The problem is that what is obvious is probably not very complicated—never mind that what Arday thinks is obvious is a vast and self-indulgent exaggeration. Within this mental universe, Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.

Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.

Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.

As I might say (with palms out and widened eyes), arguing for the obvious is not brilliance. Even when it’s about black people.

Even worse than Arday’s work displaying no actual excellence is the consequence that characters like him wind up passing the torch to the next generation of black scholars. In a career spent in and around academia, I’ve seen this happen too many times. I refer to nothing like all black academics. But this is a vortex that young black scholars are sadly vulnerable to being pulled into, aided and abetted by white fellow travelers.

Especially if they have a certain stage presence, people like Arday attract mentees, who often value sitting at the feet of someone of their own race, who may understand their experiences more readily than other professors. But what happens when the Arday types don’t have anything actually to teach? Some of his former students are demanding redress.

Arday had no original ideas. He can’t teach someone how to write because his writing consists of, well, “mimicry.” (Even his resignation letter seems likely to have been generated by AI.) There are reports that—big surprise—Arday had no idea what actual teaching was and couldn’t be bothered with supervising students’ work, probably because he had never done any himself. People taught by versions of this type end up occupying an alternative academic universe, where cultural fellowship and advocacy are the North Star, and learning and curiosity get lip service but are beside the point.

When eager young black students gravitate to people like Arday, they learn that, for black academics, their race is more important than having anything to say. Sadly, white colleagues reinforce this by treating black academics this way at conferences and in hiring. One typical result: Carolyn Rouse being appointed president of the American Anthropological Association, despite her inability to answer civil but serious questions about charges of ideological takeover in her discipline with anything beyond verbal coleslaw. Arday was treated as brilliant for his self-involved, unfocused, underinformed drivel—and his resignation letter shows no awareness that anything was amiss about that.

The mentees, evangelized in the conviction that their blackness is what makes them matter rather than hard mental work, do not learn how to reason closely and clearly. And again, white academics make sure that they never have to. An eminent white academic once contacted me while on a committee evaluating a black scholar for a prestigious award, asking me what I thought of the person’s work. The truth was that the scholar’s writings and presentations were earnest but unstructured and unoriginal. From acquaintance, I knew that she could have done much better than this but simply had never been taught how. She was on the shortlist transparently because she was black. Many like her get the award nevertheless—and the torch passes on.

Their mentors never pose serious questions to them. (“Jason, are you sure this is really an instance of racism? Explain to me why you think so, and I will teach you to make the case before those who aren’t prepared to hear your claim.”) The relationship is instead about support, protection, understanding—never challenge. Thus, the mentee winds up thrown by and bristling at even polite, reasonable questions, of a kind that white academics consider integral to their profession. For real academics, having papers rejected is a virtual rite of passage and only makes their subsequent work better. But Arday characterized the rejection of his first article submissions as “violent.” For Arday, only racism could explain it; if his topic is racism, there can be no justified rejection. Ibram Kendi’s imperious pique at having his ideas questioned is in a similar vein. He can process the questions only as being aimed at him as a person (i.e., racism).

And make no mistake: the protests of Arday and his ilk arise not from their quietly feeling inferior to their white colleagues who do real work. They get praised to the skies for their advocacy couched in academic language. They come to think of the advocacy as equally sophisticated to learning, and even morally superior—Edward Said argued that scholarship alone was of little worth unless enlisted in a commitment to social justice—and white colleagues encourage them in this.

It reminds me of a warm, smart white linguist, a generation older, whom I knew in my early academic days. Many linguists’ work focuses on highly abstract conjectures about how we produce language, expressed in a jargon as ingrown as one would expect of a science. My academic work on language has been, if not almost as willfully opaque to normal people, quite wonky; few without a linguistics Ph.D. (or something close) would get much out of most of it. This linguist assumed—not without reason—that as a black person, my interest in language must be about defending nonstandard speech such as Black English. She told me not to worry if other linguists tarred my work as less intelligent, because “If what you’re committed to is telling your students the way they talk is okay, that’s fine.” She intended no insult. But telling people that disapproval of their speech is racist is not especially difficult. It is advocacy, rather than the glorious mental squint of trying to work out something complicated. It takes much less mental candlepower than delving into the details, often delightfully counterintuitive, about how languages become what they are.

