August 16, 2026

ROGER KIMBALL: The Unmaking of Jason Arday.

Overwhelmed, Arday resigned his chair. I am not sure whether it was a sense of humor or merely chutzpah that encouraged him to leave the composition of his letter of resignation to AI, but there seems little doubt that AI was the “onlie begetter” of the missive. Alas, on Friday, August 14, the humiliation became too much. The police were called because Arday was found “unresponsive.” He was pronounced dead on the scene, an apparent suicide.

Who was to blame? A curious subhead to a story in The Wall Street Journal seems to me to get the question completely wrong. “Jason Arday’s academic rise and fall set off a debate about whether he was a plagiarist or victim of a racial witch hunt.” But that is a false dichotomy. There is no doubt that Arday was a plagiarist. And far from being the victim of “a racial witch hunt,” he was the victim of his own lies and intemperate behavior. And let’s not forget that his fabulations were directed not only at aggrandizing himself. He was also perfectly happy to play the race card to damage others, as when he complained to the police that journalists who were investigating his credentials were guilty of harassing him. The police duly opened a four-month-long investigation into a journalist who was simply going about his job.

Cambridge will of course be investigating how someone like Arday could have gamed the system to reach such spectacular heights at a comparatively young age. Nahh, just kidding. They’re blaming the media for doing their jobs: Cambridge college head: Investigate media onslaught against Jason Arday.

The head of a Cambridge college has called for an investigation into the “media onslaught” against Jason Arday.

Lord Woolley, the principal of Homerton College, Cambridge, said the 41-year-old had been subjected to the “most horrendous, toxic, vicious witch hunt” before his death.

Mr Arday was pronounced dead at an address in Battersea, south London, on Friday.

He had resigned from his position as professor of sociology of education the week before after a plagiarism row.

On Sunday, Lord Woolley said: “We need an investigation into the media onslaught, the vicious media onslaught.”

Why not investigate the media for their original not-so-vicious onslaught, which placed Arday on an impossibly tall pedestal?

“Already, leftists are blaming the media for Arday’s death. Hacks hounded him into despair, they say. I’m not having this,” Brendan O’Neill writes. Once Arday was discovered to be a fabulist, “The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it… Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.”

Tweet concludes, “Still waiting for the media to A) go at Cambridge and B) attack itself. For falling for all of this.”

UPDATE:

Evergreen:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll