Say, Didja Happen to Notice the Total Implosion of the Academic World and DEI Industry?

New in PJ Media:

Jason Arday is no longer a professor at Britain’s prestigious Cambridge University, but that august institution is going to need some time to recover from the damage he has done. Indeed, the entire academic world, and the DEI industry as well, are reeling from Arday’s sudden and shocking unmasking and downfall. They had so very much invested in him as a living symbol of the success of their analysis, and of the correctness of their worldview, that now they are due for some serious soul-searching and reevaluation of their entire approach.

Will they engage in that thorough and honest self-examination that they so desperately need? Nah. They’ll just double down. In fact, they’re already doing so.

Up until his resignation under fire on Thursday, Jason Arday was a professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge, becoming the youngest black professor in the university’s history. He resigned after evidence of his massive plagiarism and otherwise embarrassingly skimpy academic record circulated so widely as to be impossible to ignore, but this is much, much more than just a plagiarism scandal.

The question of how and why Jason Arday was hired at Cambridge, and at several other universities before that, raises so many important questions about the academic establishment that in a sane world, the credibility of that establishment would be destroyed forever. Alas, we do not live in a sane world.

That’s clear from the fact that Jason Arday is a completely ridiculous figure, as he himself indirectly acknowledged when he asked: “Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told, if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he’s 30?” Well, yes, it would, and yet Jason Arday told it, and academics eagerly believed him.

Not only did Arday claim that he couldn’t read and write until he was 18. He also claimed that he couldn’t even speak at all until he was eleven years old. But once he got speaking, reading, and writing squared away, he took off with a bang, by his own account, running 30 marathons in 35 days and raising nearly 7.5 million dollars for various charities. He also says that he completed the last nine of those 30 marathons despite suffering from a fractured leg that had swollen “to twice its normal size.”

He also said that he had played professional soccer and snooker (a variation of billiards), that a man with a knife had threatened him at Cambridge, and that other racist yahoos sent his parents a pig’s head. There is, of course, no evidence of any of this.

There is more. Read the rest here.