This past week ended with shock and sadness at the news that Jason Arday ended his own life in the midst of an investigation over his intellectual credibility. He was the vaunted education sociologist at Cambridge University, media darling and beneficiary of a big book contract, the toast of the town, and the subject of countless hagiographic profiles in media venues.
Plenty of people had whispered for years that he was nowhere near qualified for all this celebration. He was not a genius. He was a fabulist. Saying it, however, was dangerous to one’s career. As a result, he kept getting away with it. His luck ran out when a U.S. academic pressed the issue. The tissue of lies collapsed.
The circumstances surrounding his absurd appointment to a full professorship with a named chair—the youngest black professor to enjoy such privilege—are hardly unique to him. When the full truth coming out about his plagiarism and autobiographical embellishments hit the international news, despair overwhelmed him in tragic ways.
It goes without saying that this young man had benefitted from what’s called DEI, which is the new term for what used to be called “affirmative action” but mutated into rampant privilege based on raw identity politics. Reverse racism doesn’t describe it fully. It is institutionalized discrimination that breeds deep resentment from those passed over and cultivates hidden contempt for those who ride this wave to unearned prestige and plaudits.
Something else has always bugged me about these systems that confer high titles and salaries on people solely on grounds of their race. It is deeply condescending and cruel to the point of being abusive of our fellow human beings. While it is easy to resent people who benefit from unearned exaltation, the plight of those who are its seeming beneficiaries also deserves some attention.
Years ago I had the opportunity to get to know a university administrator and his wife who occupied such a role. We met at a dinner party. He was the only black gentleman in the upper echelon of a major state university. His title was vice president for civil rights or some such made-up badge. It was a position invented to create the appearance of diversity. The position fell to him because he ticked all the boxes.
He was proud of his new position. But the more we spoke, the more he had doubts that he would express under his breath. He said that he has a large budget and staff but is rarely included as part of any serious planning team. He told me that he is mostly sent out on fundraising efforts to tell his story about how he grew up poor, overcame racism, and now has a prestigious position in university administration. But, he told me with frankness, he is tired of that story of himself.
We met up a few weeks later because I was curious to know more. He laid it all out to me. He came of age in an educational environment that was especially seeking blacks who performed above expectations which he always did. But instead of moving up a notch based on merit, he said he became aware early on that he was being accelerated and escalated beyond a level that was justified.
It became obvious in his college admissions, which pushed him into an institution far above that for which he was prepared. He found himself lost in a sea of high achievers. His privilege became a burden. He could not keep up in his classes and began to cut corners. It became obvious to him early that he was going to get away with this.
It seemed like the entire system was on his side. He tried to justify this to himself on grounds that every university has white kids on trust funds with legacy connections. They work less hard than a working-class kid who made it on his own so perhaps this is not unusual.
But, he said, he always felt burdened in multiple directions. It was sad enough that he grew up poor and black in the Deep South and was not expected to achieve. But it was far worse that he was given advancements beyond what he deserved when everyone knew it and considered him to be little more than a token of a compensatory system.
He described to me that choice he had to make. He could refuse the high grades, the advanced placements, the awards and attention that he knew were unmerited. But he was never sure what the point of that would be. Instead, he accepted them all as part of a game. He lost trust and respect in the system that he joined precisely because the system never really expected a high degree of performance from him.
He continued in this vein to tell me about graduate school and PhD studies which were more of the same. There was no point in this where he knew when to refuse, when to say no, when to call out the condescension and fakery of which he was presumably benefiting. In fact, he never saw himself as much of a beneficiary at all. He felt burdened by it all, and even robbed of what all the white kids faced: high expectations and the satisfaction of knowing that one climbed the ladder by virtue of his own efforts.
The story ends with his then appointment, which he knew to be fake at least on some level, though he believed that he truly did have something to contribute to university culture. It was that tag of having been marked by DEI that prevented it. He said he knew from childhood that in any endeavor in life, a title is easy but genuine respect from colleagues must be earned. He simply did not have that and did not know how to get it.
I was hardly in a position to give him advice so I did my best simply to be a sympathetic ear. I’ve thought about this case often through the years, knowing all the while that such cases were growing in academia to absurd extents.
What if the entire system of educational and professional achievement suddenly decided that white guys from Southwest Texas needed a boost through the ranks to make up for past wrongs? Everything I did and everywhere I went was read through my accidental identity and I was celebrated on the basis that I was from Southwest Texas, bypassing everyone else. How would this sit with me?
Absurd, right? Well, for my friend and by virtue of his race, whole degree programs were being manufactured as well as departments all designed to create the illusion of achievement without the reality. And who was doing this? For the most part, it was white left-liberals who were seeking some kind of propitiation for perceived social sins, using black people as pawns in their egalitarian gamesmanship.
And it wasn’t just academia. DEI bled into corporate America, banking, media, the movies, arts institutions, publishing, and into every space and sector in modern life. Objecting to it at any point meant taking a huge risk of being called a racist. Whole systems of communication and enforcement have been invented to cover up all the ways in which meritocracy was being displaced by a new racial hierarchy.
Countless whistleblowers in academic and corporate life have faced brutal retaliation for calling this out. Everyone knows the rules: play along or face the purge. This is how Arday and so many others have gotten away with this for so long. The brave dissidents are smeared and broken. All that’s left are the people willing to live with the lies.
None of this can end well. In the case of Jason Arday, it was not a case of Icarus who flew too closely to the sun and saw his wings melt before falling to earth. No. Instead he was catapulted by others at his previous schools and by Cambridge itself as high in the air as possible but given no parachute.
One day, seemingly out of the blue, the standards police came for him and revealed vast plagiarism and implausible biography. He tried the old tricks of calling them names but they would not stop their investigations. His entire life story was being upended and he was being made a laughingstock, merely for playing along with a system that everyone knew was fake to begin with.
The personal pain of this level of public humiliation is impossible to describe. It is worse than prison. Even when it is completely deserved—he had played the game all along, just as his critics had said—the suffering is unbearable for most mortals. What angers me most about this is not even that Arday played along with the racket that he knew was nothing more than that. It’s that the racket was constructed to work exactly the way it did work, and then suddenly and without any warning, it stopped working.
Decades have gone by when such intellectual fakery has only grown and persisted. It’s not that such systems have been abused by bad actors. It’s that the systems themselves were built to baptize abuse and injustice as a fairness and compensation for past wrongs.
In reality, DEI is demeaning to everyone: the bypassed, the whistleblowers, and the seeming beneficiaries. It is a socially engineered scam created by guilt-ridden intellectuals that is exploitative even of those who seemingly win from its emoluments.
Jason Arday, despite all his failings, never deserved the indignity that comes with an unmerited promotion to the top. He knew this all along, just as my friend knew it. Any serious person with the capacity for self-examination knows it. We should stop these absurd games. They are unsustainable and can end in terrible tragedy.
