Jason Arday/Image: St Mary’s University
A few years ago, at the height of the RRR craze, Wimbledon put up a poster showing Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz in the now-infamous Naatu Naatu pose. The innocuous post left a rather odd impression because SS Rajamouli’s magnum opus is a mockery of everything British. The Brits can’t dance, they can’t fight, they are comically evil and they can’t even handle a guy shooting arrows at them. The movie literally climaxes with the EBITDA-obsessed Governor Scott’s blood literally splattered on the Crown.If one were a Britisher, one would have been rather dismayed that a very British event that venerates Rudyard Kipling would use a meme from a movie that flagellates and mocks Britain’s greatest achievement: colonialism. Or perhaps it is the nature of modern British culture, where the apple has fallen so far from Kipling-Forsyth-Le Carré Albion nostalgia that it has become too apologetic about its past, when the nation’s great spirit was represented by scurrilous rogues who would sail the Seven Seas to sell opium. Modern Britain is the antithesis of the can-do hustle culture and largely consists of apologising for its past and giving too much leeway to those its ancestors ostensibly oppressed. It worships at the altar of DEI (they call it EDI) and puts multicultural harmony above all things.White kid stabbed by a Sikh man after a dispute? Believe the Sikh man who stabbed him and accused the white kid of racism, even as the kid channels George Floyd and says, “I can’t breathe” before dying of the stab wound.Young girls being groomed by Pakistani grooming gangs? Brush it under the rug, or else people could deem us racist.Muslim woman saying she is being hounded by relatives? Treat her account as fantasy until she is murdered by said relatives.Teacher shows a Charlie Hebdo cartoon in class? Suspend the teacher.JK Rowling says sex is real? Hound her because chromosomes don’t decide sex, a DEI committee does.But even by modern Britain’s standards of culturally appropriating Gandhian ahimsa and turning the other cheek when it comes to those ostensibly oppressed in the past, Professor Jason Arday’s tenure as “Cambridge’s youngest black professor” belies belief.For those who haven’t followed the case here’s a short recap.Professor Jason Arday, Cambridge’s youngest black professor, recently resigned amid accusations of plagiarism and a host of other claims. In his resignation letter, he complained about the “unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack” while saying his appointment represented “talent, perseverance and hope” triumphing over adversity. It was the perfect swansong after a life of bull.
Empire’s Guilt
Arday’s resignation is not just an indictment of the British education system or the hallowed halls of Cambridge, but of British society as a whole, including the Fourth Estate, which appears to have suspended disbelief and fact-checking filters when dealing with him.Each of Arday’s claims are more ridiculous than the previous one.He claimed he was non-verbal until 11 and could not read or write until 18. Despite that, he became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, feted by interviewers on both sides of the Pond without so much as a fact-check. His story was promoted by BBC Breakfast, ITV’s This Morning, Channel 4 News, CBS News and ABC’s Good Morning America. WNYC interviewed him, BBC Radio 4’s Today made him a guest editor and Radio 4 later gave him a five-part series, Beyond Lonely. All of them breathlessly promoted the illiterate boy who conquered Cambridge despite being the son of immigrants.He appeared on numerous interviews that did little to challenge his claims even if they were temporally impossible. Like the fact that he claimed to have appeared in a documentary called Seven Up!, a series that began in 1964 while Arday was born in 1985. He claimed a recurring brain tumour was removed two weeks before his PhD and that he suffered a stroke afterwards.He claimed to have raised millions by running 30 marathons in 35 days and 600 miles in six days, some of them with a fractured fibula and a leg swollen to twice its normal size. When questioned, the six days became 12, while the £5 million he supposedly raised became the work of a fundraising syndicate whose members he could not identify because of non-disclosure agreements. The surviving JustGiving page for the 30-marathon feat records him raising £6,285, not millions.The fantasia soon entered Rowling territory if Rowling wrote oppression fantasy about masked intruders, mutilated pig heads, corrosive substances and other threats none of which could be backed by any physical evidence beyond the testimonies of close family members. There were no photos, no CCTV footage, no colleagues who saw any of these things claimed, and the Metropolitan Police found that the pig’s head claim was “categorically” incorrect.He said he had worked overseas for WaterAid. WaterAid pointed out it didn’t send volunteers overseas. Biographies claimed he had held visiting positions at important universities; they had no record of those appointments. His academic work had similar holes, claims that had been circulating in British academia for a while. More than 100 passages in his PhD were from another student’s thesis. A Times review found one study that had a sample of 78% female and 32% male.When finally challenged after years of gravy-train chicanery, Arday told The Guardian: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.” He lamented to The Times that it was “just academia”, that he “didn’t murder anybody”, and that positioning him as some kind of “liar and fantasist” was totally unacceptable.And even that is not the most scandalous part.Scotland Yard spent four months investigating Jack Grove, a Times Higher Education journalist who approached Arday with questions about his record. Grove says he sent three polite emails and offered Arday a formal right of reply. The Met closed the case without action but told Grove not to contact Arday again because the questions were affecting the “professor’s mental health”.
As James Hanson wrote in The Spectator: “Let’s be really clear about what this means. The UK’s biggest police force attempted to shut down a journalistic investigation, apparently because the man at the centre of it played the race card.”And yet the doyens of British academia stuck their necks out even without a basic check.Cambridge employed and marketed Arday. Hilary Cremin called him a “world-class scholar”, while the university later described him as the victim of a “vile campaign”.The Good Law Project organised a solidarity letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”. Signatories included the who’s who of academia and politics including Labour MPs.Simon and Schuster was prepared to publish is memoir tracking his journey from “illiteracy to Cambridge”.Perhaps all the powers-that-be doubled down because the initial claims came from Nathan Cofnas who was dismissed from Cambridge after he claimed that in a true meritocracy “black people would disappear from all high-profile positions outside sports and entertainment”. The claims have been manna from haven for the vocal Global Right that has found in the Arday case every single claim they have ever made about DEI in academia.Arday isn’t the first Trojan Horse in the field of sociology or cultural affairs. As far back as 1996, Alan Sokal showed how flimsy the gates of academia were when he published an article in Social Text titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity to prove that an article would be published if it flattered the “editors’ ideological preconceptions” and has been called by many as a death knell of post-modernism.The problem isn’t the knave’s chicanery but how easy the con was in post-modern Britain ridden with imperial guilt that appears to have converted into institutional theatre. All the estates that derived prestige from the Empire now derive it by showcasing their distance from what it stood for. And while the old one was held together by imagined Albion glory, the new one worships at the altar of DEI where the gravest sin – academic, moral, or otherwise – is simply admitting DEI or multiculturalism isn’t great or questioning those who are seen as the epitome of those values.Cambridge championed Arday because his presence was an argument against its historic racial inequities. His dramatic life story was deigned to have been more important than his scholarly worth. The claims were repeated ad nauseam by everyone: broadcasters, politicians, academics. Anyone who challenged them was deemed a racist. It’s a sad state of affairs for a country that was known for its eminent thinkers, the Britain of Hume, Mill, Orwell, Russell and Popper now happily worship at the altar of chicanery and mediocrity to fight some imaginary ghost and fete those it sees as new symbols of hope.Post-BLM, Arday became the perfect mascot of institutional absolution: living proof that Cambridge had changed, and therefore a man whose mythology could not be questioned without questioning the institution that promoted it. The old British establishment manufactured heroes to justify conquest; the new one manufactures saints to advertise repentance. In both cases, the first rule remains the same: do not look too closely. Go to Source
