"The fact that [Jason Arday] was promoted as some kind of prodigy given how crazy his self-representation was is a sign of just how cultic and confused the left and left-leaning institutions have become."

"I mean, it's just it's just a sign of the the cancer having spread everywhere.... I mean, it's just, this is all, anti-racism.... This is putting the black — the BLM black — square not only in your bio but in your brain. Um, it's a cult. It's always been a cult. It's been obvious for for about a decade now that this is what we're witnessing is the the ramifications of a moral panic around race and social justice that got engineered on the left.... It's intolerable and if we don't get our heads clear of its new variant, this this far-left socialist/communist alliance with with Islamism, we're going to go for another round of right-wing ascendancy in America and elsewhere.... [Cambridge was] totally corrupt in its desperation to believe that somebody who checks all the identitarian boxes is a you know is... some kind of you know woke superhero.... I mean, you're you're in the presence of a lunatic who's making these claims about himself, right?... The social justice hysteria around race that has occurred in the last decade has been almost totally dishonest almost. I mean, this is the just Jussie Smollettification of everything, right?"

Said Sam Harris.

 

"[M]any on the left are blaming the media. 'The media lynched Jason Arday,' declared Ibram X. Kendi...."

"Important British progressives... signed an open letter demanding some sort of official oversight of journalistic decision-making. 'Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed,' it said. The writer Will Self called, in an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for the police to begin 'impounding computers,' presumably belonging to people involved in covering the scandal... Some who once championed Arday seem to be trying to deflect from their own embarrassing credulity, and it is unlikely to work...."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "After a Scholar’s Awful Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship" (NYT gift link).

"Many of the people who didn’t bother questioning Arday’s back story should have known better; today their oversight looks less like respect than condescension, as if no one took him seriously enough to think hard about what he was saying. 'Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot,' Jason Okundaye wrote in the left-leaning Guardian.... For people on the left, it’s sure easier to talk about the feral excesses of the right-wing press than the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives."

What she's politely calling "condescension" and "the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives" is racism. The way they treated him reflected a belief in his inferiority.

"Jason Arday obituary: youngest ever black Cambridge professor/Sociology of education academic who made history before his career unravelled after accusations of plagiarism dies aged 41."

An obituary in the London Times.

Arday, who claimed to have been diagnosed with global developmental delay and autism spectrum disorder, was apparently unable to talk until the age of 11, and unable to read or write until he was 18. Despite this remarkable setback, by his early thirties he had begun writing and publishing academic papers, and he won his first academic post soon after....

We talked about Arday a few days ago, here. He was accused of plagiarism and various lies that made him a laughingstock. Now, apparently, he has killed himself. Though he is responsible for his deceit, I feel the greatest blame lies with the University that advanced him beyond anything that made sense. 

"Setting aside the plagiarism and fabrication allegations, I’m struck by just how … bad Arday’s work is."

"It makes me cringe to watch video of Professor Hilary Cremin, head of Cambridge’s faculty of education, fawning over him: 'We’re so lucky to have you. You’re the best in the world in terms of the research you do.' I’m gobsmacked that she didn’t think it might be worth trying to read the book he’d claimed to have written before offering him a plum academic job."

Writes Sonia Sodha, in "Jason Arday is the product of academia’s soft bigotry/Universities risk undermining genuine equality of opportunity when they reward identity over merit and sideline proper scrutiny" (London Times). 

And here's a London Times review of that book: "Jason Arday’s memoir is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe/The embattled former Cambridge professor’s autobiography, Great and Unfortunate Things, feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals."

Excerpt from the review: "As young Arday failed to hit his milestones, doctors declared him 'deficient' and said he was 'no better than a vegetable.' Arday was, by his own account, a profoundly intellectually disabled child. He claims that he could 'register sounds, but I couldn’t shape them into meaning.' He also says that smearing his faeces on the wall was one of his few sensory releases.... 'Most of my memories of my early childhood are of generalised images, sounds, sensations, feelings, rather than specific events, perhaps because language helps us to form memories, and I didn’t have access to that until I was older.'"