I was invited to write a piece about the Jason Arday scandal three weeks ago, by a magazine I’ve written for before. But I declined, and with hindsight I’m glad I did.
Mostly, I already felt sorry for the guy, and felt that his case was too pathetic. His lies were so outrageous and childish that he obviously had serious mental issues. I also believed I had little to say beyond what had already been said, and in general I don’t like writing about viral stories while they’re still unfolding. There would be plenty of time later, once the dust had settled, to deal with the abysmal state of our universities and the extent of their ideological capture, which is the real story, not one guy’s fabulism and fraud.
To be honest, I also couldn’t bring myself to personally dislike Arday. I saw his talk on Paul Simon’s Graceland (also one of my favorite albums), and though it was extremely shallow for an academic talk, you could see that he was charming and knew how to hold a crowd (about as far from autistic as you can get).
In fact, when I called Arday a “troubled man”, some people accused me of being too sympathetic to him, and perhaps they were right. Let’s not forget he defrauded students, reported journalists to the police, etc. (see here: https://x.com/LouiseMensch/status/2085799583985119449). I was mostly angry with Cambridge, which had pushed Arday into the limelight in the first place. So I was already bending over backwards.
And then I get this from academic colleagues: that I “bullied a scholar to death”, participated in a “witch hunt” and was “kicking a dead man”. Honestly, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
You are exactly what’s wrong with academia. Your kind of people put a vulnerable fabulist on a pedestal, and exposed him to international media coverage, simply because you wanted to flaunt your own virtue and cleanse off your “whiteness”.
This tragic affair is 100% on Cambridge University and all the racially obsessed DEI ideologues who participated in the charade, not on the journalists and academics who finally exposed the fraud and the lies, despite the serious legal threats and the huge reputational costs.
Calling this a “witch hunt” or “lynching” or “bullying to death” is absolutely despicable, and an insult to everyone who has ever been a victim of these crimes.
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