Seemingly everyone, myself very much included, was gobsmacked by an editorial Nature published earlier this week about the death of Jason Arday (which, sigh, see here and here and now, I guess, here, in this post you’re reading).
For some reason, the editors at Nature, a still very highly regarded science news outlet and peer-reviewed journal — the two operate separately under the same roof — decided to collect basically all the Arday-related slop they could milk from Bluesky (can you milk slop? For the sake of this disgusting image, let’s go with yes), gussied it up until it vaguely resembled something like an editorial in Nature, and hit Publish, presumably while screaming “YOLO!!!!!!!!!”
“The death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflection,” goes the headline. Subhed: “Universities and media organizations need to scrutinize their roles in the events that led to this tragedy.” If you stop reading there, you can imagine a sane editorial underneath. I’d like to think I made a version of it in the column I wrote after Arday had resigned but before he was found dead: that the story reflected quite poorly on the institutions that promoted and then covered for him as it became increasingly obvious his academic career — not to mention his inspiring biography — was built on lies.
I trained most of my fire on the academic institutions, foremost among them the University of Cambridge, but of course you can include the media as well on the list of Mandatory Reflectors, because there was a lot of softball coverage of Arday, some of it extremely cringe-inducing and almost none of it making even a token effort to investigate claims that were, in retrospect, unbelievable. It’s not for nothing that when The New York Times did finally take a closer look last month, it reported, among other revelations, that “Dr. Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him told The New York Times. His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had done research on autism, experts said.” None of this would have been difficult to uncover if anyone had bothered to check!
But that’s not the sort of reflection Nature has in mind. Instead, the authors, riding some sort of vertiginous slophigh, have come away convinced that Arday was effectively bullied to death by academia and the media. “Arday died after relentless media coverage,” explains the editorial, written by science journalists who must know how frequently correlation and sequencing are misconstrued as causation.
“In February 2023,” the editorial notes, “when the University of Cambridge appointed Arday, it issued a statement that included a description of him as the youngest Black professor in its history, news that became a global media event.” Three paragraphs later it approvingly passes on the claim that because so much of the coverage centered on his race, with some stories questioning whether he was hired because of it, that coverage was racist! You’d expect professional journalists to have more object permanence than this.
In case I’m not being clear: Yes, given the condescending and cynical way the university publicized Arday’s hiring, seeking to draw as much attention as possible to his race, and given Arday’s repeated claims to have been quite cognitively disabled — for example, he wrote that he didn’t know what was going on at work 90% of the time — of course it’s fair game to suggest his race was a factor. Cambridge itself came within a few inches of openly admitting as much! Or can you name other examples of established chairs at top universities going to scholars who admit that they know what’s going on just 10% of the time? This horrible, embarrassing train of events has led to this exchange, over and over and over:
Cambridge: Look at this BLACK professor we hired. He is the youngest BLACK professor in our history. Another thing you should notice is the color of his skin. Aren’t we good people? Doesn’t this demonstrate our commitment to diversity?
Arday, for years: I’m cognitively disabled, and this has brought all sorts of challenges. My college application was filled out for me by my girlfriend and I got a 9% on my first exam there. Even years later I had massive difficulties performing basic academic tasks — in grad school I was reading at about the same level as my then-3-year-old daughter. At least some of these problems still plague me, as I can’t understand what’s said to me at work 90% of the time. (Yes, he said all of this — see above and here.)
Journalists: It appears Arday was not really qualified for his position and that his race may have been a factor in his hiring. He also seems to have lied about a lot of stuff, sometimes in truly audacious fashion.
Nature and a million other slacktivists piling onto journalists who covered this controversy and in some cases circulating enemies lists of them: How dare you make this about Jason Arday’s race or intellectual ability?
You can understand the level of almost unprecedented bullshit going on here, right? Even by the standards of online hysteria? You can understand how unfathomably bad-faith this is, and why, because it isn’t just random online crazies, but also journalists, professors, famous activists, and now one of the pinnacles of mainstream scientific respectability stoking this grotesque controversy, I keep getting sucked into writing about it?
So what, exactly, did journalists do wrong? That remains unclear. At one point Nature notes that
The Editors’ Code of Practice from the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) in London, a body representing some of the United Kingdom’s largest media organizations, states that journalists must “not engage in intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit”, and must stop questioning or pursuing individuals if asked to desist. In a statement, IPSO says it is reviewing “a high volume of complaints and concerns about recent coverage about Dr Arday” and that it “will take the appropriate steps in accordance with our procedures” if it finds breaches of the editors’ code.
Even setting aside my American allergy to press rules that seem awfully subjective and easily abused — and remember that Arday called the police on people who asked him questions about his work and also threatened to sue them, all of which goes unmentioned by Nature!(!!) — this paragraph is a smoke machine. No evidence is presented of actual fire. Nature instead ticks off the rules journalists might have broken, and then notes that there sure have been a lot of complaints. Which, you know — shocking that weeks into this bizarre, wrongheaded, endless campaign to pretend Arday was hounded to death by the media, some people have gone so far as to. . . fill out an online form complaining about the media.
I don’t want to spend any more time thinking about or fisking this terrible, deeply dishonest column. It’s demoralizing that it was published. If you want more details on why I (and so many others) think that, start here and just scroll through the replies.
Instead I want to make a different point: a point connecting this controversy to Chunky.
Enter Chunky
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