Jason Arday Found Dead, Apparent Suicide

One of the more thoughtful reactions from UK commentators is in the YouTube video embedded above. At 0:53, he says,

It should be a reminder that many people who do act in bizarre ways in public normally are quite fragile beneath that, maybe quite unwell. We can forget that sometimes, perhaps, maybe forget that with everyone. But that said, I think the inquest will now begin. And by inquest, I mean the liberals reworking the narrative to suit them. And I daresay it will be something like, you know, innocent black man hounded by vicious anti-white right-wing media. I'm expecting that line from everyome from the BBC to the Guardian to James O'Brien as well as Owen Jones and every academic and wokey from SOAS to Berkeley. Won't be much #bekind and tolerance from them. Anywayh, the central question here is who is responsible for this man's death, cause it's an interesting question of paternity, of course.

Now as I said at the top, you know, I'm sure many people will just say, "Well, it's Arday. He's the only person you can say, you know." If of course this is as it seems, which is obviously the likely outcome. And in a brute sense, tbat would be true. Not only did he presumably take the final act, but he didn't help himself by getting in the mess he was in. You could say he was unwell, maybe he was, I don't know. But it seems to me, if I was to hazard a guess, clearly this is somebody who's a little bit unhinged and has an almost very deep craving to be worshipped and loved and celebrated, as if his identity depended on it.

And when all of that falls away, probably what's revealed is a very lost and traumatized boy, and a lot of S-H-I-T was coming at him from every angle.

The Guardian's reaction was actually even-handed:

Arday’s rise to a prestigious professorial chair was remarkable. Arday said he had been nonverbal until the age of 11, requiring extensive speech and language therapy, as well as being illiterate until 18.

That life story contributed to him being made a torchbearer for the 2012 London Olympics flame.

After leaving school, Arday went on to further study before completing a doctorate in education at Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. That was followed by a string of academic posts culminating in a professorship at the University of Glasgow and a professorial chair at Cambridge.

Arday was initially accused of plagiarising another academic’s work for his PhD thesis. But he denied the accusations, and an investigation by Liverpool John Moores University earlier this year upheld its decision to award him a PhD.

But other elements of his life story were increasingly questioned, including claims of prodigious money-raising for charity and feats of long-distance running.

He was also challenged about whether he was nonverbal as a child.

However those claims meant little in the world of academia. After initially defending Arday as the victim of a smear campaign, as further questions arose about his academic career, the university began to temper its support.

Real Clear Politics ran only a three-hankie weeper from Alex Berenson:

May God welcome Jason into His company and give him the peace he clearly did not have -- for the fabulist is the best example of the “peaceless person” running from the world and himself -- and may God save us from the quasi-religion that contributed so much to his fall.

There's a DEI culture, especially as it relates to people of African descent, on both sides of the Atlantic, but at least from what I can observe from halfway around the world, it's become even more exaggerated and bizarre in the UK. The closest comparable episode in the US is the plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, who was briefly president of Harvard, but resigned:

In response, Gay said she stood behind the integrity of her work and requested an outside review of it. The Harvard Corporation reported that the review found "a few instances of inadequate citation" and "duplicative language without appropriate attribution" in her work, but "no violation of Harvard's standards for research misconduct." Analyses by The Harvard Crimson and CNN contested Harvard's statement, finding that Gay had likely violated the university's policies on plagiarism and academic integrity. Gay requested seven corrections to add citations and quotation marks to her dissertation and two of her articles. Academic Joseph Reagle opined that media reports that Gay "plagiarized" implied that she had stolen the central ideas in her work, saying "I don't think this is the case" but that the work "contain plagiarized prose. This is a lesser but still significant infraction." Academic William Arighi, writing for the Journal of Academic Freedom, later characterized the events as "an attempt not at promoting truth but at grinding a political ax".

In response to the allegations, the congressional committee that held the hearing on antisemitism said it would examine Gay's work, and asked the university to produce related communications and documentation.

On January 2, 2024, Gay announced she was resigning her position.

However, Gay retained her posiition on the Harvard faculty. The instances of plagiarism in her case appear to have been far fewer than those in Arday's case, and there were no equivalent fantastic claims of running marathons with a broken leg or Stakhanovite fundraising achievements. Her fall was from a much lesser height, and her prior career was much less enabled by the media. There seems to have been something in the UK water that required Arday to be magnified to a much greater extent.

Why is this? The public justification for privileging people of African descent in the UK appears to have something to do with guilt over colonialism, but this is a much more venial matter, it seems to me, than guilt in the Americas over slavery. My current thinking is that the current liberal UK immigration policy began with the Labour/Fabian program after World War II that nationalized transport and the coal industry and socialized medicine, while at the same time making this affordable by importing third-world labor to keep wages in all these industries down. This effectively wrote the UK native working class out of the equation, solving the problem of the 1926 General Strike for good.

I think the ruling-class guilt in the UK stems in large part from this; DEI is just a distraction.