Cambridge is one of the world’s top universities, and probably has been for hundreds of years. Isaac Newton was a student from Cambridge when he developed his Law of Universal Gravitation. He later became a professor, and laid much of the groundwork for the modern world. We stand on the shoulders of giants like Newton. Today, the core foundations of that great institution have been almost completely hollowed out. Cambridge is now filled with professors like Jason Arday.
Who is Jason Arday? Until recently, he was a professor of education at Cambridge. (https://www.simonspeakers.com/author/arday-jason/ )At age 37, Arday became the youngest black professor at that traditionally hallowed institution of learning. There were only five other black professors at Cambridge when he was hired. (https://channel4news.substack.com/p/the-extraordinary-case-of-professor)
Arday made many extraordinary claims, over and above his claims of academic merit. He claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days with a fractured bone. He said he’d raised £5 million for charity . (https://nypost.com/2026/08/10/opinion/plagiarist-prof-jason-ardays-life-story-is-published-tomorrow-and-it-gets-more-unbelievable-by-the-page/)
I’ve been around a lot of black guys who would make extraordinary claims like this. The white liberals around them would just lap it up without question. For this reason, it’s not surprising to me that no one questioned any of his obvious lies. Whenever the black guy shows up in any situation, I roll my eyes and think: “Here we go.” The ass-kissing by white liberals is about to begin.
By way of example, I once went to see a fiction writer’s panel. By my recollection it had two white guys, a hispanic guy, and a woman on it, sitting at a table for five up on a stage. They started giving their spiels about writing. Note that I said there were five chairs, but only four people on the stage? Where was the fifth person? About fifteen minutes into the presentation, a black guy sauntered in and sat down in the fifth chair. (I think he may have apologized for being late, but I’m not 100% sure he even did that.)
The black guy was introduced by the moderator after this belated appearance. The white guy sitting next to him practically fell over himself to shake hands.
The white guys were clearly the most accomplished and professional people up on that stage. But, the black guy was really good at bullshitting and loved to hear himself talk. The female moderator kept asking the black guy questions. The female moderator also routinely cut off the white guys, like she couldn’t be bothered to hear from them. (This was a little bit into the first Trump Administration, to give you some idea of where society was at. On top of that, writers are all mostly on the political left, to begin with.)
It was apparent that the black guy was the least accomplished writer up there. He had been chosen solely because he was black, and they needed a black guy on the writer’s panel. Somehow, even though black people are 13% of the US population, the writer’s panel wasn’t complete unless 20% of it was black.
I’ve seen this pattern a thousand times. The above is just one example. The black guy who is a complete prevaricating crap artist shows up, and all the white people act like what he’s saying just came down from the mountain on stone tablets. I don’t get why this happens, other than white people, especially white “liberals” don’t want to have to face the uncomfortable truth that most black people are not that intelligent. More generally, it probably has to do with most people being altruists, and they are willing to sacrifice what they know to be the truth, in order to spare the feelings of an obviously incompetent ignoramus. Here is a quote from Ayn Rand that seems to sum up this mindset nicely:
“It is your mind that they want you to surrender—all those who preach the creed of sacrifice, whatever their tags or their motives, whether they demand it for the sake of your soul or of your body, whether they promise you another life in heaven or a full stomach on this earth. Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’—end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.’” (Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, emphasis added, https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/altruism.html)
So, what happened with Jason Arday? Eventually, it was discovered Arday had committed massive amounts of plagiarism. He used another student’s paper, without citation, in his own work. (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-police-over-arday-case-i-was-just-doing-my-job)
When a journalist contacted Arday by email about the apparent plagiarism, Arday responded by calling the Police on the journalist, and claiming he was being harassed. The worst part is the Police took Arday’s side, and told the journalist not to contact him. This was in Great Britain where there aren’t the same protections for freedom of speech as there are in the United States. More altruism, but this time, with the imprimatur of state force to back it up.
