Jason Manning at Quillette on the determination of Jason Arday’s supporters to elevate him to the status of a martyr – and to mark the Jew Nathan Cofnas down as his killer.
Arday’s strongest partisans are apt to deny any wrongdoing on his part and to attribute all accusations and criticism to a racist witch hunt or to misinformation. For some, his conduct doesn’t even matter. An op-ed in the New England Journal of Medicine expressed unconditional support: “I don’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.”
Some who direct their ire at Arday’s adversaries call for more stringent regulation of the media, such as laws limiting how often a single individual can be named in news stories within a given period. But other supporters focus their blame far more narrowly—not on traditional or social media in general, but on one critic in particular, the man whose article touched off the landslide: Nathan Cofnas.
Cofnas is a natural enemy for Arday’s progressive partisans: a nerdy Jew, and, more to the point, one who left Cambridge under a cloud for writing about the taboo topic of racial differences in intelligence. The Byline Times called him part of a far-right network funded by Peter Thiel. At a vigil for Arday in Trafalgar Square, he was denounced by name before a crowd of thousands. Cofnas himself says he has received death threats in the post. And within days of Arday’s death he announced that his employer, Ghent University, had placed him on suspension.
Some say he is being punished for telling the truth about Arday’s fraud and plagiarism. In one sense, yes. But if we are considering the proximate cause, it is more accurate to say he is being punished for Arday’s death….
So far as we are currently aware, he left behind no statement calling for judegment against another, and no appeal to supporters to avenge his death. Nor did he die in the dramatic and public fashion of a political protester, for whom rallying support is the main object of the exercise. It seems most likely that his death was simply a matter of escape from loss and shame.
But it nonetheless galvanised support and brought sanctions down on the man who brought his plagiarism to light—a man some activist-scholars had wanted punished long before Arday’s scandal began. And it may yet result in Arday being cast as an anti-racist martyr: from laughing-stock to hero.
So while I don’t think Arday’s death was an act of protest or punishment—what I call a moralistic suicide—the response of his supporters and of Ghent University makes such suicides more likely in future. Just as we worry about the impact of social media mockery, so we should worry about the perverse incentives created by elevating a self-killer and punishing his enemies. For someone caught in conflict or shameful scandal, death would offer not only escape but rehabilitation and revenge. Most likely Arday never meant to die on anyone’s head. But perhaps the next alleged fraud will.
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