The Truths That Failed Jason Arday

Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead.

Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.

He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30.

He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor.

He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days.

Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education.

He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster.

It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.

Last month, Nathan Cofnas—a former Cambridge researcher who may politely be described as a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ, and who may impolitely be described as a professional racist—published in his newsletter what appeared to be significant evidence of Arday’s plagiarism.

This month, as it became apparent that much of the Arday legend was most likely just that, the academic became an object of international obsession, especially in British media and on X.

He resigned from Cambridge last week, though this did not stem the flood of attention.

The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face.

The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness.

I find the whole pageantry grotesque.