On August 14th Jason Arday was found dead, apparently from suicide, at his home in London. For those who loved this 41-year-old Cambridge professor, it is a tragedy. For the world it is a warning of the destruction bad ideas can wreak.
The bad idea here is that people should be judged not by their individual character and abilities, but by their race, disability or other politically charged attributes. Mr Arday became the University of Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor in 2023, before being engulfed by a scandal over plagiarism and faked research. He bore responsibility for his own downfall. Yet just as troubling is the way both his supporters and detractors even now reduce him to a symbol.
De redactie van NRC selecteert de beste artikelen uit The Economist voor een breder perspectief op internationale politiek en economie.
The most egregious is Cambridge, which used him to repair its reputation for being white and elitist. He did not deserve the glittering prize of a professorship there. His peers had for some time privately fretted that he lacked the credentials to support his public profile. Journalists at the Telegraph later found over 100 passages from his PhD thesis that had been copied, some with small changes, from someone else’s. Others uncovered evidence in his published research of made-up quotes, data and funding claims.
