RANDOM MUSING | Who ‘killed’ Jason Arday? The absurd tragedy of Cambridge’s ‘youngest black professor’ | World News

There is a saying among bibliophiles: Never judge a book by its movie. For true readers, nothing any director dreams up can ever match the cinema playing inside one’s head, to borrow a line from Anurag Kashyap’s greatest villain. Two rare adaptations that arguably hold their own against their source novels are Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.And yet one film that outshone the book that inspired it is 3 Idiots, loosely based on Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, which captures the meat-grinder aesthetics of engineering education. There is a scene that hits a little too close to home when a student decides he has rolled the boulder long enough and commits suicide, unable to deal with the vagaries of engineering life. During his funeral, the film’s prodigal protagonist confronts the authoritarian dean and claims that it wasn’t suicide but “murder” caused by an institution and a society that created unbearable pressure that no post-mortem investigation could ever measure.While a Camus-like forensic dissection of suicide is beyond this piece, that line about institutional pressure came to mind when one learned of Jason Arday’s death, nine days after he resigned from Cambridge, where he had been feted as its “youngest black professor”.Police described his death as unexpected but not suspicious, and a file was being prepared for the coroner. That prevents us from drawing a forensic conclusion about his death. It does not prevent us from examining the role various ideologies, institutions and individuals played in his Icarus-like rise and Icarus-like demise.Who ‘killed’ Jason Arday?Was it the academics at every institution he passed through who hoisted him onto a pedestal so that they could slap themselves on the back for being – to borrow a line from John Lennon – “classless and free”?Was it WENA’s newest Abrahamic faith, “wokeism and DEI”, which turns everything into a meaningless culture war?Was it the press that celebrated an obvious fantasist whose career, built on a series of tottering, mendacious edifices, collapsed tragically once placed under scrutiny?Was it what American race scholar Ibram X. Kendi called a “media lynching”, a right-wing witch hunt whose sole aim was to claim the scalps of black scholars?Or was it, as last week’s Random Musing posited, a case of “Empire’s Guilt”,where the inheritors of a blood-splattered legacy are paralysed by their past, leaving Western systems vulnerable to intersectional fraud undertaken in the name of postcolonial atonement?Perhaps the answer lies somewhere among all of them, given the parts they played in Arday’s elevation and fall.A great deal has been written about Arday’s fabulist claims, and there is little to be gained by repeating each and every one of them beyond wondering whether Occam’s Razor, Hanlon’s Razor or an intersection of both might explain how he reached Cambridge’s highest academic fencepost.Many of his claims could and should have been fact-checked years ago, either by the academic world he inhabited or the media that lovingly shone its spotlight on him. After all, BBC Radio 4 made him a guest editor. This is the same BBC that ostensibly has a specialist Verify team using OSINT, satellite imagery, data analysis and forensic techniques to separate “fact from fake” and “bring clarity to complex issues”. Perhaps it could have verified some of the claims made by its guest editor.Arday claimed that he was non-verbal until 11, could not write until 18 and nevertheless obtained a doctorate. Experts told The New York Times that his “remarkable trajectory from nonverbal teen to PhD” had no precedent in the medical literature.In another era, Jason Arday might have been a happy physical education teacher instead of a dead ex-Cambridge professor. There would have been no failure or indignity in that life. He had studied Physical Education and Education Studies and trained as a PE teacher before entering academia. The tragedy was that being an ordinary teacher was apparently not inspirational enough. Arday had to be beatified, as the media was prone to doing in the post-Black Lives Matter era.

