Jason Arday, leftist martyr
The left says the right is to blame for Arday’s death. But exposing the truth doesn’t kill someone. The left that rewarded his lies set him up for exposure, and if he killed himself (it’s not official, but it’s fairly clear that he almost certainly did), then it’s the tragic outcome of that plus his own actions.
Whatever else can be said about the “Jason Arday Affair,” he was not the victim. Perhaps you can say he was the casualty, first, of his own mendacity and race-fired megalomania and second, of an educational establishment that, marinated in the anti-white, self-flagellating racial animosities of the moment, colluded in the construction of Arday’s fantastical, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately self-destructive fantasies.
And Kurt Schlichter is harsh but correct here:
Of course, the entirely predictable response of the institutional left to [Arday’s] cowardly and apparent self-deletion has been to insist, loudly and with quivering outrage, that his death is our fault. You see, we normal people pointed out that he lied about his background, his achievements, his credentials, and his work. The fact that we did what a functioning institution should’ve done itself outraged his boosters, so these moral illiterates now invert the moral calculus to keep the exposure of academic fraud from happening again. Arday lied pathologically and endlessly, enabled by a ridiculously solicitous academia, then likely killed himself when his lies were exposed. …
But let’s be serious about these condescending leftists. They knew Arday was a phony. They also knew he was useful. His existence supported their narrative, so that irritating objective truth thing could be dispensed with. But he was never their peer; he was their pet.
Yes, they treated him as a pampered and indulged pet, which is both insulting and cruel. In the end, it was very cruel indeed.
But I wonder how much they actually knew, at least at the start when they first hired him. He checked all the DEI boxes and then some, and scholarship isn’t what it used to be (and perhaps never was, in the field of education). I think they wanted so much to believe that they followed a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and never checked a thing. When the first doubts were raised, they then went into protective mode. At some point they definitely knew the truth, at least most of them did. But denial is a very powerful thing. People can fool themselves, and that makes them even bigger fools.
Here’s a recent tweet from Nathan Cofnas (I featured an interview with him in this post; he’s the professor who said Arday plagiarized his PhD thesis):
There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.
1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything. https://t.co/V8Y0xzrRYG
— Nathan Cofnas (@nathancofnas) August 17, 2026
For those without X, it says:
There is an anti-Cofnas hate rally in Trafalgar Square with ~15,000 attendees. If I were in London there is a real possibility that I would be murdered.
1000s of academics & journalists knew the truth about Jason Arday for more than a year. Now you know why no one said anything.
Cofnas is asserting that tons of people knew for at least a year. That probably is true. I don’t think most of them knew for the first year or two, but that was through willful blindness. I also think Cofnas is correct that many people were afraid to speak up, for fear of getting the sort of vicious reaction he’s getting. Others wouldn’t speak up because they felt it would hurt the DEI cause to which they were wedded. Some didn’t speak up because they felt not only would it be cause for accusations of racism against them, but because they also might lose their positions.
To.the Left it does not matter.
Ixnay on the Arday. Diversity is an umbrella incorporation of class-disordered ideologies. DEIsm is a policy of Diversity. That said, diversity of individuals, minority of one. #HateLovesAbortion
To the left (e.g. Dezis), all’s fair in lust and abortion. Throw another fetus on the fire, it’s over… maybe, baby.
Do not forget whom they’ve destroyed to make Arday what he was.
They “actually knew” a great deal, most especially when they hired him. This is coordinated institutional capture and unethical malfeasance of the highest order. A multi-decade multinational project to destroy merit and competence in Western institutions and replace it with incompetents and unmeritorious sinecures based on zero acumen.
Arday and Gay are tips of an iceberg. The rot is deep.
They knew about Arday. They always know, or they choose to not find out. This kind of stuff is usually pretty obvious.
Nothing matters but the narrative. Absolutely nothing.
Mistah Schwab (and his merrye minions in politics, business/finance and academia) MUST destroy the West so as to make the world more like the (Communist) Middle Kingdom.
There’s only ONE MAN who stands between him and his/their goal…(though he does have some significant help).
China, HO!
The problem we face is the inversion of values among the professional managerial class, where no particular onus falls on lying.
Arday’s death is tragic, in the classical sense. His end was based on what he had done (although others have been exposed as liars and managed to find a way to continue and even thrive). The only “racism” at blame is that of the academics whose standards were non-existent, enabling Arday’s fantasy rise.
Cofnas is right. The public rage and misplaced blame are part of why so many people who knew Arday was fake didn’t say anything.
My experience as a programmer in Silicon Valley is that smart guys are always sniffing out how smart the other guys are. (Gals, too.) Of course, they are rarely so impolitic as to broadcast their assessments publicly.
I can’t believe it’s any different at Cambridge. Yeah, they knew.
scholarship isn’t what it used to be (and perhaps never was, in the field of education).
