August 24, 2026

STEPHEN MILLER: How Would a Jason Arday Scandal Play Out Here?

Lauren Michele Jackson at The New Yorker wrote “Other prominent figures have been received with levity when their stories have unraveled in public,” and, “Arday was not greeted as a risible scammer endemic to the times. Suspicions surrounding this person demanded an exorcism,” as though previous cases of academic fraud have just been laughed off and it was only Arday who faced media scrutiny.

The New England Journal of Medicine published a piece titled “Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia,” where author and MD Kemi Doll argues, “I want to be clear that I don’t care whether any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career.” Clearly stating that academic integrity should not matter because Arday was black.

This is already a very dangerous standard being entertained in certain corners of our media, and as far as academia and journalism in America goes, how is it not only a matter of time before someone credibly accused of stealing their work or research and passing it off as their own under the guise of fraud, states they cannot be professionally punished because they might commit an act of self-harm?

These are the lessons to be gleaned from Jason Arday’s death, as the political Left, instead of examining their own roles in elevating these types of cases under the noble cause of DEI, are already seeking to exploit it.

In his Commentary newsletter, Abe Greenwald adds, “Catch Cambridge If You Can:”

I like to imagine Jason Arday’s story with an alternate ending. In my fantasy version, he admits to the whole thing and pats himself on the back for orchestrating a brilliant social experiment illustrating the bigotry and fatuousness that prop up elite education.

At the least, he could have gone on to make a passable living as a pop-culture celebrity. We love our conmen. George Santos, the former congressman and convicted identity thief, will make his debut next month on a Fox reality show titled Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test. Don’t forget Frank Abagnale, who spent his young adulthood as a petty criminal, passing bad checks and scamming his way through the U.S. and Europe. He impersonated doctors and airline pilots to impress his marks and pick up women. After a few stints in prison, he used his skills to go legit, educating banks and other businesses on how to spot fraudsters. Abagnale’s autobiography, Catch Me If You Can, which itself was largely fabricated, became a hit movie directed by Steven Spielberg and a Tony-nominated musical.

But Arday would have had a shot at a second act even more spectacular than that. Because he was really the one who caught them.

Greenwald writes, “One cannot honestly defend Arday either for his deceptions or his apparent suicide. And, in fact, no one really is. What the protesters and petitioners are doing is defending themselves. University administrators, professors, writers, and other liberals are out in the streets screaming at the press for revealing the depths of elite academia’s racism, gullibility, and dishonesty. They’re focusing on the media to take themselves out of the spotlight.”

That and plenty of what Heather MacDonald calls “the very therapeutic machinery that contributed to the apotheosis of the patent fraudster Arday in the first place:”

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll