Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.The disgrace and suicide of Jason Arday, a much-lauded Black professor at Cambridge University, has rocked the academic world. But the matter should also be of concern to a wider audience because it illustrates an intellectual phenomenon that has infected Western society as a whole.Arday gained international attention in 2023 when, at the age of 37, he became the youngest Black professor in the history of Cambridge University, one of Great Britain’s — and the world’s — most prestigious educational institutions. He’d been shortlisted for a professorship in the sociology department even though he lacked the kind of research record generally required for a position with such international stature. His appointment was applauded as a progressive moment in British academia.Arday’s curriculum vitae made it appear that he’d overcome considerable challenges — physical, psychological, and even political — to achieve the position. Born in London to Ghanaian immigrants, he claimed he was nonverbally autistic as a child and was unable to read until he was 18. He supposedly suffered epilepsy after being beaten and had a miraculous recovery from brain and testicular cancer. He was also a constant victim of racism.In a memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, Arday claimed a wise woman he met in a South American village prophesied his future greatness. There was also the amazing feat of running 30 marathons in just over a month. As it turned out, the South American trip never happened, and the marathon claims, if they’d been true, would have made Arday one of the world’s top athletes.Cambridge overlooked — or chose to ignore — many of Arday’s autobiographical assertions. The selection committee, which included a child psychiatrist well-known for his work with autistic children, never questioned his claims about his autism. Despite a sparse record of scholarship, the committee voted unanimously to grant him the appointment over three other candidates, including, it might be noted, two white women.Arday’s career started to collapse earlier this year after philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who’d held a research position at Cambridge until it was terminated in 2024, publicly questioned Arday’s academic record. Arday filed a harassment complaint with the police against Cofnas, who, it might be noted, is white..Cambridge followed up, calling those who questioned Arday’s qualifications racists. The university even threatened Times Higher Education with legal action if it published an article alleging passages in Arday’s PhD dissertation had been plagiarized. “The integrity of higher education is at risk if we do not take a stand against the systematic attempts to erase Black scholarship,” university officials said.For a change, the “racism” tag, that all-purpose label intended to stifle dissent, didn’t scare off the journalists. Reports of academic fraud soon emerged. Arday, as Douglas Murray observes in The Free Press, was “exposed for having fabricated extensive portions of his résumé and research … and much of the dramatic autobiography that allowed him to attain his position.”In early August, shortly before the publication of his memoir, Arday resigned his professorship. Last week, he committed suicide.No surprise, Leftists were quick to raise the racist banner. As Murray notes, London Mayor Sadiq Khan declared Arday to be “the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn’t have faced.” Zarah Sultana, a former Labour Party Member of Parliament, declared that “if Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic, he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was.”Perhaps, though, the most vociferous — and clearly racist — response Murray cites came from an American anti-racist radical. “The attacks are wielded by racist propagandists, resenting you (Arday) for shining a light on anti-Black racism,” Ibram Xolani Kendi declared in his essay “The Media Lynched Jason Arday.”It’s a puzzling claim. If investigating a Black man’s autobiographical fabrications was racist, wasn’t Cambridge University racist in appointing him, despite his lack of scholarly accomplishment, because he was Black?.You have to ask, as Jonathan Kay did in a column for Quillette, if the panellists who selected Arday were “absurdly gullible,” or did they cynically overlook his “dubious achievements so they could take credit for hiring a telegenic Black savant?”I’m inclined to the latter. Both Kay and Murray note a BBC video showing Hilary Cremin, head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, staring into Arday’s eyes and holding his hands and declaring in a cringe-worthy gush: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Cremin, it might be noted, happens to be white.How is it that supposedly intelligent, self-aware people could be so deliberately obtuse and such intellectual cowards? Were they afraid that if they didn’t pick the Black applicant, they’d be accused of racism? Were they bowing at the altar of diversity, equity, and inclusiveness? Were they brainwashed by the demands of fashionable wokeness?To answer such weighty questions, we might look to Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist theorist and author of the highly influential Prison Notebooks that he wrote while imprisoned between 1929 and 1935. Gramsci, who died in 1937, argued that what prevented the achievement of a communist new world order was the underlying ethos of the capitalist West and the “cultural hegemony” of its 2,000-year-old Judeo-Christian heritage.Western societies, Gramsci claimed, needed to be de-Christianized. This could be accomplished by a “long march through the institutions” to replace Western cultural imperialism with a radical counter-hegemony. The political and cultural traditions of the West would be overturned by delegitimizing traditional notions of family, political order, civil society, and identity. This required challenging — “deconstructing” is the fashionable professorial term — everything from the Western literary canon to notions of scientific reason and scholarly methodology.Gramsci urged the recruitment of resentful minorities, including criminals, women, and racial groups, to the cause of overturning Western culture. Guided by enlightened intellectuals, they would transform Western societies and establish a new cultural and political order in which “victimized” groups would dominate..Gramsci’s ideas, particularly his notion of cultural hegemony, were picked up by the Frankfurt School, a group of intellectuals, some of whom fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s for the United States. Safe in America, they set about translating Marxist economic theory into cultural terms — cultural Marxism, in other words — that would over time establish a “counter-hegemon” of the world’s victims.To achieve this counter-hegemon required a long march through the West’s educational institutions. Academics, public intellectuals, and other opinion makers would promote “the world that must be,” teaching students that Western political and social traditions were the source of racism and repression.And so, it has come to pass. After two or three generations of indoctrination, the Frankfurt formula has a firm grip on contemporary academia, especially in the social sciences and humanities departments. Propagandized students chant the mantras of “white privilege” and denounce principles of merit as “white supremacism.” They learn that cultural identity overrules freedom of thought and social justice requires the “politics of guilt.” (Well, just “white guilt.”)The Cambridge academics who voted to appoint Arday exemplify the success of Gramsci’s long march. Jason Arday was both the beneficiary of and the victim of this ideological fashion, a graduate, you might say, of the Gramscian academy. He learned to play the victim for all it was worth. But as Murray observes, he “had a deluded sense of himself,” and when reality bit, his delusory life deflated.Those who catered to Arday’s delusions are the cynical avatars of cultural Marxism, and they bear considerable responsibility not only for his fate, but also for undermining the moral and intellectual integrity of the institution and the culture from which they so greatly benefit.Hiring at universities and colleges, indeed in society at large, must be based on merit; that is, you must rise not on “race” or “gender” or some other byproduct of cultural Marxism such as DEI, but on worthy achievement. Cambridge’s failure to maintain this standard casts a shadow on the whole of Western academe.Robert Sibley, an award-winning author and a former senior writer and columnist with Postmedia, holds a PhD in political science from Carleton University.
