When I left Jason Arday last week, he was humiliated but alive. The 41-year-old black fabulist—the “youngest-ever black professor” at the University of Cambridge—was facing a mounting tsunami of damaging revelations. There was his plagiarism, first of all. Simon & Schuster was just about to publish his book, Great and Unfortunate Things. It did so, to considerable fanfare, on Aug. 11. The book was an “Editor’s Pick” on Amazon, which placed it among the “Best Biographies & Memories.”

I say “his” book, but it was only incidentally his. A “book doctor” called Eve Claxton was listed as co-author, and it soon emerged that another co-author was that prodigious scribe, AI. More digging revealed that Arday’s dissertation was lifted largely from a 2009 PhD thesis by a Brunel University student, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers.

But the plagiarism was, I noted, only the tip of the midden. There was also Arday’s unbridled fabulism. Among other things, he claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days. As revelations mounted, Cambridge at first circled its wagons and dismissed any criticism of its prize black scholar as a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” But no, Arday did all the undermining himself. Like Belshazzar at his famous feast, he could see the writing on the wall. And the writing had more or less the same import as that the Babylonian king saw inscribed before him by a ghostly hand. I am told that “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin” means something like “You have been weighed in the balance and have been found wanting.” Arday’s similar message could be summarized more briefly: “The jig is up.”

Overwhelmed, Arday resigned his chair. I am not sure whether it was a sense of humor or merely chutzpah that encouraged him to leave the composition of his letter of resignation to AI, but there seems little doubt that AI was the “onlie begetter” of the missive. Alas, on Friday, August 14, the humiliation became too much. The police were called because Arday was found “unresponsive.” He was pronounced dead on the scene, an apparent suicide.

Who was to blame? A curious subhead to a story in The Wall Street Journal seems to me to get the question completely wrong. “Jason Arday’s academic rise and fall set off a debate about whether he was a plagiarist or victim of a racial witch hunt.” But that is a false dichotomy. There is no doubt that Arday was a plagiarist. And far from being the victim of “a racial witch hunt,” he was the victim of his own lies and intemperate behavior. And let’s not forget that his fabulations were directed not only at aggrandizing himself. He was also perfectly happy to play the race card to damage others, as when he complained to the police that journalists who were investigating his credentials were guilty of harassing him. The police duly opened a four-month-long investigation into a journalist who was simply going about his job.

Outside of certain mystery novels, where the villain is discovered and then presented with a weapon and a private moment to “do the right thing,” suicide cannot help but be a shocking eventuality. One cannot—at least, I cannot—help but feel bad for Arday and his family, which includes his widow, two young children, and his parents. Nevertheless, I cannot exonerate him. Why? A multi-part inventory compiled on X and presented in clipped, asyndetonic style contains the answer. Here are some of the items, presented under the rubric “Be Jason Arday”:

>claim police traced a severed pig’s head at your parents’ house to a butcher who’d sold a “whole hog” that morning

>have the butcher say no officer ever came in

>have the Met call the whole tale “categorically incorrect”

>say you’re experiencing a modern day lynching on a podcast

>have the ASA make your speaking agency strip unbacked claims

>hire Carter-Ruck [a law firm] & get Times Higher Education to kill a finished story

>report their journalist to Scotland Yard for emailing you questions about your record

>have officers tell him to stop, your mental health was hurt

>report a retired professor too, have Devon & Cornwall decline to bother

>have the Met chief later admit “we dropped the ball on that one”

>get cleared by a panel you asked to weigh the “war on critical race theory”

>have 188 matching sentences called an honest & reasonable error

>do keynote on the playbook conservatives use to hunt black academics b/c beyond reproach

>have the Times find participant 11 in study is three different people

>have the same quotes come out of different mouths 25 times across three papers

>have false funding declarations

>have an outside expert say there is no question the plagiarism is extensive

>have a Cambridge autism professor send round “URGENT PLEASE SIGN ANTI RACISM LETTER”

>get 13,000 names & three Cambridge heads vouching for text they never read

>have Cambridge call it a “vile smear campaign”

>blame autistic mimicry, a l supervisor who left, & one you never met

>call the campaign racially motivated

>say “what I am not is a liar”

>turn 600 miles of margarine in six days into twelve

>have Anglia Ruskin edit your citation page the day the [Nathan] Cofnas piece dropped

>get Solent to delete the running claims

>have the TEDx video go private

>have your Jesus College page quietly turn Professorial Fellow into l Fellow & a Liverpool master’s vanish

>have academics call for a regulator probe, have the Office for Students decline to comment

>have Cambridge open a probe into your qualifications & honorary appointments

>have Jesus College open its own

>quit both on the spot

>put the letter out through the Good Law Project

>have the letter promise you’ll return stronger & wiser

>have the letter come back 100% AI

>have Jesus College drop its probe the moment you quit

>have the Good Law Project boss keep defending you, chalking it all up to neurodivergence

>have the ghostwritten memoir come out in the US anyway, after a 1.4m pre-empt

>have the UK edition still set for Aug 27

>have Cambridge order an outside audit of how you were ever hired

>have Durham & Glasgow open probes of their own

>commit suicide

>have people portray you as a victim?

Whatever else can be said about the “Jason Arday Affair,” he was not the victim. Perhaps you can say he was the casualty, first, of his own mendacity and race-fired megalomania and second, of an educational establishment that, marinated in the anti-white, self-flagellating racial animosities of the moment, colluded in the construction of Arday’s fantastical, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately self-destructive fantasies.