Hello! I hope each and every one of you has had the best summer in human history.
As for me? Still, all these years — decades? Centuries? — later, I have a bunch of book stuff left to do. The good news is that it’ll be wrapped up soon; the bad news is that I badly wanted to be in the clear by now but alas, I am not. (As I have been mired in book muck, I’ve put some live events on the calendar for my glorious draft’s-in near-future. Details here for folks in New York, D.C., and Philadelphia.)
That being said, I’m itchy to return to Singal-Minded; the lights have been out too long here, and there are gross cobwebs everywhere. So here’s how I’m going to split the difference: Tuesday morning I’m going to turn paid billing back on. Shortly after that, premium subscribers will have their first new piece in a while. It’s about a Major Media Outlet that did something ridiculously sloppy and then allowed the slop to spread for years like some sort of. . . big slop-spill (I’m shaking off the rust). You’ll see what I mean when you read it. Free subscribers will get a paywalled preview.
The Grand Relaunch with the extra bells and whistles is going to be delayed a bit. The next couple months, I’ll actually be on a slightly slower cadence — probably four or five posts a month. BUT to make it up to premium subscribers, I’m going to give you all a couple free months.
This coming Friday at 5 p.m. ET I’ll simply tack those two months on to the accounts of everyone who is, at that very moment, a paying subscriber (free-one-week-preview folks don’t count), effectively bringing down their monthly price a bit. So if you are currently a free subscriber and become a paid one at 4:59 p.m. Friday, you’ll get three months for the price of one, effectively. (I mean, maybe don’t cut it that close, but you get what I’m saying.) If you’re already a monthly or annual paid subscriber, you don’t have to do anything — your subscription end date will time travel two months into the future. I do wish there were a less clunky way to do this, as it would be nice to give longer-time subscribers more of an extension, but Substack makes it tricky to pull off fancier moves than that.
Okay! I think you’ll like Tuesday’s piece, and then I’ve got some other hopefully good stuff cookin’ up in the ol’ noggin as well (I have a really good idea for a column on contrived folksiness). In the meantime, I’m also pasting below my last column in The Dispatch for premium all subscribers since the paywall is still off (duh), which I forgot to do when it came out a couple weeks ago. Sorry! Remember that that’s yet another benefit of paid subscriptions — I usually repost anything of mine that runs in The Dispatch the next day.
See you Tuesday — it feels good to (almost) be back.
Questions? Comments? Songs about how much you missed me? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com.
The Cascade of Dysfunction That Helped Doom Jason Arday
In a better world, the late scholar wouldn’t have been elevated to—and fallen from—such dizzying heights.
There’s an exceptionally annoying thing writers do in the internet age: We type something like “I really didn’t want to talk about this,” and then we talk about it anyway, at length.
I’m going to do that here, but I can explain.
You’re probably familiar with the Jason Arday case by now. In 2023, when he was 37, Arday was appointed the youngest black professor in the storied history of the University of Cambridge, quickly becoming a minor celebrity in the process. As I summarized in the New York Times last week, drafting off the impressive investigatory work of a group of dogged scholars and journalists, it soon became apparent that Cambridge may have made a mistake in hiring him.
To make a long story short, Cambridge knew since at least 2023 that Arday appeared to have plagiarized some of his work and to have fabricated some of his interviews but refused to engage in anything like a full investigation. This led to some disgruntlement within Cambridge; someone there leaked his or her concerns to Nathan Cofnas, an American academic with controversial views on race and IQ, and he published a Substack post in July that went viral, spelling the beginning of the end of Arday’s career.
As Cofnas wrote, in addition to the other allegations, Arday appeared to have plagiarized significant portions of the Ph.D. thesis he completed at Liverpool John Moores University. Cofnas also shined a spotlight on a number of questionable claims from Arday’s inspiring life story, including that he had run 30 marathons in 35 days, 600 miles in six days, that he had been nonverbal until age 11, and that he had been unable to read or write until 18. Those claims, alongside the Cambridge appointment, helped Arday gain far more media attention than the average academic, including segments and interviews on top outlets like the BBC.
