August 14th, 2026 would have been my father Larry D. Johnson Sr.’s 86th trip around the sun. That was also the day the Cambridge University professor, Dr. Jason Arday, took his life at age 41.
My father’s final journey from hints of illness to his passing took many years. His cough was first diagnosed as asthma, but asthma medication was not helping the cough. It persisted.
A few years after the cough started, my brother died. Age 40. Before my brother passed, I rationalized my dad’s cough, attributing it to post-nasal drip. I had heard my dad say the exact same thing, many times. He wanted to believe it, and I did, too. Except this cough grew progressively more intense, almost incessant, between 1998 and 2006. The grief from my brother’s death, I surmise based on my studies of subtle energy in Traditional Chinese Medicine, made it worse.
It was chronic, and relief was nowhere in sight. At least not with the physicians he saw, from doctors in our hometown of Topeka to Kansas University Medical Center to Mayo Clinic. All of those physicians said that they could only conclude that he had an “idiopathic lung disease.” Meaning, they didn’t know the cause or cure. No one knew.
My dad was an undertaker; a mortician, funeral director, and funeral business owner. He dealt with the dead. But his gifts didn’t stop with those unlikely to notice. His greatest service was to the living, in their most grief-stricken and vulnerable moments.
There were many times when I was at my dad’s funeral home, and sheets of laughter mixed with gentle tears through the celebration and mourning of the lives of loved ones rolled out of the “family room” where he made arrangements.
People trusted him with their grief, and his presence allowed them to be their saddest while finding freedom, a candle in the dark, to laugh a belly laugh. A reminder of who the deceased was and their significance in the lives of the relations in the room and outside of it, that life continues. And, to honor the dead, we must persist in living life to its fullest.
So, after many doctors and many treatments, and a couple of back surgeries created by a few bad decisions to lift “dead weight” (not a pun, a reality), my father had a chronic cough, along with arthritic and glue-enhanced vertebrae whose condition was worsened by the force of his cough.
He was in tremendous pain, had compromised lung capacity, and eventually had to be on oxygen 24/7.
In retrospect, I wish I had been able to put on my epidemiologist hat before my concerned-son hat. After many treatments and visits to doctors, my dad was finally seen by a physician who had treated two other men who were also morticians in his age range. The final diagnosis – ”embalmer’s lung.”
His vocation gave him life and purpose by letting him compassionately care for people, a ministry of sorts, in their deepest times of sorrow and need with dignity, compassion, and integrity. He did it until he couldn’t any longer and had to stop (with my mother taking over day-to-day operations well before then). He didn’t stop completely; people continued to call him, even in his more fragile times, with their sorrow and woe. Within two years, he transitioned out of this realm.
My dad faced people directly and indirectly who were facing one of the most profound realities: We are all going to die.
Many he faced were primarily focused on the life of their deceased loved one. Inevitably, most of them, especially after burying a parent, have to face the reality for themselves.
I never talked to my father about his deeper philosophical thinking or feelings about death. He was a devout Christian, so I knew enough about his beliefs in the afterlife from that. And I think from the few conversations I had with him during hard times I was going through, his focus was, interestingly, on living more than dying. “. . .or whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.”
He would say, at peace with his choices, “I did what I was supposed to do. I can’t worry about the actions of someone else.” Dignity, compassion, and integrity shaped his choices. He never complained.
These principles, perhaps values if I may, were etched in my dad’s heart. He embodied them, and he didn’t waver in that regard. Ever.
Even when it would have been more convenient. Some might think he was maladaptive because he didn’t shift his mental model for personal gain. He would be ok with that. He would adapt to people based on their needs, not simply because a shift would personally benefit him or make things easier.
In some of my darker days, in conversation with him, he reminded me, and even now, reminds me through my memory of him, to keep living. To continue my spiritual cultivation, and serve others with dignity, compassion, and integrity.
