When Cambridge University interviewed Jason Arday for one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world, he was an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards.
Cambridge’s requirements, reviewed by The New York Times, called for “an outstanding research record of international stature” and a “proven successful track record” supervising Ph.D. students. Dr. Arday had a modest publication record and had bounced from one university to the next — not staying long enough to oversee a full three-year-or-more doctorate.
Cambridge hired him anyway in 2023, making him, at 37, the university’s youngest Black professor at a time when the school was under pressure to diversify. In doing so, Cambridge thrust him into the international limelight, giving him a platform at one of the world’s elite universities to champion academic diversity and making him a target for critics.
…the Mad Left would be forced to concede, “Yeah, we’ve turned into dumb, ridiculous assholes. Time to confess, apologize, perform a fearless personal ethics audit, reform, confess, and shape up.” But no. They just can’t do it.
David Strom of PJ Media wrote an excellent summary of the mass denial of accountability regarding Arday’s tragedy. Here are two social media posts he cited:
I don’t comprehend how anyone can let bias make them that stupid, and yet here we are. And as I said, there are millions of these people. One of the most throbbing lies is that the racist Right picked Arday out of obscurity to target. Strom writes, “That is absurd. Cambridge, the BBC, and even the Olympics used Arday as a mascot. Did you know that, based on his fabulism, he carried the Olympic torch to celebrate his accomplishments? To argue that the spotlight was put on Arday by the right simply ignores the fact that every major cultural institution relied on him to be their racial mascot to prove a point about the success of DEI. It’s pretty hard to complain that people noticed, and that they noticed the fraud they were perpetrating.”
But they are complaining, because they have nothing but lies, confirmation bias, an obsession with race and such degraded values that they are incapable of admitting that DEI is wrong to defend the indefensible.
Strom concludes,
DEI has been used to destroy the lives of ordinary people who say what ought to be the most anodyne and uncontroversial things. It is a form of ideological bullying, used to force people to accept lies and worship the DEI gods or be destroyed. They are trying to do the same thing right now, using an unearned moral authority to bludgeon people into compliance…The left is deploying the same tactic they have used in promoting alphabet ideology: shut up or people will die. To which I respond: don’t promote insanely dangerous practices, try to destroy Western science and culture, and quit promoting mental illness as something to be deeply admired instead of treated appropriately. Jason Arday needed help getting beyond his delusions, as he clearly was mentally ill; elevating him into a fake ‘best scholar in the world’ at Cambridge University was bad for him, obviously, and destructive to society as a whole…Unless you believe that Cambridge University exists not to further knowledge and elevate the truth but rather to pat people on the back and promote delusional people as the best among us, you have to see that promoting this idiocy is incredibly destructive. Cambridge betrayed itself, the truth, and even Jason Arday, all in the name of DEI. They are trying to weaponize accusations of racism in order to protect an ideology they know to be based on lies.These are people who are in no position to shame us… they will try to bully us into feeling guilty for pointing out their fraud.
Harsh words from a conservative, but how can anyone, regardless of ideological tilt, disagree with that analysis? Yet recognizing the malady still doesn’t fix the problem, and we’d better fix it. If the indoctrinated and deranged can’t react responsibly to reality when it is this stark and undeniable, what are the rest of us supposed to do? What is the ethical response? IS there an ethical response?
Ethics Alarms 
While I stand by my prior comments regarding Arday’s culpability, you are absolutely correct that the bigger picture is far more sinister and dangerous. Excellent analysis.
About 8,000 people carried that Olympic torch, and that was in 2012. Unless his face was up front and center (I don’t recall, someone please say if so) I think calling him a “mascot” is a bit disingenuous.
How about calling him a mascot at Cambridge?
But TW, those were not random people with names picked from a hat. 7,300 people were chosen through public nominations for community and personal achievements and the rest were athletes, performers, and public figures. I don’t know which group Arday was part of, but either way he was being held up as someone of note, and that status was being broadcast to the public and his peers.
I was thinking in terms of “a company mascot”. I doubt even Disney have 7,300 such distinct mascots. But fair enough, I was concerned with a too narrow definition.
I like the Spanish use that centers on “pet.”
“In Spanish, mascota most commonly means “pet” — a domesticated animal kept for companionship or pleasure, such as a dog, cat, bird, fish, or small mammal. It is used in everyday contexts like Tengo una mascota (“I have a pet”) or ¿Tienes mascota? (“Do you have a pet?”). Broader and Figurative Uses
Beyond pets, mascota can also mean “mascot” — a person, animal, or symbol representing a team, group, or organization, often associated with good luck or identity. For example: El búho es la mascota de nuestro equipo (“The owl is our team’s mascot”).
Historically, the word comes from the Provençal/Occitan mascoto, meaning “charm” or “lucky talisman,” and entered Spanish in the 19th century. Over time, it shifted from referring to lucky charms to companion animals, possibly because pets were seen as bringing comfort or good fortune.”
I think “pet” and “lucky charm” or “talisman” all describe how Oxford viewed this hire. Maybe even “companion animal” would apply!
The inimitable Dr. Thomas Sowell (Red Kryptonite to the Didn’t Earn It crowd) puts a finer point to it in his Mascot Politics.
