Yesterday in these pages, the inimitable Roger Kimball recounted the tall tale of Jason Arday, the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge. As Kimball noted, Arday has been shown over the last few weeks to be more than just your average modern academic charlatan. With every passing day, it appears more and more that he’s a full-throated fabulist in the contemporary sense, which is to say that he made up almost everything about his life and public persona and plagiarized the rest. All his lies and deceptions were, however, uttered in the service of a larger purpose: to undermine the establishment and force its members to reckon with their hatreds and prejudices. Arday overcame more obstacles and barriers than the average man could ever even imagine, and therefore his struggle must be admired and applauded, while his “scholarship” is celebrated. Because of his bravery and courage, in the face of both fate and societal bigotry, he is owed a certain amount of deference and gratitude, irrespective of any perceived defects in the results of his professional endeavors. In short, he’s a better man than the rest of us, so we should, therefore, listen to him carefully and do as he says.
Now, my initial reaction upon reading about Arday’s remarkable achievements was to think of a few of our own American social and political pioneers, some who, like Arday, could manipulate time like plastic (to borrow Roger’s metaphor) and others whose life experiences closely mirrored more famous experiences of others. Hillary Clinton, for example, claimed that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the first Western man to scale Mt. Everest. Mrs. Clinton, of course, was born in 1947, while Sir Edmund scaled the mountain in 1953. But then, what is a mere six years in the hands of one as profoundly gifted as the twice-failed presidential candidate? Likewise, Kamala Harris, also a failed presidential candidate, once told a story about how she, as a toddler, fell out of her stroller at a civil rights march and told her parents—and then the whole world—that all she wanted was “fweedom.” Interestingly, Martin Luther King Jr. had rather famously recounted a remarkably similar story about a young girl at a march in Birmingham, Alabama, who told the whole world that all she wanted was “feedom.” The difference a “w” can make, I guess.
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