On The Slow Self-Destruction Of The University
The Jason Arday story is about declining public trust and student enrollment
Nobel Prize recipient Dr. James Watson, the discoverer of the DNA double helix, was a genius in the true sense of that word. Still, Watson was destroyed personally and professionally for saying out loud that intelligence has a genetic variability linked to what we call ‘race’. In the western academy, it is a thoughtcrime to notice that genetic variation produces more or less desirable traits in human beings, or that evolutionary time in different environments will produce a variety of traits.
Touching the third rail of racial determinism destroyed Dr. Watson. Academia hates determinism, whether it involves race, gender, or sexuality. Spare me your diatribes on the imaginary racism that Jason Arday supposedly endured in the press with appeals to imaginary white men who got away with something in a dream you just had. Watson dared to say out loud that some inequalities cannot be eradicated safely or reasonably. The academy destroyed him for it.
Nor was the press notably racist against Jason Arday. The most consequential article unmasking him ran in the Guardian, which is hardly a noted right wing outlet. No, the actual racism thrives inside the ivory tower of the academy, among the elite professoriate. The racializing tentacles of academic racism radiate outwards through the host civilization of the western university, corrupting everything.
It is unsustainable, and moreover the reckoning is due. The economics professors can explain it to their colleagues: the enshittification of society, politics, and industry began as, and will likely end in, the dismantling of the university as donors and politicians reprioritize. The academy will go down very much like the English monasteries, now, because the universities are governed by the very utopian idealism they have imposed upon us all.
Race and the superstitions of the academy
To repeat: Dr. Watson recognized a link between IQ and race. Group average differences are not the same as individual destiny or justification for discrimination, as Watson has recognized, but he was still stripped of all his honorary titles and hounded by the academy, anyway. His family went through months of media harassment.
He did not take his own life, though, because he was not a coward, or a pathetic fraud, which is the same thing. Narcissistic collapse is a much bigger red flag for suicide than autism. And anyway, Jason Arday’s story about being autistic was clearly false, as people who knew him as a child say that he was verbal.
His miraculous story of magical African mother-healing does real harm to actual parents of actual autistic children who mistake his risible lies for truth, then blame themselves for inferior results in their kids. Of all his intellectual crimes, that one is the most unforgiveable, to me, and it speaks volumes about privileges afforded the ‘neurodivergent’ in the academy today. When the neurodivergent have privileges, everyone will become neurodivergent.
Arday is no innocent. A man who sends the police and libel lawyers after journalists when they ask him questions very likely has something to hide. Still, in the 48 hours since his body was found, Jason has become Jesus. Activist students are gathering to hold vigils and declare Jason Arday innocent of plagiarism. Academics who defended his fraud now declare him innocent of same. Never mind the hundreds of examples of plagiarism staring us all in the face: we are supposed to buy this cockamamie story in which racists made it all up, because someone with a degree has said so.
Tyler Austin Harper is such a person. Arday “was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough — which is to say, not white enough”, Harper writes at The Atlantic. This puts the cart ahead of the horse: a purely meritocratic academy would necessarily be a whiter academy, say the genetic determinists, who are racist for saying so, according to Harper. He deplores the “nakedly racist enthusiasm” for the Arday story which, again, culminated in the pages of the left wing Guardian.
Which is disappointing, because Cambridge is synonymous with academic elitism, and Harper recognizes how out of touch the academy is. He sees “a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo”, someone who is not educated enough to buy Jason Arday’s bullshit. Men who never go to college, who work for long periods of time in blue collar occupations, meet fabulists like Arday, and learn to recognize them. Every working class neighborhood has someone like him.
The degreed classes lack this form of immunity. People who grant actual doctorates to students for masturbatory self-biographies disguised as a dissertations will naturally have no bullshit detector for any man who claims to have run nine marathons on a broken leg. A nonwhite man who makes the same claim will be received with glowing approval by a white academic elite professor, for he feels his privilege most keenly, being a cleric of the ideology of social justice.
Writing about Arday at City Journal before the suicide, John McWhorter said that academic hucksters all share “an assumption that his view is one that everyone would share if not compromised by hatred of the subaltern”. Arday was “a Magic Negro. The kindly, antiracist white academics think suspending their judgment when it comes to a black man makes them good people.”
The cathedral of the university has no immunity to a fraud with Jason Arday’s constellation of real and claimed characteristics. Indeed, it is impolite to question the word of a nonwhite person anywhere, anytime, inside or outside of the cathedral grounds, because of past racism. Black men are presumed truthful because they are held innocent by default due to past racism. This is all supposed to correct past racism, but it is deeply racist, and racializing. It promotes someone like Arday above their ability, guaranteeing an eventual, likely consequential, failure at some point.
That point came when Arday secured a $1.4 million book deal with Simon and Schuster. The triggering event that started the landslide of exposures was Jason Arday chasing a payday with lies. This was not the fault of any white person. Nathan Cofnas dared to write about Arday only after other people had met with Arday’s intimidation tactics. Cofnas is just one academic heretic who has exposed Arday’s extensive plagiarism using standard detection tools.
Never mind: we are supposed to blame racism because Cofnas has been railroaded out of the academy for the same thoughtcrime as Dr. Watson. Harper for one is sure that Cofnas is too tainted by racism to speak about Arday. Harper notes the exposure of Ross Barkan as a plagiarist, and the discrepancy that Barkan has kept his new job at The Nation. Racism, surely!
But this is nonsense. In the counterfactual universe where Arday did not take his own life, he might have profited handsomely on a tell-all memoir, How I Got Away With It. Writing before the suicide, McWhorter made this same point. “We don’t even need to speculate whether sometime in the near future, Arday will use critical race theory to justify his inventions, on the premise that his anecdotes represent a ‘common black narrative.”
In this, he will be backed by people devoted to that school of thought who say that we need to understand him “on a certain level.”
What level is that? A low one—bigotry.
We will never know, of course, because Arday was unable to cope with disclosure of the truth. He probably needed intensive cognitive behavioral therapy. So where were all the people who had lifted him up, at that moment? Why were they not getting him the help he so obviously needed?
The answer, of course, is that they were ghosting his messages. Those are now the same chattering bunch of Brits who demand “accountability” for his death. They are washing their hands in the blood of Jason Arday, martyr to the anti-racist cause. All their DEI crimes are forgiven, now. Thus the effort to sanctify him, exonerate him, and lift him up once again as a saint.