There’s an old joke about white people’s reception of black colleagues: after the black professor finishes giving a talk, someone in the audience asks if he can tap dance, too. Arday’s elevation at Cambridge was founded in racism no less overt.

The best spin we can put on his appointment is that his supporters saw the obstacles he had purportedly overcome as justification for expecting less of him. Arday claimed to have been diagnosed as autistic at three; to be mute until 11, and illiterate until 18; to be dyslexic and to have had two brain tumors removed just before his Ph.D. defense; to have had a stroke after that; to suffering epilepsy from a peer beating him as a child; to being in coma for months after being hit by a car; to suffering testicular cancer. For Arday, just showing up in academia constituted excellence.

But if Stephen Hawking’s work were mediocre, no one would have celebrated it. The intelligent take would be to pity that his physical misfortune had prevented him from achieving something on a meaningful level. Let us imagine a white version of Arday with long blond hair (not dreadlocks, because I suspect those would have a sirenic effect on many as signaling an allegiance to social justice). Even with the same claimed experiences as Arday, this man with long blonde locks would not be celebrated as brilliant—but as someone sadly denied the chance for brilliant achievement.

Okay, the white Arday wouldn’t have suffered racism. But how about a South Asian Arday? Same experiences, again, but with parents from Mumbai—call him Jashan Aradhye. No one will say South Asians experience no racism in Britain, and yet a Jashan with the same biography would not be made a Cambridge professor. I’m not British, but I strongly sense that all would understand that to pander to this unfortunate Jashan would undermine his humanity, implying with a wan, self-absorbed gesture that underperformance is somehow excellence.

No, it is only because he is black that Arday was elevated in this way. The idea is that being black and triumphing over obstacles merits being appointed a Cambridge professor. This means that race determined his appointment.

Consider, too, the cartoon nature of the biography Arday presented. In addition to all his other claimed maladies and misfortunes, he supposedly also had Asperger’s. But kids with this condition are hyperverbal, while Arday was supposedly mute. Arday even said that he was in Michael Apted’s famed Seven Up documentaries but for some reason was “pulled out” at 14. This is obviously untrue, given that the documentary series was being produced long before he was born. All his other fabrications, such as finishing a suspiciously superhuman cumulative marathon with a bone fracture that swelled his leg to twice its size (is that what happens with bone fractures?), make Arday’s fictive biography almost funny. And they don’t stop there. After his Cambridge appointment, thugs (mysteriously in touch with academic matters) threatened him at his office with a knife, while others sent a severed pig’s head to his parents (which Arday, just in time, intercepted before his parents saw it!). Also, the reason his dissertation is full of plagiarism is because of the racism he faced during its composition. It’s as if Arday were James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in 1962.

The only reason people would believe all this damnable foolishness—and remember, across the pond they’re not wowed by his lovely accent the way Americans are—is that they see Arday as a Magic Negro. The kindly, antiracist white academics think suspending their judgment when it comes to a black man makes them good people. We don’t even need to speculate whether sometime in the near future, Arday will use critical race theory to justify his inventions, on the premise that his anecdotes represent a “common black narrative.” In this, he will be backed by people devoted to that school of thought who say that we need to understand him “on a certain level.”

What level is that? A low one—bigotry.

If Arday shows any indication of the “neurodiversity” he claims, it’s that he seems genuinely not to understand the nature of the charges against him. “I thought you’d just believe me.” Autism taught him to mimic—as if this somehow justifies plagiarism. He attempted to cover his absurd Seven Up story last week by saying that his was a program by the same name, bringing together black mothers of children with challenges. But what kind of program would check up on children only every seven years? Arday is clearly not the sharpest knife in the drawer, a Richard Santos (“I said I was Jew-ish”) without even the hucksterish flash.

The youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge properly should have been a physical education teacher who did some after-hours tutoring. A make-believe academic who misspelled paltry as poultry in the title slide of a keynote address instead scaled the heights of Britain’s Harvard because of his skin color and his exceptionally long dreadlocks.

There is a certain mercy in the impression that he won’t perceive how those who elevated him saw him as a performing monkey. Still, it’s long past time for Anglophone academia to stop thinking that it’s immoral to evaluate black scholars on the basis of whether they are—get ready!—intelligent.