The Rot of Academia
Jason Arday and Israel
If you’re not British, you might not have heard of Jason Arday, Britain’s academic superstar, whose work focused on dismantling institutional racism, decolonizing academia, and diversifying representation within higher education. He was the esteemed University of Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor, at age 37, with dreadlocks down to his waist. He was a television favorite and received several honorary doctorates, all kinds of awards, and important roles in various organizations. He even carried the Olympic torch. And his latest book, a memoir titled Great and Unfortunate Things, was just published by Simon & Shuster, following an advance payment of 1.4 million pounds.
As Professor Arday told it, his life was an extraordinary story of overcoming obstacles and challenges while trying to do good:
Diagnosed with autism as an infant, he did not speak until he was 12 and could not read or write until he was 18.
He won professional snooker tournaments at age 10.
As a child he was beaten by youths into a weeks-long coma, during which medics told his parents to switch off life support. When he later miraculously recovered, he begged the judge to spare his assailants, who later became his students.
He completed thirty marathons. In 35 days. With a fractured leg for the last eight.
He raised five million pounds for charity, even before he became famous.
He installed water points overseas for the needy with the WaterAid charity organization.
He had a brain tumor while completing his PhD, which was removed just before having to defend his thesis, requiring him to re-learn the material.
He was threatened by masked men with knives who cornered him at the university - twice.
A severed pig’s head was sent to his parents’ home to harass and intimidate them.
If this list of challenges and accomplishments sounds unbelievable, that’s because it is unbelievable. Every claim that he made in the list above was a lie. Even his dreadlocks were fake.
This was first suspected by London Times journalist Jack Grove a few years ago, who also found that much of Arday’s academic work seemed to have been plagiarized. He contacted Arday with questions, whereupon Arday reported Grove for harassment to the Metropolitan Police, who engaged in a four-month investigation and warned Grove to stop. Arday also hired an aggressive law firm specializing in defamation which warned the London Times that Grove’s inquiries may have been “racially motivated” and intimidated them into dropping the story.
But soon others also started investigating and revealing Arday’s lies and plagiarism. Cambridge responded by describing Arday as the “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” (Speaking as someone who has actually been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine my credibility, I don’t think that this is a remotely accurate description of what happened to Arday.) A petition to the same effect, accusing Arday’s critics of racism, gained twenty thousand signatures, including from leading academics and other important figures.
Eventually, as was inevitable, the house of cards collapsed. The lies were just too many, the plagiarism too rampant, the fraud too obvious. It also emerged that students at Cambridge had been complaining that Arday wasn’t actually teaching them anything in class, to no avail. Last week’s British press was full of the revelation that Arday was in fact a fraud.
Arday responded on Friday by killing himself, leaving behind a wife and two children, along with a still-fawning fan base who insist that he was bullied by racists into suicide. I have enormous sympathy for most cases of suicide, but not this one. This was Arday’s final act of doing something that he excelled at: harming others while emotionally manipulating people into thinking that he was a victim. The blame lies with Arday and those who enabled him.
But the story here is not Arday; delusional people and scam artists are two a penny. Nor is it a story about those who exposed him, who were simply doing their job. And nor, contrary to what many are still claiming, is it a story about racism.
Rather, the story here is the rotten state of the academic establishment (and much of the media). They uncritically accepted all his claims, did not care about his lack of ability, hired him at the expense of other candidates, elevated him to the highest levels, had him teach students that had paid a fortune for an excellent education, and attacked anyone who dared question him as being racist, because he perfectly satisfied their desire to show aversion to racism. Even after he was exposed and Cambridge acknowledged that an investigation was required as to how he was hired to begin with, they still insisted - before an investigation had even started - that Arday was an aberration and not reflective of DEI causing a wider problem.
Personally, I found all this oddly reassuring. I used to have great respect for the world of academia. My late father was a brilliant physicist who spent his life in academia, with two doctorates, and had exceptional integrity. My own professors in Jewish Studies at the Jerusalem Lander Institute and Bar-Ilan University were impressive and honest scholars.
As such, after Gaza’s brutal invasion of Israel, when I started researching academic writings on Israel, it was shocking. Article after article, in prominent publications by accomplished academics, condemned Israel, presenting Jews as the eternal oppressors and Palestinians as the eternal victims. The charges seemed to be false, but when so many prestigious scholars are in agreement, it’s only natural (and even important) to question whether perhaps they are indeed correct and it is oneself who is subject to bias. The Arday case superbly illustrates the sham that is modern academia, especially with regard to its ideas about colonialism and victimhood.
When I was preparing my book The Lions Of Zion: Biblical Natural History and the Significance of Israel, half of which is a response to academic delegitimization of Israel, I wrote to the authors and journal editors that I was disputing, pointing out the serious flaws in their work. They dismissed me out of hand, not bothering to respond to my challenges or publish my critiques. (And I found that Israeli and Jewish academics were some of the worst offenders!) One of my goals with the book is not just to dispute specific examples of academic attacks on Israel, but also to demonstrate the broader problems of a false populist ideology that brooks no critique.
The brainwashing and pressures on people, especially young students, to applaud woke values and oppose Israel are immense. We must exert ourselves to counter them.
You can purchase my book The Lions Of Zion on Amazon or preferably from the website store of the Biblical Museum of Natural History. Meanwhile, I am visiting the US later this week for two weeks (first Los Angeles and then NJ/NY), and will be doing some parlor meetings in Teaneck and Lawrence on behalf of the museum; please write to Ellen at advancement@BiblicalNaturalHistory.org if you would like to participate.