Sometimes he came to visit me, particularly during the handful of times he came while I was divorcing my first wife. His physical presence I only got occasionally due to our distance, me in Atlanta and Boston, and him in Kansas. And I never felt him less present from afar–his grounding ensconced me in a love-woven cocoon of reality.
When I unconsciously would seem to click out of that mesh of truth and transformation, I swear, something spiritual and mental had been embedded in me that prevented me from straying away from “what is,” ”what I choose to respond to (not react),” and “how I choose to respond.”
My dad never allowed me (to the extent of his influence on me) to unface reality. He did so while encouraging me to hold a dream bigger than I could fully conceive in the moment.
Now, let me share the connection to Arday.
Dr. Jason Arday was born to Ghanaian immigrant parents on the “Southside” of London in the mid-1980s. According to his origin story (consistently across many sources, and that I won’t detail as it is readily available and perhaps at this point something you might be familiar with, if only loosely), he was diagnosed as autistic. He says that he was non-verbal for many years and didn’t become enmeshed in scholarly pursuits until he was 18 years old.
Arday became “the youngest black professor in Cambridge University history” in 2023. Compared to 99% of applicants for an endowed chair professorship at Cambridge, Arday was extremely disadvantaged.
The reality is, Jason Arday got a job he was underqualified for. One where on measures such as:
🚫Research record
🚫Supervision of PhD students; and later
🚫Productivity after endowed chair
Arday underperformed by any reasonable measure of such a role.
Now, this underperformance after his appointment could have stemmed from the constant pressure and “campaign of scrutiny intended to undermine him,” as his family asserted. The prestige of the role, his visibility, and the expectations he had from the outside world and himself come with the privilege of pressure. And being harassed and singled out, sometimes with hostile, racist vibes, is a horrible microscope that, I imagine, starts to feel inescapable in the moment. This scrutiny also had nothing to do with his credentials or any deficits before he was hired.
Yet, let me cite another hardscrabble scholarly case. That of Professor Roland Fryer.
Roland Fryer, Jr. grew up between Daytona Beach, FL, and near Houston, TX, with his grandmother. His father was incarcerated, and many of his relatives made ends meet selling crack cocaine.
Nurtured by his grandmother and mentored by teachers, professors, and friends who saw his potential and aptitude, he was introduced to economics and proved he could excel. At age 30, he was the third-youngest tenured professor in Harvard history. Only Jeffrey Sachs and Lawrence (Larry) H. Summers (who served as Harvard’s president) were tenured earlier.
In 2016, Dr. Fryer was set to publish a study finding no bias in police-involved shootings. The research drew academic and public pushback. Some scholars who have made their names on what one could frame as deficit and discrimination, or, as Eve Tuck has written, damage-centered research, reached out to Fryer before the publication of his seminal paper.
Many of them asked him to NOT publish the research. At that point, he’s said publicly, that he “had to publish it!” His conclusion about going to press was: the data is impeccable; the findings can be replicated if one chooses. Thus, he could confidently defend his scholarship, despite the controversy. Thorough, high-quality research that looks forward to scrutiny.
Fryer would not be stopped for something as frivolous as worrying about the opinions that so-called white people would have reading the headlines of his paper. Fryer is perhaps one of the biggest advocates for the marginalized and underserved. He is open about creating opportunity for those who grew up like he did. And publishing the paper made a large cohort of race-focused scholars unhappy. Some quite influential enemies resided adjacent to his lab at Harvard.
In the Spring of 2018, Harvard, after a complaint from a woman Fryer fired due to poor performance, investigated sexual misconduct accusations under Title IX, in the midst of the “Me Too” movement.
As a superior to the woman, Harvard found that Dr. Fryer acted inappropriately by taking part in sexually suggestive banter (but nothing physical). They recommended workplace sensitivity training and asked him to be more mindful of the impact of his speech, given his position.
