Ideas Have Consequences

Pervasive ignorance about group differences is what makes race hucksters possible.

Written by Bo Winegard.

This is the bitter fruit of equalitarianism.

By now, the outlines of the sordid Jason Arday affair are clear, even if the depth of his dishonestly remains unknown.¹ It all sounds like a sardonic satire of DEI: a fraudulent fabulist became a professor at Cambridge, was celebrated by his colleagues, feted by the media, and then defended by progressive academics even while his outrageous lies and pervasive plagiarism became undeniable. What on earth happened?

Even setting aside Arday’s many mendacities, he was manifestly unqualified to be a professor at Cambridge. His publications, such as they are, sound as though they were written by pulling scraps of random postmodern jargon out of a hat. To give one example:

Anti-racist education within the Academy holds the potential to truly reflect the cultural hybridity of our diverse, multi-cultural society through the canons of knowledge that educators celebrate, proffer and embody. The centrality of Whiteness as an instrument of power and privilege ensures that particular types of knowledge continue to remain omitted from our curriculums. The monopoly and proliferation of dominant White European canons does comprise much of our existing curriculum; consequently, this does impact on aspects of engagement, inclusivity and belonging particularly for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) learners.

This excerpt is not from a blog or some obscure pay-to-publish outlet, but from a professional journal by the Taylor and Francis Group.

It has roughly the same meaning as the shapes your eyes make if you press on them with your fingers. It is not entirely incoherent, but it bears almost no relation to the external world.

My desire for pain being finite, I have not subjected myself to a thorough review of Arday’s work, but what I have read is similar to the above—perhaps even less coherent. He consistently deploys progressive argot about “anti-racism,” “whiteness,” and “embodiment” while making fact-free claims about the world in sentences that sound like anti-racist Beat poetry.

And yet he was treated by many academics and media outlets as a gnomic sage, a profound, if unique, thinker whose virtually—or perhaps I should say, literally—impossible backstory only added to the depth of his insights. One might even argue that Arday’s conspicuous incompetence and shoddy, obscurantist articles are more of a scandal than his brazen lies and apparently pervasive plagiarism.

What do they say about our intellectual elite?

For I am not interested in Arday the man, but in Arday the mirror who reflects the hideously deformed face of modern academia. How did such a charlatan, such a transparent fraud, such a writer and speaker of oracular codswallop, become a celebrated professor at Cambridge, one of the most prestigious universities in the world?