Although the respected New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has the right to publish what it wants, and African-American gynecological oncologist Kemi Doll has the right to write about what she thinks, their intersection in a new NEJM “voices” piece is hyperbolic and misguided to the point of toxicity. Doll’s article simply poisons the debate about merit versus “equity” in America by simply asserting that there are “structural” intentions held by academics to kill—literally exterminate—black professors. The thesis is in Doll’s first sentence—her topic sentence:
“They are trying to kill us.”
And yes, she means that literally.
Doll’s short op-ed, which you can access below, is so over the top that the NEJM has itself gone off the rails, embarrassing itself by publishing it. Its assertions are either distorted or wrong, and there’s no evidence of a conspiracy to exterminate black scholars. Doll’s “evidence” rests on two academics who committed suicide, one being Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor of sociology who apparently committed suicide after his plagiarism and made-up stories came to light (see my posts about him here). To Kemi Doll, Arday died because the allegations against him were intended to kill him.
That, of course, is nonsense. The story is complicated, but to couch it as people wanting Arday to die is a ridiculous simplification. There may have been a bit of racism motivating some of Arday’s critics, but most of it came from the realization that Arday, a professor without much merit as well as a serial liar, was promoted largely because of his ethnicity and his claimed disability (he said he was severely autistic). It was an obvious case of ideological capture of academia, a case so clear that it has now become acceptable to talk and write about ethnicity versus quality—a topic previously taboo.
You can read the NEJM piece by clicking on the screenshot below.
I’ll quote a lot of it starting from the beginning. The quotes are indented, and my comments are flush left.
They are trying to kill us.
When Black academics say this, I imagine folks outside of our community think we are being hyperbolic. We are not. I think my non-Black colleagues are starting to get a taste of this as they realize how diabolically opposed to our own well-being most of the movements of our federal health agencies seem to be these days. It’s appalling and scary and also — yes, welcome. This is how it feels to know that there are systemic pressures working against your success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life.
Note that Doll cites racist “systemic pressures” that are aimed at ruining the carers of black academics and even killing them. In fact, the opposite is true. Affirmative action, DEI, and the “racial reckoning” that’s been occurring for a long time have given minority academics, including women, a leg up. These initiatives, which led to Arday’s promotion and, indeed, sacralization, is clearly what got him the Cambridge professorship in the first place. Until Arday’s fabulism and plagiarism were revealed (starting with a post by Nathan Cofnas, who clearly didn’t want Arday to die), Arday was on a pedestal, told by his own chairperson at Cambridge that “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Doll continues:
Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His publications specifically focused on race and racism in the British educational system, and he didn’t shy away from using his own life in his examples. After the deliberate targeting of his veracity as an academic by another former Cambridge professor, dismissed due to his racism and white supremacist views, Prof. Arday came under intense scrutiny with regard to his Ph.D. thesis and the stories in his memoir. Besides making the point that his Ph.D. advisor and the university cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations, I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career. And certainly not his life.
Note the penultimate statement: Doll didn’t care whether any allegations against Arday were true. But if they were true (they include made-up positions he put on his c.v.), and they seem to be, then he was unqualified for his position at Cambridge. Remember that Arday killed himself only after Cambridge decided to investigate the allegations. Did anybody predict that those allegations would lead to his (presumed) suicide? I don’t think so, but Doll argues that his death was not only predictable, but engineered by academia and the media:
But Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard, and it will look “fair” to most until perhaps we are dead. Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey of Lincoln University expressed the severe stress, pressure, and undue criticism she weathered in her position before her suicide in 2024. Dr. JoAnne A. Epps, Executive Vice President and Provost of Temple University, and Dr. Orinthia T. Montague, President of Volunteer State Community College, died enduring the unique stressors of their jobs. Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution. Today, I took a moment to appreciate that she is still with us, thank God.
I urge you to check those references for suicide caused by stress, pressure, and criticism. Yes, Candia-Bailey killed herself after claiming she was bullied in academia, but Epps “died. . . . after becoming ill onstage at a memorial service, the university said.” The reference to Orinthia Montague says nothing about suicide, and I can find nothing about that in other places (e.g., here) What is ludicrous about Doll’s claims here is that she simply asserts that the last two died because of “stress and pressure”. But, for crying out loud, being a president or provost of any college is a stressful job, and there is no evidence that Montague or Epps had sufficiently more stress than other administrators because they were black, crossing a stress threshhold that led to death. Neither death is attributed to suicide, so Doll simply asserts that they were due to blackness-induced pressure. Didn’t the NEJM even check the links?
