The Ivory Tower Is Falling

The big news story of early August was Jason Arday. Appointed to a professorship at Cambridge University in 2023, the black scholar had been championed by university leaders as a sign of their great commitment to righting racial injustice and achieving “real” diversity. Unfortunately for Cambridge, Arday was exposed as a plagiarist, fabulist, and academic fraud. The public revelations led Arday to resign on August 5. A week later, he committed suicide.

I regard Arday as a victim of the mostly white, progressive fixation on victims. He clearly had a genuine intelligence. Knowing a chance when he saw it, Arday fabricated patently unbelievable stories of his childhood, claiming to have suffered from severe disabilities, knowing that the more disadvantaged and “marginal” his image, the more highly he would be prized. He entered fields (sociology and education) in which his stories would warm the hearts of colleagues, and the fabulation worked. Neurodivergent and black! The very thought of elevating such a person to the highest honors provoked spontaneous orgasms in progressive circles. 

Questions were raised about plagiarism soon after Arday’s appointment at Cambridge. University officials refused to investigate. Last year, as a journalist was preparing an exposé, legal action was taken to kill the story. In a further step, Arday reported the journalist to the police for engaging in racial harassment. When a scholar at another university raised questions about his publications, Arday filed a racism complaint with his employer. Extensive plagiarism in his doctoral thesis was documented by academic experts. Both Cambridge and the university that awarded Arday his doctorate dismissed the charges. His allies at Cambridge played the race card in an open letter: “The integrity of higher education is at risk if we do not take a stand and speak out against the systematic attempts to erase Black scholarship.” At each juncture, the British establishment protected him.

Arday had to be protected. For those running Cambridge University and every other institution of consequence in Great Britain, Arday was a cherished sacred object, not a person. To this day, the university’s public pronouncements speak about him with great delicacy to avoid any hint of sacrilege. In this environment, I imagine that Arday recognized he could get away with pretty much anything. However fraudulent his academic career, Arday possessed an entrepreneurial genius, if also a disturbed psyche. He took advantage of the atmosphere of unaccountability and plenary permission with remarkable élan.

Yes, Arday exploited his black privilege. But he was also exploited. Heidi Mirza, one of his graduate school advisers, observed before his suicide, “He’s a pawn whose ambition made him vulnerable.” David Harris, a fellow academic whose questions about the integrity of Arday’s scholarship were ignored, commented at the time: “Prof Arday badly needs critical friends, in my view, not sycophants.” I’m not sure “sycophants” is the right word; “enablers” seems more accurate.

The whole affair reveals a great deal about today’s university culture. I can testify from experience as a professor for twenty years that university faculty engage in constant gossip and endless, detailed dissection of university politics and events, even the most trivial. It’s beyond belief that Arday’s fraudulence and incompetence were not widely known and whispered about in Cambridge common rooms. Yet everyone went along and maintained appearances. The collective agreement to sustain a lie likely rested in pious convictions that Arday’s presence on the faculty served the goals of social justice to such a degree that the price of compromised academic standards was worth paying. Those with misgivings were cowed by the power of identity politics. Why speak up? It will only bring grief and reprisals. (The academic who detailed Arday’s plagiarism was suspended by his university.) Whatever the cause, the silent complicity of an entire elite university bespeaks a deep corruption. These are not good times in higher education.

During the same month that Arday’s story made headlines, The Atlantic published “Confessions of a Token Black Professor: Why I Lost Faith in Academia” by Tyler Austin Harper. Hired in 2020, Harper recounts his experiences at Bates College, an elite liberal arts college in Maine.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd–inspired Summer of Love, college leaders at Bates pressed for dramatic changes, including a plan for required “Race, Power, Privilege, and Colonialism” (RPPC) classes in every major. From the outset, Harper had misgivings, but with a modesty befitting a newly hired faculty member, he withheld judgment. In due time, however, he came to an unhappy conclusion about the college. Bates, he writes, is “a place where current and future elites paid—or were paid—for the privilege of cosplaying as radicals, victims, or both.”

Before he arrived at Bates, Harper had accepted the stated purposes of affirmative action, which involve giving priority to candidates from underprivileged backgrounds or marginal communities who have hidden or delayed promise, while continuing to maintain academic standards. But his experiences of what really happens during the process of faculty hiring taught him otherwise. 

“After a few years at Bates,” he writes, “I began to see the version of affirmative action that I had defended in my head as a fantasy.” Serving on faculty search committees, he learned that being black was the overriding “qualification,” not academic achievement or promise. “A sort of woke Jim Crow” operated, one “in which radically separate standards were applied to white and nonwhite candidates.”

Harper knew, of course, that he was not the only faculty member who was aware of the “radically separate standards.” It’s an open secret as widely known as it is universally denied. Which means that Harper himself, an accomplished scholar and among the most promising young faculty at Bates, was implicated. He notes that senior leaders at Bates slotted him into committee assignments that concern “Black” issues. He began to see that he was not a fellow professor in a community of scholars; he was a pawn, a token, a pricelessly valuable commodity—one of the “irreplaceable negroes,” as a black friend of his wryly put it.

In 2025, Harper resigned from his faculty position at Bates. In the end, it was not the woke Jim Crow or his role as a token black professor that drove him from the ivory tower. It was instead a general sense that higher education has become intellectually and morally bankrupt. He comments on his reaction to a poster announcing the college’s annual sex week:

Once, I might have seen in that poster a symptom of everything wrong with the college—money wasted on weird bullshit, organized by bureaucrats whose jobs nobody could explain. Now I found it all oddly refreshing. What was Bates if not a place devoted to risk-free ideological masturbation? For a week, at least, we could be honest about it.

After resigning, Harper reports on the fate of the RPPC courses. Securing this purportedly transformative initiative had been the great ambition of the college’s leadership, and it was passionately supported by many faculty members. Yet in November 2025, as the Trump administration was pressuring higher education to abandon DEI projects, college leaders counseled the faculty to vote to suspend its implementation.

Harper notes that he should have been happy to hear the news: “I had argued all along that the RPPC was pointless, unworkable, mad.” Yet he found himself to be disappointed: “Here was one last sign that it had all meant nothing.” He recalls an early Bates student (the college was founded by abolitionists in 1855) who left the college to fight for the Union cause. At the Battle of Gettysburg, he led a bayonet charge down Little Round Top and “into the maw of an advancing Confederate force.” Turning to consider his former colleagues, Harper observes, “Now this same college could not find the spine required to simply stand by a curricular change that its faculty and administrators had breathlessly, earnestly, performatively insisted was an imperative because it was nothing less than a matter of justice.”

Those who hope to reform higher education have an important lesson to learn: What Harper endured and now regards with disdain was not the consequence of a few radical faculty members or covens of activist students. By Harper’s account, “the source of the most intense racial monomania on campus, I came to realize, was senior leadership.” The same senior leaders folded their tents when the wind changed direction. I’m willing to bet a similar spinelessness rules at Cambridge and elsewhere across the defiled landscape of higher education. Too many of our institutions are run by men without chests.