But, the saga wasn’t over because the findings then went to Professor Claudine Gay (who became Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2018) and sociology Professor Larry Bobo, who happen to be racialized as black and were among those unhappy about the findings of Fryer’s 2016-17 research; and, were likely among those who were compelling him to not publish his findings, at least not with the conclusions he had made.
In a unilateral verdict, Bobo and Gay (before her rocky tenure as Harvard President, which ended in a resignation after a horrible showing at a congressional hearing about antisemitism on Harvard’s campus and accusations of plagiarism), failed to take Dr. Fryer’s tenure (per their intent) but instead got him suspended for two years. They also shut down his well-funded and prolific lab (a profound documentary on Fryer’s story).
Harvard, and particularly Gay and Bobo supported Fryer about as much as Cambridge purported to support Arday.
For Fryer, the punishment was extreme by any measure. He was highly productive. He supervised many PhD students (who also suffered when his lab was razed), along with the many less privileged children his work was elevating to greatness, coming to a sudden halt.
His research track record was stellar (best of the best). He was/is very pro-support of the underserved, and his academic integrity and rigor are unquestionable (e.g., Clark Medal, deep publications, MacArthur Genius, etc.)
Yet, he persists after his disproportionate public pummeling. Doing so by building businesses, still teaching, writing, and speaking as a public intellectual.
By the way, Fryer also initially claimed he was targeted because of his skin color. Once he discovered the arbiters of his fate claimed the same racialization, he realized what Chuck D from the iconic, Public Enemy, “. . .go by the color, you’ll discover. . .Damn! . . . everybody ain’t no brother (or, “sister” in this case.)”
Arday, like Claudine Gay, faced plagiarism accusations. Her scholarly record, upon her confirmation as President, was also questioned. The side-by-side comparison to other scholars seeking similar roles, respectively an endowed sociology chair and President of Harvard, both institutions arguably the most well-known in the world, was asymmetrical. There were more qualified candidates for the prestigious jobs they held.
And, that’s not so bad. Why? I’ve met and continue to meet people who get jobs for reasons that have nothing to do with a meritorious track record. They still could have performed their duties successfully. This happens quite a bit.
The problem is: the jobs they got, by the nature of the institutions and the level of the roles, invite scrutiny. Candidates (at least the final ones) would benefit from knowing that scrutiny is the unwritten part of the job description for roles like theirs. It’s predictable.
Since it is, why wouldn’t the university, in both cases, be relentlessly thorough in its diligence?
So that when scrutiny comes (not if), they can respond resolutely and publicly with facts to quell the critic’s noise.
This even goes for critics who live up to their accusations of eugenicism and blatant bigotry, like Nathan Confas. Yes, he used flawed AI tools to detect plagiarism (e.g., Pangram or Turnitin). Yes, he can be considered a white supremacist. Yes, it is possible that the color of Gay’s and now Arday’s skin could have been at least part of what ignited the heated criticism and all that it entailed on and offline. The pressure and vitriol of trolls can no doubt become relentless and surely overwhelming.
And, the knee-jerk response of skin color/racism was used by Drs. Fryer and Gay, and Arday. Dr. Fryer’s distinction was that none of his story questioned the quality and authenticity of his work. His critics and his judge/jury of two influential Harvard professors, and a slew of so-called black scholars, discouraged him from publishing that “the police don’t disproportionately kill unarmed black people [but do harass black people much more]” research.
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One cannot say, with certainty, that Gay and Bobo dropped a bomb on Fryer’s career because he defied the gatekeepers of the predominant critical race theoretical narrative that had been rooted and cloned by professors at Harvard and spread beyond in the 1970s.
It is not a stretch to say Fryer was punished with race being one variable; just not in the typical reactionary way it is usually seen. Thus, the story of Roland Fryer got much less airtime than either Gay or Arday. And, significantly less support for what, from my reading and dialogue with parties closer to the source, was reinforced by many as a fairly benign set of behaviors that only became harmful when a terminated employee/(once) friend was looking for a larger severance package. Fryer was/is unquestionably competent. His punishment was disproportionately greater than that of Gay and Arday (notwithstanding that he was overwhelmed by the pressure).