________
Never was. At least, when I went to college – 1970s – Ed always got the dumbest students. I realize that nowadays there are new “studies” departments we didn’t have back then, which are about as bad.
Eeyore, your statement is Dumb. You are calling all Teachers dumb. Were all of your Teachers dumb? Don’t tell me you learned on your own either.
My Wife was 4.0 Undergrad and Grad School, in History when History was really being taught. She taught HS and JRH for 30 years.
I am curious as to how he got his undergrad degree and Masters?
Of course not all teachers are dumb. However: In recent decades, teachers have to have degrees from education departments rather than from actual fields of study with a few extra classes in child development and a semester of student teaching. It is simply true that the average ability level of students in the education department is less impressive than that of STEM students, for example. This doesn’t mean that there are NO capable teachers coming out of these schools, just that the average level has declined dramatically.
(The scene opens in a brightly lit room, filled with oak furnishings, with stained glass windows containing Latin phrases visible in the background. Behind an imposing desk sits a woman “of a certain age,” with reading glasses perched at the end of her nose while she looks intently over them at the rather younger black man seated across from her. Her gaze is intent, yet coquettish and as she speaks in a breathy tone, her bosom heaves visibly beneath her silk blouse, which is unbuttoned to exhibit a bit of cleavage peeking out, like the top of a soufle ready to come out of the oven.)
Woman: “Hello, Professor Arday! I’m absolutely thrilled to have the opportunity to interview you for the professorship here at the University. Let’s review your qualifications, shall we?”
Black Man: “I’m black.”
Woman (panting enthusiastically): “You’re hired!”
So much absolute lying out there.
The litmus test would appear the (carefully created, nurtured and developed) NARRATIVE—that Holy of Holies—which must be protected and defended at ALL costs.
If the Truth runs counter to the Narrative then the Truth is the enemy and must be attacked viciously and relentlessly—OR it must be ignored.
Ditto with Reality.
Ditto with science.
Ditto with culture.
Ditto with history.
Etc. ad nauseum ad infinitum.
And should the Narrative prove faulty or ultimately indefensible, then it must be silently, stealthily discarded—and FORGOTTEN—and replaced by a new, revised Narrative.
Peak dishonesty.
Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia…
The days of most female college grads being channeled into nursing and teaching are over. My 9th grade math teacher, although woefully inept at classroom management, was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from a Big 10 school. The school’s Latin teacher had an Ivy League Ph.D. (1930s). She had written the textbooks her students used. At the time, it was difficult for women to get college teaching positions. Today, bright women have many more options beyond teaching or nursing. As a result, the intellectual level of schoolteachers is lower than it was several generations ago.
Nonetheless, schoolteachers are not as dumb as you believe.ETS: Improving Teacher Quality in a Changing Policy Landscape Improvements in the Teaching Pool informs us that beginning teachers who passed the Praxis tests for teacher certification had average SAT scores of 521-Math and 531-Verbal. (Figure 15 on page 20 and Figure 13 on page 18)
This compares with average SATs for college graduates of 543-Verbal and 542-Math. Below average, but not by a lot.
Beginning teachers certified Elementary Ed, Special Ed, and Phys Ed teachers have average SAT scores well below the average SAT scores for college graduates.
Beginning teachers certified for high school academic subjects score above average on the SAT section that best pertains to their certification.
I’d estimate Elementary Ed certifications as 510-Verbal and 505- Math
Phys Ed scores are way low, but no one ever expected gym teachers to be bright.
However, when it comes to evaluating Ed School doctorates, your point is well taken, and then some. A doctoral dissertation is supposed to be equivalent of the student’s first piece of published research. I taught school for several years, and had the opportunity to look at four Ed School doctorates that fellow teachers, my supervising principal and a school superintendent wrote. Only one had replicable, statistically valid research: comparing testing results for schools w 60 minute classes versus 90 minute classes (no statistically significant difference). The other doctorates were what I would call stories.
Steve,
Lololololololo!
Cannon fodder
Narcissistic collapse, I’ve heard it called. By a woman who was carefully warned about how narcissists can kill themselves or their opponents in it. Her therapist did — she was divorcing a narcissist.
Sasha Stone’s trying to warn us but getting a bit pessimistic.
(Still, in spite of everything, ya’ gotta believe…)
“Woke 1.0 Canceled America. Woke 2.0 Will Destroy It.
“Confessions of a former cult member.”—
https://www.sashastone.com/p/woke-10-canceled-america-woke-20
H\T Powerline blog.
Cambridge is doubling down in ways that might be expected.
Not sure it deserves any benefit of the doubt….
“Cambridge University-linked project erases Israel”—
https://archive.ph/rVodG
H/T Blazingcatfur blog.
OTOH, if the UK has decided that its most pressing moral imperative is to circle the drain, why should its universities be any different?
