The August deaths of two very different people have dominated both traditional and social media.
On August 14, 41-year-old Cambridge University professor Jason Arday was found dead in his London home from apparent suicide. On August 25, 80-year-old American singer/songwriter Dolly Parton died after a short bout with cancer.
Both events precipitated a flurry of online commentary and mainstream analysis. Juxtaposed with one another, the respective deaths of these two public figures illustrate the difference between deception and transparency. The latter is liberating; the former is sometimes lethal. If the fabulist Arday was more like the fabulous Parton, the former would probably still be alive. He would not be famous, but neither would he be dead.
Jason Arday was appointed full professor in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University at age 37, the youngest black professor in the history of this elite university. He was hailed as brave and triumphant, overcoming individual handicaps and social barriers, to ascend to the apex of the academic universe. He claimed to have been autistic, non-verbal until he was 11 years old, and unable to write anything other than his name at age 18. Despite these alleged impediments, by the age of 30, he was awarded a Ph.D. by little-known Liverpool John Moores University. This precipitated Arday’s rapid rise to celebrity in the UK, including numerous honorary degrees, appearances on popular UK television shows, and, eventually, his appointment at Cambridge.
As unlikely as this trajectory from illiteracy to academic superstar sounds, it was the more believable of the many fantasist stories that Arday told about himself. For example, he made all the following ludicrous claims, none of which withstand even the most cursory scrutiny: ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last five on a broken leg (no documentation, no eye witness corroboration); ran 600 miles in 6 days (ditto); had brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor a week before his dissertation defense, after which he forgot everything in his dissertation, but still passed his defense (no medical records can be found of any such surgery or cancer); visiting professorships at Ohio State, Coventry, Glasgow, and Nelson Mandela (South Africa) universities. All these institutions have denied his claim.
Despite the absurdity of all these claims and the paucity of any corroborating records, Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, celebrated Arday as “the best in the world, in terms of the research” he was doing. But it all began unravelling when Arday’s dissertation was proven to be largely plagiarized from an earlier thesis. This led to scrutiny of other academic papers, which also showed a pattern of wholesale plagiarism of the work of others.
Predictably, Arday and his supporters cried discrimination, complaining that he was a victim of a racist witch hunt. He sicced the police on journalists who merely asked him to clarify inconsistencies in his personal biography. He made false claims of being attacked by a knife-wielding intruder in his Cambridge office (there was no such attack) and of his family being sent a pig’s head at their home (again, it didn’t happen).
Initially, Cambridge doubled down in its defense of Arday, calling these inquiries into his fabulist claims “vile.” But as more and more stories were shown to be false, Cambridge was forced to open a formal investigation into his claims, prompting his sudden resignation on August 5. Nine days later, he was found dead in his South London home, from apparent suicide. Arday’s death is tragic. But it is not the fault of his critics. Rather, his blood is on the hands of his enablers, the racist faux academics who saw him not as a celebrated academic but as a totem of diversity, equity, and inclusion. In the hands of True Believers, DEI is a lethal weapon.
Don’t get me wrong. Arday was responsible for the lies he told, and, ultimately, death by his own hand. He is dead, in large part, because he was the apotheosis of narcissism. But if the racist university infrastructure at Cambridge and other U.K. institutions had not enabled Arday’s fantastically absurd claims, he would probably still be alive. It is more likely that he would be a primary school P.E. instructor (the field of his “Ph.D.”) than a world-famous “scholar.” But he would be alive.
The contrast of the fabulist Jason Arday to the fabulous Dolly Parton could hardly be starker. Born into poverty in East Tennessee, with little prospect of ever leaving her native Sevier County, Parton became perhaps the most important female country singer and musician in American history. Parton was beloved through virtually any lens of American public life through which one cares to view her life and career. Composer of perennial favorite songs, “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” and “I Will Always Love You” (among thousands of others), Parton forged a golden career from the raw ore of a self-described Appalachian hillbilly.
While many in the U.S. and around the world enjoy her music, it was Parton’s honesty and transparency that really won our hearts. Yes, she wore wigs, sported fake fingernails, and had numerous plastic surgeries. But in her case, these were not indicia of self-deception, but rather the careful cultivation of a transparent personality. She didn’t pretend about anything, including the various enhancements to her physical appearance. Rather, in a lifelong example of actual irony (an abused and misused term), Parton told us what role she was playing, without guile or deception.
She could be coy, of course. But even then, she told us so. She was the antithesis of narcissism.
But beneath the celebrity persona she created was the real life of an enormously talented singer/songwriter and perhaps the most generous philanthropist in American popular music. Using tens of millions of dollars of her own money, Parton leveraged her wealth and celebrity into an international reading and literacy program, known as Imagination Library. Over the 31 years of the program, the Imagination Library has distributed more than 300 million books to libraries and underprivileged households in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia.
