“O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” Huzzah! I’m back. Like a Phoenix rising over Arizona. Like Prometheus released from his cruel shackles I am back again!
Now what to discuss? Of course, Jason Arday!
I mean this story is practically unbelievable. Arday was the poster boy for DEI overreach. Someone who was illiterate until he was eighteen was given a doctorate and then made the youngest black professor at Cambridge University with a dissertation that was plagiarized from the work of another black doctoral candidate. And then there are the outrageous lies on his resume and about his private life including the statement that he ran 30 marathon races in 35 days with six of them on a broken leg. He claimed to be a college instructor in Ohio at a college that had no knowledge of him at all. He even claims to have had brain cancer without anyone else having ever heard of it. And after being exposed as a fraud he has now, apparently committed suicide.
Presently, the Left is attempting to frame the people that uncovered his various frauds as his murderers. A few have started describing his death as a “lynching.” Well, I have an alternative opinion. My underlying thesis is that DEI as it is currently perpetrated in academia is responsible for Arday getting into the terrible mess he suicided over. If his thesis advisor had checked his work against the other published works in his field they would have discovered that he was a plagiarist. In fact if they had bothered to check his references they would have known that several of them were fake. And based on the comments by several of his students who have come forward, Arday was absurdly unqualified to teach in his discipline and should have been close to being discharged by the university already. The fact that the department that gave him his doctorate degree didn’t acknowledge how woefully unqualified he was to teach at Cambridge proves that he was being hired as a DEI figurehead to show Cambridge’s commitment to social justice even at the cost of depriving his students of a decent education in that subject matter. So DEI at Cambridge is responsible for Arday’s mess and is therefore the root cause for his death.
Now, Arday is only one of several black academicians recently exposed for plagiarism and other fraudulent practices. This recent trend seems to have as its source a willingness of honest academicians to admit that “the emperor has no clothes.” Colleagues who have watched as universities rewarded black academicians for substandard work now see that it is safe to speak up. And now that they have, the truth has penetrated into the open and more and more cases will surface.
Jason Arday had a wife and two children. His death is a catastrophe for them. I take no pleasure in it. But if his wife is looking to start a lawsuit then Cambridge University is the logical defendant to sue. They should be punished for allowing plagiarism and fraud to be their public policy.