Hilariously Comical DEI Academic Accused of Plagiarism, Joins a Long List of Fakers

Many years ago, late economist Walter E. Williams recounted a story about being offered a prestigious Ivy League professorship. A young man at the time, he refused the position. Since he wasn’t qualified on paper, he explained, it would be obvious he was hired simply because of his race. (Williams was black). He did later accept a position at George Mason University — but he issued a warning to the interviewer.

“If I find out you hired me based on affirmative action,” he essentially said, “I will quit on that day.”

Unfortunately, however, since such integrity is rare, America — and the wider West — has diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hires everywhere. There’s “civil rights” attorney Ben Crump, who somehow passed the bar exam despite reading at an elementary-school level. There’s also black female ex-professor Kerri Greenidge, who just left Tufts University owing to plagiarism accusations and other trespasses.

And now there’s yet another DEI scandal involving plagiarism and more, at Britain’s legendary Cambridge University. This one concerns one Jason Arday, who’s described as a “distinguished and highly respected scholar of race, inequality and education.”

Now, Arday, 41, became in 2023 the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history, hired at just 37. That much is true. Yet the rest of his story sounds, well, perhaps a bit fanciful.

For starters, Arday may be a professor of soft science sociology, but he’s got victim-narrative composition down to a hard one. Before addressing that, however, note that Arday is credibly accused of being a serial plagiarist. As the Daily Mail wrote today, an academic

identified more than 100 passages from Arday’s thesis that he claims are identical (or nearly identical) to an obscure 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, of Brunel University in west London. After several newspapers, including the Daily Mail, reported his findings, various online sleuths piled in, using X to post screenshots of purportedly flawed or plagiarised studies and articles from his back catalogue.

The Mail points out that the powers-that-be have tried to kill this story. Cambridge says: Nothing to see here — move along.

Like a Woke Walter Mitty — With a Not-so-secret “Secret” Life

Whatever you believe, though, get a load of Arday’s back story. For if it’s true, he’s one of the most amazing men alive.

First, raised by working-class Ghanaian immigrants, Arday claims he was diagnosed with a severe form of Asperger’s at age three. He consequently was unable to speak until 11 and incapable of eating unaided until seven, the story goes. Additionally, he couldn’t read or write until age 18. This is perhaps believable, however — so far.

Despite his woes, Arday pulled himself up by the bootstraps and earned a series of degrees, culminating in his doctorate. He then climbed academia’s ladder, holding jobs at various institutions of “higher learning” before ending up at the esteemed Cambridge.

He also purportedly raised more than £3 million for charities before he was 30. And today this figure supposedly stands at £5-5.5 million. “But details about his selfless exploits,” notes the Mail, “are shrouded in mystery.” There appears to be little to no proof of them.

Arday claims he raised virtually all this money through three major sponsored runs. In one telling, he completed 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days. In other accounts, though, it was 600 miles in six days. This was later adjusted in some university materials to 12 days. Again, proof of these exploits is lacking.

But it gets even better. Arday asserts he had a brain tumor removed, and then had a stroke, just two weeks before his Ph.D. viva. Yet he still passed that taxing exam. The Mail tells us:

“I didn’t remember anything” [he said] during the viva, Cambridge’s much-feared oral examinations, at which candidates are interrogated in person by dons to defend their theses.

Oh, Arday avers that he was an elite soccer player as well, reaching the semi-professional level.

George Santos, Meet the Master

We’re still not done, though. The Mail also quotes retired British tennis star Andy Murray, who met Arday and later referenced the academic’s 30-day-marathon exploits. As the paper writes:

“He told me on the 20th day he fell — he had a [epileptic] seizure — and had a hairline fracture in his leg but carried on . . . It was pretty cool speaking to someone like that.” In a separate interview, Arday has claimed that the fracture caused his leg to swell up to twice its normal size.

Of course, some would say it’s his head that has swelled to twice its normal size.

Whatever the case, all this, states the Mail,

suggests that the professor is a living, breathing medical miracle with remarkable powers of recovery, especially since in a 2023 interview The Guardian reported that ‘he has barely slept over the past 15 years . . . working through most nights — often on his academic and charity work, but sometimes just to make ends meet’.

Either that or he makes George Santos, the now-disgraced, fabulist GOP ex-congressman look like a piker.

Where Santos got a criminal conviction, however, Arday has cashed in big. As the Mail further informs, among other things, the academic has been

hired to give Ted talks and motivational speeches at corporate events in the UK and US. At least four universities handed him honorary degrees and he was nominated three times for a Pride of Britain award. The Royal Society of Arts made him a fellow, and he was invited to guest-host a Christmas edition of Radio 4’s Today programme.

Unfortunately, while Arday’s Walter Mitty-like tales may be uniquely amusing, as mentioned earlier, he has much company. There’s disgraced ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay, who scammed her way into higher education’s upper echelons via plagiarism. There’s The New York Times’ Jayson Blair, who “routinely faked articles” and had to resign from the paper in 2003. And then there’s the DEI King of Plagiarism himself, Alex Haley. It wasn’t just that his 1976 “classic” Roots: The Saga of an American Family was fiction. It’s also that he plagiarized 81 passages when writing it — from white author Harold Courlander.

All this and more points to why DEI must DIE. As to this, we understand the devastating effect it has on competence and morale in our society. But does it even help the black community? If you’re a wise and loving parent, will you coddle your child and vault him into lofty positions without any concern for his competence? What effect would that have on his character development?

Is it any more wise and loving to do this with a segment of our nation?

Walter Williams and other normal people will give you one answer — those with a white-savior complex quite another.