2. You know, don’t you, that the next step will be a tsunami of op-eds and essay criticizing and condemning the conservatives—racists, all of them— who “killed” Arday with their determination to drive a neurodivergent “of color” out of his remarkable position. So he puffed up his resume a little bit— Everybody does it. How else was someone like him to break through the societal barriers white society has erected to impede people like him? I will be shocked if Arday isn’t quickly canonized as a victim. It is the perfect way to deflect attention away from the real issues behind this tragedy.
3. Arday was a sick man. At this point I hesitate to say he was a sociopath; he was obviously a narcissist, but narcissists and sociopaths usually are strong enough to handle failures and exposure without imploding. Lance Armstrong didn’t kill himself. Jordan Belfort is still out there conning people. What is so frustrating to me is that Jason Arday was obviously not all there.
That photo above reminds me of the look we have see in the eyes of mass shooters like Jared Lee Loughner and lunatics like Charles Manson. I have seen that look in the eyes of friends of mine on the verge of nervous breakdowns. Why didn’t anyone at Cambridge see that he needed help? I read one essay by a student of Arday’s who wrote that there was no substance to his teaching. Nobody realized that this was a catastrophe waiting to happen? Nobody was in a position to intervene, to blow the whistle?
4. Affirmative action, DEI, and all the other well-intentioned devices that place people in schools, jobs and positions based on group characteristics rather than individual talents, abilities and achievements risk these kinds of tragedies. It would be wonderful if the Jason Arday saga drives home that lesson.
You know it won’t.
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.
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?”