Diversity, Equity, and Confabulation

        If The Onion or Babylon Bee or another satirical publication wanted to spoof the absurdity of DEI -- the ideology of "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" -- they couldn't have invented a character as unbelievable as Jason Arday.

        But Arday is very real: Born in 1985, in 2023 he became at 37 the youngest black man ever to hold a professorship at Cambridge University.
        Naturally, he had to overcome great adversity to do so -- indeed, superhumanly great adversity.

        Arday, the son of Ghanaian immigrants to London, is not only black; he's autistic and was nonverbal until the age of 11, according to glowing media profiles he's received.

        He's epileptic, too, he claims -- yet that didn't stop him from "running 30 marathons in just 35 days," as told in Britain's Independent newspaper.

        That would sound farfetched coming from someone else, but Arday is apparently as exceptional in body as he is in mind:

        In a 2021 blog post on the "International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination," the University of Bath presented Arday as claiming that he'd played both soccer and snooker (kind of like billiards) at a professional level as a child -- though on July 30, the university amended the transcript of Arday's conversation to say he'd only played soccer "semi professionally" and was "really good" but "not good enough to be professional" at snooker.   

        Never mind -- he has so many other claims to fame that correcting that legend takes little away.

        After all, Arday was also a star of perhaps the most famous documentary in British history, Michael Apted's "Seven Up" series, which followed the same group of subjects from childhood to old age at seven-year intervals, starting in 1964

        Starting, that is, 21 years before Professor Arday was born.

        No, the series didn't add new participants over time -- the whole point was to track the very same people who took part in the first installment.
        Yet thanks to DEI, truly anything is possible.

        Arday now says that when asserted in 2022, "I was part of a programme, actually, which ... was called Seven Up at the time. And Seven Up is basically when they follow you over the duration of your life, so they follow you at (ages) 7, 14, 21. I was pulled out of the project when I was 14," he was talking about a totally different "Seven Up."

        As with so much else in Arday's biography, evidence for this, other than the professor's say-so, is absent.

        And there is so much more to his story -- the brain tumor he overcame while getting his Ph.D., the 600 miles he ran on a treadmill in six days, the millions of pounds he raised for charity ...

        A miraculous fellow like Arday might never have been admitted as a student at Cambridge, let alone made "professor of the sociology of education," if not for the spirit of DEI.

        Yet now he faces accusations of plagiarism because more than 100 passages in his dissertation appear to be lifted from another academic's work.

        He insists he's a victim of racism and insufficient accommodation:

        "Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism," the BBC reports, "but defended himself by arguing that he had not received adequate supervision during his Ph.D. given his autism and learning disabilities ..."

        Even the left-wing Guardian newspaper found Arday less than reliable when he claimed a campaign to get him fired from Cambridge included a man threatening him with a knife -- video showed no man and no knife -- and someone sending a severed pig's head to his parents. (London butchers and police said their recollections and records conflicted with Arday's story.)

        When the paper asked about the discrepancies, Arday replied, "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me."

        The trouble is, too many in the media and academy have believed Arday all along.

        He's a poster child for the suspension of common-sense DEI demands of its believers on both sides of the Atlantic.

        When he's just a professor of the sociology of education, even at a university as prestigious as Cambridge, an Arday is comical.

        But it's no joke when DEI spreads from sociology and education departments to every other corner of the academy, including medical and law schools -- and from there into hospitals and courtrooms.

        Left unchecked, there's no limit to how far DEI will go:

        If Jason Arday next decides he's an airline pilot, who will keep him out of the cockpit?

        Honest, competent minorities wind up under suspicion when DEI lowers standards for anyone who fits the right racial profile.

        By fueling such suspicion, DEI creates a market for itself -- as its purveyors claim only affirmative action can overcome the public's bias.

        Professor Arday's tall tales are beyond belief, yet they reveal the naked truth about DEI.

        Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com.

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