My friend Maarten Boudry, identified by Wikipedia as “a Belgian academic and skeptic,” was commissioned by Persuasion (the Substack founded by Yascha Mounk) to write a piece on Jason Arday. He did, but they ultimately rejected it. This was a while back, so I don’t think it was passed over because it was old news. It overlaps some with my piece on Arday and Nature at the Chronicle of Higher Education, but is not identical in focus.
At any rate, I read it and offered to post it here, and Maarten accepted. It apparently has three titles, and is indented below.
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The Cult of Saint Arday
The Perverse Incentives of Academic Martyrdom
Saints, Sinners, and Suspensions
A “scholar who inspired a generation,” writes the journal Nature of the late Jason Arday. Anyone searching this editorial for any admission of Arday’s extensive academic misconduct and fraud, will search in vain. If we are to believe the most prestigious journal in the world, Arday was simply a victim of “systemic racism in academia.” This editorial, which needs to be read to be believed, seems to be the apogee (so far) in the canonization of Jason Arday that has taken place since his apparent death by suicide on August 14. Not to be outdone, his own employer and chief enabler, Cambridge University, has launched an independent review this week—not to investigate how an obviously unqualified person like Arday was elevated to the highest ranks at such an august institution, but to ask, essentially, how Cambridge “could have and should have done more” to stand by Arday in the period after the accusations against him entered public discourse. Buried as an afterthought in the announcement is a vague reference to the “wider circumstances of Arday’s time at Cambridge.”
It is tragic that Arday lost his life, and it is also understandable that questions of academic misconduct should fade into the background now. But the complete denial of any wrongdoing, combined with the vicious attacks against journalists and fellow academics who were just doing their job and exercising due diligence, makes it impossible to just move on. Cambridge Chancellor Chris Smith denounced the “racist feeding frenzy” leading to Arday’s death. Celebrity academic Ibram X. Kendi described a “lynching,” while podcaster Owen Jones said Arday was “hounded to death.” A columnist in a prestigious medical journal invoked Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit” and wrote that “they are trying to kill us [black people].”
At the risk of belaboring what should be obvious by now, the plagiarism accusation can be settled in a few minutes by simply reading Arday’s thesis side by side with an earlier thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers—with The Telegraph finding over 100 instances of overlap between the two. Arday even copy-pasted responses of subjects from earlier publications, attributing them to people he allegedly interviewed himself, which constitutes outright fraud.
As is also well known, his life story was held together by bizarre implausibilities ranging from world-class long-distance running with serious injuries to doing volunteer work in Brazil for an NGO that never sends volunteers abroad, to an appearance on an acclaimed television show that could only have occurred decades before his birth. For a period of over a year, multiple internal whistleblowers had provided Cambridge with evidence of plagiarism and fraud, but they decided to look the other way. Instead, they fed Arday’s delusions and praised him to the skies as the “best in the world in terms of the research that you do,” as the head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education said in a BBC story about his appointment. And let’s not forget that Arday intimidated any journalist or academic who dared to raise questions about this misconduct, by hiring legal firms to threaten to sue them for libel, or just by leveling accusations of racism.
In fact, right before Arday decided to take his life, even his own defenders finally seemed to come to terms with these disturbing facts, as they gingerly dropped their support for him. Several prominent signatories of the Good Law Project open letter, which had expressed “unwavering solidarity” with Arday against racially motivated “malicious attacks”, withdrew their names in the days preceding Arday’s death. They must have belatedly realized that the evidence against him was simply too damning, and the risk to their own reputations simply too great. Indeed, Cambridge University itself, which had long dismissed all allegations as a “vile smear campaign,” eventually opened an investigation into Arday after all. Of all newspapers, The Guardian exposed his ludicrous stories about a severed pig’s head and a knife-wielding assailant. A day before his death, a Guardian columnist had accused Arday of “using his neurodivergence as an excuse for dishonesty.” If you’ve lost The Guardian, it’s over. In fact, this loss of support from his erstwhile defenders plausibly contributed to Arday’s sense of despair.
