It has been ten days since Jason Arday died by suicide, and there are still articles being published today in which people on the Left blame the Right as if this incident were somehow akin to the Charlie Kirk assassination. Let's start with this one which is completely over the top.

Suicide is complicated and multifactoral in its causes, but it is undeniable that the ghoulish hunting of this gentle spirit is why he is dead today. Jason was not just hounded out of Cambridge or academia; he was hounded out of the workforce, hounded out of existence. For this wretched Western society (which is so well exemplified by the grotesque nature of so-called “higher” education) wants each of us to believe we are born to be exploited and used up—especially people who are Black or mentally ill or disabled. This grotesque order wants each of us to believe that if we fail to manage our own exploitation, we deserve the death penalty...

I have no idea if, how, why, or to what degree Jason may have done or not done what he is accused of having done. And I do not care. At all. He seems to have been a gentle soul who navigated disability, racism, and cruelty with tenderness and tenacity—a human being struggling with mental illness whose cries for help were ignored.

I don't know and I don't care is quite a statement from someone who apparently taught at Northwestern's school of journalism. It turns out to be much easier to blame everyone else for Arday's death when you don't know about the extent to which he was a fraud.

I am reminded of the case of Juan M. Thompson, a Black journalist who was fired from the Intercept for fabricating sources in 2016, prior to making bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers, serving 5 years in prison, and dying at 39, likely of a drug overdose. Thompson was a fabulist and also seriously mentally unwell. When there are so very few Black journalists and professors in PWIs, it is extremely suspicious that some who squeak in do so with stories too outlandish to be true. Is this storytelling required to get in the door?

So in this telling, the problem was that Cambridge's standards for Arday were too high and he felt compelled to lie to them. So it's their fault, not his. Next the author goes after the journalists.

Some of the people who hunted Arday are, let’s be honest, extremely mediocre people. To call them journalists would be an insult to the profession. And while he was partially their focus—and while he paid with his life for their malice—their bigger target was all non-white people who try to wrest away resources from PWIs. “Dare to step into these spaces,” they warn, “dare to take some of the resources we’ve been hoarding, and this could happen to you, too.” Every public lynching has hoped to serve this purpose of deterrence, and this once was no exception...

As a friend put it to me, “The moral of this unspeakably tragic story: the ‘post-racial’ university and the elite it serves are ideological weapons of death.”

Here's the problem with comparing this to a lynching. Arday killed himself. Beyond that, Arday was himself a mediocre person. He was a fraud and a plagiarist. The work he did produce wasn't original. In reality, he got his position by telling white people fantastical stories that they wanted to hear. That's why he was open to attack and why, ultimately, he decided there was no way out for him. He was caught in his own lifetime of lies. But this author doesn't know and doesn't care.

Over at Vox, they have an interview with Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote an excellent story for the Atlantic about his time as a black academic. But even though Harper seems to be directing most of the blame toward Cambridge and Arday himself, he can't help but blame the right for going too far.

I would say blame is not a finite resource and I think there’s plenty of it to go around in this case in particular. I think blame that belongs to conservatives and that belongs to Republicans and that belongs to various kinds of institutions. And that of course belongs to Jason Arday, the man.

I think this is a person who is clearly a serial fabulist, and I think one could fairly say a con artist, who was able to, through an increasingly implausible array of stories about his background — that he was mute until age 11, that he was illiterate till age 18, that he ran 600 miles in six days, a feat which is just 50 miles shy of a world record — flatter the vanities of people at Cambridge University who were very desperate to get a magical minority in the door. And they were so hell bent on their desire to engage in diversity politics that they overlooked what should have been very obvious flaws.

I think it’s also true simultaneously though, that you cannot just blame Arday or liberal institutions for this, and particularly for how this ended. This was, it’s worth noting, an academic scandal that — on the order of academic scandals — is not one that perhaps should be international news, but that’s very much what it became, in no small part because the British press turbocharged it.

So Harper isn't saying this wasn't a story; he's just saying it wasn't an international story if not for the mendacity of the British press. But I don't think that's true. Arday was presented as one of the greatest black academics of his era, the youngest black professor ever hired by Cambridge in 800 years. To discover that he is a fraud and a con man (as Harper put it) seems like a big story. 

Was the British press scrutiny far too intense? Yes. Do I think it was racist in the sense that I have a hard time imagining there would be this much scrutiny on a white academic who did the same thing? Yes, I think you can absolutely say that. To me, there is a question about, “Okay, what is the line between appropriate journalistic scrutiny and obsession?”

But I also think it’s worth noting, to be fair to the British press, that they’re responding to the way in which he was marketed to them nationally. He was marketed by Cambridge as the youngest Black professor in the 800-year history of this very venerable institution. To some extent, when you brand someone that way, when you film BBC specials with a closeup on his Black hands nestled in the white ones of the head of the Faculty of Education, I think some degree of scrutiny is warranted.

Harper is correct that the focus had everything to do with how Arday was presented. He suggests that no white professor would similarly get this level of scrutiny but I think that's false if you create a similar context. For instance, imagine a white professor who identifies as a leading authority on some subject that is currently hot politically. Then imagine that professor turns out to be a complete fraud and con man. Would he get a lot of negative press? I think he would and not because the press is racist.

Put another way, if Arday had been some middling academic at some minor British university, I don't think he'd have made much of an impact. But that's not what happened. Cambridge embraced him and made him into a kind of racial symbol of excellence. That's why he had such a long way to fall.

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