The Cambridge Con-Rag
The Arday saga provides hope for confabulists everywhere.
OK, you lazybones out there, read what follows and blush like you’ve never blushed before. Imagine you were diagnosed with autism from age 3. You could not speak until you were 11 years old.
Then, at 18, you learned to read and write. This was in 2003. Things got better after that. Out of the blue, you earned a BA in education and PE. Two master’s degrees and a teaching qualification followed, and then, miracle of miracles, you were awarded a PhD by Liverpool John Moores University.
No Hollywood hack would ever dream of passing this off as fiction to any self respecting studio. Snoopy himself, who pretends to be a World War I fighter pilot, a best-selling author, and any number of other heroic figures, would never dare try this one. But this is real life, in rainy old England, and in 2023, Cambridge, one of the oldest and most famous universities in the world, made this victor over adversity a professor of sociology of education. He was the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history. (His parents are from Ghana and emigrated to London, where he was born.)
So far, so good. Left-wing newspapers and the BBC fawned over him, especially as he claimed to have raised $7 million for charity. This week, in the good old US of A, publisher Simon & Schuster is releasing his autobiography, titled Great and Unfortunate Things.
Jason Arday is his name, one that will go down in history as the greatest hero of our time. But unlike most of our eggheads, Jason does more than use his noodle. He ran 600 miles in six days, followed by 300 miles in three days on his treadmill. He also completed 30 marathons in 35 days, including over 200 miles with a broken leg.
These are all self-confessed accomplishments, as is his claim that a masked intruder threatened to kill him if he did not resign from his university post. (Arday, always a gentleman, did not report this to the police.) Now for the bad news, spread by racists, anti-black activists, frustrated Ku Klux Klansmen, and other unsavory right-wingers: More than 100 passages in his thesis seem to be identical to a thesis previously written by another candidate—but to this I say, so what? Can’t two people think and write exactly alike?
Well, no, seems to be the answer. Although Jason has overdone it, to say the least, Cambridge stood by him until last week. He did, after all, claim to have suffered a stroke some time ago, and as a result cannot remember a thing. How did all this happen?
The Brits are even more woke than the American left is nowadays, hence when Jason Arday’s Munchausenian tales were suspected, his fellow academics and the press attributed them to right-wing smears. Once the plagiarism and fantasies were exposed, leftists simply sputtered that the accusers were racist.
All a poor little Greek boy like myself can say is that, although I wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey when I was 5 years old, Hollywood has never paid me a cent, and not even bothered to thank me. To the contrary, they made my Greek heroes fat and ugly, and the Trojans thin and attractive. If you think Jason Arday has a bad deal, what about me? I have it on the highest authority that one Taki’s The Last Alpha Male—the greatest book ever written, the Bible aside—has been laid aside while copies of Great and Unfortunate Things are being stacked in every window, on every wall, and in every available space in bookstores the world over.
Finally, and joking aside, this black conman was a poster boy for diversity. Those who at first suspected our hero to be a cheat and a liar and a total phony were called a despicable lot of patronizing ignoramuses. Such are the joys of wokeness and leftism. If this were a baseball game, it would be diversity 10, truth 0. On the left, truth no longer counts, only race and wokeness do.
Even after he was forced by events to step down, Arday the conman did not offer an admission of guilt, nor did he apologize. His ardent defenders on the left continue to attack the accusers who discovered his lies.
All I can say is that Cambridge has produced more than 100 Nobel Prize winners, yet accepted conman Arday’s undistinguished plagiarized work. Why?
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