'Have the media learnt nothing?'

Okay.

So th- there's been one story really that the entire British media establishment has been, uh, talking about, and that's because they've realized they've had a role most likely in a man's death-

Yeah

... which is, uh, Professor Jason Arday, former Cambridge professor of sociology of education, the youngest Black professor at Cambridge.

For anyone who doesn't know, he was embroiled in a kind of plagiarism scandal over the last sort of two weeks after a self-professed race realist, a man who literally has no pupils, called Nathan Cofnas, who accused Jason Arday of plagiarizing.

Nathan Cofnas is a, a...

He says that his dream job is to be a professor of eugenics and has said that in a pure meritocracy, n- Black people would only be in sports and entertainment and no other industry.

So a proper, proper bastard.

And anyway, he accused Jason Arday of plagiarism, and this story has kind of snowballed because lots of people at the time were saying that plagiarism in academia is incredibly rife, which it absolutely is.

There are literally countless, uh, white professors and, and academics who have committed plagiarism and who, who remain in post.

But Jason Arday, youngest Black professor, had autism, basically had this sort of mad backstory, born in a South London council estate, non-verbal, could barely read until he was in his mid-teens, and then obviously went on to have an academic career and becoming youngest professor at Cambridge.

So when this plagiarism accusation was presented by Mr. Eugenics last year, Jason Arday's original university, John Moores University, Liverpool, launched an investigation and cleared him, but this accusation came back, and Cambridge University basically said they were going to launch an investigation, and Jason Arday then stepped away from his post, resigned.

And this was two, about two weeks ago, and what ensued after his resignation was what can only be described as an online lynching-

100%

... with media outlets from both left and right in the UK proceeding to comb through Jason Arday's entire life story and cast doubt on the accuracy and the truthfulness of basically his entire personality.

Now, when this story came out, I was like, "Why the fuck...

Like, why do I care about whether a, a, a professor at Cambridge has committed plagiarism? Why, why is this even news?" And I remember being shocked at the time because it was literally the leading story on BBC News, and I read that article, and I literally couldn't make sense of it because I was like, it, it just honestly felt like an internal university story.

And then I read a bit more, and I realized, oh, it's because he's a Black professor, and it, this is actually the right-wing press are picking up on DEI, what, you know, they love to bang on about.

Trump obviously, a couple of years ago when he f- when he became president for the second time, blamed a helicopter crash on DEI.

Basically, whenever anything happens that involves someone who isn't just milky white, it becomes a discussion around DEI.

So I was like, "Oh, well, okay, it's a story about that." And then of course, the media ran with this idea that because Jason Arday is Black, he was held up as this diversity poster boy, and that he only got his job because he's Black.

And when I read that, I was like, "Well, that's, that's not true.

That can't be true." And then I read a bit more into it, and this, this is when I made the video I did about Jason Arday, where I tried to breathe in a little bit of nuance, which was At that time, so this is about 10 days ago, this is before Jason Arday stepped down and the whole coverage became so poisonous.

At that time, there were questions around whether, uh, Jason Arday, the work he had produced as an academic, whether that warranted a professor position, and I think that is a fairly standard question.

And it fed into this idea that perhaps there is a DEI element, which is Jason Arday has been made a professor, which is an incredibly public position, when really he hasn't been an academic long enough to warrant that position, which makes it a failure of Cambridge University for putting that pressure on someone like Jason Arday and making him a public figure when his work wasn't up to scrutiny.