The True Tragedy of the Death of Jason Arday

It’s become a journalistic cliché to call the most humdrum occurrence (starlet gains weight/loses husband) “a Greek tragedy” but the case of Jason Arday really is. It makes one think of Icarus, who sought to escape imprisonment on Crete (surely an oxymoron, considering the beauty and hospitality of the island) by fashioning “wings” from wax and feathers.Dazzled by the sun, Icarus went toward it, only to find his wings destroyed by the heat and to die by drowning when he fell into the sea. Arday used it himself in an interview to promote his memoir: “I always wanted to be a person who flew close to the sun. But sometimes I wonder: Did I fly too close?”Many persons born ambitious and working-class in the United Kingdom know how soul-destroying it is to be constantly warned by parents and teachers that they mustn’t aim too high. (My bright, attractive cousin, on telling a careers advisor that she wanted to be a stewardess, was literally told to “Come down to earth,” as if she’d announced her ambition to become Queen of England.) Perhaps it’s different in the United States; there’s a joke here which goes, “A poor Brit sees an expensive car and thinks ‘I’m gonna trash that!’ — a poor Yank sees an expensive car and thinks ‘I’m gonna get that.’’’ We’ve had prime ministers of working-class origin. Keir Starmer was one, and so is his unelected successor Andy Burnham.There is nevertheless a feeling of hopelessness in this country as regards social mobility, with many studies showing that it has been actually reversing for some time. Those least likely to make social progress are white working-class boys; a situation which has led many of their parents to support the anti-immigration Reform Party.Much of this is believed to have happened due to diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, which has effectively seen meritocracy abandoned in favor of race-based promotion. In the sad story of Arday, the comedy of DEI was disclosed as a tragedy for everyone involved; the white people who were shut out, and the black people who were patronized.When Arday became the youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge University — appointed in 2023 at the age of 37 — one could see why it would be cause for celebration; record-breakers generally add to the gaiety of nations, unless they are serial criminals.One could even understand why Arday got carried away with the glory of his achievement, and took the opportunity to try and see if he could make Whitey believe — in the spirit of the White Queen replying to Alice — as many as six impossible things before breakfast.Thus he wasn’t just the youngest prof of color at the august academy, but was also mute until the age of 11 and unable to read or write until the age of 18 before experiencing several “improbable triumphs and heartbreaking setbacks” and then scoring the Cambridge gig.It’s as if just to see how dumb clever people can be, he pushed the envelope, going on to claim, amongst other disproved fantasies, to have run 30 charity marathons in 35 days — the final nine with a fractured leg — and to have appeared in a television documentary that was aired two decades before he was born.This wild merry-go-round of fantasy came to a screeching halt last month when the American academic Nathan Cofnas, who had been sacked from Cambridge due to his unpalatable views on race, accused Arday of plagiarism. The thread was pulled, the lies unravelled, and Arday soon resigned from his post, unable to withstand “an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack.” This week, he committed suicide.We live in an age of Magical Thinking. Men identify as women and annoying people identify as neuro-divergent; what’s not to say that both Arday and those white saviours who hired him — while all of them knowing the reality — felt that feelings trump facts every time and that if he identified as a person of super-human talents and achievements, that was who he should be accepted as?The trouble with this way of thinking is that eventually the facts catch up with the feelings, and there can only be one winner. So what started as a “Silly Season” story has ended as a true tragedy. It’s also the prompt for yet another round of the Culture Wars, with the left blaming the press for interrogating him and the right blaming academia for believing him. Meanwhile, the family of Jason Arday — the persons who knew him and loved him for what he was, not what he pretended to be — mourn him and prepare to bury him. So in the end, no one won.

The True Tragedy of the Death of Jason Arday

The True Tragedy of the Death of Jason Arday

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