File under: Thin edge of the wedge.
From what I’ve seen and read of videos [*not* sound bites but more extended talking] and quotes [which I do believe to be accurate, again, not sound bite length discourse],
I’ll put many-to-most teachers’ intellects up against Ketanji Brown Jackson’s any time.
@ Neo > ” I also think Cofnas is correct that many people were afraid to speak up, for fear of getting the sort of vicious reaction he’s getting. Others wouldn’t speak up because they felt it would hurt the DEI cause to which they were wedded. Some didn’t speak up because they felt not only would it be cause for accusations of racism against them, but because they also might lose their positions.”
I point out, redundantly here, that the people shouting “No Kings” and “Trump is Hitler” have suffered NONE of these results.
Therefore, we have no king, and Trump is not Hitler.
QED
Please note that psychology, sociology, history, and political science are academic subjects, some of whose practitioners might make education an object of research. Understanding how people learn is most germane to the tests-and-measurements wing of psychology. ‘Education’ itself is not a social research discipline.
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Teacher training is properly concerned with understanding and implementing modes of imparting knowledge. Elementary education is properly concerned with imparting basic skills and, as an addendum, a modicum of civic knowledge. If you wish to screen people for an elementary teacher training program, you might just administer an examination to test their reading comprehension, their mastery of English grammar and penmanship, and their understanding of the fundamentals of American history, geography, and civics. Subject knowledge is a necessary antecedent for secondary education of various sorts and for the ancillary disciplines (music, arts-and-crafts, athletics).
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One thing we might do is shut down schools of education and replace them with revived normal schools. All those admitted to normal schools would have to pass a screening examination of the sort described. The general elementary certificate might consist of a modest array of methods courses followed by an internship for the balance of the first year; the second year would consist of a stipended apprenticeship. During your internship and apprenticeship, you’d be under the supervision of a state-certified master teacher on site and of a faculty adviser at the normal school. A special ed certificate might require a longer array of methods courses and perhaps a longer apprenticeship.
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Other sorts of certificates might course work antecedent to enrolling in the normal school, say, 42 credits (D credits excluded) of given subjects. For aspirant academic secondary faculty, the subject list might include any of a dozen foreign languages, English, comparative literature, mathematics, computer science, history, geography, biology, physics, chemistry, or geology. For aspirant vocational faculty, it might consist of 42 credits at a technical college in one of 20-odd trades or the completion of a certified apprenticeship. For the ancillary subjects, perhaps 42 credits in music or studio art or exercise regimens followed by (a) a blind audition, (b) a blind portfolio assessment, or (c) physical fitness tests.
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The faculty at the normal school might consist of a mix of psychologists from various subdisciplines and experienced elementary and secondary teachers. Some might have joint appointments on the arts and sciences faculty.
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You have other sorts of trades represented in the school building: nursing, IT, business disciplines, nutrition &c. These have their own training programs. Your line administrators (principals, deans) and school counselors might in addition to their time in normal school have post baccalaureate training in psychology and / or public administration.
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NB, the foregoing can be accomplished by tertiary institutions devoted to teaching – i.e. state colleges and the like. There is no need to set up this apparatus in research universities. Cambridge can get along just fine without a ‘faculty of education’, and the one they have has demonstrated it’s a forty pound weight hung on the institution’s neck. (And, one suspects, useless for the task of trainng teachrs).
When I was in college the teacher education majors were notorious for being the dumbest kids on campus. Alas, women liked to sign up for that, so they always had the best-looking coeds. The college of engineering didn’t have a single coed for years until the civil engineers enrolled a young lady. We were joking that she obviously got lost and went into the civil engineering building to ask for directions, and they wouldn’t let her leave until she signed up to become a civil engineer.
At Insty, Ed Driscoll has posted over and over again on le affaire d’Arday, to the point where some commenters are complaining. Just let it go, they plead … but I think that we can’t – not if we care anything about genuine scholarship, the degradation of most of our institutions of higher education, and the awful hollowing-out that DEI has had on them. These issues all came together in the person of Jason Arday. A serial plagiarist, liar and a fake – but promoted higher and higher by people in higher ed who wanted to believe or were intimidated into going along with it. Kids considering college these days – and their parents who may have to pay for it all – must be asking themselves what is the actual value of such education in the long run: classes taught by fake professors, made-up subjects, all for an essentially meaningless piece of paper and the hollow status of having gone to college.
I guess the real value is that it employs the fake professors, but that’s about it. Cambridge and our own Ivies may eventually live down the embarrassment of having fallen for the siren song of DEI, because of their storied reputation as a finishing school for the offspring of the privileged and well-connected… but the rest of us have to wonder if that piece of paper is really worth it when it comes to making a living.
