09/08/2026
Jason Arday Is Completely Innocent - Interesting Piece by Justin Murphy
Jason Arday is completely innocent. In fact, it's the only theory that makes sense. Liar, fraud, and "con man" just don't fit the data, sociologically or characterologically.
That's why this case feels so big, bigger than any of the academic fraud cases in recent memory.
This is obviously a kind, gentle, loving person—all he is doing is what most people in the world do: he is deploying words in whatever way sincerely feels like it will do good for the world.
Of course, this is a scandal because some of our institutions are supposed to do other kinds of things with words.
At one point in history, anyway, Cambridge was a place where a very specific type of person gathered to do a very specific, extreme, difficult thing with words. That thing ceased being the place's raison d'être over 50 years ago, but heritage brands die hard; so even many of our smartest scholars (who genuinely know and do that special, rare thing) cling to utterly wishful notions about the status quo university (especially the elite ones, which they imagine have been relatively immune, but in fact have deteriorated even more catastrophically given their high baseline).
Listen to his interviews.
This is not the Wolf of Wall Street but the Sweet Summer Child. His psychology is essentially this: If you say certain words that make other people happy, and then they give you applause and money, then it is good to produce words in that way. This is just being a good person. To be accused of doing bad things when you have only ever said good things, just means the accusing people are just bad people.
Now, most people who make it to advanced careers at Cambridge are not altogether more noble than this. But they are far more sophisticated. They too have spent more than a decade producing essentially arbitrary strings of words (not as naively stupid as Arday's but with a similarly socialized and compromised notion of what it means to put words together for an academic career). That weird, rare thing that Newton was doing at Cambridge is as alien to the median "legitimate" scholar at Cambridge, and the best in academia will admit this at the bar.
(Aside: The good ones worth their salt are closer to 99th percentile, essentially, and they keep their mouths shut about politics because politics is for the mediocre academics! Cofnas, who is a good scholar and ethically correct in all of this is probably only ethically correct due to 'moral luck;' if he were happily tenured at a level he's content with, he'd be doing real science and wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole!)
So in my mind, Jason Arday is ethically higher ranked than the modal professor at Cambridge—to be perfectly frank and completely serious. He's an idiot but I genuinely believe there is not a trace of mens rea in this guy.
The only reason there is outrage is because a bumpkin commentariat (including many high-IQ people) still believe that something different is supposed to be happening at a place like Cambridge. Against all reality for decades, there is a widespread, persistent confidence in these legacy heritage brands, which gives them credit they stopped deserving long ago. So this "scandal" is mostly driven by the wildly out-of-date wishfulness of the outraged observers. Anyone who's made it reasonably far up the ladder of academia finds this to be relatively unremarkable (though yes, Arday is an extremely dramatic case study and again Cofnas is in the right to discuss it).
Even Cambridge did nothing exceptionally wrong here! They are just a normal social institution doing what normal institutions do after that rare thing Newton wanted to do can no longer be understood or protected for diverse structural reasons.
Neither the modal administrator nor Jason Arday even understand that once upon a time the University of Cambridge did something truly specific, rare, and uniquely valuable with words. Just listen to them, and take them at face value: They are sincerely convicted that what Newton was doing at Cambridge was ideological fakery to dominate the less educated and non-white populations. What could possibly be wrong with giving Jason Arday the university's highest honors? What could possibly be wrong with saying nice and creative stories that win honors?
People just have no idea how far it's all gone.... Or they have to pretend otherwise, for the sake of representing some respectable pole of the discourse.
