Suppose you were a black professor at a prestigious university, someone of genuine intellectual distinction who earned every inch of your career through talent and relentless work. Yet you can’t quite shake the feeling – is it paranoia? – that some students, peers and members of the public think you obtained your position, at least in part, because of the colour of your skin rather than the breadth of your knowledge and the power of your intellect.
That is the price serious scholars now pay for the idiocy of identity politics. Universities that put symbolism before substance in an act of self-congratulation cast suspicion on the achievements of those who earned their positions entirely on merit, regardless of colour or background.
Newton, Hawking, Wittgenstein, Arday. One of these names does not belong. All four became professors at Cambridge; three of them expanded the boundaries of human knowledge, while the fourth expanded mainly the boundaries of his own biography.
Arday, after all, is an alleged plagiarist1, elite marathon runner and – for all we know – astronaut and time traveller. We are still discovering the full extent of the Cambridge professor’s fantastical claims, and each discovery adds another element to a catalogue of mendacity, fabrication and vanity. The latest is perhaps the most disturbing: using law enforcement to protect his reputation.
We learned this week that the UK’s Metropolitan Police investigated a journalist for doing his job, which in this instance was finding out whether Arday was the man he claimed to be. Jack Grove of Times Higher Education assembled the case that Arday plagiarised his PhD, finding numerous passages lifted from another student’s thesis, including the typos.
When Grove offered him the customary right of reply, Arday did what anyone would do under such circumstances: employ an expensive defamation firm to insinuate that the investigation might be “racially motivated”. The story was buried for the best part of a year. Later, Grove learned he’d been investigated by the police for “harassing” a man he’d never phoned or gone anywhere near. This is Britain, after all. That’s how we do things now.
This is the same Arday who told journalist Krishnan Guru-Murthy he wanted the world to “spin on an axis of love”, who dreamed of taking “a thread and a needle” to “interweave love into our society”. The needle, it turns out, was the Metropolitan Police.
Arday, we now know, is a man of many talents. He ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last 15 on a fractured leg. He ran 600 miles in six days, a feat that would place him among the greatest endurance athletes alive. He was part of Seven Up, the documentary that has followed the same Britons since 1964 – an impressive feat considering the programme began two decades before he was born. And while all this was going on, he single-handedly raised five and a half million pounds for charity2.
We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.
Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”
It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.
Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining… well, you figure it out.
“As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.”
You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person's sentences at least making the effort to mean something.
The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.
The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?
They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.
Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.
The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.
Meanwhile, the ones who pay most are serious black and brown academics, who must clear a new hurdle placed in their path by those claiming to help them: the suspicion that their achievements owe something to their immutable characteristics rather than their intellectual merits.
The rest of us pay too – exhausted after decades of this nonsense, worn not quite into submission but into cynicism, and sickened by an intellectual class that in a better society would illuminate reality rather than mock it.
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Liverpool John Moores, which awarded the PhD, investigated and says it still stands. Cambridge says he's cleared.
The sum was raised over two decades by a collective of around 100 people.
Thanks for reading, and special thanks as ever to paid supporters of the Gadfly. I'm going to take a short summer break from the madness and lose myself in a few books. Some of that reading will doubtless find its way into my next essay in a couple of weeks from now.
"Suppose you were a black professor at a prestigious university, someone of genuine intellectual distinction who earned every inch of your career through talent and relentless work. Yet you can’t quite shake the feeling – is it paranoia? – that some students, peers and members of the public think you obtained your position, at least in part, because of the colour of your skin rather than the breadth of your knowledge and the power of your intellect."
This is indeed one of the consequences of identity politics. I have been experiencing it first-hand, as a woman in STEM. I am proud of my research accomplishments, but if I ask myself "Anna, would you get the same bag of accolades is you were a man" -- the answer is "no." This poisons my accomplishments.
When we see a slew of unqualified women elevated by the DEI initiatives -- this does not provide an inspiration to younger generation -- instead it taints the accomplishments of qualified women and reinforces the stereotypes that women cannot advance without social engineering.
This is what's on everyone's mind when they see an accomplished female in science -- that she got there, at least in part, by means of social engineering. This is the price of DEI.