Self-deception is among the most enervating practices in which we humans engage. Beginning with our primordial parents in the Garden of Eden, we can see that attempts to tell ourselves that we are something other than what we really are can be soul-destroying. And when we try to deceive others, soul-killing self-deception can lead to the premature death of the body, as well. Of course, as rational moral agents, we are responsible for the choices we make and the stories we tell. But when narcissistic impulses are aided and abetted by racist ideologues looking for trophies, self-deception is both encouraged and embellished. And, in the case of Jason Arday, it was lethal.
Fabulist Jason Arday achieved celebrity status through chronic self-deception, abetted by a racist ideological infrastructure, and died an untimely death. Fabulous Dolly Parton achieved celebrity through self-giving transparency and lived a full life. There’s a cautionary tale in both their stories.
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It would be helpful to understand what the racist infrastucture is at Cambridge and other U’s. When one makes accusations of such magnitude it would help to provide such evidence ratger than just accuse and leave at that. This is why we have courts of law. We did accuse people of witchcraft without evidence and mainky ignorance that sent people to the gallows.
Trained in the dark force to a high degree I see. It would be helpful if there was some degree of reality upon which comments are made. Tell me, in what universe, is it at all believable that trained academics would accept a single one of Arday’s many atrociously over-the-top self-promotions? In what world would a pack of white people strain so completely to swallow that pack of lies from a young black man? Of course, each of those individuals desperately held on the stupidly racist Critical Race Theory that itself … I need to just shut my mouth and stop writing.
Michael B: you write what all rational people think but lack the courage to say aloud. We need to always speak the Truth lest the evil of lies overwhelms all of us. We either stand up to be counted among the Truth-tellers or we’re siding with the Liars.
Remember, you’re dealing with progressives, so ultimately what is true neither matters nor factors into the discussion. Promoting Arday advanced the leftist DEI narrative, and at the end of the day, that’s all that really matters to the left.
Excellent, I agree with you!
In The Telegraph:
Gove: Cambridge peddles ‘toxic nonsense’
Former education secretary attacks a philosophy that ‘dances on the grave of learning’
Amy Gibbons
Published 27 August 2026 7:36pm BST
Excerpt (link omitted):
Writing in The Spectator, Lord Gove said: “The book exhibits all the weaknesses of modern academia.
“Solipsistic personal reminiscence is treated as ‘fieldwork’, spurious authority is sought by citing other works, themselves written in impenetrable jargon, statistics are deployed in an effort to prove a point but without any recognition that correlation does not equal causation.
“Prof Cremin is not a junior research fellow feeling her way to an understanding of her discipline; nor is she Titania McGrath’s woker sister. She is the woman responsible for what those who are supposed to be our best teachers are themselves taught.
“And yet in her major published work she doesn’t just display ignorance, she flaunts and celebrates it. By dancing on the grave of learning.”
In The Telegraph:
Gove: Cambridge peddles ‘toxic nonsense’
Gove: Cambridge peddles ‘toxic nonsense’
Former education secretary attacks a philosophy that ‘dances on the grave of learning’
Amy Gibbons
Published 27 August 2026 7:36 PM BST
Excerpt (link omitted)
Writing in The Spectator, Lord Gove said: “The book exhibits all the weaknesses of modern academia.
“Solipsistic personal reminiscence is treated as ‘fieldwork’, spurious authority is sought by citing other works, themselves written in impenetrable jargon, statistics are deployed in an effort to prove a point but without any recognition that correlation does not equal causation.
“Prof Cremin is not a junior research fellow feeling her way to an understanding of her discipline; nor is she Titania McGrath’s woker sister. She is the woman responsible for what those who are supposed to be our best teachers are themselves taught.
“And yet in her major published work she doesn’t just display ignorance, she flaunts and celebrates it. By dancing on the grave of learning.”
For those that don’t know “Titania McGrath” is a super-woke parody account on Twitter/X.
Claims
1) He ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last 5 on a broken leg.
2) He ran 600 miles in 6 days.
3) Visiting professorships at Ohio State, Coventry, Glascow and Nelson Mandela Universities.
What do they all have in common, besides their OBVIOUS outright absurdity? Not one of them was true, which means in turn that not one of them was given even a cursory check. For myself I can’t get past that incredible fact.
Cambridge has done horrible damage within the last few years to its formerly impeccable reputation, which was built up over centuries.
