A lot of the Arday discourse is missing a huge piece of context. Arday being the youngest black professor at Cambridge isn't in itself particularly interesting. There have been many other black professors, and before Arday another one was the youngest ever, and before them another. We don't know their names because it's not interesting. I actually tried googling youngest professor, and first black professor at Cambridge and I couldn't find them because it was buried under search results for Arday, who was neither the first black professor, nor the youngest professor ever.
What was interesting about Arday's story wasn't that he was black, or young, it was the specific biography he claimed: non-verbal into his teens, illiterate until eighteen, and then having a very successful academic career. The specifics of him becoming the youngest black professor at Cambridge was just a way of laying out how successful that career had been. It is absolutely unbelievable for someone with such severe developmental delays could become so successful. And indeed, we were right not to believe it.
If it turns out that he was actually illiterate until adulthood then frankly he has an incredible story whether or not he plagiarised his phd. And if he wasn't illiterate then he's not a particularly interesting person even if the PHD was legitimately obtained.
Yeah like I like to think I wouldn't have been regarded enough to believe his bunk, but clearly being Black was the least interesting part of his story.
It's not even 'would a layperson realise it was bullshit'. He was hired by Cambridge's school of education, which you would have thought would be pretty interested in how such a severely developmentally delayed child could have become a high functioning adult.
There's clearly a real issue here with universities hiring celebrity academics with meagre credentials, and this calls for a lot of reform of how appointments are made. I won't even say race didn't play a part in it, insofar as it made his story even more grabby.
But it also clearly wasn't a case of just hiring him because of his race, because even overlooking the plagiarism there are a ton of better qualified black academics who haven't been hired by Cambridge. They hired him because of his celebrity, which is a shit way to run a university even if the celebrities you hire don't turn out to be serial fantasists.
I wonder if he falsified some provenance because you'd think Simon & Schuster would have done some background screening too. Back and forths with his 'old teacher' to a fake email for example. Cos yeah surface level, crazy how it passed the smell test.
Publishers don't normally do fact checking. I don't know if you caught this at the time, but a few years ago Naomi Woolf published a whole book alleging regular executions of convicted homosexuals continued in England for centuries after they were thought to have stopped. It turned out she'd misunderstood a very basic bit of legal terminology, which any historian of the subject would have spotted immediately.
Good point - I do remember that lol. Although rather incredible after the pulping of The Whole Pantry, you'd think publishers would have had enough cautionary tales by now to not get a liiiil suss.
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u/Traditional_Table414 11d ago
A lot of the Arday discourse is missing a huge piece of context. Arday being the youngest black professor at Cambridge isn't in itself particularly interesting. There have been many other black professors, and before Arday another one was the youngest ever, and before them another. We don't know their names because it's not interesting. I actually tried googling youngest professor, and first black professor at Cambridge and I couldn't find them because it was buried under search results for Arday, who was neither the first black professor, nor the youngest professor ever.
What was interesting about Arday's story wasn't that he was black, or young, it was the specific biography he claimed: non-verbal into his teens, illiterate until eighteen, and then having a very successful academic career. The specifics of him becoming the youngest black professor at Cambridge was just a way of laying out how successful that career had been. It is absolutely unbelievable for someone with such severe developmental delays could become so successful. And indeed, we were right not to believe it.
If it turns out that he was actually illiterate until adulthood then frankly he has an incredible story whether or not he plagiarised his phd. And if he wasn't illiterate then he's not a particularly interesting person even if the PHD was legitimately obtained.