By Becket Adams
Sunday, August 09, 2026
The story of modern academia resembles that of the modern
press: an institution designed to provide continuity, trust, and a coherent
worldview between generations that has become hollowed out by political
factions and twisted into an intensely unlikeable caricature of its former
self.
Last week began poorly for higher education with the
American Association of University Professors’ unprecedented endorsement of
Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who quipped in April that Vice President JD Vance’s “brown
kids” will eventually discover their father thinks they “are less American than
everyone else,” and urged Second Lady Usha Vance to “get out” of her marriage
while she still can.
The week then closed even worse for academia and the news
media with the resignation of Jason Arday, an apparent plagiarist and probable
fabulist whose brief career as a darling of both industries owed as much to the
excesses of higher education as to those of the press, as if he were the
unnatural offspring of some cursed union between the two.
Arday, who spent years as the toast of the teachers’
lounge as Cambridge University’s youngest-ever black professor, leaves behind
him a wreck of fabrications and red-faced supporters.
A book he claimed to have published, Being Young,
Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, was never actually published. Contrary to his claims, he is
evidently not a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State
University, or Nelson Mandela University, nor an honorary professor at Durham
University.
Then there’s the matter of Arday’s published works, most
notably his 2015 Ph.D. thesis, which appears to have included more than 100 instances of flagrant plagiarism. There are
additional allegations that papers he published in 2018 and 2021 likewise contain substantial plagiarism.
All of this is in addition to the litany of likely
falsehoods or at very least embellishments the now-former professor of
sociology of education attached to his personal biography: He claimed he ran 600 miles in six days; he said he ran 30 marathons in 35
days, some of it while suffering a hairline fracture; he claimed he personally
raised $7.4 million for charity (he said later it was he and a consortium of individuals, none of whom he can name because
of a nondisclosure agreement); he said he appeared in a BBC childhood documentary series that aired in 1964 and
whose participants were born in 1956 or 1957 (he was born in 1985); he said he
was threatened at knifepoint by a masked man who demanded he resign as
professor (the university found no evidence); he boasted that a
charity that does not send volunteers overseas had sent him overseas; and he claimed someone once mailed a severed pig’s head to his parents’ house, leading
to a police investigation of local butchers in which one was found to have sold
a “whole hog” the morning of the package delivery (police have no record of any
such event, and the butchers named by Arday say the authorities never contacted
him).
There’s more: In Arday’s forthcoming memoir, which as of
this writing Simon & Schuster has no intention of pulling, he claims
to have started his master’s degree while reading at a preschool level; he
claims a brain tumor caused him to lose his memory; he claims he once begged a
judge not to punish two muggers, only for those same men to later appear as
students in Arday’s class; he also claims he became godfather to one of the
muggers’ children.
Though it is reasonable that one or two of these tales
could have slipped past the gatekeepers in the press and the supposedly
cerebral eggheads of higher education, it is indefensible and shameful that so
many went largely unchallenged for so long. Remember, the bulk of his ludicrous
CV didn’t appear after the accolades, but before. News outlets propped
him up as a wunderkind even amid his increasingly preposterous backstory;
academia elevated him to the highest heights, revealing that, just like the
peer-review system, few, if any, in higher education do the reading.
There’s gullible, and then there’s whatever it is that
made a celebrity of Arday.
“Meet Jason Arday, Cambridge University’s youngest ever
black professor, who didn’t speak until he was 11,” gushed a 2023 CBS News headline.
The Guardian reported, “[H]e learned to talk at 11 and
read at 18 — then became Cambridge’s youngest black professor. Diagnosed with
autism as a child, Arday found his voice through speech therapy and his
mother’s unflagging support. Now he is using it with the same tenacity that saw
him run 30 marathons in 35 days.”
No one actually confirmed his marathon claim. Reporters
showed up for day one and day 35 of the marathon, and everyone took him at his
word in between.
Even People magazine published a puff profile titled “Man
Who Was Illiterate Until Age 18 Becomes Cambridge University’s Youngest Black
Professor,” while the style publication Rake was agog over his “bespoke style.”
Meanwhile, the BBC was positively in love, publishing an article on
February 23, 2023, whose opening lines read: “Although he could not speak, the
young Jason fervently questioned the world around him. ‘Why are some people
homeless?’ he remembers wondering. ‘Why is there war?’”
In an unbylined blog post, Cambridge
University itself described Arday as a “highly respected scholar of race,
inequality and education.”
The post added, “At 37, he will be the youngest Black
person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge — a platform he intends
to use to inspire more people from under-represented backgrounds into higher
education, building on the university’s many initiatives in this area.”
Interestingly, the anonymous blog post and the February
2023 BBC article have identical language.
The BBC reported: “His mother played a critical role in
developing his self-confidence and skills. She introduced him to a wide range
of music in the hope this would aid his conceptualisation of language. But it
also kick-started a lifelong interest in popular culture that has characterised
some of his research. Supported by his mentor, college tutor and friend Sandro
Sandri, Prof Arday finally began to read and write in his late teens.”
Cambridge published this: “As a child, Arday’s mother
played a critical role developing his self-confidence and skills, in particular
by introducing him to a wide range of music. Her hope was that this would aid
his conceptualisation of language, but it also kick-started a lifelong interest
in popular culture that has characterised some of his research.”
Then, in a moment of unintentional comedy, both posts
quote Arday as remarking, “When I started writing academic papers, I had no
idea what I was doing.”
You don’t say.
On August 5, after Arday announced his resignation, news
host Piers Morgan asked, “How did this serial fantasist ever get
to be a Cambridge professor? That’s the most interesting part of this farce.”
Yes. Yes, it is.
Just as shameful as the journalists who touted this
fraudster are the academics who slurped up his nonsense like greedy pigs at
feeding time. It is shameful on its face, but doubly so given that we are told ad
nauseam that these people are smarter and more qualified to direct policy
than the average voter. Not likely. Upon hearing about 30 marathons in 35 days
or 600 miles in six days, the average voter would not have swooned, published
glossy profiles, and handed out academic awards. The average voter would have
immediately said, “BS,” followed by, “Prove it.”
Most shameful of all is that none of this needed to
happen. Arday did not force himself on anyone. He was scooped up by industries
eager to promote him for an aesthetic and thus prove their own virtue, but not
for any real talent or skill.
Beneath this humiliation, as Arday slinks back to
obscurity, is a story about the rot of a once-respected public institution and
how it overlaps with the corruption of a second institution. For both higher
education and the press, the problems are the same: Facts and truth are no
longer at the center of everything but are subordinated to the “message” and
the correct “narratives.”
Promoting Arday was bad on the merits, but the social
damage such incidents cause demands attention. The news media and higher
education are supposed to serve a public good, but that goes only so far when
they have no goodwill. Just like the news media, the percentage of U.S. adults
who say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher
education has seen a sharp decline, falling 19 points since 2015 to just 38
percent — one of the sharpest long-term declines among major U.S. institutions,
according to Gallup.
The decline stems from rising costs, the perception that
college does little to prepare students for work or life, and, you guessed it,
higher education’s “perceived political agendas.”
So what better moment, with confidence already low, for
the AAUP to rally behind El-Sayed or for Cambridge to pick an aesthetically
“correct” midwit and foist him onto the world? This is the same destructive
obliviousness that has wreaked havoc on the news industry, where pro-journalism
groups, apparently blind to their credibility crisis and shrinking audiences,
continue to bestow honors and accolades on actual and accidental clowns.
“Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told,”
Arday said in 2023, “if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a Ph.D.
before he’s 30?”
Yes. Yes, it would be.
No comments:
Post a Comment