None of the four institutions involved in the academic facet of this scandal—Cambridge, LJMU, and the two journals notified of apparently plagiarized material—responded in a sufficient manner. Rather, all four seemed to prefer to cover for Arday—in July Cambridge sent me and other inquiring journalists a statement describing the accusations as a “vile campaign” to undermine him. But Arday had no meaningful track record in academia; he hadn’t produced anything of note and openly stated that due to his autism, when he was at work, “90% of the time I don’t know what is going on but I am having to pretend I know what is going on.” Despite that, he had been appointed to an “established chair at Cambridge,” as the New York Times later explained, which is “a permanently funded position that comes with prestige and research support [and] is among the academic world’s most sought-after jobs.” The scrutiny mounted shortly before the release date of his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a major title published by Simon & Schuster on August 11 for which Arday claimed to have received a 1.4 million advance, according to the Guardian, though he didn’t specify whether he meant dollars or pounds.
Eventually Cambridge folded, announcing an investigation last week. Arday announced his resignation just hours later. Then, this past Friday, he was found dead in London’s Battersea neighborhood after an apparent suicide.
What I mean about not actually wanting to write about this: If I somehow controlled the internet, I would have enforced some sort of 72-hour cooldown period. Everyone go for a walk, hug your loved ones, reflect on life’s preciousness. No insta-takes in response to a man’s tragic death; no using a corpse that hasn’t yet been laid to rest to promote your own politics. But we live in 2026, so that wasn’t what happened. Instead, there was an instant explosion of outrage directed at racists, the media, and racist media. This explosion is so misguided, so driven by misunderstandings about what actually happened, and so censorious that it warrants a robust response.
I’m not nutpicking here. The MacArthur-winning American race scholar and activist Ibram X. Kendi described what happened to Arday as a “lynching.” The co-host of PBS NewsHour, Geoff Bennett, derided a fair and important New York Times postmortem of the scandal as “ghoulish.” In the U.K., Labour MP Dawn Butler published a letter to the head of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, an independent regulatory body, arguing that “Jason would still be alive today if not for the relentless and pernicious coverage by the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator, to name a few,” and calling for (unspecified) “decisive action” in response to his death. The British journalist and broadcaster Will Self took things even further, posting a lengthy open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for a crackdown that sounds far more Moscow than London. Self argued that the Crown Prosecution Service “should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers” before claiming that “This is not an attack upon a free press—it is a necessarily immediate defence of one.” An open letter arguing that “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed” was signed by a number of British academics and politicians, including Green Party leader Zack Polanski.
As far as fighting over a corpse was concerned, I admittedly became part of the problem: In the hours immediately after Arday’s death, I was back on X, arguing like everyone else. I couldn’t help it; I found the outrage following this tragedy particularly deranging because of the almost perfect, 180-degree extent to which it misses the point.
I mean that in two senses. First, the call for more scrutiny of media, or even outright censorship of it, is astonishing in light of the facts of this case. It was because of the U.K.’s lack of press protections that this story took so long to come out, which, in the end, increased the damage done to Arday. Times Higher Education had a story in the works last year, but Arday sicced an infamous British law firm, Carter-Ruck, on the outlet, killing it. That would not have happened in the United States, because our defamation laws are much more media-friendly (as strange as that might sound during the Trump era).
Arday abused not only the civil system but the criminal one, too. In 2023, mere months after Arday’s hiring, the first academic to notice oddities in his work emailed him to ask about those oddities. Arday responded by reporting him to the police. Last year he also reported a member of the Times Higher Education team, Jack Grove, to the police on similar grounds. Here in the United States, cops would likely respond to such a complaint with the American version of “bugger off”—in the U.K., while both criminal complaints were eventually dropped, they were apparently taken seriously by police at first. A cop even told Grove that while he wouldn’t be investigated further, he shouldn’t email Arday again. That’s direct law enforcement interference with the press in what is supposed to be one of the freest countries in the world.
These are all signs that in British society, it’s very easy to weaponize the law against good-faith media or academic inquiries. To come out the other side of this horrible story wanting to give more power to those who would crack down on journalistic inquiry beggars belief. To be sure, none of this is to deny that there are elements of British tabloid culture that are a bit bloodthirsty, but as my examples have hopefully made clear, anger at the media has gone well beyond those outlets. (And while it’s ill-advised to pin suicide on any one cause, anyway—a point to which I’ll return shortly—does anyone actually think the excesses of the right-wing tabloids are more likely contributors to Arday’s death than his entire life and career falling apart in a short period?)
