An almost unbelievable scandal involving a professor of black studies at Cambridge University demonstrates how institutional DEI can only be defeated from without, not within.
First, the story, which has received far too little attention from American media.
Cambridge University Professor Jason Arday has been one of the darlings of academia, particularly in the U.K. He’s been wildly and effusively celebrated as an incredible, inspirational story of how a young, black man with autism who couldn’t read until he was 18 became an esteemed professor.
“He has helped the Government with its antiracism strategies; advised on the national curriculum; guest-edited the Today program,” Kathleen Stock wrote for UnHeard. “ … His writing has been enthusiastically praised by [journalist] James O’Brien and [member of parliament] David Lammy. His fans now await his memoir, to be published in a month’s time.”
Arday’s life story and work have been promoted as a necessary antidote to the alleged systemic racism of Western societies.
He was a poster child of successful DEI, much like how Ibram X. Kendi was billed as the wise swami of antiracism before he came crashing down to earth.
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The problem, as has been recently uncovered, is that Arday has been accused of not only rampantly plagiarizing his work, but of making up large parts of his quite fantastical personal biography.
According to the Telegraph, Arday has been accused of “copying parts of his PhD thesis from another student.” An analysis of his thesis found “188 sentences that were identical or highly similar to the work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student.”
Arday has said that he was in the British TV documentary “Seven Up” that followed the lives of children from the time they were seven.
“Footage of a talk Prof Arday gave in October 2022 has re-emerged, revealing his claim that he appeared as a child on ‘Seven Up,’” the Telegraph reported on Sunday. “He told the University of Bath’s Race Equality Taskforce: ‘I was part of a programme, actually, which – it doesn’t really exist any more – but it was called Seven Up at the time. … I was pulled out of the project when I was 14.’”
This wasn’t possible.
The Telegraph noted that “the inaugural episode [of Seven Up] was broadcast in 1964, meaning its subjects were born in 1957.”
The Telegraph also confirmed with the BBC, which aired a Millennial version of this show in 2000, when Arday “would have been 15,” that he wasn’t involved with the show.
That’s not all. Many of his other incredible personal claims have now been questioned too.
You know it’s getting bad for Arday now that even the reliably leftwing Guardian ran a piece about the plagiarism accusations against him. Though they spun this whole thing in a way to make it seem like uncovering academic improprieties is an unfair “rightwing media” tactic to bring down black, celebrity professors.
Arday has not disputed the accusations of plagiarism (which he attributed to having autism) and responded to the criticism by saying that while he’s made “mistakes,” the larger effort to scrutinize his work is “racially motivated” and “aligned to ableism and racism.”
Cambridge has dug in its heels and said, according to the Guardian, that the claims against their star professor are just a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility.”
There’s also a growing letter of solidarity signed by thousands of people, mostly academics, maintaining their unwavering support.
“Jason is the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history,” the letter reads. “Rightwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of plagiarism. We can’t let them. Stand up to their hate and division by adding your name.”
The whole thing looks bad for Arday and Cambridge. But I’d like to add here that the primary lesson of the Arday affair is not just how a single fabulist can easily game the system due to the very nature of the DEI mentality—though that’s a well-established trend.
DEI is based on a kind of identitarianism that strips away incentives toward merit and excellence.
Who and what you are, the idea of you, matters more than any of your work.
Add to this mix an internal culture of fear created to ensure that nobody questions the system lest they be labeled a “racist,” which is basically worse than being a murderer in some of our most prestigious academic institutions, and it’s easy to see how hucksters thrive.
No, the bigger lesson here is that this system will continue unabated unless countered by outside, political force.
The U.K.’s academic establishment isn’t aghast that one of its top scholars is being exposed. The problem, as they currently construe it, is that some people noticed and said something.
It couldn’t be clearer that DEI ideology remains stubbornly ingrained in institutions that haven’t been squeezed from outside to abandon it.
DEI is “dying” in American institutions—especially universities—only because of outside pressure, because the Trump administration and some states have brought the financial and legal hammer down on them to stop their racially discriminatory practices.
That’s not to say that DEI is wholly dead in higher education, far from it. But it’s had to publicly retreat in a way that was unthinkable just five years ago.
Not so in other Western countries, a point that Canadian professor Eric Kaufmann recently made on X.
Up north and across the pond, DEI and its noxious racialist cousins like critical race theory burn out of control as if it’s still 2021, the peak of the Great Awokening.
It would be a mistake to think that the anti-DEI “vibe shift” in America is just the way of things going forward.
It isn’t going away because of vibes. It’s going away because universities have been threatened with defunding, because the Trump administration has issued warnings that illegally hiring on the basis of race or sex will be treated as illegal.
That’s what got them to back down and back away. Understanding this reality is vital going forward.
Don’t forget the woke insanity of the last decade and don’t forget what it took to stop it.
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