The perfect story by Jason Arday, which, however, turned out to be false

Jason Arday’s problem is not Jason Arday himself. The world is full of mythomaniacs, inflated CVs and autobiographies written with a word processor. The problem is Cambridge, a university that ought to distinguish a scholar from a public figure but which, instead, did the opposite: it created the public figure, then paraded him like a trophy, subsequently defended him against questions and finally recognised the value of the investigation.

Arday was perfect. At 37, he was the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history. He spoke of having been an autistic child, mute until the age of eleven, unable to read or write until he was eighteen, and of having subsequently become a professor, writer, athlete and philanthropist. Not a biography: a pitch for Netflix. At the university of diversity, equity and inclusion, he was not merely a lecturer, but living proof of the system’s merits. Before asking what he had written or demonstrated, one need only admire what he represented.

Then someone was foolish enough to check. The thesis contained extensive overlaps with the work of another researcher; the universities listed on her CV denied she had held the positions claimed; a book presented as having been published by Palgrave Macmillan had, according to the publisher, never progressed beyond the proposal stage. Even her reputation as a sporting and charitable legend began to unravel. Arday claimed to have run 600 miles from Edinburgh to London in six days, thirty marathons in thirty-five days, and the last nine with a broken leg following an epileptic fit. He claimed to have raised over five million pounds; a JustGiving page relating to one of his endeavours showed a total of 380. That left just four million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand and six hundred and twenty pounds to go: a discrepancy worthy of a footnote. He also claimed to have installed water points in West Africa and South America, but WaterAid explained that it does not send volunteers abroad. He claimed to have played semi-professional football without naming the club and to have appeared in the BBC documentary "Seven Up", which began more than twenty years before he was born. The BBC clarified that it had nothing to do with the matter. The only things missing were the moon landing and a season playing bass with the Beatles. Then there were the threats: masked men, a knife, a pig’s head delivered to his family. The police denied that the investigation he described had ever taken place; even the butcher he named could not recall the sale.

Faced with this barrage, Cambridge did not verify the facts: it verified the identity of those asking the questions. It spoke of a ‘vile campaign’ to discredit Arday. The journalist became the aggressor; the question, sensationalism; the CV, racism; the fact-checking, psychological abuse against an autistic person. Even Scotland Yard ordered a reporter to stop contacting him. Under the new epistemological order, three emails could constitute persecution, whilst a non-existent book remained a mere editorial quibble.

Then the whole edifice came crashing down. Arday resigned and Cambridge launched an investigation into the very issues which, until very recently, it had considered morally suspect to raise. The problem is not merely that a man may have told many lies. The problem is that the university needed them to be true. Arday was the poster child for its virtue, the holy card used to demonstrate that the system worked. In the end, it is unclear who exploited whom: whether Arday used the university’s ideology to build his own legend, or whether Cambridge used him to build its own. Probably both. But a university ought to know that, when categories matter more than evidence, sooner or later the evidence too demands to be taken into account.

(article produced by Foglio AI, based on a prompt by Luciano Capone, who is currently on holiday at some seaside resort)