Jason Arday was a Cambridge University professor and serial plagiarist who was found dead after he was exposed as a fraud.
To me, the Jason Arday story represents a kind of racial fairy tale. Arday, a black man with dreadlocks and strong eyeliner, said that he was diagnosed with autism at age three, that he couldn’t speak his first words until age eleven, and that he didn’t learn how to read and write until age 18. He claimed heroic feats of athletic prowess, like running 30 marathons in 35 days. He faced death threats at his office in Cambridge after he bravely stood up to racists. And he was simultaneously a prodigy in the field of sociology; he was the youngest black professor ever appointed at Cambridge.
Arday was a would-be academic demigod who fulfilled a racial fairy tale that elite liberals desperately wanted to believe. There’s a now-viral clip of Professor Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, fawning over him, holding his hands, and telling Arday that he’s the “best in the world” in his field. The irony is that he actually was the very best at what he did, but what he was doing was plagiarism, fabrication, and deceit, not sociology of education. What he was the best at was creating a racial myth that flattered the sensibilities of liberal academics.
