Consider a man who has worked painstakingly to fabricate an entire life that is not his own. His lies grow more fantastical, spinning out of control as he tells tales upon tales until one day he is found out. The liar must deal with the consequences of his actions and seeks to escape through suicide.
It happens a lot, many times when a man has a secret paramour, or simply a terrible secret. While one sympathizes as a human being to an extent, the feeling is generally that the person could not handle the weight of the consequences of his crimes. Yet no one ever blames the person who outed the cheater. Sympathy rightly goes most to the person cheated upon because cheating remains a sin no matter whether he could live with the consequences or not.
In Europe, an American academic faces the loss of his job because he outed a cheater. Not one in the romantic, but in the academic sense.
One of Britain’s most elite educational institutions, Cambridge University, in 2023 hired an academic named Jason Arday. The black academic had worked in other institutions and seemed to have a dramatic and inspiring backstory of overcoming illness and poverty, achieving incredible athletic feats. Among his claims were that he was mute until 11, illiterate until 18, and could run 600 miles in six days.
He also claimed employment at The Ohio State University and Glasgow University, both of which denied he had ever worked there.
Academia in the United States has historically had as short a trigger on lying and cheating as baseball used to have for gambling. In the 20th century, the University of Notre Dame fired a highly successful football coach because he stated on his resume that he had played varsity instead of junior varsity in college, a lie decades-old. The timing of the lie did not matter so much as the potential stigma lying and cheating brings to an institution of higher learning, whether it be a tenured professor or a head football coach.
Colleges and universities are only as good as they are trustworthy in terms of seeking and sharing truth.
Nathan Cofnas, an American teaching at the University of Ghent in Belgium, had suspicions about Arday, hired as a sociology professor. He ran the professor’s thesis through a plagiarism checker and found over 100 instances of stealing from a fellow academic. When combined with an implausible, actually impossible, life story, the game was up.
He accused Cambridge of hiring and defending Arday simply due to the cause of racial diversity and ignoring red flags because of his image and charisma.
After a period of public and press questions going to the heart of the Cambridge academic mission and how Arday’s lies compromised it, Arday took his own life. Ever since, European Leftists have venerated him as a saint and called for press suppression laws.
Arday is hardly the first individual nationally exposed for grifting. Two of the best known examples in the United States are Frank Abagnale Jr. and Stephen Glass.
Arday certainly did not face anywhere near the same pressure as Abagnale, although both played the same con. They posed as bright young men with fascinating stories to get into positions they did not earn. The excellent film “Catch Me If You Can” portrays him convincing a hospital to hire him as a surgeon, believing he earned his degree at an Ivy League university and had employment at premier health care facilities even though he had never even taken a college science class. He similarly talked his way into a history professor and airline pilot position.
Abagnale did not have to worry about being dragged on social media, but he did have the Federal Bureau of Investigation relentlessly on his tail. He knew the consequences of getting caught was decades in federal prison, not general humiliation.
Stephen Glass in the early 1990s came on board The New Republic as the bright young man of the staff. Over time, he wove fantastical and tough to confirm stories about embarrassing conservative misdeeds that never happened. Remember, this was a pre smartphone world and there were not videos of every public event floating around.
Working for a liberal publication that focused on politics, editors later admitted that their biases kept them from examining his work more deeply.
When discovered, Glass’s public humiliation became national when Hollywood made a motion picture about his crimes called “Shattered Glass.” The film portrayed him in a weird and pathetic, as opposed to a sympathetic, light. He simply moved on to law school and practices in that field today.
The usual suspects accused the press and commentators of racism, however, because Arday was pursued similarly to Glass or the New York Times’ Jayson Blair who lost his job after publishing stories about going to West Virginia. Locals pointed out that his writing proved that he had never been to the places he claimed to write about. The New York Times’ reputation has never really recovered from that.
But where does the racism truly lie?
In 2001 or so, director Spike Lee while speaking to a group of film students articulated the archetype of what he called “the magical, mystical Negro character.” Lee argued that creative works like “The Green Mile” or “The Legend of Bagger Vance” resurrected images of “the happy slave” and “the noble savage.”
In turn, he savages writers such as Stephen King for producing the work and actors such as Will Smith for playing the roles. Lee goes a bridge too far in accusing them of fomenting racism, but he makes a point about the use of such imagery. Stephen King was trying to contrast a pure heart against the sometimes ugly racism of the 1930s South and “The Green Mile” was one of his truly great works.
Arday, however, almost literally transformed himself into the stereotype and Cambridge University was only too willing to use him to advance its own image.
National Public Radio’s commentary on the issue centered on points made by Tyler Austin Harper, a former professor now writing for The Atlantic. He told NPR that “some universities had created a culture in which Black and Brown academics could be treated as if they were there to be ‘Black and Brown first and foremost, and scholars and educators second.” This comes right to the edge of accusing higher education of violating the Civil Rights Act in terms of using race in hiring.
Harper went on to accuse those blaming the press of trying to ignore or cover up academia’s failures. That includes academics and the Communist inspired Green Party movement in Europe. Communist radicals even proposed replacing an iconic statue of Winston Churchill with Arday. The Left has no actual real heroes to hang their hats on, so they take anyone whose image they can use to manipulate the gullible, regardless of reality.
The right course of action lies in shaming everyone involved, from the fabulist Arday to the administrators who ignored and thus enabled his delusions. Shame is good when used against malefactors such as these. The fear of shame is a powerful social tool that makes people think twice before engaging in self-destructive actions or actions destructive to those around them. One cannot forget that Arday did both.
What is the wrong reaction is the Leftist urge to suppress free speech because the press found a liar in their academic ranks. Since the case of William Cosby versus the New York Post Boy in the 1750s, Britain and the United States have agreed that the truth is the best defense when the press faces accusations against itself.
The damage done to academia will be the most lasting. Trust comes from faith that an institution will act in the truth and will resist lies and grifts. How can anyone trust that a Cambridge University education has any meaning if one cannot trust that their hires have more qualifications than a student tutor?
American higher education has seen its own reputation decline and its own mass utility questioned because too many schools have allowed ideology to corrupt their basic mission to educate and to prepare students. Those questions could be answered if but academia would commit to a true diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds instead of a false diversity of surface attributes where everyone thinks and believes more or less in the same ways.
