Former Cambridge professor of education Jason Arday has now been dead for more than a week, and police do not suspect foul play. Yet the news and editorial stories are multiplying. Arday left a voice message for a fellow Cambridge professor the morning his body was discovered, who said Arday “…felt he couldn’t go on.”
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I can’t recall hearing Arday’s name until early August, when stories accusing him of plagiarism made the big London dailies and crossed the pond. About 10 days ago I saw a brief Facebook clip featuring him and Cambridge Professor Hilary Cremin. It was from 2023, when Arday had just been named the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history. Cremin is Dean of the Faculty of Education.
The 39-second video shows Professor Cremin just fawning over the young man, saying his research was “the best in the world.” Hilary was so proud! She had finally bagged a black and was showing him off like a Boone and Crockett trophy.
It should go without saying that Dean Cremin is a world-class ninny, but I will say it anyway. I was more focused on the newly minted Professor Arday. He seemed very pleasant, even somewhat sweet. I remember feeling sad for him and didn’t know why. Michael Polanyi, who once delivered the Eddington Lecture at Cambridge, famously said that we can know more than we can tell, and maybe this was another instance.
Did my tacit dimension (a term coined by Polanyi), that mysterious place where we store our perceptions, thoughts, and intentions, sense depression on that 2023 video? I will never know, and now he is just dead folks, as a former colleague used to say. His bones may now be picked over without mercy by journalists, essayists, and worst of all—fellow academics.
As Henry Kissinger said, summing up Sayre’s law, the fights in academia are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. I can relate, having spent mercifully few years in academe. The professional educators in this hemisphere have done such a marvelous job this past half-century—swapping the history, philosophy, and transcendent beauty of Western civilization for postmodernist dreck.
One thing about the late Jason Arday seems indisputable: He was a fabulist. As the Cambridge Dictionary says, a fabulist is “someone who tells lies.” To confabulate is “to invent experiences or events that did not happen.” The rival Oxford English Dictionary adds, “Psychiatry. To fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory.”
A Spectator (London) article, published not quite a week before Arday’s death was announced, printed a long list of claimed accomplishments, none related to plagiarism. Some assertions are so extreme they almost beggar the imagination.
So, you may be thinking, “That settles it; he was just a plain liar.” I urge caution, because every doctor who has done a lot of ER work has been badly burned by that assumption.
We have seen patients who come in raving like lunatics, or speaking very softly and deliberately, seeming rational but saying things that are almost impossible. Like running 600 miles between London and Edinburgh in six days, or 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine on a broken leg, as Dr Arday claimed. This is confabulation, and it is a doctor’s job to find out if it comes from an illness.
If you heard this in the ER from a new patient, the first thing you would do is make sure he had enough oxygen in his blood, start infusing thiamine (vitamin B1), then get lab studies and an MRI of the brain, searching for certain lesions in the brainstem. You suspect confabulation and wonder if disease caused it.
You have not diagnosed medical confabulation, but if you even think it, you must treat it as an emergency. You are protecting the patient with an exercise in abduction, first described by Charles Sanders Peirce, which I modified to invent a clinical simulation:
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- The surprising behavior, confabulation, is suspected in a new patient who claims that he wrote the Book of Isaiah.
- But if the man has Korsakoff psychosis, then confabulation would be a matter of course.
- Hence, there is reason to suspect that he has Korsakoff psychosis.
You are not making a diagnosis—rather, this is the first step in differential diagnosis, initiated by listening to the patient, then refining the possibilities through a physical examination. If you find something needing immediate treatment, it’s a good thing you are in the ER.
What if you aren’t in the emergency room, but in your regular office, seeing a new patient telling stories that seem outlandish? He is intelligent, and so calm, articulate, and pleasant that you don’t even want to think he is mentally ill. That is a trap many doctors have fallen into. Masked depression leading to suicide is well described in medical journals, sometimes with autopsy evidence of predisposing brain disease.
The New York Times published a lengthy piece the day after Arday’s body was found. It was extensively researched and fairly presented, but incomplete, omitting the possibility that Professor Arday may have had a medical or psychiatric illness. The article quotes Dr David Harris, who had privately written to Cambridge about Dr Arday’s potential plagiarism. He wrote that “Prof Arday badly needs critical friends, in my view, not sycophants,” something I think true, but premature.
“Before I started running, the only exercise I got was jumping to conclusions.” That came from my medical mentor, Dr Herb Fred, whom I mentioned in a recent AT article. We learned to memorize the answer to his rhetorical question—Why don’t people think?—because thinking is painful, difficult, and time-consuming.
What Jason Arday needed was a real doctor.
Too late for all that now, unless someone rehabilitates his reputation via a postmortem brain examination. It would be bitter news if he were found to have an organic brain disease that explained the confabulation. Unlikely, perhaps, but you seldom diagnose what you are not looking for. And we can never know if he had a purely psychiatric illness, which no autopsy can reveal.
Embalming time is here. Not for his physical corpse, which has been respectfully cared for by the common people, those who trade in material things. The academics of Cambridge trade in ideas, they think, but actually follow the dictates of the Left. I think academics such as Hilary Cremin can only recite left-wing dogma.
Polanyi’s Eddington Lecture was titled Beyond Nihilism, and dealt with moral inversion. He talked about “the pathological forms of morals due to the modern intensification of morality,” and said, “We must learn to recognize moral excesses.”
I would urge Dean Cremin and her Faculty of Education to read Polanyi’s words and perhaps even think about them. They might start to question whether their obsession with race is just that—namely, a modern moral excess—and that it caused them to lose their way. That way is now leading to more trouble, as recent demonstrations, vigils, and protests in Cambridge and London attest. Professor Jason Arday must forever be seen as a victim. Cambridge and the Comments Section will not have it any other way.
If you’re the sort of person who believes that things like our skin color and the shape of our nose are linked to character, behavior, and especially the intentions of our soul, which defines our being, then you need more education. But please, don’t go to Cambridge and expect to hear the truth.
Image created using AI.
Dr. Atcheson’s unpublished pseudo-Victorian romantic murder mystery, The Spheres of the Universe, features a most diabolical physician – a psychopathic, narcissistic, serial killer. He welcomes correspondence at [email protected]
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