Now let me close this by:
Reinforcing that Dr. Jason Arday is a tragic character in a drama created by years of co-crafting an embellished narrative; not being checked on his claims, allowing the story to take on a life of its own; the absence of someone in his life who insisted that he face reality to elevate his game beyond reproach.
Jason Arday didn’t have a Larry D. Johnson, Sr. A figure, father-like, or another wisdom-holding figure guided by unconditional love. Roland Fryer’s grandmother, despite the huge obstacles in his path, grounded him in reality. Claudine Gay, who bounced back strongly after her post-presidential resignation with a reported $900k salary as a sociology professor, grew up in a prosperous two-parent home. From what I know about well-educated Haitian immigrant families, she was held to a high standard and had a level of financial, intellectual, community, and moral support that is rare, regardless of one’s racial ascription.
Arday had a lot of coddling. He was lifted up, but he didn’t have what Dr. David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, said he gravely needed: “critical friends” rather than “sycophants.” That is, people who mostly uncritically supported him in the perpetuation of that which was clearly not helpful to his well-being or career long-term.
Being clear that race played a role in the saga. And race and racism’s role was elevated because integrity was not upheld and reality wasn’t faced by the university. People outside the university also didn’t process it with reflexivity, refusing to acknowledge and intervene despite the obvious gaps in Dr. Arday’s development. And thirdly, but perhaps most importantly, not by Arday himself nor along with his family, who were also so proud of the accolades gifted to him and all that came with it that they didn’t stop (out of ignorance of the reality or willful blindness toward the situation) to consider the help or harm that could come to their sensitive son, spouse, or self beyond his 15 minutes of fame.
Inadequate citation (aka plagiarism) is an avoidable mistake. It takes rigor. Rigor is helped along by good editors with knowledge of the field of study and its body of evidence to discern where the author is elevating, maintaining the status quo (i.e., regurgitating), and potentially imitating, without proper attribution, a person who had an insight that one found similar to their conclusion or helped them round out a line of inquiry.
And, it happens, perhaps even to the most gifted of writers without their conscious awareness. Like the argument that Nabokov’s Lolita was heavily influenced by Heinz von Lichberg, who published “Lolita,” written in 1916. Nabokov’s body of work beyond Lolita also tells a different story. I imagine if Nabokov were still alive, a plagiarism accusation would have created a different response by his advisors and from Nabokov himself. The rigor, breadth, and depth of his work signal this.
It seems (and it happens for a variety of reasons) that Jason Arday didn’t have sufficient personal rigor, nor advisors with such.
Let’s assume, despite the opinions of many who might read this, that Dr. Arday had the aptitude for rigor. There are indications this is the case. If so, did he have adequate exposure to close ties who practice with it? Were there any beacons, human lighthouses, to guide him through periods of (metaphorical) shadow vision? Was he adequately exposed so that he could learn and maximize his potential? It seems that we can check “No.” on all the diagnostic questions above.
And the fact that the answers are clearly all a-nay says someone(s) were not being honest about reality, whether out of self-protection, hubris, ignorance, willful blindness, or any combination of the above.
When I was about 13 or 14 years old, I was in the backyard of our family home in Topeka, KS, half-assedly raking cuttings from the hedges that my mother had trimmed the evening before, when it was not oppressively hot and when I was supposed to rake the leaves.
It was 36℃/97 ℉, and since I didn’t wake up early and my mom insisted I finish before going to play with my friends, I had to endure it and get the job done from 11:30 am until my mother’s final inspection pardoned me.
I was suffering and didn’t recognize I was doing so at my own behest. I was doing a sorry job, and doing so was making my predicament worse.
