Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Earlier this week, an estimated 30,000 people gathered in London to mourn Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who took his own life after revelations that much of his own academic record and personal biography was plagiarized or simply made up altogether. Despite these facts, many who gathered directed blame at the media for covering what an Al Jazeera opinion writer called an institutional murder. Ibram X.
Kendi even claimed that the media lynched Jason Arday. It was back in 2023 that Arday became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge, a school over 800 years old that is, along with Oxford and Harvard, considered to be one of the top three universities in the English-speaking world. Immediately, he was hailed by colleagues for his brilliance in the field of sociology. His success seemed even more impressive because of what he had overcome as a black man, subject to discrimination and systemic oppression, including being nonverbal until age 11 and illiterate until age 18. It all sounded just too good to be true.
And unfortunately, it was. On August the 5th, Arday resigned from Cambridge after a former colleague found evidence that his PhD thesis and several academic papers closely resembled and in some cases copied the work of other scholars without proper attribution. Then a childhood classmate denied Arday's claim that he couldn't talk as a child. And Arday also claimed to have run 600 miles in six days and to have completed 30 marathons in 35 days, much of it with a fractured swollen leg, and also to have been on a TV show that came out decades before he was born. Rather than admit wrongdoing, Arday wrote in his resignation letter that, and I quote, talent, perseverance, and hope can triumph over even the greatest adversity, adding that his years at Cambridge were marked by an An unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack.
But according to detection software, the letter was mostly, if not fully, written by artificial intelligence. Rather than blame Arday for these mistakes and those who hid and enabled his lies, protesters instead directed attacks at the man who exposed them. According to the Mayor of London, Arday was, and I quote, the victim of a pernicious public shaming. Others insisted that a white academic would have never faced the same level of scrutiny. Before the news broke of Arday's death, respected academic and linguist John McChordar, who happens to be black as well, suggested that Arday was indeed a victim, but a victim of academic paternalism, one that's often directed toward minorities.
According to McWhorter, and I quote, the kindly anti-racist white academics think suspending their judgment when it comes to a black man makes them good people. But in reality, he continued, they're guilty of the same racism they're claiming to oppose. As he bluntly put it, and I quote, our day's elevation at Cambridge was founded in racism no less avert. In other words, just as it's racist to assume that someone's morally inferior because of their race, It's also racist to assume someone is morally superior because of it. But that is the consequence of the spirit of our age, this critical theory mood that dominates academia and dehumanizes those that it claims to help.
Back in the nineteen fifties, another Cambridge professor argued for a different moral vision. A higher moral law, one that transcended time, place, era, and culture, and to which every single person is accountable. C. S. Lewis called it the Tao, the doctrine that certain attitudes are really true and others really false to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.
Those who deny the Tao are, he continued, like men who should commit patricide in order to be free and live on the vitality of the father they had killed. End quote. In the very same way, dismissing universal moral norms based on certain external characteristics of some will never deliver the dignity that people really deserve. It's what might be called a soft bigotry of low expectations, and it doesn't respect people. Rather, it infantilizes them.
Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have victims.
Some of the world's worst ideas right now are those that cause people to constantly imagine themselves as being only victims. In this, Arday was as much a victim of his own ideas. As he was the victim of others' good intentions. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr.
Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org.