The complaints of racism—that “Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys,” as the academic Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz put it—constitute an even more extreme example of point-missing. Look: In much the same way some of the media coverage was excessive, of course, amid the broader online circus, there has been racist commentary. There always is when a person of color is the subject of public scrutiny and shaming, especially in a situation like this where the story really does involve a dispute about diversity, equity, and inclusion.
But to claim that Arday was unfairly singled out on account of his race is to ignore the very important other half of the ledger: He was elevated to an untenable position because of his race! You don’t need to take my word on that. Just read the very end of the Times of London’s contemporaneous article about his hiring, if you can stomach it:
Professor Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, said hiring Arday was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.
She told The Times: “Not only is Jason Arday a world-class scholar, he also brings a wealth of experience that can help us to take forward our efforts to widen participation at all levels.
“Hopefully it is becoming increasingly clear that with concerted effort and a genuine commitment to change, those barriers that still exist either to working or studying at top universities can be overcome.
“To any students or prospective colleagues who are wondering if Cambridge is a place where they can belong, the answer is, emphatically, yes.”
Even more dyspepsia-inducing is a BBC segment from that same period that, to me at least, gets harder to watch every day. In it, Cremin approaches Arday and takes his hand as though he is some sort of messianic figure. A bit later, during a strange sit-down centered on her complimenting him, she explains, “The Board of Electors on your interview, they were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you.” Then she looks him dead in the eyes and lies to his face: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”
In the article that the NewsHour co-anchor would later describe as “ghoulish,” the New York Times revealed damning details about that hiring process: “A review of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work,” the Times reported. A bit later: “Dr. Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him [said]. 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.”
There’s a word for what Cremin and her colleagues did here: racism. It is racist to respond to someone’s skin color by pretending they are something they are not. It’s not racism in the way lynchings or slavery are racism. But it’s racism nonetheless. And anyone with a passing familiarity with this story knows that Arday was appointed to his post precisely because of how Cambridge thought the color of his skin would reflect back on the university itself—precisely because of what the current crop of censors might call systemic problems within that university.
To be clear, Jason Arday is not dead “because of” Cambridge University’s social-justice-coded racism. Suicide is multicausal and we should strongly resist the urge to blame it on any one factor, whether Cambridge or “the media.” But it’s clear that Jason Arday never should have been within miles of such a prestigious academic appointment. His fall was inevitable from the first day he arrived at Cambridge. As my friend Sarah Ditum put it, “I do not regret writing about Arday, but I am sorry for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about.” That’s exactly right.
In a saner, fairer world, Jason Arday would have lived out a happy and healthy life somewhere else, gainfully employed, loved by friends and family. Maybe his chronic tendency toward fabulism would have elicited rolled eyes at the local pub, but it never should have caused more harm than that.
Instead, thanks to a cascade of institutional dysfunction that will go down in history as uniquely bizarre and condescending—even by the considerable standards of higher ed misadministration—Jason Arday found himself in an environment where no one would say no to him, where no one would ask follow-up questions (at least out loud), and where people covered for him rather than holding him accountable. As a result, he did significant harm—to the scholars he plagiarized, the peers he wrongly beat out for a prestigious position, and (everyone keeps forgetting this) to the parents of nonverbal kids with autism, who are frequently victimized by false and suspicious claims of miracle cures like Arday’s.
None of this means he deserved to die—of course he didn’t deserve to die. But it does mean that, if we want to prevent such scandals from recurring in the future, it is imperative to learn from this rather than to use Arday’s death as an excuse to rewrite history.
Correction, August 19, 2026: This article has been updated to correct the advance Arday claimed to have received for his book.
This made me think that giving someone a higher position is not necessarily the same as helping them.
A position brings not only status and resources, but also the demands, scrutiny, and pressures attached to it. If an institution places someone in a position they cannot sustainably maintain, and then repeatedly prevents normal correction, what initially looks like protection may only postpone the collapse while increasing its eventual cost.
The problem, then, did not begin only when he fell. It also began when he was elevated.
How many books could you have written in the time you spent relapsing into your Twitter addiction? 🤣