The tragedy and the scandal of the Jason Arday affair

The tragedy of Jason Arday has a profound lesson for all teachers - and It is to do with the fundamental reason why education and teaching exist – which is to seek truth in the pursuit of knowledge.

Sadly, and tragically, Jason Arday betrayed that ethic when he plagiarised other people’s work and told untruths about his own life gaining positions at British universities, including one at Cambridge, which has many times been ranked as the best in the world. For that reason alone, he was not worthy of being called a professor.

But much worse, it is those who wanted him to be that professor who are the more scandalous.

In my view, Arday was a fraud, but it is the people who lauded and promoted him who are really the ones to blame. Not only did they suspend every critical faculty they had, but they dismissed and disparaged those whose job it is to relentlessly interrogate and seek the truth in the interest of the public - journalists.

The people who supported Arday promoted him as an icon and a trophy to their ideology about education and society. When exposed by journalists that he was not that, his life was bereft of any professional meaning. Now those same people – who include many teachers and professors - are using him as their ideological martyr.

The real tragedy of this affair is that two young children are now left without a father.

The real scandal of this affair is not that Jason Arday was wearing the emperor’s new clothes, but that the very pinnacle of the British education elite has actually been doing so all through this sorry affair – and proved itself to be unworthy of the fundamental ethic of their profession.