The apotheosis of that miracle was his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a title that would prove disconcertingly prophetic. In it, Arday claimed that his girlfriend completed his university application and wrote his personal statement because he could barely read. By the time he began his master’s degree, he said, his reading ability was comparable to that of his three-year-old daughter. While teaching, he supposedly worked overnight in a supermarket and then as a cleaner, writing his doctoral dissertation during five-hour train journeys between London and Liverpool. Shortly before his viva, he claimed, surgery for a brain tumour was followed by a mini-stroke that erased his short-term memory.The book added coincidences that would make Dickens question his own restraint.Arday said that a teenage beating caused him to develop epilepsy, that he asked a judge to spare his attackers from prison and that two of them later appeared in one of his university classes, having transformed their lives because of his mercy. One supposedly made Arday an offer he couldn’t refuse and asked him to become his child’s godfather. The ages of these individuals vacillated between the proposal and the published text.More revealing than any individual claim was how the story changed.The proposal circulated to publishers reportedly described a teenage car accident, months in a coma with locked-in syndrome, doctors advising his parents to withdraw life support and a year spent relearning how to walk and speak. None of this appeared in the published memoir. The proposal mentioned testicular cancer, whereas the finished book described recurring brain tumours. A prophecy supposedly delivered by a Brazilian shaman in 2005 became one offered by a young aid worker in 2006.No one claims that one’s memories are perfect, and when we look back, details often change and emerge. But all non-fiction publishers have a duty to verify such claims, particularly when they read as though they were written by ChatGPT after being asked to imagine the perfect victim.A major publisher nevertheless packaged this accumulation of suffering and triumph as an inspirational life story. The memoir did not merely recount the myth that academia and the media had created around Arday; it inflated that myth.And then it all deflated.Much has been written about Arday since the revelations. One that shone through was by a former student who wrote in Unherd that Arday was a terrible teacher who often arrived late, rarely followed the prescribed syllabus, spent hours discussing musicians’ lyrics and was wont to blame everything on “white supremacy”. None of that was surprising, but the author’s conclusion was. She wrote that his elevation reminded her of the tale of the Post Turtle, in which a farmer sees a turtle on a fencepost and observes: “You just want to help the poor bugger get down, and you can’t help but wonder what kind of idiot put him up there in the first place.” It is a question, she concluded, that many of Arday’s backers might now be tempted to ask.All of them must ask themselves some hard questions, particularly the university that educated Newton, Turing, Darwin and Hawking.According to The New York Times, Cambridge required an “outstanding research record of international stature” and a “proven successful track record” of supervising PhD students. Yet Arday had never remained at one university long enough to oversee a complete doctorate lasting three years or more.Cambridge was not the only institution that played a part in Arday’s Post Turtle-like elevation. He was handed honorary doctorates like confetti by Anglia Ruskin, Solent, St Mary’s and Westminster, alongside an honorary fellowship from South Bank Colleges.Academics who questioned his credentials and raised allegations of plagiarism were stonewalled. Arday reportedly engaged the prominent libel firm Carter-Ruck to challenge inconvenient reporting. When a Times Higher Education journalist emailed him with questions and offered a formal right of reply, the journalist was contacted by the Metropolitan Police and told that his questions were affecting Arday’s mental health. Numerous media outlets invited Arday on as a special guest while Cambridge dons gushed about him on international television.The dam finally broke when Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge scholar whose views on race and intelligence have been widely condemned, published a newsletter detailing the plagiarism allegations.What followed was perhaps too much scrutiny for any individual not used to the celebrity spotlight.A Guardian investigation disputed many of Arday’s claims and produced the line that will live in infamy: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.”His death has since become another flashpoint in the culture wars, producing demands for restrictions on media investigations and competing political gotchas instead of a Yeats-like cold eye being cast on how this came to pass.James Cleverly, the former Tory home secretary and the first black man to hold that post, told BBC Radio 4 that universities had used Arday for “bragging rights” and elevated him for his “ethnicity and age” rather than his talent.There is nothing new about conmen who are fabulists and fantasists.One prime example was Frank Dux, whose life