Jason Arday has been found dead at home, apparently by his own hand.
Arday has been written about extensively already, and I don’t want to waste time recapitulating the comical saga of his academic malfeasance here. If this is the first you’ve heard of him, you can do much worse than to start with the original piece by Nathan Cofnas exposing the Cambridge con artist’s record of plagiarism, semi-literate rambling, and outrageous tall tales:
Librarian of Celaeno’s piece skewering him is also worth reading. It covers all the necessary ground and hits exactly the right satirical notes.
Now that Arday has cancelled himself from life, the usual suspects have taken to legacy and social media to decry the injustice. Arday was murdered, no, he was lynched by the vicious right wing hate mob that drove this innocent black saint to the depths of despair. Have you no shame? No humanity? What kind of trash people would so relentlessly hound an innocent black body, besmirching his good and unimpeachable name in a public campaign of vilification, for no reason other than that he plagiarized his entire dissertation, lacked a grade-schooler’s understanding of grammar, and spun tall tales about his Guiness World Record breaking feats of athleticism? This is the ugliest kind of bigotry, absolutely beyond the pale of acceptable discourse, a dark sign of where we are in Trump’s United Kingdom.
Dear reader, it would be be both ignoble and un-Christian of me to take any sort of pleasure in Arday’s suicide. Of course, so far as I know, none of the tributaries contributing to my bloodline are especially aristocratic, and I have never pretended to be much of a Christian, so perhaps that gives me all the excuse I need to revel in the charlatan’s end. Nevertheless, I shall reign in the base impulses of the chimpanzee within, and take the higher path. Arday had two children, and whatever one’s opinion on the man, losing their father like this must be devastating for them.
That said, Arday is not the first academic to take his own life after finding his career in the targeting reticule of a digital mob.
Arday’s entire schtick, for which he was rewarded with a meteoric rise to a prestigious professorship at one of the world’s premier institutions of higher indoctrination, was kvetching about racism in academia. He didn’t even do so in a particularly clever way. So far as I can tell he did not find anything original to say about racism, nor was he especially talented as a literary popularizer. He was both unoriginal and untalented even by the vanishingly low standards of what academics are pleased to call his field of research. Now, you have may noticed that racism has been a particularly fashionable subject matter in the halls of quackademe throughout the long and dismal era of the Cancelled Years, so you might not think it is any great mystery as to why or how Arday was hired at Cambridge, as he is (or rather, was) a black body talking blackness, which is surely sufficient explanation for how this particular turtle ended up on its particular post.
I’m not sure that it is, however. There is no particular shortage of black bodies, and discussing the particular travails of inhabiting a black body is one of the favourite subjects of black body inhabitants both in and outside of academia. That is to say that while Wokeness explains why Cambridge found it necessary to hire a black man, it doesn’t explain why this black man, particularly, and not one of the many others they might have picked. eugyppius makes a stab at explaining this by the argument that even minimally presentable professional black people are so exceptionally rare that the institutions fight over them like South African mercenary armies over blood diamonds.
There’s something to eugyppius’ argument, to be sure, but Arday’s writing was so incoherently terrible that I think we need to look for additional factors.
Personally, I suspect it was his eyes.
In every picture of Arday that I’ve seen he wears an open, beatific expression. His gentle gaze seems to say “I forgive you for your racism ... I know you can’t help it ... I know you regret it ... Here, take my hand ... it will all be okay.” He doesn’t actually have to say anything. He just has to look like that, radiating sincerity and acceptance, and that gaze hits that particular species of sexually frustrated middle-aged white woman who dominates every departmental hiring committee like a 2x4 right between their SSRIeyes. It stuns them into a sort of a jellied bliss. Arday possessed a kind of basilisk stare of friendliness. Contrast that with the usual run of professional black people, who affect a haughty, aggressive, Black Panthers sort of countenance, and you can see why AWFLs would flock to him like thirsty goats chasing the mirage of an oasis in the unsheltered noonday sunshine of the Sahara. Arday hypnotized his way into the faculty lounge the same way Rasputin stared his way into the Czar’s court.
I don’t mean to imply that Arday’s expression was necessarily genuine. Given the rest of his oeuvre there’s every reason to suspect that it was a very carefully constructed facade, a minstrel show that he put on for the benefit of the dumb, credulous cracker bitches who kept heaping adulation onto his brow and stuffing cash into his pockets no matter how transparently absurd the howlers he came up with. He probably enjoyed the daily glow of duper’s delight as one of the little perks of his position, and honestly, who could blame him? Don’t hate the playa, hate the game.
So let’s talk about the game, and the casualties that it’s already racked up.
Until a few days ago Arday was one of the game’s winners, and the outraged howls from the other winners have to be understood in this context, because if Arday can be brought low so quickly...
There have been many losers to this game.
