By now, you’ve probably heard the name Jason Arday. Just in case you haven’t... he was a professor at Cambridge University who recently committed suicide. Arday was the youngest black person to be elevated to the exalted status of Professor at Cambridge, a university of (until recently) legendary repute with a history going back over eight hundred years.
Arday was legendary, in a rather literal sense.
He was mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18.
He was autistic and epileptic.
He endured locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor.
He ran 600 miles in six days.
He ran 30 marathons in 35 days. He had an epileptic episode during marathon #21, broke his leg, got up and finished, and then ran 9 more.
He raised millions for charity from those marathons.
He traveled intercontinentally to install “water points” under the auspices of WaterAid.
He was on the receiving end of physical threats from masked men and had his knuckles repeatedly rapped by schoolteachers.
A severed pigs head was sent to his home.
He was a semi-pro soccer player and a “snooker shark” who made mountains of cash hustling other players.
He was awarded professorships at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and Durham University.
He published a book called “Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse.”
How far into this list did your bullshit alarm start ringing?
Yes, indeed, it was bullshit. Either grossly exaggerated or completely fabricated. And yet, one of the greatest universities in the world overlooked the breathtaking brazenness of his fabulism and made him a different sort of legend: a person to be feted and admired for achieving a professorship at a such a young age.
While being black, of course.
What did him in, reputation ally, in the end was not the fabricated curriculum vitae. It was credible accusations of plagiarism.
Here’s the rub: The person who first reported the plagiarism is a controversial figure, accused by many of advancing “scientific racism,” or the idea that different races have disparate abilities. So, the wagons initially and briefly circled around Arday, and anyone who dared challenge the myths and legends surrounding him was attacked with the usual accusations of racism and related bigotries (it was called a “witch hunt, among other things). Whether Nathan Cofnas is a racist or espouses racist ideas should be irrelevant in assessing whether his accusations of plagiarism are valid, but of course Arday’s defenders defaulted to ad hominem responses and genetic fallacies.
The truth didn’t matter to those attackers, or was of such secondary importance as to be irrelevant to them and their worldview.
Welcome to the modern, progressive, “woke” world we live in.
People, with a straight face, engage in factual relativism, brashly telling us that “their truths” can be different from “our truths.” Or, in balder terms, that two plus two does not always equal four. These people now dominate the institutions that used to be most committed to seeking the truth: our elite universities. Their relativism and reality-detachment has infected other institutions and Western culture itself. Because most of this is rooted in the soft sciences (Arday’s field was sociology of education) where being wrong doesn’t lead to direct catastrophe (as opposed, to, say, a civil engineer screwing up a bridge design), they can get away with excreting massive piles of steaming bullshit for years or decades.
I’ve had many conversations with rational people who cannot comprehend that facts and truth and logical conclusions developed from empirical data are of no interest to these “elites.” I point out, time and again, that the only way to comprehend how they could defend Arday is to first come to terms with how they think and that truth is very, very low on their priorities list.
The results are not just academic. They’re not theoretical. One can reasonably ask if Arday would still be alive had his fabulist bullshit been called out earlier in his life, if he had not been elevated to such an exalted position by people who chose willful ignorance in favor of affirmative action and social promotion over actual merit and fidelity to what’s real.
We also see reality intruding in the current controversy in the WNBA. The politically correct “trans women are women” mantra is being challenged by reality, much to the dismay of the corporate cowards (aren’t they all?) who dare not acknowledge that someone born with XY chromosomes has inherent physical advantages over someone born with XX. It’s not enough that Sophie Cunningham has chosen the path of honesty - and put herself in activists’ crosshairs - by speaking out for women’s rights in sports. Now, two ex-NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, have upended the narrative by declaring themselves for the WNBA draft, pointing out that there’s nothing in the rules that disqualifies them. If they get drafted, the whole enterprise becomes a joke. If they don’t, the team managers tacitly acknowledge that trans women are not women.
Thing is, everyone knows the truth here. That truth, as in the case of Jason Arday, is simply not of interest to some people. They have other priorities, including sacrificing the interests of many to favor an “oppressed” few.
I caught a clip of progressive talking head Cenk Uygur claiming (I paraphrase) he’d be OK if his daughter had to go to Dartmouth instead of Harvard if that meant that a trans kid got a leg up. Merit notwithstanding, I think it safe to presume. Whether that’s the truth or just bluster (I won’t speculate in his case, but there are countless “elites” who defend the public school status quo while sending their kids to top-tier private schools) doesn’t matter much - it’s the message that his ilk are propagating and the outcome that they are trying to cajole or coerce.
Again, to understand your ideological counterparts, you need to get into their heads. You need to understand how they think and why your sound rational arguments don’t make any headway with them. The subordination of truth to agenda is a big part of that, and that is rooted in blind tribal loyalty. To admit Arday was a fraud is to do harm to their team’s reputation, and thereby to abet the “evil enemy” that is the other team. It’s mind-numbing to ponder, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
You can scroll back through the history of the last decade or so and find countless more examples of truth being made subordinate to agenda.
The tragedy of Arday’s suicide is being blamed on the whistleblower and all those who pointed out that the emperor has no clothes, but the true blame belongs to all those who accepted his lies, encouraged more of them, and made the pedestal so tall that any fall would be catastrophic.
👍👍 Sure seems that being woke requires some degree of mental illness, allowing the mentally ill woke to ignore reality.
Lost in the shuffle:
**the blacks who CAN do the work and do NOT need or want standards lowered or tests eliminated.
**this man's students, who are due a refund and a free makeup course for being shafted.