When the former professor was found dead in his London apartment, however, all his sins were instantly washed away. Across academia and the web, the entire mountain of evidence against him was either denied outright or downplayed as the kind of peccadillo every academic is guilty of. Definitions of plagiarism were retroactively modified to suit the purpose, with celebrated academic Jason Stanley arguing that plagiarism does not cover “the mere overlap of sentences.” Apart from the dishonesty, this way of sanctifying someone who took his own life and punishing those who had criticized him also sets up perverse incentives, as Jason Manning wrote in Quillette: “Just as we worry about the impact of social media mockery, so we should worry about the perverse incentives created by elevating a self-killer and punishing his enemies.”
My alma mater Ghent University unfortunately also played a leading role in this drama, because of the affiliation of the man who first set the ball rolling: the self-described “race realist” Nathan Cofnas. Although Cofnas’ controversial views on race and IQ made him the worst kind of messenger for this particular piece of bad news, his role was ultimately limited: he merely broke the silence around Arday’s fraud, after which the legacy media sank their teeth into the story, uncovering fabulation upon fraud. Days after Arday’s death, Ghent University made international headlines by suspending Cofnas, currently a postdoctoral researcher there. When a case of academic fraud comes to light, the Ghent rector must have concluded, the one to punish is the lone academic who had the audacity to blow the whistle.
Fully in thrall to the new cult of Saint Arday, hundreds of academics and students at Ghent University signed a petition claiming that the late professor had come under fire only because “Black scientists are not allowed to belong,” and because his enemies implicitly believe that “elite academic environments naturally belong to white people.” Two Belgian academics even dragged my name into the story, accusing me of “bullying a scholar to death” and “kicking a dead man”—all for having posted a few times about the affair.
In the letter from Ghent University suspending Nathan Cofnas, the rector, Petra De Sutter, accuses Cofnas of a “targeted campaign of professional elimination”—and in so doing entirely overlooks the exhaustive documentation of misconduct provided by Cofnas. De Sutter’s letter is, moreover, one drawn-out heckler’s veto: the justification for the disciplinary measure is not so much Cofnas’ actual violations as the flood of complaints received, the “tension and unrest” in the workplace, and the cancellation of lectures by third parties. (Cofnas remains today barred from campus and under disciplinary investigation for another three months.)
Rather than focusing on a single researcher with unsavory views on race, academia would do better to reflect on how its sweeping abandonment of standards of excellence and meritocracy is not just corrupting entire disciplines, but also harming the racial minorities it pretends to defend. For what is more demeaning to black scholars than the assumption that you need to lower the bar for them because they couldn’t make it otherwise? How does that land with genuinely brilliant black academics like John McWhorter, Kizzmekia Corbett-Helaire, S. James Gates, Jr., Danielle Allen, Musa al-Gharbi, Thomas Sowell, or Kwame Anthony Appiah? Nothing is more condescending than white academics who treat black scholars like children, shielding them from all criticism and amending the definitions of “excellence” and even “plagiarism” to suit.
At this point, I’m more depressed than outraged about the state of academia. It was bad enough that an unqualified fabulist like Arday could rise to the very top of one of the best universities in the world. Worse still was how Cambridge tried to cover it all up and threw around accusations of racism until the bitter end. But the canonization after his death by large swaths of the academic left, and the wild accusations against anyone who has asked critical questions about his story, leave even me speechless. Most damaging of all, it reinforces all the perverse dynamics that led to his meteoric rise and tragic downfall in the first place: don’t you dare question what a black researcher says from his own ‘lived experience’ — because then you’re a vile racist (or a race traitor, if you happen to be black yourself) and complicit in a ‘lynching’ or ‘witch hunt’. Instead of learning vital lessons from what happened here, academia is already preparing the ground for the next Jason Arday
Maarten Boudry is a philosopher and independent author writing on human progress and human (ir)rationality. His upcoming book, The Betrayal of Enlightenment, will be published by Pitchstone Publishing.
