Jason Arday Died for Somebody’s Sins

Fraudulent former Cambridge University professor Jason Arday was found dead a little over a week ago, apparently by his own hand. And while it has been depressing to see how swiftly some of his sympathizers from the world of commentary — though notably not from the world of Cambridge — have instrumentalized his death for their own political ends, I would hardly call it surprising. In fact, I might even venture to suggest that an attention-chasing fabulist like Arday is precisely the sort of person who would take consolation in the thought that his death is now being used as a club to bludgeon those who brought his wrongdoing to light.

As some of you may have read by now, the first academic to be formally punished for the Jason Arday scandal is none other than Nathan Cofnas, the scholar who first discovered Arday’s (undisputed) history of plagiarism and invention. For his troubles, Cofnas has been (1) falsely tarred as a sinister “race-realist”; (2) denounced by name by various U.K. politicians; (3) suspended from his postdoctoral research program at Ghent University in Belgium (as a prelude to likely termination). Cofnas has ably accounted for himself in a piece cross-posted to the Wall Street Journal, but I feel like a paragraph I wrote last week sums the argument up tidily:

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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Fraudulent former Cambridge University professor Jason Arday was found dead a little over a week ago, apparently by his own hand. And while it has been depressing to see how swiftly some of his sympathizers from the world of commentary — though notably not from the world of Cambridge — have instrumentalized his death for their own political ends, I would hardly call it surprising. In fact, I might even venture to suggest that an attention-chasing fabulist like Arday is precisely the sort of person who would take consolation in the thought that his death is now being used as a club to bludgeon those who brought his wrongdoing to light.

As some of you may have read by now, the first academic to be formally punished for the Jason Arday scandal is none other than Nathan Cofnas, the scholar who first discovered Arday’s (undisputed) history of plagiarism and invention. For his troubles, Cofnas has been (1) falsely tarred as a sinister “race-realist”; (2) denounced by name by various U.K. politicians; (3) suspended from his postdoctoral research program at Ghent University in Belgium (as a prelude to likely termination). Cofnas has ably accounted for himself in a piece cross-posted to the Wall Street Journal, but I feel like a paragraph I wrote last week sums the argument up tidily:

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.