John McWhorter On Jason Arday: Cambridge "Chose a Black Person With No Concern for Excellence."

As over the past week I’ve lived and breathed the imbroglio over Cambridge’s hiring of Jason Arday, who resigned in disgrace on Wednesday amid an avalanche of credible accusations of plagiarism, academic fraud and serial fabulism, the one person whose thoughts on the matter I’ve wanted to hear more than anyone is John McWhorter.

McWhorter, a New York Times Opinion columnist, is a professor of linguistics at my own alma mater, Columbia. So he’s had a front-row seat to the rather curious direction elite higher education has taken in recent years. Five years ago, when I was lying around recovering from cancer surgery, I read his treatise on progressive ideology, Woke Racism. The book solidified for me the constellation of observations I’d been having about how certain belief systems on the far left had calcified into a rigid and unforgiving pseudo-religion.

As a black academic,…