Another academic and former Cambridge professor eventually ran Arday’s works through an electronic plagiarism detector, and posted the results online. (https://ncofnas.com/p/dei-fraud-and-cover-up-at-cambridge?ref=quillette.com) This academic had been removed from his job at Cambridge because he said that without affirmative action, almost none of the students at Harvard would be black, which I think is 100% true. (https://freespeechunion.org/archive/why-we-should-defend-nathan-cofnass-academic-freedom )
The latest news development on this story is that Arday has apparently committed suicide, and I do not feel sorry for him at all. I could feel an ounce of compassion for Arday if all he had been doing was the constant bragging and misrepresenting of his worth. Even the plagiarism might be forgivable, since the field of education is probably so shot through with leftist ideas to be almost worthless, anyway. But, on at least two occasions, he called the police on people who questioned him. This shows a willingness on Arday’s part to use physical force to silence his critics. He is a force-initiator, and that is unforgiveable. He deserved whatever ignominy he received. The fact that he was too psychologically brittle to withstand that public shame and scrutiny is entirely on him. He chose his path.
The lesson to be learned from this episode is that we’ve got to shut down affirmative action/DEI, and judge people solely on their ability to do the job. Merit means to deserve or to be worthy of something. It doesn’t mean that practicing virtue and effort will always lead to success. (Sometimes factors beyond your control cause you to fail.) But, for those who achieve a particular value, accolade, job, or social position, it means they made efforts to achieve that result.
Closely related to the concept of merit is the concept of justice. Justice demands that we must judge people in accordance with objective standards, and give them what they deserve. We give them what they deserve for selfish reasons. Jobs at Cambridge or Harvard must go to those who, by objective standards, are capable of producing value at a level that is equal to the (supposed) value of these institutions. Even people who try their hardest, and give it their all, don’t automatically deserve a job. They must, in fact, be capable of producing value that is equivalent to that job. There is no doubt in my mind that intelligence is partly genetic. Many professors or students that end up at Harvard will be there, at least in part, because they won the “genetic lottery” when it comes to intelligence. Others who tried equally as hard may end up as lecturers at the local community college or state college. (There is nothing wrong with that, ethically speaking. What matters on a personal moral level is that you gave it your best effort.) From the standpoint of justice, it’s irrelevant that genetics played a role in someone’s ability to compete in the job market. The most intelligent are capable of producing the most value for Harvard or Cambridge. The owners of Harvard and Cambridge should want the best because it ultimately means the best value will be produced, which benefits us all. If money hadn’t been spent on Jason Arday’s job at Cambridge, they might have been able to afford another cancer researcher. Maybe that scientist would have made the next big breakthrough that results in a cure for cancer. Instead, money and resources were poured down the sewer that is DEI and affirmative action.
If an airline picks pilots for its planes, it should do so on the fact that job candidates are, in fact, best able to fly and land the planes. The self-interest of the owners of the planes demands that, to say nothing of the self-interest of the passengers. That is the purpose of justice. To enhance and promote the lives of the people who practice that virtue. It doesn’t matter if the pilot that wasn’t picked had lower intelligence for genetic reasons, or because he had a bad childhood. All that matters, from my standpoint as a customer, is that the person most capable of flying and landing that plane is in the cockpit. Justice serves self-interest. That’s why we practice the virtue of justice.( https://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/justice/1.html)
Intellectuals at universities are supposed to provide us with new knowledge, and new ways of thinking about the data collected. Academics in the “soft-sciences” like education, the social sciences, and philosophy are there to help us better understand ourselves, and our relationship to society and the universe. They are like airline pilots of the human psyche. When they do their work correctly, they can help us to better navigate a world fraught with dictatorships, warfare, and other dangers. Justice demands that our universities be filled with the best and the most productive. The world’s problems are too serious to tolerate even one incompetent charlatan at Cambridge, who got there through nothing but the color of his skin.
