After Jason Arday’s Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship
New York Times · LC · trust 7/100
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Among other things, Arday said that he’d gotten his Ph.D. despite severe autism that left him nonverbal until he was 11 and unable to read until he was 18. He’d claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, which would have made him one of the world’s most accomplished ultramarathoners.
Grove sent Arday three emails with questions about both his work and his history. Arday responded by hiring one of Britain’s leading defamation firms — one known, among other things, for trying to quash investigations into Scientology — and reporting Grove to the police for harassment. As Grove later wrote , an officer told him not to contact Arday again because it was affecting the professor’s mental health. The magazine, fearing expensive litigation, killed the piece.
But the story didn’t go away. It made its way to Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge research associate who’d been fired for racist blog posts. Cofnas published his review of Arday’s intellectual misdeeds last month, and it exploded in the British press, particularly on the right, which saw the scandal as an indictment not just of Arday or Cambridge, but of academic diversity policies writ large. Cambridge announced an internal investigation, and Arday resigned.
But the coverage, much of it gleefully vicious, continued, in part because of the publication of Arday’s new memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” this month. On Friday Arday was found dead in what was widely assumed to be a suicide.
In the wake of Arday’s death, many on the left are blaming the media. “The media lynched Jason Arday,” declared Ibram X. Kendi. The head of a Cambridge college called for an official inquiry into the “media onslaught.”
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