Here’s eugyppius again, with a little anecdote from the front lines:
The story eugyppius relates is one of many. Some of those stories involve suicide. Professor Mike Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, shot himself after getting pressured to step down over offensive tweets. Richard Bilkszto, a former principle with the Toronto District School Board, killed himself after getting fired for ‘bullying’ an anti-racism trainer (i.e. he politely pushed back on some of the more incendiary claims). Remember the soul-searching from the left when these men killed themselves after getting their names dragged through the mud in public, their livelihoods destroyed, their careers permanently ruined? The thoughtful op-eds and emotive think pieces asking “Did we go too far?” Of course you don’t. The most we’ve gotten is AOC cackling that “Woke 1 was craaaazy.” Though of course she doesn’t say why it was crazy, or how Woke 2 will differ. I suspect the sequel will feature the same old story arc with the same giant plot holes, with worse dialogue and disappointing special effects. Hollywood can’t do anything right these days.
Suicides are, thankfully, the exception. Most people don’t kill themselves when they get cancelled. They just suffer. Examples are too numerous to list but I’ll belabour you about the cranium with them anyhow.
James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix and therefore one of the most significant scientific minds of the postwar era, was forced to step down from his position as director of the Cold Spring Harbour genetic research laboratory because he observed that evolutionary biology applies to the neurobiology of ancestral human populations, and was ultimately reduced to selling his Nobel prize to make ends meet. To his credit, Watson never recanted.
Planetary scientist Matt Taylor was brought to blubbering tears by an outraged mob because he wore a loud shirt to the press conference announcing his crowning achievement, namely the landing of the Rosetta probe on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. The shirt in question displayed Barbarella style images of scantily clad scifi bombshells, which outraged ugly feminists, who did not care in the slightest that Taylor was providing free publicity for the friend who had designed the shirt, a female artist.
Astrophysict Geoff Marcy, who independently co-discovered the first exoplanet 51 Pegasus b, was forced to step down from his professorship over a MeToo scandal that involved literal rape such as placing his hand on the shoulders of grad students to provide them the reassurance of human contact, and escorting a drunk grad student back to her hotel room at a conference dinner. One of his accusers promptly stepped into his newly vacant position. When the Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery of 51 Peg b, Marcy was completely unpersoned, his name going unmentioned, with the presenters going so far as to scrub his name from a figure lifted directly from his original paper. Even years after the fact there were efforts to cancel other scientists by association merely for allowing his name to be listed as a contributor on the author list of their papers, in recognition for the (pro bono) assistance he gave to their data collection and analysis.
Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, who incidentally is black, was cancelled for debunking the claim that black bodies were disprortionate victims of lethal police violence. Officially, Harvard’s administration didn’t go after him for that; instead they ginned up a Title IX violation, alleging sexual harassment of women in his lab. He was placed on unpaid leave, banned from teaching and supervising, and his laboratory was closed. He’s since been allowed back in a limited capacity. They probably went easy on him because he’s black.
It was, by the way, the disgraced Claudine Gay who led Fryer’s persecution. I’ve written about Gay before: she was forced to resign as the president of Harvard after it was revealed that, like Arday, she’d plagiarized every word she’d ever published, but she remained on the faculty and continues to pull a salary of several hundred thousand dollars annually.
Tim Hunt, a Nobel-prize winning biochemist, made the mistake of joking that one of three things happens when women enter laboratories: “you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry”, which is funny because it is observably true. For being funny and truthful, he was forced to step down from his professorship at University College London, and from his positions with the Royal Society and the European Research Council.
Theoretical particle physicist Alessandro Strumia was forced out of CERN because he gave a talk in which he examined hiring data and concluded that physics (a discipline which he maintained, accurately, had been developed overwhelmingly by men) did not discriminate against women but, to the contrary, if anything discriminated in their favour. Thousands of physicists signed a letter condemning him.
Evolutionary biologist Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying were forced to resign their positions at Evergreen College after Weinstein publicly objected to the ‘Day of Absence’ in which the diversitarians required students and faculty of whiteness to vacate campus. Weinstein’s objection led to vicious personal harassment and disruption of his classes.
MIT molecular biologist David Sabatini had his career ruined due to a he-said/she-said was-it-consensual/was-it-rape-because-power-dynamics relationship with a junior colleague. He was forced to resign from the Whitehead Institute, and was fired from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The common element in all of these cases is cancellation for violation of some woke taboo or other. In some cases it was for repudiation of some aspect of the doctrine of absolute human equality. In others it was for stepping over the invisible and mobile boundaries of the new sexual mores of male purdah inflicted upon society by feminists worked up into a lather over a hallucinatory rape culture1. Many were men who made significant, even immense contributions to the natural sciences, none of which counted for a hill of beans once the lesser mediocrities mobbed up in an outraged mass. They were not cancelled for plagiarism, or for falsifying data, or for lying about their biographies. So far as anyone knows their scholarship was impeccable. It was their loose tongues and, on occasion, wandering hands that got them in trouble.