As for Claudine Gay, she was asked to resign by the Harvard Corporation because she did not handle well the allegations of antisemitism at Harvard (she had to clarify her position several times), because she was credibly accused of plagiarism, and because she could no longer lead the University effectively. Rather than boot her out of the Presidency, Harvard stood by her (even dismissing her plagiarism accusations as only examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution“) until the pressure from the Corporation became too great. Indeed, some people, as in NYT link I just gave, argued that Harvard was going easier on Gay than it was on students who might have done the same thing. I see no evidence that Harvard wanted to dump Gay because she was black. Indeed, why was she appointed President if there were structural pressures to ruin her career?
At any rate, Gay landed on her feet. Though she resigned the Presidency, Harvard Magazine says that Gay returned to the faculty as professor of government and of African and American studies, earning “a base salary of $1,397,749, plus other compensation of $150,802 (again, principally the value of a University-provided official residence)”. I don’t know another regular humanities professor making nearly $1.5 million per year! Clearly, Harvard was not trying to ruin her career.
More:
The message to Black academics is clear. Come in, be great and indeed be excellent, but don’t dare dream too big. Don’t dare shine too bright. Walk the line of excellence and humility with perfect grace, and be ready to fight for your life.
The lesson is really that your ethnicity (and, in Arday’s class, his claimed early disability) can elevate you to prestige. Beyond Arday and Candia-Bailey, the argument that universities and academia are trying to exterminate black people is nonexistent.
Doll does mention one white man who lost his job after accusations of falsified data:
In contrast, as a white man, you can rise to be president of Stanford University, and after your falsified data is found and has set back an entire field of research for years — you will only lose your job and then quickly find another one as the CEO of a $1 billion biopharma start-up. Beyond this single story of nauseating privilege, it is a fantasy to act like plagiarism, falsified data, and suspicious, unreproducible results are not major and common problems in academia. We have entire websites devoted to attempting to keep pace with the number of scientific papers retracted amid scandal. Scroll through the recent posts on Retraction Watch and let me know how many of those investigators have been hounded, literally, to death by the news media. I hear the assertions that the British press is particularly vicious and unabashedly racist, which contributed to hundreds of articles attacking Prof. Arday in a matter of days. However, this country is not far behind. The New York Times, before his body was even laid to rest, asserted on social media that Arday’s death was a result of “race, diversity, and academic hiring.” Sure.
I won’t list other white academics who lost their jobs for plagiarism or other accusations, or even killed themselves as a result, as that’s just playing an anecdotes game. Yes, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford after wonky and apparently falsified data were found in a paper he co-authored, but, like Claudine Gay, he landed on his feet. And remember, the attention directed to Arday was only tangentially because he was black, for it was his ethnicity and claimed disability, as well as the accusations of fabulism and plagiarism that Cambridge University at first ignored, that gave the story its viral status. The striking part was the realization of how far ideological capture had gone in academia—so far that a man totally unqualified for a professorship had gotten there without anybody looking too closely at his qualifications. (Indeed, I think the NEJM publishing Doll’s palpably ludicrous analysis is itself an example of ideological capture of the journal.)
At the end, Doll bemoans her own fate, telling us that she pretty much has it as bad as did Arday, although that cannot be true. She also analogizes her accusations of racism to lynching, for lynching is the subject of the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939 (bolding below is mine):
As someone who introduced herself here as being in it for the long haul in academia, I am in contemplation this week. Not because I am considering leaving, but because it’s important to query whether my systems and boundaries for my own well-being are strong enough to withstand the ever-present winds of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Are my bonds with my fellow Black academics well-tended to? Are my filters to keep nonsense out of my inbox tight enough? Do I need to ratchet up my “No”s even further?
In these times where trees bearing strange fruit are on the rise (again) in the U.S. South, where Black mothers everywhere heard about Nolan Wells long before it was in the mainstream media, I don’t believe there is such thing as hyperbole. They are trying to kill us. They always have been.And yet, we are still here.
Rest in peace, Jason Arday.
Ask yourself if you’re an academic: are colleges and universities trying to deny jobs to minorities, impede their progress, or even trying to kill them by putting in motion processes that they know will result in suicide? I’d say that, in these days of DEI, it’s the precise opposite.
But why did the NEJM even publish such a palpably misguided and hyperbolic piece? I would answer this way: the journal’s editors were trying to signal their virtue. And that’s ideological capture.
Thank you for reporting on this very disturbing subject.
I did not know the sociologist who died. I have a lot of sympathy to his family.
The disturbing issue is that if somebody comes under scrutiny because of any accusation – the press, the “authorities”, the peers from Academia cannot stop talking publicly.
There are so many people out there who love to listen to their own voices disregarding the consequences that it becomes scary!