Sgt. Mom:
Yes, there’s a bunch of people who are bored with the story. But to me, the story is incredibly important because it brings together so many things that have gone so wrong in our society and which in some ways are even worse in Britain. Now we seem to have reached the George Floyd stage – not that Arday is like Floyd, but I mean that he is being raised to glorious martyr status:
to the point where some commenters are complaining.
==
There are partisan Democrats who hang around Instapundit threads. That aside, Instapundit posts are one sentence long, so the complaint would be facially invalid even if the complainers weren’t there to annoy the other participants.
People who make an icon of Floyd and Arday are telling you how they feel about themselves in relation to the society in which they live. Their image of society bears little relation to the actual matrix they inhabit.
Very much related—the Frankfurt School and its sleight-of-hand progeny:
“The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.”—
https://instapundit.com/817618/
Ray
When I was in college the teacher education majors were notorious for being the dumbest kids on campus.
Any reaction to my well-documented post @ 7:34 p.m.?
The college of engineering didn’t have a single coed for years until the civil engineers enrolled a young lady.
My sister will attend her high school class’s 60th year reunion this year. She is a retired ChemEng. She made contact with a high school girl friend after many years, and found out that her friend had gotten a degree in EE.
In my ChemEng cohort of about 25, four were female. One was by far the top student. She could do her Transfer Ops homework in class–which took most of us several hours working together.
I have a suspicion that the reason you find education majors have a poor reputation is.
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(1) the course content in actual programs is commonly rubbish, and it selects for people who cannot recognize rubbish. The more intelligent students are the more likely to get disgusted and change their major. (Thos. Sowell has long maintained that teacher training courses diminish the quality of the applicant pool in teaching).
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(2) Elementary school teaching is demanding in its way. A satisfactory teacher can maintain order is well-practiced at explaining things. The capacity to explain things is correlated with intellect, but you can get by with more modest quanta than you can in other occupations.
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(3) However, the screens which form the applicant pool are heavy on credentials and have been for a long time. It was a century ago that baccalaureate degrees replaced normal school certificates as the modal credential for aspirant school teachers. There’s a higher propensity to seek out formal training to be found in baccalaureate granting institutions than there is with occupations with similar intellectual demands.
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The bad reputation of education majors can be ameliorated by (1) maintaining formal screening examinations to enter training programs and (2) eliminating inane courses. Instead, have a standard menu for each type of certificate, all oriented toward exposure to various sorts of instructional method.
Re: The Empire Strikes Back
Today when I ask YouTube for videos related to Arday, pro-Arday links show up 3-4x as often as con-Arday.
A recent tweet of John Cleese sums up well racism vs Islamism:
_______________________________
The uneducated call me a racist
I am not a racist
I am a culturalist
I believe that some cultures are better than others
I prefer cultures that do not advocate stoning, pederasty, wife beating, female genital mutilation and beheading opponents
Call me old-fashioned…
John Cleese (@JohnCleese), July 28, 2026
@Gringo.
We joked about the teacher education majors and would ask if they were functional or just decorative. I’m retired now but have worked with a dozen female engineers and interestingly enough have only worked with two black engineers. We used to joke about the HR department hunting for the mythical black engineer. They would hire you as a minority if you had a dark suntan.
@ Ray > “We used to joke about the HR department hunting for the mythical black engineer.”
Consider the cognitive dissonance of the students themselves, created by the Wokerati insisting that colleges must admit minority students despite any evidence of academic qualifications in potential or achievement, while simultaneously decrying all of the personal habits and behaviors that are necessary for successfully learning anything while in college, or in professional life or careers of any kind (thank you Smithsonian for your so-helpful chart a few years ago).
There should be NO surprise that so few minority students even graduate in the substantive fields, or that the ones who do are still inadequately trained.
@ Unwillin Bar-kiss > “Do not forget whom they’ve destroyed to make Arday what he was.”
The short-short story by Steve (Retired/recovering lawyer) very nearly summarizes the speculations by John Carter of Barsoom (linked by Unwillin Bar-kiss) on why Arday was hired at Cambridge rather than some other young black academic.
John Carter’s post primarily focused on a facet of the situation that I have been looking for around the news-rooms and found lacking: the fate all of the white academics who suffered much more than Arday from the harassment and venom directed against them, including at least two suicides.
Thus, it speaks to the concerns raised by Sgt. Mom and Neo about the situation of academia in general.
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-self-cancellation-of-jason-arday
His list starts with James Watson, of the DNA-discovery-fame, and includes a number of examples that I recognized from prior news reports, and some I did not.
There were a lot, and all of them were persecuted by the Left (aka the Arday hagiographers) with much more venom for their “offenses” (none of which involved their professional achievements).
The Arday Affair could be the tipping point to motivate a reversal of the decline.
It probably won’t.
George Orwell:
“”The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” – Notes on Nationalism, (1945)”