Nine days after resigning under pressure from the University of Cambridge, professor Jason Arday was found dead in London on Friday afternoon, Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reports.
Arday was 41. The cause of his death has not been made public, but police said it “is not believed to be suspicious.”
He is survived by Debbie McKenzie, his wife, and their two children.
In 2023, Cambridge, among the world’s most prestigious universities, appointed Arday the youngest black professor in its history. His hiring came despite a paper-thin academic record and bizarre biographical claims, including that he had been unable to speak before age 11 or read before 18.
But the impending publication of Arday’s memoir, released in the United States on Tuesday, led to new scrutiny of both his biographical claims and his work, which automated checkers found appeared heavily plagiarized.
After briefly blaming racism for the attacks, Arday quit, becoming a poster child for problems with efforts to diversity higher education even at the cost of lowering academic standards.
On Wednesday, Cambridge announced it would “investigate the circumstances around [Arday’s] appointment by the Faculty of Education back in 2022 and his time here in Cambridge since his appointment nearly four years ago.”
I wrote about Arday and his resignation on Tuesday.
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(Tuesday’s article)
You don't hate elite academia enough
How badly did the University of Cambridge — one of the world’s top academic institutions — want to hire a black man as a professor in 2023?
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It’s a tragedy when anybody dies this young. May his widow and children make it through what will be some difficult times ahead.
Such a very sad result of such idiotic policies. I hold the people in charge of hiring at Cambridge for this.