Now the target is on the back of whistleblower!
Thank you for your monitoring of “hunters” on both sides!
It is disheartening, though not entirely unexpected, that a respected medical journal would publish this kind of bilge. Perhaps we are seeing the prelude to Woke 2.0 or something even worse
Obviously Doll’s article is ludicrously absurd, but attempting to steel-man it just a little:
It probably is stressful being a diversity hire in a high-profile role and finding yourself out of your depth. It likely is stressful being expected to produce good-quality research if you were not appointed on merit and are not up to the task (and one can see how resorting to plagiarism is tempting).
It probably is stressful if you are expected to teach bright undergraduates, if your own grasp of the subject is not great. And it likely is stressful if you know that most of your colleagues are of the opinion that you were appointed on identity, not merit. I can see why someone in this position can come to regard the whole system as hostile.
Of course this is just another drawback of DEI, and the remedy is scrupulously merit-based hiring.
Doll does not mention, nor do I think she believes, that these people were “diversity hires”. She says that the hounding of and death wishes around black academics are because they are blacks.
Yes, she writes that “Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history.” — taking the appointment at face value, as if it were a genuine reflection of his merit. So right from the start she’s not acknowledging that the quality of work was a problem for his appointment.
Here on Turtle Island dozens of universities for several years have been scouring the country to find hundreds of black and indigenous PhDs to hire into faculty jobs specifically allocated only for those ethnicities (the Scarborough Charter). This is legal under our human rights legislation and welcomed by our university leadership for many of the same reasons Hilary Cremin gushingly welcomed Jason Arday in that cringey video from 2023 (representation, reparations, performative antiracism).
Will all those Scarborough faculty members be excellent scholars and teachers? The rest of us hope so because they will be our colleagues for 30 years. Will some of them wonder about whether they are qualified for their jobs? Of course, because that self-doubt is a feature of ~all academic lives. Will other people think of them as diversity hires? Probably, because they are diversity hires (or equity hires – potato, potahto). Will any of them be killed for being black or indigenous? Of course not. Does that mean Canada is less racist than the USA or Britain? This person didn’t think so
https://www.hrreporter.com/focus-areas/compensation-and-benefits/school-principal-takes-own-life-after-alleged-bullying-by-anti-racism-trainer/378345
and she used her antiracism training session to abuse and harass a high school principal who later killed himself. Rather the opposite of the killing fields that Dr. Doll describes.
Woke is definitely not dead!
When your lens is ideological, everything is evidence of the ideology’s correctness.
Attributing black deaths to systemic pressure is like attributing malaria to miasma – a claim that is false because neither systemic pressure nor miasma exist. I’m not saying racism doesn’t exist, but racism is real and physical – there is evidence for racism, when racist acts occur. But systemic pressure? It’s a phrase without a real-world referent. It’s an invented evil, like witchcraft and sorcery, that can be used to explain literally any and every adverse outcome suffered by a black person – as this author proves.
And the fact that the editors permitted the author to as good as blame the truly tragic death of Nolan Wells to “the ever-present winds of white supremacy and anti-blackness” is beyond disgrace. There is not a shred of evidence that his long-time white friends wanted anything but good for him.
Evidence people!! That NEJM – the premier scientific medical journal in the country – should sink to publishing an article that effectively attributes deaths of black people to a racist miasma is… I’ve run out of words.
Critics didn’t intend for Arday to commit suicide, or for the others to die. Nor was Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard’s president meant to hasten her death. So, I don’t accept that “They are trying to kill us.” These deaths may be sad cases, but I don’t think that they are part of a pattern. Each is unique. The NEJM is letting her have her say.
The Arday case and the polarised reactions to it have confirmed something I was already feeling fairly sure about: that public discourse today (political, academic, media) is no longer concerned with what is true but with whose side you’re on. I see this as an intellectual disaster. Now, when someone disagrees with you, it’s simply no good presenting evidence and arguments to make your case : they just think ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’
What’s more, sophisticated proponents of the ‘whose-side-are-you-on’ worldview can cite intellectual authorities on which to ground their position: Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault etc. Even to get a good-faith discussion started you’d have to somehow neutralise those guys – but you couldn’t do that, because the ’whose-side-are-you-on’ proponent would, of course, attack your motives for trying to do so. I have to say it seems to be mainly left-wing people (and I used to count myself as left-wing) who have espoused this worldview.
We see this not just in the Arday case but in disagreements about trans ideology, the Gaza conflict and a host of other controversies. I’m dismayed. If you can’t appeal to evidence and arguments any more, there can be no such thing as public reason. I am a philosophy lecturer, and philosophy becomes impossible in these conditions. Well, I’ll retire in a few years, so that’s some comfort.