My dad happened to come home for lunch as my mother was off part of the summer. While I was raking, I could feel him watching me for about two minutes. It was likely longer, but the intensity of his gaze was felt powerfully for two minutes. I dared not look!
Then in a flash, my dad was standing next to me, in a three-piece suit at high Noon. He put his hand out for the rake and began, in his Marine-shined Johnston and Murphy shoes, to properly rake the cuttings–lightly lecturing me the entire time on how to do it the “right way.”
He then gave me back the rake to see if I’d really paid attention, then beamed back into the house to cool down and rehydrate before going back to meet with the family of a deceased. I never raked the same or saw raking (or how to do life) the same since then.
My three-piece-suit-wearing dad, raking in scorching heat to teach me a lesson, is one of many he provided. He didn’t preach very long when he did, and as St. Francis of Assisi is inaccurately quoted but congruently cited, when he preached, he seldom used words; and if so, few.
Yet, the principles of integrity, dignity, and compassion are foundational to who I am. To me, they are my father’s greatest legacy. I hope I can pass at least a smidgen of that to my niece (who I helped raise) and my son.
It doesn’t occur to me that Jason Arday, based on his life, publicly available scholarship, and mental models/worldview, was built on a solid foundation of durable principles. Without that foundation, he floated through experiences with nothing to ground him in reality or tether him to truth.
He and his family took his good fortune, after an earlier life of challenge, to mean he was good to go indefinitely. Thus, they ignored or looked past his foundational (principle-deficient) fragility. The institutions he was invited into didn’t help build a stronger foundation; they sought to capitalize on his narrative for institutional gain. (The most sinister mechanisms of elite capture.) Who stood up for Jason with the utmost care–to create the conditions for him to thrive vs. cheering him on without insisting on greatness and constant effort toward greatness; and owning greatness and flaws in order to grow through adversity?
Who was truly there to help Jason Atta Kwei Arday?
Third, I have never defended DEI. What I do uphold and refuse to stray from are principles. The flippant statements about Arday or anyone else being “DEI hires” are lazy and reflect people who don’t acknowledge the realities of institutional and organizational life.
Jason Arday’s was an unprincipled hire (or if you think it was principled, the principles were brittle and destined to crumble). If you look to some of the most powerful institutions in whatever country you live in, you will find several of such hires. Most in roles that won’t determine much in other people’s lives, but some that can determine the fate of multitudes.
Use “DEI hire” if you must because you can’t help it. But if you are honest, that it means an inadequate hire or lackluster qualifications; use it judiciously. That is, don’t make it a simple-minded quip to criticize someone because of their visible or invisible identities.
Dr. Jason Arday’s story was an avoidable tragedy. People who have enabled it to become tragic–from those in the Golden Triangle to folks from South London–are complicit. This painfully, but obviously, includes Dr. Arday (rest his soul) himself.
Many wound up the ticking time bomb. And now, claims of systemic racism, negligence, charlatanism, plagiarism, ableism, etc. are being selectively plucked from the rubble of a man’s life.
A man flawed but loved,
A man who was lofted and harshly let down.
A man who created wings, ascended, and flew toward a dream, yet lacked full awareness of the sun’s heat and had to face reality in his tragic descent when his wings were singed.
A man who will be praised and vilified.
A man who had conditions created for him to thrive, yet, unfortunately, didn’t have the agency, along with a nurturing community, to take the favorable opportunities and create the extraordinary out of them; even in the inadequacy that all great people have experienced in their growth.
Reflecting on Arday’s trajectory is saddening. It’s a lesson about intentions and the actions behind them.
Ask: Are we creating the conditions for those we “help” to thrive? Do we understand what it means to do so over the long term? Do I have skin-in-the-game as it relates to this person? That is, right now, does their success or failure impact me?
If this avoidable tragedy teaches us nothing else about our personal institutions or organizational realities, the questions above, at least, call for us to look at ourselves in the mirror before we jump in to take a side.
If you must choose a side, #ChooseHumanity – all of it.
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