“”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)”

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

In every picture of Arday that I’ve seen he wears an open, beatific expression. His gentle gaze seems to say “I forgive you for your racism … I know you can’t help it … I know you regret it … Here, take my hand … it will all be okay.” He doesn’t actually have to say anything. He just has to look like that, radiating sincerity and acceptance, and that gaze hits that particular species of sexually frustrated middle-aged white woman who dominates every departmental hiring committee like a 2×4 right between their SSRIeyes. It stuns them into a sort of a jellied bliss. Arday possessed a kind of basilisk stare of friendliness. Contrast that with the usual run of professional black people, who affect a haughty, aggressive, Black Panthers sort of countenance, and you can see why AWFLs would flock to him like thirsty goats chasing the mirage of an oasis in the unsheltered noonday sunshine of the Sahara. Arday hypnotized his way into the faculty lounge the same way Rasputin stared his way into the Czar’s court.
…

So let’s talk about the game, and the casualties that it’s already racked up.

Until a few days ago Arday was one of the game’s winners, and the outraged howls from the other winners have to be understood in this context, because if Arday can be brought low so quickly… (sic)

There have been many losers to this game.
…
Some of those stories involve suicide. Professor Mike Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, shot himself after getting pressured to step down over offensive tweets. Richard Bilkszto, a former principle with the Toronto District School Board, killed himself after getting fired for ‘bullying’ an anti-racism trainer (i.e. he politely pushed back on some of the more incendiary claims). Remember the soul-searching from the left when these men killed themselves after getting their names dragged through the mud in public, their livelihoods destroyed, their careers permanently ruined? The thoughtful op-eds and emotive think pieces asking “Did we go too far?” Of course you don’t. The most we’ve gotten is AOC cackling that “Woke 1 was craaaazy.” Though of course she doesn’t say why it was crazy, or how Woke 2 will differ. I suspect the sequel will feature the same old story arc with the same giant plot holes, with worse dialogue and disappointing special effects. Hollywood can’t do anything right these days.

Suicides are, thankfully, the exception. Most people don’t kill themselves when they get cancelled. They just suffer. Examples are too numerous to list but I’ll belabour you about the cranium with them anyhow.

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 common element in all of these cases is cancellation for violation of some woke taboo or other. In some cases it was for repudiation of some aspect of the doctrine of absolute human equality. In others it was for stepping over the invisible and mobile boundaries of the new sexual mores of male purdah inflicted upon society by feminists worked up into a lather over a hallucinatory rape culture1. Many were men who made significant, even immense contributions to the natural sciences, none of which counted for a hill of beans once the lesser mediocrities mobbed up in an outraged mass. They were not cancelled for plagiarism, or for falsifying data, or for lying about their biographies. So far as anyone knows their scholarship was impeccable. It was their loose tongues and, on occasion, wandering hands that got them in trouble.

Notably, these were all established, mostly tenured professors – men who had already made their careers. The woke mob went after them specifically to cultivate a climate of terror within academia. If even Nobel laureates could be brought low for speaking out of turn, then everyone else had best be exceptionally cautious about what they said, even in private. The result of this was to remove any possibility of internal resistance to DEI imperatives.

It did not matter how crazy the diversitarians became. No matter how unhinged their claims, regardless of how facially absurd or brutishly dishonest they became, no one could speak against them, because that would be to commit a racism, a sexism, a transphobia, it would be to do a bigotry, to contribute to a hostile work environment, to make the gay race commissars feel unsafe, and even if your comments never drew the unsympathetic compound eye of Social Media Sauron, your colleagues would whisper amonsgst themselves, it would be the kiss of death for your career, and so you shut up and kept your head down.

The Arday Affair could be the tipping point to motivate a reversal of the decline.
It probably won’t.

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.

The uneducated call me a racist

John Cleese (@JohnCleese), July 28, 2026

Today when I ask YouTube for videos related to Arday, pro-Arday links show up 3-4x as often as con-Arday.

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.

“The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.”—
https://instapundit.com/817618/