PWS
Asking the Left to admit its culpability is akin to asking a large set of people to commit mass heresy before the world and each other. Do not hold your breath.
The alphabets have their intersectional religion. Their banners hang everywhere. Without their shared faux victim hood and resultant anger, they have nothing.
Perhaps letting them destroy someplace well known is the only way to sweep the cobwebs from their eyes. New York seems like a good candidate.
I don’t for a second believe that this Jason Arday was remotely intelligent enough to commit the abundance of plagiarism that brought about his downfall. Rather, I believe elements at Cambridge conspired to create this fiction. Now, they’re attempting to portray him as a victim.
Has anyone else noticed how much Jason Arday looked like Meghan Markle?
Shame.
no, but his face looks “shiny” in every photo I have seen.
very fake looking.
looked like makeup
-Jut
“Has anyone else noticed how much Jason Arday looked like Meghan Markle?”
Heh!
PWS
To your long-time Georgetown history professor, you can reply that all he has done is demonstrate why the left has lost all credibility. He thinks he is showing how it is fine to plagiarize. All the has shown is that those institutions no longer care about academic rigor and have no credibility.
Now about the plagiarism. There are different grades of plagiarism. Let me explain why the current round of plagiarism is so devastatingly bad.
When I was in grad school, many of us were asked to carefully check the introduction chapters of foreign students’ dissertations. Because of the difficulty of writing in a foreign language and the differing intellectual property standards in different cultures, there was a lot of plagiarism and the advisors were very careful to detect it and get it corrected before the defense. This is a mockup of a typical Asian students introduction.
“Poorly worded original sentence. Sentence directly copied from source 1. Two sentences directly copied from source 2. Poorly worded original sentence tying the thoughts together.
Four sentences from source 3. One sentence from source 1. One sentence from source 4. A poorly worded original sentence tying them together.
rinse and repeat.”
You can see what is going on. They lack the English language skills to really blend the thoughts from the different sources together, so they just copy whole sentences (occasionally paragraphs) from many sources and tie them together with some original sentences. This is plagiarism, but this is pretty easy to fix. They are writing a typical intro, they just aren’t doing the paraphrasing and integration of the ideas needed. We would work with the students to get this fixed so that there weren’t any problems. There are probably a lot of programs that didn’t do this, resulting in a massive amount of plagiarism. I am fairly sure this is pretty common in dissertations, especially the Introduction chapters (which are typically reviews of the literature and not original research).
This is not the plagiarism of Claudine Gay and Jason Arday. From what I have read, both of these people substantially plagiarized only 1 author each. This has the danger of making their plagiarized works not original, but other people’s work passed off as their own. This is much more serious. In the former plagiarism, original work is done and described, only the background work is introduced using a hodge-podge of other people’s sentences. In the case of Gay and Arday, it is possible that there never was any original work, at least nothing substantial.
The first type of plagiarized dissertation is a problem because of the lack of paraphrasing of sentences. The work is worthy of a doctorate, but the work was worded with plagiarism. The latter is a problem because there may not be sufficient original work to justify the doctorate at all. These are potentially illegitimate degrees, which is why these are so serious. For Harvard to keep such a person on faculty is appalling and shows the academic bankruptcy of the institution.
This is the result of the repudiation of meritocracy. To justify DEI, they had to state that merit didn’t matter, and it was racist to boot. Meritocracy is whiteness. This is easy to do in a field that doesn’t really matter. There is no ‘right’ way to justify black supremacy. There is no ‘correct’ way to declare everything ‘whiteness’ and bad. There is no ‘right’ way to blame everything bad on ‘the patriarchy’. There is no merit in those fields because there is no absolute truth, no reality to check against. In fact, such fields would declare all three of those things ‘whiteness’ and ‘the patriarchy’ and rail against them. As this cultural Marxism spread from the deconstructionists to all other fields, merit was placed on the back burner. We reached the point where air traffic controllers were selected for NOT knowing anything about engineering, aircraft, or air traffic control!
I don’t know what can be done for people who will justify Arday and Gay’s plagiarism and lack of ability in flagship institutions. I suspect you can’t reform it, you can only destroy it and start again. I explained to my classes how the dark ages happen, how you end up with people who can’t actually understand the knowledge that came before. I explained how it could take over 1000 years to rebuild an education system to the point that the old knowledge could be used. The pre-meds just ignored it. The engineering students pointed out that they can’t understand their textbooks now and need the professor to interpret it for them. They engineers were scared and the pre-meds denied that it could happen.
We better find some way to get back to objective truth and transmitting knowledge to the next generation because we are about 30 years from the next dark ages.
I’m reminded of the book Small Gods from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. If I remember correctly, one character speaks of an Omnian missionary who was sent to another country to spread the word of the one true god Om. The people there killed the missionary.
At least, that was the “deeper truth” of the matter. The “superficial” truth was that the people had ridiculed the missionary and thrown vegetables at him until he returned to Omnia, and his own church executed him for his embarrassing failure. But spiritually, quintessentially, the people’s rejection of the missionary’s message was literally murder, for which Omnia declared war on the country in question.