Jason Arday’s Story Refracts Ugliest Aspects of Culture Wars

I can’t stop thinking about Jason Arday. 

He is the British-Ghanaian professor at Cambridge University who was credibly accused of plagiarizing academic work and embellishing his life story in a storm of controversy in the past month, countered by accusations of racism that fell flat and ended suddenly with his resignation from the university in early August and his death by suicide a week after that. 

It’s a tragedy, a nauseating one, drawn in the red ink of our hyper-charged identity politics. 

Arday was not simply an apparent fabulist or fraud. He was an attention-seeking comer lacking the credentials for the top of academia where he was perched, supported by a university too eager to embrace a diverse candidate. When appointed at age 37, Arday was the youngest Black professor at Cambridge in its 800 year history. He died at 41. 

The New York Times pointed out on Saturday that Cambridge was mostly to blame for this travesty. 

“If, in hindsight, elements of Dr. Arday’s story seemed too good to be true, Cambridge ignored repeated warning signs,” the Times wrote. “In addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work. They declined to investigate plagiarism concerns and accused his critics of a ‘vile campaign’ to discredit him.”

When questions arose from both conservative activists with agendas and journalists without agendas, Cambridge doubled down. Arday even called the police on one journalist who asked questions. As scrutiny continued, Arday’s story spiraled swiftly to a Shakespearean end, driven by the social media mob and the public shame that can simply crush a person.  

This story reflects the ugliest aspects of our culture wars in media. As I keep reading details of Arday’s supposed life journey — how he didn’t speak until age 11 or read until 18, yet earned his doctorate in his early 20s, how he ran 30 marathons in 35 days — I keep thinking about who will take this on as a Hollywood script and how. 

It’s certainly stranger than fiction and too tempting to ignore. I’m sure the right will want to tell the Jason Arday story as a cautionary tale of too-much-woke: Here’s what happens when we put race ahead of merit. A left-wing version might make Arday a victim of the relentless desire to keep minorities down: A white person with autism would never have been hounded to death in this way. 

Even bereft of a political slant, this is an irresistible ripped from the headlines story that may end up on a Dick Wolf show or a Netflix limited series. 

Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper nailed the politics: 

“Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough — which is to say, not white enough.”

But haven’t we learned anything? The Arday story makes me think of all the other stories of fabulists who were enabled by good intentions surrounding race and gender.

That includes the infamous Jayson Blair, the overambitious young New York Times reporter who in 2003 turned out to be using drugs while inventing and plagiarizing news stories. His journalistic malpractice was enabled by a well-meaning top editor Howell Raines. Raines spent 25 years at the Times and stepped down over the Blair scandal. 

It reminds me of the 2014 Rolling Stone “Rape on Campus” feature about the supposed gang rape of a woman named “Jackie” by fraternity bros at a party at the University of Virginia. The Washington Post exposed wild holes in the story, while the writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely admitted she didn’t want to ask the accuser too many questions so as not to retraumatize her. Turned out the fraternity members named did not exist or match records, no party took place as described and police found no credible evidence that the event occurred. The article was retracted, and Erdely and Rolling Stone were both found guilty of defamation with malice. 

And of course there’s Janet Cook, who in 1980 won a Pulitzer Prize at the Washington Post under the tutelage of legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward. Cook wrote about an eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy who turned out to be invented. She resigned, returned her Pulitzer Prize and left journalism forever. 

It turns out that academic and journalistic power brokers who are too eager to be the agents of social justice and racial or gender equality can be tripped up by their good intentions. 

The Arday story isn’t just ugly, it has broad repercussions. It undermines the accomplishments of legitimate scholars of color and makes their journey harder. For those looking for proof that Black people are intellectually inferior, it feeds a toxic, false narrative.  

In The Atlantic, writer Harper (a former professor) offered this searing insight:

“I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further.” 

It is fascinating to go back a few short years, no more than five, and see how our own framing has shifted from Woke 1 to Trump 2. Just a few years ago we were called upon to greet every day as anti-racists, to post our pronouns in our email signatures, to offer land dedications at our regular gatherings. The goal was to make our society better, more equal, more compassionate.

Those days are long gone, replaced by shrinking spaces for people of color, the end of affirmative action and actual punishment by law enforcement for DEI. And in Hollywood we are facing significant backsliding in hiring women, in greenlighting stories of Blacks, Asian Americans and Latinos and in portraying gay and trans characters on screen. 

Arday’s story lands in the middle of all this, with a lesson to be learned. There’s a great satire to be written here, once the tragedy of this personal loss fades away. And as I think about Jason Arday I yearn for the sharp pen of “American Fiction” writer Cord Jefferson and its originator Percival Everett, who saw all the absurdity in the culture wars of publishing and academe, and made it hilarious art. The film told of a Black university professor who adopted the persona of a felon-turned-writer, to the delight of his publisher. The Jason Arday story, when it is told, deserves our deepest reflection.