There’s nothing wrong with Boudry’s excellent article, that doubtless was turned down for the most poultry of reasons, as Arday would have put it.
He wuz a martyr, not a ‘saint’, bruv!
Yashka Mounk ought to write a book about Arday, titled ‘the Idiot Synthesis’, ( pace Dostoevski).
Ramesh 49% oppressed Indian, 49% oppressed Chinese, 2% pi-oppressed Denisovan
You mean they chickened out?
The lesson I gleaned from the Arday affair is this…most academics are (to borrow a phrase from our dear host) “invertebrates”. And perhaps the precarious state of academics, in which getting and holding onto a good job as a tenured professor is increasingly difficult in many fields, has forced academics into a “go along to get along” mentality just to survive.
The ones who actually try to exercise the free speech that tenure ostensibly protects are becoming rarer. I fear that the mob mentality that is so easily enabled by social media technology has cowed far too many academic institutions.
I appreciate that and agree it might be true in some places. But here on Turtle Island it’s not just a matter of being cowed by a mob on socials.
It’s a close call whether tenure and academic freedom would protect a professor who wrote factually accurate things about a British Columbia version of Arday. Our provincial Human Rights Tribunal would welcome a complaint of discrimination and harassment based on protected characteristics (race, disability).
For example, criticizing transgenderism has cost a BC school trustee a high six-figure penalty from one HRT.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/barry-neufeld-former-chilliwack-bc-trustee-pay-hate-speech-tribunal-2slgbtq-9.7098536
That guy didn’t directly criticize any single “trans” person, and he lost bigly. A professor criticizing a hapless and incompetent black social scientist at another Canadian university would run the same risk, with possibly worst outcomes for criticizing an identifiable individual, and would be unlikely to benefit from legal or rhetorical protection from his university (where affirmative action in faculty hiring is actively pursued) or from his labour union (led by white people who imagine themselves saving oppressed neurodiverse racialized folx). The high risk of speaking out relative to the possible benefit is a big deterrent. Staying mum doesn’t necessarily indicate lack of spine (tho that could be true) but rather an understandable degree of caution. The vibe shift is real but as usual we’re way behind the trend.
The posthumous reinvention of Arday would seem to come from a feeling of collective guilt that his very public outing led to his suicide. Public exposure was probably a factor, but the ultimate outcome was neither intentional nor predictable. Sadly, it was Arday’s own behavior that made him so vulnerable.
In deference to the poor family in mourning. I hope that the entire discussion soon dies down.
While we should indeed have some sympathy for his family, we can’t let the story die since it is the clearest example of the corruption of academia by identity politics.
St. Jason Arday fills a position left vacant when Ward Churchill died earlier this year. Mr. Churchill was a pretendian who maneuvered a position of affirmative action bureaucrat into various special academic appointments and then a department chairmanship at U. Colorado. After he was fired in 2007 for “research misconduct” including falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism, he enjoyed a brief period of pop-Left sainthood, but neglected to commit suicide. In his memory, I suggest “Churchill’s Law”: it observes that the intensity of an academic’s pop-Left rhetoric varies with the fraudulence of his or her scholarly pretenses, to the first (or possibly second) power.
I’m speechless! Just like the martyr was for 14 years, or was it 10, or 15?
Cambridge such endow a professorship in his memory. But he doesn’t deserve a mere Chair. What about a Stool or nay, a Pedestal? Yes, the Arday Professorial Pedestal in the Sociology of Oppression-hood & Victimology.
I’m disappointed to know Persuasion would not publish this piece, especially after they asked Boudry to write it. I’ve listened to a number of podcasts with Yascha Mounk and I thought the whole point of naming his podcast (and his Substack) “Persuasion” was the idea that the way to convince people of your point of view is not to call them names and not to silence them, but to persuade them.
Maybe they felt Boudry’s argument was a bit too persuasive.
Racism is shameful, systematic makes it pathetic.
A guy taking advantage of them is embarrassing.
Why I honestly regard my cynicism as equal opportunity.
Great commentary and analysis by Dr. Boudry. Thank you for publishing it, Dr. Coyne.
