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Frank
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Jason Arday’s body was barely cold before the ‘progressive’ consensus had formed on the cause of death. This was not the suicide it appeared to be, but a ‘lynching’ – the inevitable, willful destruction of an innocent, obscure academic by a deceitful, racist and right-wing media. The relentless scrutiny of the former Cambridge professor’s work, qualifications and life story – wildly out of proportion with his wrongdoings and public status – supposedly proved fatal.
The trouble with this telling is that it is a lie. The press, for all its faults, actually did its duty in the Arday affair. It asked tough questions about a powerful plagiarist (a professorial chair is no minor academic role) and a major public institution (Cambridge University), which had fallen for, promoted and covered up his deceptions. And journalists did this in the face of financially ruinous libel action, organised smear campaigns calling them racist, and even possible arrest. Yet it is the press that is now being lined up for punishment.
Of course, there have been the usual suspects – namely, the woke race obsessives – who you’d expect to join in the digital witch-hunt against the press. Indeed, Ibram X Kendi, Kehinde Andrews and Black Lives Matter UK were all quick to accuse the press of ‘lynching’ the Cambridge professor. More worryingly, the establishment has closed ranks, too. On Monday, Cambridge don Lord Simon Woolley, at a vigil for the deceased, claimed that Arday was the victim of a ‘public execution’, instigated ‘by the wicked, evil people who dragged his name through the mud’. Even a former Archbishop of Canterbury joined in the baying mob pronouncing a ‘debased media culture and the fever-ridden jungle of online comment’ guilty for Arday’s untimely demise. A righteous mob had formed, demanding a crucifixion.
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Nor was the Arday affair merely ginned up by the right. One of the most damning exposés came from the Guardian. Indeed, it was black Guardian journalist Lanre Bakare who exposed Arday’s lurid false claim that he had been sent a severed pig’s head in the post. The New York Times found evidence that Arday’s claim to have grown up as ‘non-verbal’ was false, witheringly concluding that his remarkable trajectory ‘had no precedent in medical literature’.
Was it wrong for the press to focus on Arday’s race or to examine his rise through the prism of DEI? Not when you consider how racialised the coverage was when he first came to prominence. Arday, Cambridge and much of the media continuously hailed him as ‘Cambridge’s youngest black professor’ at the time of his hiring. What’s more, the decision to hire him was made in the wake of Black Lives Matter, when Cambridge was attempting to atone for past racial sins. Race was undoubtedly a factor in elevating a man whom the New York Times bluntly described as being ‘an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards’.
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