But of course, the concept of evidence is just white, European neocolonialism. We have been liberated from all that, with the new Way of Knowing instantiated by the self-identification concept: self-ID in regard to sex, medical history, professional record, number of marathons run, etc. . Academics like the author of this NEJM essay will try to apply this new principle to medicine and surgery; its application to physics, engineering, and plumbing repair will prove to be a big challenge, perhaps even an embarrassment.
With this op-ed, Wokism has mutated to full-blown paranoia about a few people, and the irony is that not a single thought was given in the op-ed about the trail of broken careers and psyches of dozens if not hundreds of victims of Wokism’s excesses.
I don’t know which is more outrageous: the NEJM piece or Gay’s $1.4 annual salary. Gay seems to have paid a steep price for academic fraud.
Kemi Doll writes: “I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true.”
If someone doesn’t care that anything is true, why should anyone care what they have to say?
Former Harvard Medical school dean Jeff Flier addressed the Dr Kemi Doll op-ed in the Sensible Medicine Substack this past week, link below, but Jerry’s post is better because he directly addressed each point while Flier did not. Also, Flier seemed to feel he had to sugarcoat each of his thoughts. Jerry of course is very thorough and upfront! Link below.
This is obviously an awful and tragic episode for all involved—Arday, his family, and public faith in academia to name a few. But agreed with an earlier commenter that public discourse, and journalism and Free speech in general, obviously can’t exist if everyone who can be legitimately investigated holds a suicide possibility to quash it. When anyone becomes a public figure, public scrutiny is part of the deal.
The Arday charges so far do in fact appear to be true, so it is a particularly bad precedent for other academics to claim he should not have been investigated. Or that they don’t care what is true, as Dr Doll clearly stated. Again, the reason the Arday case played out mainly in the media is because Cambridge and earlier employers didn’t do any diligence at all before hiring Arday, and afterward, Cambridge refused to investigate the charges for two years while Arday literally stopped mainstream news sources from reporting by threatening litigation.
https://www.sensible-med.com/p/the-new-england-journal-failed-in?r=4uo81&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
I also saw Flier’s response at the Sensible Med substack. Its style is as you would expect it to be for a leader of the profession – judicious, emotionally neutral. The Black medic’s ventilated voice merely underscores the usual tropes about ‘Black women being over-demonstrative over-emotional’ and so forth. In short, an own goal. Heckuva job, Dr Doll. The NEJM needs to be made aware her op-ed is woke garbage. It deserves mockery from the medical profession, and not an ounce of ‘respect’. Why? Because to accord it ‘respect’ invites more of the same.
Ramesh 49% Indian 49% Chinese 2% Denisovan.
Anything sourced from Eurasia is acknowledged to be sourced from Neanderthal and Denisovan lands, the original big-brained custodians of the continent. Still waiting for an op-ed in the NEJM of homo sapiens.
Regrettably, Dr. Arday committed suicide, but he opened himself to investigation with his wild claims. If one has autism to the extent he claimed he had, it does not miraculously vaporize as he stated. His thesis advisor only met with him a single time, and this, in itself, was suspicious. I worked with an individual who also had a single meeting (in an obvious sham program) before he began his study and was advised to use the Student’s T-Test. His collected data were categorical, for which the test is not suited. I explained this, but he insisted on using the T-test. His dissertation was still accepted, and he was awarded a doctoral degree. In another instance, like Dr. Arday, a student conducted interviews on experiences with discrimination. Her area of study was Educational Leadership. No connection was made, but she too was awarded a degree. All that was accomplished was trading one form of discrimination for another as neither could function as an academic.
This is pure emotional blackmail. If you dare to scrutinise my/black person’s work or statements in academia as to be false, misleading or inaccurate I will kill myself.
Their ethnicity demands them to be above any accountability or responsibility. To claim this is how white supremacy and racism is embedded within academia is absurd.
When she wrote her essay, its author seems to have been living in a brew of grief, grievance, and fearful anticipation of more investigations of the work of diverse academicians by those she believes to be bad actors with racist motives. If so, it may take some time before she, and others with similar beliefs and who are similarly grieving, to allow themselves to understand Dr. Arday’s tragic story in its complicated entirety. Humans, you just gotta love us.
I understand that selection bias might be at work here, but whenever I read pieces that illustrate Wokeness is alive and well in academia and in the ideological automatons it can produce, I think about the federal executive branch. Specifically, I think about that flood of policy advisors and unelected officials who flow into Washington D.C. from academia each time the blue team arrives on Pennsylvania Avenue.
They are rarely content to rename lakes.