Notably, these were all established, mostly tenured professors – men who had already made their careers. The woke mob went after them specifically to cultivate a climate of terror within academia. If even Nobel laureates could be brought low for speaking out of turn, then everyone else had best be exceptionally cautious about what they said, even in private. The result of this was to remove any possibility of internal resistance to DEI imperatives.
It did not matter how crazy the diversitarians became. No matter how unhinged their claims, regardless of how facially absurd or brutishly dishonest they became, no one could speak against them, because that would be to commit a racism, a sexism, a transphobia, it would be to do a bigotry, to contribute to a hostile work environment, to make the gay race commissars feel unsafe, and even if your comments never drew the unsympathetic compound eye of Social Media Sauron, your colleagues would whisper amonsgst themselves, it would be the kiss of death for your career, and so you shut up and kept your head down.
To my eternal shame, that is exactly what I did during my own stint as an early career scientist. It was obvious what was happening, and equally obvious that there was nothing I could personally do about it. So, I figured, I would just mind my own business, keep my nose clean and my attention focused on my own wholly apolitical and culturally uncontroversial research, publish lots of papers, solve intersting problems, discover neat things, build my reputation, and squirm my way into a faculty position where, perhaps, I could start revealing my power level ever so slightly and do my little bit to contribute to the long countermarch through the institutions.
Needless to say, that didn’t work, because I failed to account for the next phase of the cultural revolution. Once the chilling effect produced by collecting a mountain of famous scalps had exempted the commissars from any clapback to their Necessary Conversations, they had a free hand to restructure the hiring pipeline in such a fashion as to exclude anyone with even a whif of ideological heterodoxy. By the time I was applying for faculty positions, “diversity statements” had become de rigeur with every application package. These were little ideological loyalty oaths, essays in which one was expected to explain what one had done in the service of diversity, how one would contribute to diversity in the future, and how one’s own theoretical understanding of the transcendant intellects of Crenshaw and Kendi influenced one’s personal and professional behaviour. In the University of California system diversity statements were effectively the most important part of the application: before the search committee would even see the applications, human resources would review the diversity statements, and pass on only those applications that met their expectations. That was an extreme example, but by 2022 these things were everywhere.
More recently, diversity statements have fallen out of fashion, in large part due to pressure from the Trump administration. Of course this pressure has been applied in the stupidest fashion possible. Diversity statements are banned, but the true believers who required them in the first place are still there. Instead of requiring applicants to write hosannahs to diversity, they now simply expect it. If your teaching statement, cover letter, and CV don’t hit the necessary notes, in the bin your application goes.
It is one thing to be expected to grovel by spouting cant you don’t believe. The humiliation ritual is made all the more degrading when you realize that it doesn’t matter how well you grovel, because the diversitarians are going out of their way to avoid hiring white men. In Canada this even became de facto law. The Canadian government reserved its prestigious Canada Research Chair positions for ‘equity seeking groups’, but then went even further and informed universities that unless their faculties were making observable progress towards the goal of more closely matching the demographic makeup of modern multicultural demographically engineered mass migration era Canada, they would be ineligible to host Canada Research Chairs. Since white male boomers weren’t about to give up their positions, the only way to diversify faculties was to effectively lock younger white men out of employment for the foreseeable future. The same thing happened in the US, albeit informally and technically illegally, not that anyone cared about the illegal part.
This ‘soft cancellation’, as you might call it, did incalculably more damage than the high-profile firings. It was quiet and unremarked, apparent only as a statistical decline in the fraction of white men being hired into any and every field. For individual applicants there was no overt sign that they were being discriminated against. A rejection email would never say “Sorry, you’re a white male,” simply “We wish you luck in your future endeavors.” On one level you knew what was happening – all your colleagues chattered endlessly about how important it was to promote Women In STEM or to combat the scourge of whiteness – but on another, you simply felt that you weren’t good enough. Your applications met with silence and failure because you were just a mediocre white guy, privileged and entitled for thinking that you even had a shot next to all of these fierce and brilliant black women or whatever.
I don’t know if there were any suicides because of this, but I suspect that there were. Certainly, during this period, I was no stranger to suicidal ideation. Every night on end, as I drifted off to sleep, the black dog of depression would settle its hopeless paws on my chest and pant the fetid breath of doubt into my face. During the day I found that I could not even think about research, as the moment my thoughts turned to the subject they would invariably spiral down into darker paths.
I was lucky. I found this place, and all of you, who provided me not only with an outlet for my thoughts but with a source of income.
Others probably found a position in the private sector. Others weren’t so fortunate. During my wanderings in South America I encountered a biochemist who described himself as a vagabond. His story was much the same as my own, and that of many others: a promising research career that trailed off into a void of unremarked silence from every search committee he applied to. So far as I know he was living on his savings. I have no idea what happened to him.
