Lessons from Arday’s Lived Experience

Note: This article was written a week ago, before yesterday’s tragic news of Jason Arday’s suicide. Already this is being blamed on his unjust persecution by critics. I fault all those who celebrated his compulsive lying for the sake of DEI, allowed it to reach heights he could not sustain, and now deny responsibility for his glorification.

The more I read about Jason Arday’s fall from academic grace, the more I admire his manifest skills. Rising from a humble background, with little formal training and scant prowess in analytic research or exposition, he quickly ascended to tenure at Cambridge, one of the world’s premier universities, through personal charm and world-class bullshit. Arday’s exposure disgraces both the “Sociology of Education” he was pronounced expert in and the institutions that promoted him. It testifies to an academic subculture that prizes claims about melanin-enhanced ”lived experience” over quests for objective truth. It aggravates the very tensions that DEI purports to offset.

Americans have long had a flair for self-promotion, following the dictum “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit”. However, England’s Jason Arday upstaged us with a trail of whoppers so implausible or easily refuted that only the willfully undiscerning could pretend to believe them. These include:

• a diagnosis of autism at the age of three, being unable to speak until he was 11 or read or write until he was 18.

• ran six hundred miles between Edinburgh and London in six days for charity.

• ran 30 marathons in 35 days, with the last nine on a leg fractured after an epileptic fit.

• featured in a TV documentary series on children decades before he was born.

• personally raised over $6 million (in GBP) for 80+ charities.

• installed water points in Brazil as volunteer for charity WaterAid.

• a pig’s head delivered to his parents’ home that he reported to the police.

• completion and publication of his book Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse.

• visiting professorship at Ohio State.

• Master’s degree in psychodynamic counselling from University of London.

Arday’s undergrad and PhD work focused on physical education. Afterwards he switched to sociology, emphasizing his “lived experience”:

While my PE background was the source of many insights, it also posed a problem: the research into race and education that I wanted to explore fell squarely within the study of sociology. The mandate from my department was that they wanted me to focus on sports-related research.... But I wasn’t going to let that directive, or my lack of training as a sociologist, stop me. After all, I had expertise born of lived experience.

Just seven years later, at age 37, he was awarded a chair professorship at Cambridge in educational sociology This made him one of the youngest people ever to hold a chaired professorship at Oxbridge. He claimed to have “barely slept over the past 15 years… working through most nights” to combine research, teaching, marathons and charity work.

By its own account, Cambridge fast-tracked the appointment for DEI reasons. The BBC, CBS News, and ABC News applauded Arday as a prodigy. The publicity encouraged other researchers to utilize Arday’s work, which evidently had not been scrutinized before. Evidence mounted of extensive plagiarism and fraud; Arday’s added contributions were mostly his personal reflections on DEI aspects. Nathan Cofnas, who had previously been hounded out of Oxford for his critique of DEI, summarized the evidence here. Cambridge leapt to Arday’s defense; it belittled or denied the problems and framed criticism as a racist witch hunt. Arday or backers hired a law firm to bully The Times into killing a story on the allegations. London Police told an investigative reporter to cease inquiries of Arday due to the distress it caused Arday.

The dam has now broken. On August 5 Cambridge announced it would reopen its investigation. Within hours Arday resigned “with immediate effect” in an eloquent statement denying any wrongdoing, which three detection checkers rated as entirely or almost entirely AI-generated. Nevertheless, a “Solidarity Letter” defending Arady from “entirely false accusations of plagiarism” (but providing no counterevidence) has garnered over 20 thousand signatures, including various Lords, MPs, professors, lawyers, and actors.

While the evidence against Arday is overwhelming, I confess to personal admiration for someone who can lie so big, so long, and so endearingly for such personal advancement and public adulation—perhaps to the point of convincing himself that he deserves both. I urge Cambridge to rehire him to lead a new Faculty of Bollocks, offering degrees of BS in BS, Master’s in Malarkey, and Doctorate in Drivel. Like it or not, these are profitable skills, and doubtless many employers would hire grads to help ferret out bullshitting by others—for the same reason that software firms employ known hackers.

However, I have no sympathy for the institutional incentives that gilded Arday’s path. The core problem is less DEI than what DEI covered up: the abandoned quest for objective truth. “Lived experience” is a euphemism for “subjective impression”, infused with preference for impressions previously underrepresented in universities. Decades ago that was wrapped in reverence for objective analysis: “Let’s study various perspectives, compare their various strengths, criticize their misconceptions and identify some unifying pan-human themes, which we will try to convey clearly to others.” Bravo. Now it’s “dissident perspectives are trash, criticizing our conceptions is cruel, white males will never understand, and the more incomprehensibly we say this the better.”

Here is an Arday-coauthored example: a 2023 article entitled “We’ll See Things They’ll Never See: Sociological Reflections on Race, Neurodiversity and Higher Education.” The abstract explains that “autoethnography”—aka, self-reporting on “lived experiences”—“drawing on the politics of neurodiversity and Black subjectivities” helps combat the “general whitening of how we understand neurodiversity in academia”. However, common understanding is inherently limited since “as Black neurodivergent sociologists, we’ll see things they’ll never see”. Notice the combination of cri de coeur, preemption of criticism, and academic swagger. Notice the absence of testable hypotheses.

By honoring anti-analytic twaddle, Cambridge dishonors itself. Furthermore, it sets back the noblest aim of DEI backers—namely, to encourage respectful debate and collaboration that transcends differences of race or sex. Glorifying a humbug as the Wizard of Oz cannot help but dismay our honest Dorothies and stir up witch-hunting strife.