Great And Unfortunate Fabrications

Authored by Roger Kimball via American Greatness,

Jason Arday should ask for a cover charge. His entertainment value is that splendid. For the last couple of weeks, the “youngest ever black professor” at the University of Cambridge has been a nearly ubiquitous and nonstop source of hilarity. The proximate catalyst for the comedy is the imminent publication of Great and Unfortunate Things, co-written with the “book doctor” Eve Claxton. It is due out on August 11 from Simon & Schuster. Amazon lists it as an “Editor’s Pick” of “Best Biographies & Memories.” “A story of resilience, dignity, and the extraordinary power of those who hold steady for us when we cannot yet hold steady for ourselves,” says one blurber. “Makes you believe in the transformative power of grit and the magic of a mother’s love,” quoth another. A story easily worth the “$1.4 million” advance that Jason said he was offered for the book (though that figure is disputed). Did you know that poor Jason, now 41, was “diagnosed with autism and developmental delays at age three, and experts told his parents he would never speak, write, or live independently”?

And that was the least of Jason’s trials. The Atlantic got hold of an advance copy of the book and drew attention to what some have delicately described as numerous “inconsistencies” in Arday’s account of his life story. Comparing the final book with the book proposal, the author of “Icarus in the Faculty Lounge” uncovers some amazing things. In his proposal, Arday recounts being hit by a car, spending months in a sort of conscious coma, then waking up and having to relearn “everything – how to walk, to talk.” That remarkable experience is, we are told, entirely omitted from the book, as is his bout with testicular cancer (in the book he grapples with not one but two brain tumors). Arday has apparently never been to Brazil, but that quotidian fact did not prevent him from encountering a mysterious “shaman woman” there who predicted that he would suffer greatly but also achieve great things. “Every event she described has since come to pass,” he wrote.

Time itself is plastic in Jason Arday’s hands. He somehow managed to appear on the television program Seven Up more than 20 years before he was born. He is also a remarkable athlete, having run 30 marathons in 35 days. Take that, Pheidippides! Clearly, Great and Unfortunate Things should not be categorized as “memoir” or “biography” but fantasy. But the blatant fabrications in the book are only the tip of the Arday midden. There is a vigorous online debate now about whether Simon & Schuster will pull the book before publication. If I were a betting man, I would put a fiver on the cynical side, saying, “No, they’ll go through with publishing Arday’s drivel. They are that craven.” We’ll know whether I am right on Tuesday. But speaking of “drivel,” take a moment to absorb this 40-minute dollop from the master himself. How proud Cambridge must have been!

Like Shakespeare’s Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale, Arday also seems to be a “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” i.e., a plagiarist. Last month, the London Telegraph published a story listing more than 100 passages from Arday’s doctoral dissertation that were “identical or nearly identical to a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student.” Does that list prove that Arday is guilty of plagiarism? Outside the universe of Jorge Luis Borges, I would say yes, it does. But when Cambridge was first shown the evidence of plagiarism, it dismissed it as part of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” Vile or not, the allegations were irrefutable. Arday has just resigned his professorship. One enterprising blogger reports that Arday’s letter of resignation was put through an AI-writing detection program and was determined to be “fully AI-generated” with high confidence. Consistency! I like to see it. Arday hasn’t admitted any wrongdoing, though. He is just moving on to his “next phase.” Nolo contendere, as Spiro Agnew once put it.

Have I mentioned that Arday is black? He is, and you will not be surprised to discover that among his fabulations are charges that he has suffered from numerous racist attacks. “There has been,” he said in an interview, “a very well-orchestrated and coordinated campaign to unseat me from my position. The motive is racially motivated. I think there’s a reason why it’s me, and I do think that reason is aligned to ableism and racism.” When questions about Arday’s thesis surfaced, Jack Grove, a reporter for the Times Higher Education, started looking into “anomalies” in Arday’s CV and the charges of plagiarism. Arday promptly reported Grove to the Metropolitan Police, claiming harassment. The police opened a four-month inquiry to investigate the charges. They have subsequently apologized.

Almost everything about Jason Arday is fake. He was described as a “professor of sociology.” But his degrees are in education, not sociology. He naturally continues to enjoy support from the academic left. “The glee of the right over the Arday case,” runs one typical effusion, “is indicative of how unsafe academia is for Black scholars and of an attempt to erode whatever fragile safety still exists.” But who said anything about black scholars? The leader of the Green Party, Zack Polanski, signed a letter claiming that the allegations against Arday were “entirely false.” Blacks, you see, are often “held to higher standards” than whites. What a card Polanski is!

Two points. First, the tsunami of ridicule building around Jason Arday assures that he will be consigned to the graveyard of exposed fraudsters. Already the memes are burgeoning. Jason Arday beat out Neil Armstrong to be the first man to walk on the moon. The Bayeux Tapestry is making a long stop at the British Museum. You’ll see that Jason Arday occupies a prominent place in it and was, in fact, responsible for William’s victory at Hastings in 1066. Arday was also there with Nelson on the Victory at Trafalgar in 1805. I’ve seen the picture. “Historians now believe Britain would never have achieved naval supremacy without him.” Ha, ha.

That’s the droll side. But we must not let it conceal the dour reality that underpins the comedy. Which brings me to my second point: to wit, the politically inspired intellectual bankruptcy of the University of Cambridge. X recently listed “Cambridge Gender Studies PhD Topics Draw Online Mockery” as trending. Quite right, too. Here are a few:

• Traditional Cultural Norms, Technology and Gender Relations in Ghana
• The Political Economy of Female Circumcision
• Unsexed beings: constructing gender, humanness, and agency through the use of the word “unsex” in Late Modern British society and writing
• In Her Own Words: A Study of Women’s Voices in Contemporary White Supremacy and Far-Right Online Hate
• Legal Mobilization by Black Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer (LBQ) Womxn in Kenya and South Africa
• Exploring gendered embodiment in transgender and gender-diverse adolescents at the intersection of exercise and eating behaviours, social inclusion, and mental health: Towards a desire-centred approach in paediatric gender-affirming healthcare and research
• Codes of Life, Codes of Death: Tracing the (Im)possibility of Trans Lives in Algorithmic Assemblages

Et very much cetera.

And then there is Hilary Cremin, a senior professor and dean of faculty in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge. A friend sent me her personal profile:

She co-chairs the THRiVE research group, whose professors and researchers investigate human thriving in and through Education. This includes topics such as wellbeing, peace education, conflict, equity, inclusion and social justice. Together the group has a significant portfolio of research and publication.

Hilary’s own work focusses on Education, Peace and Conflict, whether this is: inner peace; interpersonal conflict resolution; social / community peace; global peace; or peace with the planet and non-human species. Her book Positive Peace in Schools with Terence Bevington outlines a framework for peace education in schools and communities. It forms the basis for her most recent peace education research project – the Cambridge Positive Peace Hub – which is creating an interactive digital platform for schools globe whilst supporting a global network of peace educators, researchers, policy-makers. visionaries and young people.

Hilary’s most recent book Rewilding Education calls for an urgent global conversation about the aims and purposes of education in times of existential crisis. It proposes radical change, moving from education as monoculture to education as ecosystem. Learning in and through Nature, and in embodied and contextualised ways are highlighted in case studies from around the world Hilary uses the arts, auto ethnography and poetry in her research. She welcomes approaches from collaborators also interested in these methods and ideas.

Cambridge has a lot more than Jason Arday to worry about.

Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine’s Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art’s Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).