Who are the Real Racists?
Academia's obsession with race as the magic explanation of everything has opened it up to various race hustlers
I first heard of Jason Arday, the youngest black full professor in the history of Britain's storied Cambridge University, a little less than a month ago. Approximately a week later, on August 5, Cambridge announced that it was opening an investigation into charges that Arday had plagiarized much of his PhD thesis. A few hours later, Arday resigned his professorship, in a letter later determined to have been produced by AI. Nine days after that, Arday (presumably) committed suicide.
As rapid as his rise to fame was Arday's fall. And the story of that rise and fall shone a bright light on post-modern academia at one of the world's oldest and most prestigious universities.
THE STORY OF OVERCOMING adversity and nearly superhuman feats that Arday told was no less amazing than that of his meteoric academic rise. He claimed to have been diagnosed as autistic at three, to not having spoken until he was 11, and to not having learned how to read until he was 18. Along the way, he was allegedly diagnosed as dyslexic; as suffering from "locked-in syndrome," after being hit by a car, and epilepsy, after a schoolyard beating; and having been treated for two types of cancer, including having two brain cancer tumors removed shortly before his PhD defense.
None of that, however, prevented him from having achieved great things. Among his unverified achievements were having run 30 marathons in 35 days, including nine on a leg swollen to twice its normal size, and having raised over $5 million for charity. No wonder Simon and Schuster paid $1.4 million for his autobiography, and even antied up for an uncredited co-author to help the distinguished university professor write his autobiography. It even went ahead with publishing the book, Great and Unfortunate Things, after his presumed suicide.
Arday's account of the events of his life was literally unbelievable. And that alone should have alerted Cambridge that he was a serial fabulist prior to its appointing him a full professor. Instead, Cambridge appears to have dramatically lowered its normal standards in appointing Arday.
Rosalind Arden in Quillette compares Arday's academic record, even without any taint of plagiarism, to the previous ten Cambridge appointments in his department to a similar rank of full professor. In the case of the former, they were 19 to 28 years subsequent to earning their doctorates; Arday was eight. Each of them had won a major competitive grant or fellowship; Arday had not. Six of the previous ten were internal appointments after having spent 13 to 28 years at Cambridge.
Arday's undergraduate degree, by contrast, was in education studies and physical education from a college that had only recently been granted authority to issue degrees. His PhD was from a university generously described as the second-best in Liverpool. The others had all written or edited two to seven books; Arday one.
Yet Cambridge feted Arday as if he were the second coming of Stephen Hawking, if not Sir Isaac Newton himself. Upon his appointment, the BBC ran "an error-filled, factually unchecked" (in Douglas Murray's words) segment about Arday. It is chiefly remembered today for the manner in which Hilary Cremin, the head of the faculty for education, greeted him with the wonder "normally reserved for someone marveling at a newly discovered species."
After holding hands for a bit, Cremin gushes, "We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do."
To which Richard Dawkins (someone with whom I never expected to agree about anything) asked: Had she actually read his thesis? His own verdict was that it was academic gibberish obviously not meant to convey meaning to another human being. John McWhorter, a black professor of linguistics at Columbia, delivered his verdict that on its own terms, apart from questions of authorship, Arday's thesis was decidedly mediocre, consisting of little more than interviews with acquaintances about the racism they felt they had experienced.
The appointments committee at Cambridge ignored all the flashing red lights. One member of that committee was Paul Ramchandani, a psychiatrist whose academic work has focused on autistic children, and he surely knew there was no case in the literature of a 12-year leap from being unable to read to earning a doctorate. Rhys Morgan, head of policy, governance, and integrity at Cambridge, declined to investigate charges of plagiarism the same year Arday was appointed. Cremin and vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice reiterated their support for Arday and his "world-class" scholarship.
And in July of this year, less than two weeks before Cambridge announced its own investigation, a university spokesperson denounced the "vile campaign to undermine [Professor Arday's] credibility, which must stop." That same spokesman argued that the plagiarism charges had been thoroughly investigated by the university that granted Arday's doctorate and dismissed.
In short, only racism could explain the questions raised about Arday. That was certainly his own expressed view of the matter. He wielded the charge of racism as skillfully as King Arthur did Excalibur. To the first academic who contacted him upon his appointment to inquire about the similarities of an article he had published to another academic's published study of two years earlier, Arday wondered why he was not more concerned about entrenching racism and ableism by scrutinizing black professors. For good measure, he reported the fellow academic to the police as engaged in racist harassment.
When Arday learned that Jack Grove of the Times Higher Education Supplement was planning to publish an exposé of his academic work and life story, he reported Grove to the police and hired the law firm of Carter-Ruck to threaten the Times with a libel suit, under Britain's notoriously pro-plaintiff libel laws. The article was quashed.
INTERESTINGLY, it was black academics and commentators who took the harshest view of Cambridge's coddling of Arday. McWhorter called Arday a "Magic Negro" in the eyes of his Cambridge colleagues, who would at once give them the chance to celebrate blackness and demonstrate their own antiracism.
Worst of all, McWhorter argued, Arday and his like would have a deleterious impact on aspiring black academics: "Arday had no original ideas. He couldn't teach someone to write because his writing consists of 'mimicry'... There are reports — big surprise — Arday had no idea what actual teaching was and couldn't be bothered to supervise students' work, probably because he had never done any himself."