Some, I am certain, were not fortunate in any way. How many killed themselves? How many found themselves living in their parents’ basements? How many fell into alchoholism or drug addiction? How many never married, never had children, never passed on their high-IQ genetics? I don’t think statistics even exist on this. No one, so far as I know, has studied it. Certainly no one in academia would dare study it.
Jason Arday was hired specifically because of this ideological climate, specifically to reinforce this climate. He owed his career to woke hysteria. His life was built on the wreckage of the lives of better men than him, actual scholars and scientists whose contributions counted for nought, because glassy-eyed middle-aged white women and cowardly old white men place a higher priority on venal careerism and the fellation of their political organs than they do on knowledge, truth, or ability. Arday lived by the lie and died by the lie. Karma’s a bitch, and I’m inclined to give her a scratch behind the ears in this case. Who’s a good girl? That’s right, karma, you’re a good girl.
No one knows how many young men checked out of this mortal vale because of the awokening, but while the answer is probably not zero, I like to think that the answer is also ‘fewer than you might think’. Certainly some landed on their feet. Some even came up in a fighting stance. For a trained academic who knows how to conduct research, how to analyze data, how to break problems into their constituent elements for analysis and then recombine them into a novel synthesis, how to test hypotheses and evaluate theories, and how to communicate their findings, it’s often entirely possible to build an ad hoc career in the attention economy. Many of the leading lights of what I’ve referred to as the Digital Koryos have an academic background.
DEI, the Dispossessed Generation, and the Digital Koryos
Recently an essay was published in Compact which many are hailing as the essay of the year. The title, The Lost Generation, emphasizes the destruction that the cultural revolution of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that swept through every single one of our institutions over the last decade has wrought upon an entire generation of young white men.
Few of the academic refugees in the digital koryos were actually the victims of a hard cancellation; most, I think, either banged their heads against the brick wall for a while, or saw the writing on that wall before they bothered trying to break through it and walked away in disgust. I think for this type there is a certain resilience that emerges from the arrogance of talent. They don’t need the institutions to survive, because they – or rather, men like them – were the ones who built those institutions in the first place.
Creatures like Arday are not like this. They are much more fragile. They are hothouse flowers who only prosper in the warmth and humidity of the institutions ... or rather, perhaps, strangling vines whose growth invariably pulls down the very trees on which they depend. Once cast out, they are done. There is no real organic demand for their ‘intellectual output’. Everything about them is false and homosexual, an astroturfed simulacrum of scholarship that no one – including inside the academy – is actually interested in engaging with. Left to their own devices, required to gather their own audiences, they wither. They know that they cannot survive on their own; this is why they cling to their perches with such tenacity; it is why, once removed, they despair.
How many of the woke will follow Arday’s example as the institutions they’ve suborned crumble around them?
I don’t know the answer to that, but I doubt it will be zero.
Thanks for taking the time to read this quick little piece, which I banged out on a Sunday afternoon with nothing else to do. Honestly, I’ve written so much about the ‘DIEing Academy’ that I’ve almost gotten bored with the subject. What else is there to say? But seeing the woketards performatively wailing over the death of their pet, shaking their little fingers in moral condemnation as though they haven’t been responsible for the destruction of an incalculably greater number of lives in recent years, and for far worse reason, made my gorge rise. Anyhow.
If you’re still in the mood for more of me, you may enjoy this excellent and wide-ranging conversation I had with Russell Walter, which touches on a number of subjects I’ve written about before: Why do young people struggle to plan for or invest in the future right now? How much of generational conflict is really the boomers’ fault versus just unavoidable technological change? Is doom-and-gloom rhetoric actually harmful to young men’s motivation? Can heroic, earnest storytelling still work in a cynical, ironic age? How can we “re-enchant” the world? Is nationalism becoming disconnected from actual nations, replaced by online tribes and “network states”? Why is it so hard to make a living as an independent fiction writer today?
As always, my deepest thanks to every one of you who supports my writing. I could not possibly do this without you. Every Postcard From Barsoom is sent free of charge, open to all to read. My Medicis receive only the knowledge that it is their patronage which keeps this blog available for the plebs. Well, that and the cool badge Substack puts next to your name, letting the other commenters know who the aristocrats are. Getting that badge, and my profound gratitude, is the easiest thing in the world...
Rape culture is absolutely not a hallucination in Africa, the Middle East, and India ... but naturally, these are precisely the locales in which white feminists forbid any discussion of rape culture.
While his death is no reason to continue vilifying him, the fact that he took his own life while he had two small children is absolutely low class and deserving of a place in hell
"How many of the woke will follow Arday’s example as the institutions they’ve suborned crumble around them?"
Not enough to atone for strip-mining Western civilization, that's for sure.