The Unmaking of Jason Arday

hen I left Jason Arday last week, he was humiliated but alive. The 41-year-old black fabulist—the “youngest-ever black professor” at the University of Cambridge—was facing a mounting tsunami of damaging revelations. There was his plagiarism, first of all. Simon & Schuster was just about to publish his book, Great and Unfortunate Things. It did so, to considerable fanfare, on Aug. 11. The book was an “Editor’s Pick” on Amazon, which placed it among the “Best Biographies & Memories.”

I say “his” book, but it was only incidentally his. A “book doctor” called Eve Claxton was listed as co-author, and it soon emerged that another co-author was that prodigious scribe, AI. More digging revealed that Arday’s dissertation was lifted largely from a 2009 PhD thesis by a Brunel University student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers.

But the plagiarism was, I noted, only the tip of the midden. There was also Arday’s unbridled fabulism. Among other things, he claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days. As revelations mounted, Cambridge at first circled its wagons and dismissed any criticism of its prize black scholar as a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” But no, Arday did all the undermining himself. Like Belshazzar at his famous feast, he could see the writing on the wall. And the writing had more or less the same import as that the Babylonian king saw inscribed before him by a ghostly hand. I am told that “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” means something like “You have been weighed in the balance and have been found wanting.” Arday’s similar message could be summarized more briefly: “The jig is up.”

Overwhelmed, Arday resigned his chair. I am not sure whether it was a sense of humor or merely chutzpah that encouraged him to leave the composition of his letter of resignation to AI, but there seems little doubt that AI was the “onlie begetter” of the missive. Alas, on Friday, August 14, the humiliation became too much. The police were called because Arday was found “unresponsive.” He was pronounced dead on the scene, an apparent suicide.