story ostensibly inspired the Jean-Claude Van Damme film Bloodsport, which featured an American military veteran participating in a secret Hong Kong martial-arts tournament called the Kumite. The film helped revive Hollywood’s martial-arts genre and even inspired the Johnny Cage character in the Mortal Kombat video-game series. Yet Dux’s claims about his military record, the secret tournament and even the sensei who supposedly trained him were comprehensively disputed.But Frank Dux’s mythology produced a martial-arts film, not a professorial chair at Cambridge. The existence of fabulists is not remarkable in itself. Mankind has always had its fair share of soothsaying storytellers. The remarkable part is institutions willing to authenticate their fable.The Myth of ArdayIt seems like an absurdly simple observation. Arday was not an absurdist, just a fabulist, but to many individuals and institutions he became a useful absurdity.In The Myth of Sisyphus, an essay anyone struggling with ontological issues should read at least once, Albert Camus, the OG intellectual who was hounded – in a different way – almost as much for his good looks as his ideas, argues that there is only one truly serious philosophical question: suicide. Before debating knowledge, morality, God or metaphysics, philosophy must decide whether existence is worth continuing.Camus distinguishes between two propositions that are frequently confused: life possesses no ultimate meaning, and life is therefore not worth living. The second does not logically follow from the first.For Camus, the absurd arises from the collision between humanity’s desire for meaning and a cruel, indifferent universe that offers none. Suicide does not resolve that contradiction; it merely snuffs out the consciousness experiencing it. His answer is revolt: continuing to live without invented consolation while confronting the absurd with complete lucidity.Camus illustrates this through Sisyphus, the hubristic king condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll down every time he approaches the summit. Sisyphus cannot change his fate, but by seeing it clearly and continuing to push, he denies the gods complete control over him. Camus therefore concludes that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”.Perhaps this lucidity was what Arday’s public life lacked. He was transformed into a story that supplied meaning to everyone except himself.To Cambridge and the wider academic establishment, the supposedly non-verbal child who could not read until adulthood but became a professor represented redemption from historical exclusion. To broadcasters and publishers, he was an irresistible tale of adversity and triumph. To advocates of DEI, he proved that the system worked. Once the contradictions emerged, he became equally useful to the Right as proof that the entire system was fraudulent.

In every version, Jason Arday the human being disappeared behind Jason Arday the argument.That does not absolve Arday of his own agency. He made the claims, benefited from their repetition and apparently expected journalists to continue believing him. No one, no matter how oppressed, has the right to commit fraud.But academia, publishers and broadcasters authenticated those claims, placed him beneath an unforgiving spotlight and converted his biography into an institutional achievement.He made his own bed, but his death should not be used to hound the press, close down legitimate scrutiny or cast suspicion upon other scholars of colour.Near the end of his memoir, Arday wonders whether he has completely overestimated his abilities and whether his story might become an Icarus-like cautionary tale about flying too close to the sun. The metaphor was painfully apt, but Arday did not fashion the wings alone. Universities, publishers, broadcasters and admiring academics supplied the feathers, wax and favourable winds, thrusting a troubled man into an unforgiving spotlight because his imagined ascent served their interests.His biography became his boulder: the non-verbal child, the late reader, the miraculous scholar, the marathon runner, the prodigious fundraiser and the persecuted racial pioneer. Arday pushed it, but numerous institutions placed their hands behind it. When scrutiny sent it rolling back downhill, many of those hands disappeared while his critics gathered below to celebrate the crash.Sisyphus’s victory, according to Camus, lies in possessing his fate consciously. He knows that the rock will fall but refuses to let that knowledge conquer him. His happiness is not pleasure or optimism; it is the dignity of retaining ownership of his struggle.We cannot perform the same imaginative trick with Arday. We do not know his final state of mind, and until the authorities establish a cause, we cannot say that he committed suicide. Turning his death into either proof of a “media lynching” or vindication of the campaign against him would reduce him once again to a convenient symbol.A post-mortem may eventually tell us how Jason Arday died. But, as Rancho understood in 3 Idiots, it cannot measure the pressure inside his head. Nor can it tell us how much of the boulder was his and how much was placed there by everyone who applauded as he pushed it uphill, only to abandon him when the truth sent it rolling back down.