Mike Hart raises a very alarming case. The case in question was brought against a School Governor Barry Neufeld, who took public exception to a gender affirmation policy in British Columbia. The judgement itself was made by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. Their link to the decision itself ends in a 404 error, but one of the teacher’s unions has (usefully) made a copy available here:
https://www.bctf.ca/docs/default-source/for-news-and-stories/49_chilliwack_teachers-_association_v_neufeld_no_10_2026_bchrt_49.pdf?sfvrsn=2d847803_1
It makes for sobering (and long) reading. However, it is best summed up by a passage on page 18/19:
“Throughout this process, Mr. Neufeld and his counsel were incredulous at the
suggestion that, by attacking “gender ideology”, he was denying the existence of trans people.
This is reflected in his closing submissions:
‘Gender ideology may be summarized as the belief system that everybody
has a gender identity; that this gender identity is not determined by the
biological sex of a person; that this gender identity therefore may be one
of any number of gender identities such as masculine, feminine, “queer”,
non-binary, or even more than one gender identity at a time; that anyone
may assume any gender identity simply by self-identifying; and that a
person actually is whatever gender identity that person thinks, regardless
of biological sex. A believer of gender ideology therefore believes that if
a person identifies as a man, that person actually is a man, regardless of
whether the person is biologically male or female.
As is to be expected, believers of this ideology do not regard it as a belief
system at all, but rather as an accurate and true account of the world. The
teacher witnesses in this case repeatedly testified to this. However, the
inescapable fact is that beliefs such as the belief that people have gender
identities independent of biological sex, can change gender, or can hold
more than one gender identity at a time are just that: beliefs. They are
not hard, concrete, observable facts such as water is wet and fire is hot.
In this way, gender ideology is no different than other belief systems, such
as the belief system that people were created by a spirit-being (i.e.
“God”), have a spirit themselves, and that spirit will live on in a spiritual
place after the physical death of the body.’
55) We [The Tribunal] can think of no better example for how transpeople are denied than this passage….”
It appears that publicly stating this position on a a policy that he, as a governor, had to consider will cost Mr. Neufeld $C 750,000. The tone of the decision strongly suggests that Neufeld had no chance whatsoever in this process.
Such a sum would personally ruin me and reduce my dependents to destitution. Consequently, and given the woke-weaponry that is clearly now available, I am not surprised that deep cover is the location chosen by many who might happen to not quite agree with the Ardayesque and related agendas. Any other position (especially in Canada) would be foolhardy to the point of irresponsibility if dependents were involved.
I am forced to consider that rule by Trump and his cronies (for all their drawbacks) might represent an improvement on rule by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal and their ilk.
The kerfuffle over Arday leaves a question: how many more like him are out there? Who are not quite so obvious, more subtle in their lying?
It seems to me that if he had been slightly more careful and not so brazen he’d be there for his working life.
Well, there are 3 issues in the Arday case.
One is inventing stories about background. This can include claiming degrees which one does not actually possess. This was not the case in Arday’s situation, but it has been known to happen. He actually did receive his degrees (deserved or not).
The second is plagiarism, which we know occurs. Claudine Gay lost her job as President of Harvard because of it, yet for some reason is allowed to keep her professorship.
The third is the lightweight c.v.s, and there are certainly more cases out there in university systems, especially in fields in which published work is not based on research anyway. This is not a fault of the individual involved, but one of the universities. The only explanation that I can think of for that is that these universities want to pad their faculties in certain departments, and try very hard to hire minorities underrepresented among academic faculty.
The Arday affair exposes numerous problems in academia, and, as you suggest, there are several cases of each of them still “out there”. Some of them, like Claudine Gay, are known. Others will remain under the radar, unless someone like Cofnas investigates, and there is little incentive for anyone involved with a university to do that. Likely, it would cost them their job, and just as likely, even if academic crime is shown, the university will do all it can to cover it up or ignore it— as is the case of Gay.
I think there might be a lot of such frauds out there in academia.
D.A.
NYC