I feel strongly that it does not present a very christian attitude to contrast Mr. Arday with Mrs. Parton so soon after their passing in the manner of Mr. Craycraft’s dispatch. The avalanche of accusations that erupted elsewhere should instead have elicited patience and nuance, not instant response and verbatim replication. Mr. Arday’s career and personal history lie at the nexus of many challenging aspects of education, of mental processes, of public perceptions, as well as of social and cultural divisions. By naively failing to verify the accusations and describing him as “the apotheosis of narcissism”, the Dispatch replicates the signs of excessive enthusiasm for character assassination on display by those least likely to deserve our attention.
There are undoubtedly many facts that remain to be revealed in the weeks and months to come, but here are just a few that should be noted:
1) He did actually run 30 marathons in 35 days: multiple newspaper reports exist (and were apparently not searched for by Mr. Arday’s accuser). Read James Smoliga’s “Jason Arday ran the marathons. What does that tell us?” on Substack.
In this particular case, “Broken leg” is a media/internet-distorted shortcut for what Arday actually described as a hairline fracture in the NYT book review quoted by Dr. Smoliga, a professor at Tufts with degrees in veterinary medicine as well as in sports medicine & nutrition. This is quite a different thing. The main points of Dr. Smoliga’s blog are about the likelihood whether it could be true that someone keeps running for days after suffering a hairline fracture, since no archival evidence for its occurring has turned up so far. He concludes that it probably wasn’t, because in his searches for evidence of the severe fall Mr. Arday described no press reports turned up, nor possible hints of any medical mishap.
I am not a medical professional, but I must point out that Dr. Smoliga does not mention the relatively common occurrence of hairline fractures only being diagnosed weeks after the causal event. For example, later x-rays can reveal a bone callus indicative of healing, even where no actual hairline was visible on earlier images. Hairline fractures can even develop slowly from overuse, without involving any split-second accident. As we all know, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We may never know IF a diagnosis of a hairline fracture was ever made, even less so WHEN Jason Arday might then have received it, or first shared it with anyone.
2) Dr. Smoliga also addresses the 600 miles in 6 days claim, which Arday eventually clarified: it actually took 12 days because he did take rest days between runs. At this point we cannot know whether this is a case of an egregious lie being walked back, or a misunderstanding of parlance within the distance-running community. One of my nephews talks much like this about his own running: with frequent omission of rest breaks, which he then specifies only when challenged. He runs marathons and longer, even though all his relatives (myself included) keep telling him to stop doing so – since he has type 1 diabetes.
3) Some of the claims of professorships at other universities are presumably false, but Mr. Arday did have genuine professorial appointments in Glasgow and at Nelson Mandela. In both of the latter cases, those were not “visiting professorship” appointments, but he was respectively employed as “holder of the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education” and as adjunct professor. It is unclear to me whether the latter included salary, but as a retired college faculty member myself, I can attest to the widespread mixing up of those types of academic titles in daily conversation, especially if an appointment only lasted for a year or two before the appointee moved elsewhere.
We’ve now dismissed one part of accustion 1 and (for the time being) set aside the other part as potentially unknowable. Claim 2 maybe was or was not an outright lie, but it definitely had been corrected/explained well before the past weeks. Accusation 3 is down from four to two false claims. Piling onto a perceived opponent with a variety of accusations, some verified and some unverifiable, is a tactic common in tabloids and political polemics. It does nothing to build an accuser’s credibility overall.
I therefore strongly caution myself against quick conclusions about the so-called evidence of dishonesty and fabulism, since I personally met neither Dr. Cofnas nor the dismissed Prof. Arday. From Dr. Cofnas preceding and subsequent writings, It is likely, that he harbors grudges against the University of Cambridge for firing him in 2024, and that this may well have clouded his judgment far beyond what was called for. For example, he consistently interprets DEI and “wokism” as systemic ailments in need of defeating by “hereditarianism”, and he prefers to depict himself as a victim of persecution – including a repost in his substack newsletter of a depiction of himself as Christ on the Cross (AI generated by another substack blogger). As a philosopher and academic who has written about morality in his own dissertation, he could by now have acknowledged a failure to properly research some of the accusations of fabulism in the introductory paragraphs of his plagiarism report. Instead of restricting himself to the factual plagiarism analysis, he has fueled a level of online polemicism that further undermines his own academic standing, while cascading to the point of Mr. Arday’s suicide.
The facts, as visible to outsiders without axes to grind, are that Mr. Arday most likely was genuinely autistic during childhood and genuinely suffered language challenges into the onset of adolescence, as testified by his schoolfriends (read for example Sam Clark’s reminescences at thenerve.news). Autism usually manifests with severe impairments of empathy and socialization during childhood, which makes Mr. Arday an all the more remarkable person: he did not just emerge from it but displayed exceptional levels of personal warmth, audacious altruism and multitalented engagement for good causes. This is attested by the grief testimonialized by so many of the people who knew him and interacted with him, and it needs mentioning regardless of whether this included any tendency to report dishonestly on past achievements. Read for example his former student Montel Gordon’s tribute (at jamaica-gleaner.com).
