Jason Arday and the Scourge of Professional Minority Academics

Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor at the centre of an explosive plagiarism and diversity hiring scandal, was found dead Friday at his home in Battersea. His family have a released a statement strongly implying that he committed suicide. Arday was 41 years old.

A noisy minority of self-righteous simpletons hope to place responsibility for Arday’s death with the people who exposed his fraud and the ridiculous hiring practices that brought him to prominence.

Beware always of false dichotomies: Arday was both “a culture war pawn” (and quite a willing one) and a “fucking human being.” In fact there are a lot of fucking human beings around, billions of them, so it’s hard to know how that changes anything. Suicides are solely responsible for their own deaths and do not become special put-upon victims the moment they take their own lives. That is an important line to hold, and not only because some of what follows will be critical of Arday: Nobody should be constructing suicide as a means of farming sympathy or of striking back at one’s critics, because suicide in most cases is a profoundly anti-social and destructive answer to one’s problems. Particularly for a father of two children, as Arday was, killing oneself represents a seriously selfish and narcissistic act.

I was a professor for many years in the United States, and I’ve had abundant experience with diversity hires and their enablers. Below the fold, I want to explain how people like Arday come to be hired in the first place, why many of them turn out to be such terrible people, why institutions like Cambridge are so desperate to defend them even when they’re caught in indefensible misconduct, and why the entire ad hoc system of preferential minority hiring is even more ridiculous and counterproductive than many imagine.

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