It’s not a leap of any kind to say that the left’s DEI devotion is what killed Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor who was found dead last week after international scrutiny of his professional work (plagiarism) and fantastical personal biography (fraud). But if there was any hope that his apparent suicide would be a reckoning for DEI’s loyal acolytes, forget it.
Arday was the center of controversy around the world this month when other scholars pointed out egregious errors and obvious plagiarism in his academic work, which then drew more attention to absurd claims he has made about his own life, including that he was effectively mute and illiterate until he was an adult, on top of being a herculean athlete who could complete 30 marathons in almost as many days. (Yes, he actually made that claim.) We now know that he was given his prestigious position at Cambridge, making him the university’s “youngest black professor,” because he wasn’t white and because he alleged to have endured various forms of racism.
That’s not my assessment. It’s the New York Times’. “When Cambridge University interviewed Jason Arday for one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world,” an article in the paper said on Saturday, “he was an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards.” It went on to say Cambridge had “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.”
“Diversity” is, of course, left-speak for “not white.”
The people who noticed that Arday was a fraud were pointing out that he was rewarded for no reason other than that leftist academics wanted to continue perpetuating their destructive DEI scheme. That’s it. There have already been a billion examples like Arday. Claudine Gay at Harvard, to name just one. And now there’s a dead person — someone who almost certainly wouldn’t be dead if not for having been elevated to a position he had not earned and was not equipped to maintain under legitimate scrutiny or pressure.
That’s a small price to pay, apparently. The dying news media, which reinforces the DEI scheme as a full-time job, reacted to Arday’s death not by highlighting him as a cautionary tale, but by maintaining that he was the victim of those who called out the DEI scam.
A CNN article noted the “intense public debate” over Arday “and what it means for a society grappling with multiculturalism.” The Washington Post explored “whether online scrutiny has curdled into a weapon.” Tyler Austin Harper at The Atlantic implored that Arday be treated “like a person” in death and not, as he wrote, “Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not.” A New York Times headline said Arday’s death leaves “Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring.”
Those hard questions have already been asked and answered. The DEI perpetuators simply aren’t willing to abandon their cause. Even when it’s deadly.
More people will die in the name of DEI. It’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make.
