The New Neo

By now you probably know that Cambridge professor Jason Arday has quit his position without acknowledging guilt. The final straw was apparently that he had claimed to have written a book that doesn’t exist. He blames his decision to resign on harassment by the people who uncovered his lies:

While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.

I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.

But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. …

For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away. …

This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me. It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.

It’s really an extraordinary letter, under the circumstances – the circumstances being that Arday was caught in an enormous number of lies, and with having issued other statements about his history that were so suspicious as to probably be lies. And yet he claims both integrity and victimhood, even as he leaves the fray.

The fact that AI tools indicate his resignation letter may have been written or assisted by AI – see this – isn’t of all that much importance to me compared to the rest of his story. Those tolls aren’t always correct, for one thing. If they are correct in this case, it would be one of the least of his deceptions. At any rate, I am assuming the sentiments in the letter are his, no matter how it was written. And as such, it is very typical of the sort of thing we see these days when people are caught in wrongdoing – a doubling-down on their innocence, and a blaming of those who have uncovered what they did.

I say “people” because this phenomenon is hardly limited to one race or another. It seems common everywhere, and it doesn’t matter how much evidence implicates them. With Arday, the evidence finally reached critical mass so that even the leftist Guardian piled on. It has become too embarrassing to continue to defend him.

But, as this article indicates, it is especially embarrassing and actually destructive to the black community in Britain, especially those in academia. The piece is written by one such person, who says:

But the existence of bad-faith agitators can’t excuse us from confronting the rot: the patronising assumption is that standards and truth are optional when evaluating a black professional. This is a slap in the face to the 160 or so black professors in Britain today who earned their chairs through gruelling intellectual labour, original research and the unglamorous grind of academia.

It’s also an insult to the civil-rights titans who forged the path before us. Pioneers like Doreen Lawrence, whose unyielding pursuit of justice transformed British policing; Dr Harold Moody, who founded the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931; Sir Geoff Palmer, Scotland’s first black professor; and visionary educator Dame Jocelyn Barrow. These giants didn’t demand to be recognised based on sentiment. They forced a hostile establishment to respect them because their work was bulletproof.

The ultimate casualty of the Arday scandal isn’t one man’s career, nor the bruised egos of those who rushed to his defence. The tragic reality is that Jason Arday has potentially done far more damage to black Britons than any racist agitator ever could. External critics and bad-faith actors can only ever attack from the outside – their prejudices are expected, discounted and easily identified. But Arday’s unchallenged rise, if the allegations turn out to be true, has handed our harshest detractors the ultimate weapon. It provides a silver bullet to anyone looking to roll back equality legislation or widening-participation schemes, or to question every rightful appointment and call professionals like me ‘diversity hires’. No external opponent could ever inflict as much damage as this “>case potentially has.

But it doesn’t only give “the ultimate weapon” to bigots. It can certainly make even non-bigots doubt the credentials of minorities in academia. This problem was identified quite a while ago in the US by two brilliant black people who had a remarkable lack of advantages in their early lives: Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas. Sowell is older, and grew up in a time when there was nothing remotely like DEI to help him along, and his intellectual achievements are so profound that I don’t think they’ve ever been doubted. But black academics today all run the risk of having their accomplishments doubted, because of the Ardays of the world as well as minority professors who seem mediocre rather than duplicitous. And this is true even though there are plenty of non-minority professors who are also mediocre (I’ve had my share).

I went to school a long long time ago, and it was before there was any favor shown to black teachers or professors. Nevertheless, I was taught by a number of black teachers both in high school and college, and it just so happens that they all were highly superior teachers, definitely among the best teachers I ever had. Perhaps that is a reflection of the fact that, back then, the standards for black teachers were higher than for white teachers. That was a discriminatory situation, but it certainly made for some extremely excellent and memorable black teachers (here’s a previous post I wrote about one of them, a junior high school English teacher who was one of my main inspirations for writing).

That state of affairs was discriminatory and wrong. But the supposed corrective – favoring certain minorities – was wrong, too. I submit that there are plenty of very qualified black teachers who would be hired if the standards were merely the same – I knew some of them and know some of them now. Probably, however, some or even many would tend to be – like Sowell and Thomas – more conservative than leftist. And there we have another group which has been discriminated against in the teaching field in recent years: the right.

Arday wasn’t just a DEI hire. He was a DEI hire with a story that was preposterous on its face. And yet the desire to hire him – and broadcast his wonderful story not just of race but of overcoming profound autism – was apparently too great to resist and too good to fact-check. One of his claims is that he didn’t speak until he was eleven or read and write till eighteen, and yet he became a brilliant professor. Just now I did an experiment; I asked Google “is there a documented case of someone autistic who didn’t speak until the age of eleven but later spoke well and fluently?” The answer from Google AI was this:

Yes, Jason Arday, a professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, was diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay as a toddler and did not speak until age eleven. He later acquired fluent speech, learned to read and write at eighteen, and went on to earn a PhD.

But the only authority who has said this about Arday was Arday himself; I have been unable to find a single independent confirmation of it, either from a doctor or a relative of his. There are tons of articles referring to his diagnosis and story of language acquisition, but it appears that the only source is Arday. And although it’s not unusual for children with autism to gain speech much later than average, I can find no other case of a non-verbal autistic child beginning to speak as late as eleven; it tends more often to be some time between four and eight.

To have challenged Arday would not only have raised cries of “racism,” but cries of discrimination against the autistic as well. Some people may have originally kept silent out of fears of accusations of racism being leveled against them, but my guess is that a larger number simply wanted to believe in his fabulous story.

[NOTE: Here’s a summary of some of Arday’s apparent fabrications.]