All outlets are reporting that Jason Arday, the DEI academic fraud whose career and reputation were spectacularly derailed the same week his autobiography was published by Simon & Schuster, has been found dead. Details are slowly emerging, but if his death was not a suicide, it will stand as one of the most spectacular coincidences of all time. I’m going to write this with the presumption that the 41-year-old took his own life. [The New York Times report is here.]
Ethics Notes:
1. I learned of this tragic development (from Young Bill) literally as I was preparing to write a post called “Stop Making Me Defend Jason Arday!” My trigger was a Washington Free Beacon article titled, “Fallen Cambridge Star Jason Arday’s ‘True Life’ Memoir Appears To Poach Life Events From His Favorite Soap Operas, ‘Spartacus,’ and ‘Forrest Gump’ : A Free Beacon review of Arday’s memoir, out this week from Simon & Schuster, shows that his melodramatic autobiography tracks closely with plotlines from popular TV shows and movies.”
The message of the EA post was to be that we should learn the lessons of the Arday debacle and be clear about its causes and villains: the woke obsession with DEI, especially in institutions of higher education, is the main cause, and the villains are the Left’s culture warriors and race hucksters, particularly those who have infested the faculties and administrative ranks of our colleges and universities, specifically the irresponsible, incompetent fools at Cambridge. Then, I was going to write, leave poor Arday alone. He had been humiliated on the world stage, he was bound to be blamed by the real villains, who exploited him, his life was, if not ruined, would take a very long time to be livable, and he was obviously a disturbed and unstable individual. There was far too much glee in the long article by Benjamin Ryan finding suspicious parallels between Arday’s alleged life story and the plots of movies and TV shows he had seen. I also found some of the parallels contrived: life imitates art and art imitates life: any remarkable life is likely to resemble memorable drama and fiction to some extent.
The article was piling on, beating the metaphorical dead horse, kicking a man when he’s down. There was no need for that. Dismantle Cambridge and the indefensible void in academic integrity that made this tragedy possible. Flog academia, flame it, broil it. Expose and destroy everyone involved. Arday was the tool of unscrupulous, reckless, smug and intolerable people.
Ethics Alarms 
Question is: Who is the biggest ethics villain? Arday, Cambridge, or DEI culture? Plenty of blame to go around, but it seems Cambridge might be the biggest. They ignored standards, promoted and defended him and their misbegotten DEI policies. They abused their considerable credibility to foist a fraud on students and then put him in an untenable spot, though it was one of his own making. Truly sad and completely unnecessary with proper institutional vigilance.
I have to ask where his parents and family members were. Were they dysfunctional? Had they washed their hands of him concluding he was beyond help? Shouldn’t they have warned Oxford about what they were getting into? His family info just seems MIA.
“Arday was the tool of unscrupulous, reckless, smug and intolerable people.”
Bravo India November Golf Oscar!
And these same unscrupulous, reckless, smug and intolerable people will do just as you claim: Blame Righty.
In a perfect world, this would be a fatal blow to the Didn’t Earn It crowd.
Alas, perfection is not a human attribute.
PWS
No need to re-hash the cultural rot that has gotten us to this mess, nor the DEI imperatives at Cambridge that resulted in a disaster and death. We’re all too familiar.
There is a hint of sympathy here for Jason Arday as the victim of a society that enabled and then crushed him. And you’re wondering if he is a sociopath. A shallow search on Bing provides common traits of sociopaths:
At least some of that rings some bells.
I suggest that this is all on him. He has been lying and exaggerating. He applied for and accepted a position for which he knew he was not qualified. He exploited the cultural rot and stupidity of the review panel at Cambridge. He cheated all his students who paid for and deserved the best education in the world. And when his duplicity was discovered, he didn’t man up and admit to wrong-doing – he blamed those who uncovered his chicanery, alleging it was a cruel political plot. He perpetrated a fraud and got caught. Those who enabled him should face consequences. But don’t let him off the hook because his suicide has transformed him into some form of sympathetic victim or martyr.
Tough analysis but true. He is responsible. Is this death a tragedy? Yes, but as tragic as the motorcyclist who decided to jump 10 buses and missed.
jvb
Your four points
1: “Far too much glee” is not glaringly apparent to me in Benjamin Ryan’s piece. How did you quantify glee or qualitatively determine the glee threshold? And what if you applied the same metrics to your own Ethics alarms ringing! / “Pigs Head Story” post of 8/10? From my reading, if one is gleeful so is the other.
2: Justifies the Benjamin Ryan piece, doesn’t it?
3: Jason Arday wasn’t all there. Neither was Capt. Queeg. But Benjamin Ryan didn’t author the Caine Mutiny in this case. That was a collaboration between Arday himself and his enablers. Exposure was inevitable and necessary but happened way too late. An ounce of prevention vs. a pound of cure.