Some academics can start out as plagiarists, yet it is nevertheless possible for some to become greatly appreciated by many students and colleagues as an inspiring mentor, scholar and friend. When past deceit has become clear, this nevertheless does not mean all other parts of a person’s life are void and dimissable. It seems to me that a genuine tribute to Mrs. Partonwould be to follow her steadfast refusal of being drawn into mud-slinging contests. As she joked after being accused of lyp syncing at Glastonbury: “My boobs are fake, my hair’s fake, but what is real is my voice and my heart.”
2) Smoliga also addresses the 600 miles in 6 days claim, which Arday eventually clarified actually took 12 days because he took rest days between runs. At this point we cannot know whether this is a case of an egregious lie being walked back, or a misunderstanding of parlance in the distance-running community. One of my nephews talks just like this about his running: with frequent omission of rest breaks, which he then specifies only when challenged. He runs marathons and longer, even though all his relatives (myself included) keep telling him to stop doing so since he has type 1 diabetes.
3) Some of his claims of professorships at other universities are false, but he did have a professorship appointment in Glasgow and an adjunct professor appointment at Nelson Mandela. In both of the latter cases, those were not “visiting professorship” appointments, but he was respectively employed as “holder of the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education” and affiliated (unclear whether that included salary) as adjunct professor. Being a retired college faculty myself, I can attest to the widespread mixing up of those kinds of academic titles in daily conversation, especially if an appointment only lasted for a year or two before the appointee moved elsewhere.
Just from those three examples among the many that were raised in Nathan Cofnas’ blog revealing Arday’s plagiarism, as well as from other reports that have been presented upfront as unbelievable claims, I would strongly caution anyone who, like myself, doesn’t personally know Dr. Cofnas or who knew (dismissed) Prof. Arday from making any quick conclusions about the so-called evidence of dishonesty and fabulism. Jason Arday’s plagiarism is clearly established, but many of the other accusations leveled against him are liable to be much less “obvious” fantasies and transgressions than they were made out to be in the initial rush to judgment. The fact is that Mr. Arday most likely was genuinely autistic during childhood and genuinely suffered language challenges into the onset of adolescence (as testified by his schoolfriends, read for example Sam Clark’s reminescences at thenerve.news). Autism usually revolves partly around inabilities to socialize, this makes it all the more remarkable that he apparently gained a level of personal warmth, audaciousness and multitalented engagement – regardless of whether this included an ability to report honestly on past achievements – to cause so many of the people who knew him to grieve his passing (read for example Montel Gordon’s tribute at jamaic-gleaner.com). It therefore does not present a very christian attitude to contrast Mr. Arday with Mrs. Parton so soon after their passing, in the manner of Mr. Craycraft’s dispatch. The avalanche of accusations that erupted does bear the hallmarks of substantial enthusiasm for character assassination and impulse-driven copying of the previous minute’s latest “shocker”. There are undoubtedly many facts that remain to be revealed in the weeks and months to come. I for one do not doubt that it is possible for an individual
I was going to ignore this “defense” on the grounds that it is patently ridiculous, but I think feedback is necessary. Constructing a life built on lies, which is basically what Arday did with the help of others, is profoundly sinful. As such, Arday is responsible for his choices and his behavior. The fact that he chose to end his life rather than repent and make things right is clear evidence of his guilt. At the same time, defending, excusing, or minimizing lies is also profoundly sinful, and that is the essence of your response here. There is no defense for what Arday did, and exposing his lies and holding him accountable for them is the just and appropriate response. You are defending the indefensible here.
It is a fine example of the “gamma wall of text”.
That’s the problem: too much enthusiasm when someone is taken down that way.
This is a fabulous and very Christian song by Dolly Parton. God bless her:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYro45kIRlw&list=RDFYro45kIRlw&start_radio=1
Thank you so much, Mr Oscar for sharing that lovely Dolly Parton song. 🙂
You are welcome, Ms., I did not know much about her and then I found this moving song, Silver and Gold. Pure genius. It made me cry.
God bless Dolly Parton. Turns out she was also an extraordinary philanthropist as this excellent article points out. A true Christian soul.
Well that didn’t work out as intended … my just submitted comment appears to have spliced part of itself after the concluding sentence (Dolly Parton’s quote). Apologies for the mishap! If it passes muster otherwise, then please delete everything after Mrs. Parton’s statement.
Are you kidding? No one reads long-winded screeds like your anyway.