A SHORT NOTE ON THE DEATH OF CAMBRIDGE PROFESSOR JASON ARDAY

It is sad that Prof. Arday found it necessary to commit suicide recently, but his lies had caught up with him.  The youngest professor at Cambridge U. in the UK had been hired and publicity followed his amazing life stories.  I am not interested in if all his marathon runs were true or fantasy, I am interested in his academic writings.  One, and then another scholar found clear evidence that Arday had plagiarized from other scholars.  This means he basically copied from their writings, put it in articles and books, and pretended that it was his original work.  That is stealing from another scholar so that you get the credit.

     When Arday was exposed as a fraud, his family denounced the mis-information floating around, and blamed his critics on racism.  Indeed, when he knew scholars were beginning to inquire about his scholarship, he complained to the police in UK, who are super sensitive about being called racist.  Were I still living in the UK, I might be cautioned about this post.  Earlier this year, when a white guy asked the police for help, that a person of color had stabbed him, the police listened instead to the POC who said he had been insulted by the white who used racist language.  The super sensitive police, ignored the white and inquired more from the POC about the racist insults.  When they got back to the white guy's plea and considered arresting him for racism.  The white guy, now lying on the ground, had bled to death from the stab wound made by the POC.  We must be sensitive!

      Prof. Arday was a jewel in the Cambridge U. crown.  Suddenly, with allegations of copying other's research rather than doing his own, the crown was looking like tin.  But the method of hiring him still continues.

     The madness began after passage of the Civil Rights Act in the US, a law meant so all would be treated equally.  But to speed things up, the ADL came up with a proposal to the EEOC; instead of suing each individual company for racist violations of hiring, etc., use a broad approach.  The unquestioned  hypothesis, since all large groups of people are all alike and share the same basic intelligence, physical endurance, susceptibility to disease, etc. the simplest method to uncover discrimination, look at the stats.    If a city is 40% Negro,  but only 20% of the Negroes have jobs, compared to 55% of the whites who are 60% of the population, that would be a red flag for discrimination in hiring in that city.  Though it was not that simple a statistic, that was the starting point, and the reason for Affirmative Action, hiring a Negro even if he or she was not the best qualified.  The American law was extended to women, then Hispanics, and then to more and more.  To show the effectiveness of the new implementation of the law, one did not want to hire the best qualified, as he might be another white male.  The age of a new racial discrimination had begun.  Make the work-force look like America.

     Suppose we applied that same rule to basketball?  Whites are still the majority, so of 5 players, 3 should be white, 1 Hispanic, and 1 Black.  Now and then an Asian might replace the only Black on the team.  The Team would look like America.  But would it be a better basketball team?   Has this quota system made a better America?  A better Cambridge?

     Hugh Murray