Jason Arday

 I have been reading some of the takes on the Arday case. 

1) Andrew Gelman is a statistician and expert on scientific fraud and malfeasance. He has no problem with the obvious fact that Arday is a fraud:  

"Actually, it’s worse than that. Cambridge was informed about Arday’s research fraud three years ago, but the university first refused to investigate the problem, then last year when a news story was about to come out on it, they sicced lawyers on the newspaper to suppress it.

So, here we go again. Jason Arday, like David Agus, did not live up to his part of the bargain. Society gave him status and he returned the favor by lying all over the place."

2) Jason Stanley is a philosopher and purported expert on fascism and propaganda. He doesn't look closely at Arday's actual research, but concludes that since Arday's articles have some citations, that Arday must be a legitimate scholar after all. But of course, if they were plagiarized and fraudulent, then the number of citations wouldn't matter. 

3) Henry Giroux blames big factors. Systemic colonialism, systems of power:  

"Arday’s death must be understood against a wider culture of cruelty and dehumanization, one nourished by systemic racism and by a social order organized around greed, dispossession, hierarchy, and profound inequality. This is a system in which the legacies of colonialism have not disappeared but have been absorbed into institutions, cultural assumptions, and structures of privilege that continue to determine who belongs, who is protected, whose failures are forgiven, and who is subjected to relentless scrutiny."

Every thing's to blame except actual humans taking actions. It's all structures and systems doing the work, the bigger and more pervasive, the more explanatory power.   

4) John McWhorter views the problem as one of assuming that black intellectuals are mediocre anyway. If you accept that, then you will hire a black professor as a token and not care about the quality:

" Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue."  

Every one of these responses is completely predictable by the commenter's particular vantage point.  Gelman is an expert on fraud in academia, especially in the social sciences. McWhorter is black linguist who has come out against wokeness, Stanley is a philosopher who has branched out into rather superficial political commentary, Giroux is an expert on critical pedagogy.  

Maybe my response is predictable as well. My reaction to each of these takes is a foregone conclusion. I will have more to say about Giroux later. How can an academic culture so cruel and hierarchical also align itself so perfectly with Giroux's own ideological position?