The Deadly Cost of Replacing Standards with Stories

Humans are storytellers. We create narratives to help us make sense of ourselves and the people and world around us. Sometimes the stories are objectively true; other times, not so much.

And truth is often stranger than fiction.

These notions came to mind as I read about a charismatic UK academic named Jason Arday, PhD. It’s a cautionary tale about the consequences of allowing narratives to outrun the evidence, and about universities forgetting their role as truth-seeking, rather than activist-promoting enterprises. Those failures can have deadly consequences.

Three years ago, Cambridge University, long one of the world’s great bastions of the Enlightenment, celebrated Arday as its youngest ever Black full professor and an “exceptional scholar”. That was their story, and they stuck with it even after it became clear that his appointment was based on what can most generously be described as a work of historical fiction.

On August 14, Arday was found dead in his home under circumstances authorities described as “unexpected, but… not believed to be suspicious,” suggesting suicide. Those same authorities subsequently opened an inquiry and further characterized his death as “unnatural.” No evidence has been released suggesting it was anything more unnatural than suicide itself but we should withhold judgment until the results of that inquiry are known. 

The sad ending of Arday’s life came just a few weeks after Nathan Cofnas, PhD, an American researcher at Ghent University in Belgium broke a story showing that the Cambridge professor’s doctoral dissertation was riddled with plagiarism and that his biography included wildly embellished tales of personal struggle and athletic prowess.

Despite requiring changes, the university that awarded Arday’s doctorate cleared him of plagiarism. Other reviewers disagreed. Readers can decide for themselves.

Most of the commentators I’ve read described Arday as a fabulist, which he clearly was. In that regard, he was no different than many others who inflate their accomplishments to satisfy ego or gain advantage. Academia was supposed to be different. The credibility of universities as places where objective knowledge is taught, learned, and expanded rests on upholding the highest standards of evidence and ethics.

Critics have long shown how those standards have been subsumed on U.S. campuses by so-called “social justice” priorities of race-based diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. They’ve shown — particularly in the humanities, including Arday’s field of sociology — how the mere mention of any of the various personal identities favored by progressives elevates the perception of individual or scholarly worth. These fields have devolved into such navel-gazing nonsense that “autoethnography” — interviewing oneself and writing about the experience — counts as research.

Bestowing an unearned doctorate and professorial title on a fabulist is bad enough. The academics and administrators who did so could be forgiven if they were simply suckered by a poser and committed themselves to better uphold objective standards. But the person who hired Arday wasn’t suckered. 

Prof. Hilary Cremin, Dean at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education, explicitly rejects Enlightenment principles in her book “Rewilding Education”. Arday’s “stories” were a perfect fit for her worldview that the empirical knowledge central to Western Civilization and that built the modern world must give way to the “poems, stories, and case studies” from the global south. 

Poems and stories don’t make planes fly or power the device you’re using to read this column yet Cremin and her ilk are the ones teaching the teachers who teach our children. Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking are no doubt rolling in their graves at what’s become of their alma mater.

Arday’s saga likely would have stayed across the pond but for the fact that his padded CV included a false claim that he had been a visiting professor at Ohio State in its now thankfully shuttered Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Then, never wanting to miss a news cycle, the Trump State Department announced it was “…reviewing any relationships we have with Ghent University,” after the university’s rector suspended Cofnas. Ghent has since reversed that suspension.

Though Cofnas’ Substack made the news, researchers at Times Higher Education were prepared to run the story a year earlier, only to kill it after Arday’s lawyers intervened.  

Cofnas is hardly a sympathetic character, arguing that in a “race realism” meritocracy, black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” While I generally reject ad hominem rebuttals, there isn’t enough space to list the brilliant Black thinkers that easily dwarf Cofnas’ small-mindedness.

Group differences in IQ have long been documented, as have genetic links supporting the heritability of intelligence. But Cofnas’ racial determinism is as flawed as phrenology.

Sympathetic or not, his well-documented takedown of Arday’s qualifications rests on the solid ground of hard evidence.

Then there’s Petra De Sutter, Cofnas’ boss. The Ghent University rector suspended him with a mealy-mouthed claim that “[academic] freedom is not unlimited. It… may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others…” The offended rights aren’t listed.

Before the Enlightenment, universities were cloistered castles that mostly preached religious dogma. They evolved by adopting the secular values of empiricism and rationalism to follow the evidence wherever it leads. Academic freedom means nothing if truth is subjugated to feelings.

De Sutter would also benefit from learning the risks of throwing stones in glass houses, after delivering an inaugural address in which three of four quotes were AI hallucinations, then forfeiting an honorary doctorate.

As if that madness weren’t enough, the New England Journal of Medicine, previously one of America’s premier academic medical publications, jumped into the narrative washing with an opinion piece by Dr. Kemi Doll. She opens by declaring, “They are trying to kill us,” then writes that she doesn’t “care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career. And certainly not his life.”

What a stunning inversion of reality.

Doll’s patients certainly care a great deal whether her medical judgment is based on truth. And while racism is real, Cambridge was so determined to bolster its diversity bona fides that it utterly failed to conduct even a rudimentary review of Arday’s record. Barring a revelation that he was murdered by more than one person, there is no “they” on whom to blame his death. There is instead a culture that failed to hold him to standards of excellence befitting his titles. His defenders claim he died because of the pressures of a “racist feeding frenzy” rather than the activism that replaced the search for truth for which universities exist — or used to exist — in the first place. 

University credibility has long been in decline and the Arday affair provides the clearest view yet as to the reasons. If we’re lucky, his story will be its nadir, though it’s doubtful. 

In the U.S. since 2000, more than 40 million people graduated from colleges and universities. Many have been inculcated with reality-denying views about the sort of cultural practices that actually support human flourishing — especially the necessity of struggle and personal accountability for objective outcomes. They view every struggle or failure as oppression by others rather than the seeds of growth. Such perceptions easily explain the current support for con artists like Arday and politicians and policies that promise socialist and Marxist utopias that have never — and can never — exist.

And that’s the real story here. Jason Arday wasn’t a victim. He was a pawn who became a casualty of a perverse ideology. He should still be alive with his family and Nathan Cofnas should still be an unknown race-baiting post-doc. Cremin and De Sutter should be fired, and medical schools should stick to evidence-based physician training. 

Sixty-three years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. shared a story with the world of his dream that one day, his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. The sad story of Jason Arday shows us the nightmare that results from failing to do so.