4: Driving home the point you’re making may require a better understanding of Arday and his memoir, ergo Benjamin Ryan, as well as the circumstances by which a fabricated memoir (if it turns out to be) is published by S&S.
Arday’s suicide is on Arday and his enablers. Not his critics. Incidentally, Grandma’s list of personality traits describes me to a T. I impulsively manipulate with superficial charm without remorse or attachment. But I don’t care because when it comes to the ladies, I can shim sham shimmy!
1. How one receives an essay is personal. Yes, I felt the Ryan piece was excessive, and he was enjoying himself too much. Arday had already resigned. He was cooked.We knew the book would be full of made-up stories. I know I wasn’t gleeful about the pig’s head story, I was and am disgusted.It was my favorite because it made no sense and there was no verification at all. It was an example of one of my favorite principles: when you lie, make the lie so outlandish that they say, “That must be true, because nobody would try to get away with a lie like that.” And again, my focus was and is that Cambridge and others enabled him. I wasn’t gunning for Arday. Ryan was.
2. How? The kind of victim argument I am predicting is the “You bigots drove him to kill himself in despair!” spin. Arday was a victim in another sense: a sick man was enabled and consumed by his delusions so a university could win DEI blue ribbons.
3. I like Captain Queeg analogies but this isn’t a good one. Captain Queeg was insecure and suffered from PTSD, But he earned his position as Captain. As Barney points out, he might have been fine if his crew had given him the support he needed, But Arday didn’t earn his position and got too much support.
4. I’m disgusted that S and S published the book. I assume that they think the backstory is so wild that it will sell copies to enough people like Ryan, curiosity seekers and people who like to look at bloody car wrecks to make back their investment. I would have sooner read “If I Did It.”
Your last paragraph pretty much sums up my conclusion as well.
There are a few in the ragtag cast of supporting characters, a handful of the rabble, riffraff, and scum in the Motley crew, the hangers on, a certain “low element” in your regular commenters. Being one of the latter, I apologize for my occasional calumny. Notwithstanding, I was writing from a submersible at the bottom of the Molloy Deep, where I had proposed to my wife several years ago. (We return now and then on our anniversary.) What I actually pinged was: “Great blog! Great post!” However, between the acoustic modems, the Russian translators aboard the transducer pickup vessel, the old model data decoding computers, the poor interface between the satellite uplinks and polar satellites, it was inevitable that the figurative in my text would be altered towards the literal.
best line I saw:
is he really dead, or is he just saying he is dead?
I feel sorry for him. He sounds delusional. Plagiarism, outrageously unbelievable claims, cribbing storylines from soap operas and Forrest Gump?
maybe he was a narcissist or a sociopath; you would have to be to tell lies like that and think you won’t be discovered.
Or, maybe he was delusional and had difficulty distinguishing between himself and the rest of the world. He sounds like he lacked any type of ego integrity; he believed everything he imagined.
how could he believe the sorts of things he claimed? How could he expect others to believe them?
worst of all, why did Cambridge believe him (or pretend to)?
Didn’t anyone on any hiring committees ever go out to someone who knew Arday and ask, “So, what’s the deal with this guy? I mean, is he for real?”
No need. He was hired intentionally. They knew he was a liar and they didn’t care or they encouraged it. Most of these people aren’t stupid. They were all well aware of what was going on. They either agreed with the hire or they wisely kept their mouths shut to keep their jobs.
I have two points to add. First, while many narcissists have the resilience to weather boutsv of public humiliation, it’s by no means uncommon for them to break instead, leading to deep depression, psychosis, and yes, suicide. There’s even a name for this: “narcissistic collapse”. I would venture to opine that is what happened here.
Second, I think there’s more here enabling fraud in Academia than DEI. In short, I think there are entire fields that are little more than fraud from front to back. The frauds on top enable the frauds coming up, who in turn give cover and legitimacy to the frauds on top. So intellectual lightweights doing fake work, whether boxes they check, can succeed because the whole edifice is intellectually lightweight and largely fake.
He may have been a tool, but remember, he was an enthusiastic tool. He tarred his critics as racists. He destroyed the grades a student if he found they harbored ideas he didn’t like. His professorship wasn’t a victimless crime. He leaves behind many victims of his actions. So yeah, he may have just been a tool of more powerful people, but he misused the power he was given and with gusto, if the accounts (in the lawsuits) are true.
I have more sympathy for those have been cancelled, expelled from college, or forced out of their position because they did not toe the line of DEI doctrine than for Jason Arday. It is sad that he decided to end his life however.