Cambridge Waits Out the Arday Scandal

The fall has been a season of depressingly inexorable denouements (for one thing, the forecast calls for impending November rains), but few endings were more predictable in their cowardice than Cambridge University’s decision to wait out the Jason Arday scandal, until the hubbub died down and the spotlight shifted, and then quietly abandon even the slightest pretense of intellectual accountability or professional reckoning. The people who hired an obviously incompetent plagiarist and fabulist and shepherded him into a position where he was guaranteed to fail will be allowed to skate.

Oh, but it gets far worse than that. You see, the nature of the inquiry has shifted . . . to whether Cambridge offered Arday enough psychological help before he killed himself. Yes, instead of accountability, we get ritually woke self-flagellation.

JB

About the Author

Jeffrey Blehar

Jeffrey Blehar is a National Review staff writer living in Chicago. He is also the co-host of National Review’s Political Beats podcast, which explores the great music of the modern era with guests from the political world happy to find something non-political to talk about.

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The fall has been a season of depressingly inexorable denouements (for one thing, the forecast calls for impending November rains), but few endings were more predictable in their cowardice than Cambridge University’s decision to wait out the Jason Arday scandal, until the hubbub died down and the spotlight shifted, and then quietly abandon even the slightest pretense of intellectual accountability or professional reckoning. The people who hired an obviously incompetent plagiarist and fabulist and shepherded him into a position where he was guaranteed to fail will be allowed to skate.

Oh, but it gets far worse than that. You see, the nature of the inquiry has shifted . . . to whether Cambridge offered Arday enough psychological help before he killed himself. Yes, instead of accountability, we get ritually woke self-flagellation.

JB

About the Author

Jeffrey Blehar

Jeffrey Blehar is a National Review staff writer living in Chicago. He is also the co-host of National Review’s Political Beats podcast, which explores the great music of the modern era with guests from the political world happy to find something non-political to talk about.