To be mentored by such people is to end up, according to McWhorter, occupying an alternative academic universe in which cultural fellowship and advocacy are the North Star, and learning and curiosity get lip service but are beside the point. And for aspiring black academics, it is the worst of all, since the message they absorb is that their race is more important than having anything to say. As a consequence, they are never taught how to construct an argument or reason closely, because no one expects that of them. The racism of low expectations is akin, McWhorter charged, to an old joke about a black academic who, after he delivered a lecture, was asked if he could also tap dance.
Coleman Hughes, a prominent young black public intellectual, pointed out that there are, in fact, many real-life stories of black intellectuals overcoming amazing odds. Thomas Sowell, who is still writing books in his mid-nineties, grew up in a house without electricity or running water, and spent part of his teenage years in a homeless shelter. Roland Fryer was abandoned by his mother at birth, had an abusive alcoholic father who ended up in prison, and spent much of his youth with relatives who ran a major crack cocaine operation. Yet he became Harvard's youngest tenured professor of economics. Glenn Loury was a gang leader on Chicago's South Side. Eventually, however, he earned an economic PhD from MIT and became an Ivy League professor and podcaster.
None of these, however, perform the function that progressive whites seem to crave — being told that purging the racism in their hearts is the key to black advancement. Indeed, they are "an active threat to the white guilt complex." Sowell has spent a career demonstrating that disparities between different cultural, ethnic, and racial groups are found across the globe, and have many causes other than discrimination. Fryer's research showed that American police departments are no more likely to use deadly force on black suspects than white ones. And Loury has proven a trenchant critic in his podcast with John McWhorter of woke racial politics.
THAT OBSESSION with race as the magic explanation of everything has opened up academia to various race hustlers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, and thoroughly distorted academia. The same week that the Arday story broke, Tyler Harper Austin, a black academic, published a long piece in the Atlantic on why he had left academia for long-form journalism. Initially delighted to have been the only doctoral student in his class to have been offered a tenure-track position, he quickly came to realize that he had been chosen as a token: "I had been hired to be visibly black first and a scholar second, if at all."
A curricular working group at Bates College, where Harper taught, proposed that "every major, including physics, chemistry and biology, offer and require courses 'centering' race, white supremacy, colonialism and 'intersecting experiences of power and privilege.' " The dean of faculty at Bates required very department to conduct a racism self-audit, bring in an outside consultant, and produce a "curricular transformation plan."
That race obsession has permeated ever deeper into academia in the form of critical race theory, which argues that because racism is so pervasive, systematic, and deeply ingrained, the old platform of civil rights organizations — "color-blindness," "formal legal equality," and "integration" — must be scrapped. And it has advanced because radicalized faculty and administrators took over hiring.
Watching from inside the asylum, philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers noticed that radicals would only hire other radicals, while moderates would hire based on competence. So, in the end, the radicals took over. Michael Shellenberger quotes the end results. In a 1969 survey of 60,000 professors, 27 percent identified as moderate, 28 percent as conservative, and 46 percent as liberal or left. Whereas today at most of America's top universities, only single-digit percentages of faculty identify as conservative.
George Owers was an undergraduate at the same Cambridge college with which Jason Arday was affiliated, years before the latter arrived on the scene. He recalled in UnHerd the opening lecture from the then-master of the college, who was one of the world's greatest experts in geo-engineering. His initial message: The college's mission was the single-minded pursuit of scholarly excellence, without compromise. Later, as a graduate student in history, Owers received stern guidance on how serious an offense plagiarism was, and that negligence or ignorance of citation practices was no excuse, and would be punished accordingly.
Today, the master of the same college is Sonita Alleyne, who did her undergraduate work at Cambridge. She is not an academic, however, but rather the co-founder of a music production company and the trustee of a number of charities associated with the arts. She recently signed a petition by the Good Law Project that the campaign against Jason Arday was nothing more than racism to "undermine Black people who hold positions of influence." Plagiarism or manipulation of data were of little or no concern to her.
And that continued to be true for many, even after Arday's suicide and implicit admission of wrongdoing. Britain's largest academic union demanded that policies be enacted — including limits on the press's right to print stories, even accurate ones — to "shield other black academics from scrutiny by a racist, right-wing conspiracy." The University and College Union argued that "lifting text verbatim from another scholar's work, even without attribution, does not necessarily constitute plagiarism."
And there were calls in Parliament for limits on the number of stories about a particular person or subject that can be printed in a set time period, regardless of the public interest. And certainly, it was to be expected that Britain would be gripped by the goings-on at the pinnacle of academia.
The chancellor of Cambridge University, Chris Smith, blamed Arday's suicide on a "racist feeding frenzy," and another Cambridge don, Lord Woolley, likened his death to a "lynching" or a "public assassination."
In truth, racism did play a role in Arday's sad death. But it was the racism of Cambridge and associated academics who elevated Arday to a post for which he was not qualified, based solely on his skin color and a backstory of Paul Bunyanesque tales, which would have been amusing if delivered in the local pub, that brought about the shame he could not bear.
And finally, it is a form of racism to deprive Arday of agency for his decision to take his own life. It is the rough equivalent of saying that the invaders from Gaza on October 7 had no choice but to behead babies, violate and mutilate women, and incinerate entire families.