{"id":104136,"date":"2026-08-08T04:00:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-08T08:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=104136"},"modified":"2026-08-07T14:10:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T18:10:40","slug":"pointing-the-finger-of-blame-accurately","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/08\/08\/pointing-the-finger-of-blame-accurately\/","title":{"rendered":"Pointing the finger of blame accurately"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Librarian of Celaeno<\/a> wants you to know that former professor Jason Arday did nothing wrong:<\/p>\n

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Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

Once upon a time, an autistic black child was born. Usually, it takes several years to figure that out (the autism, not the blackness), but so autistically autistic was the infant Jason Arday that it was immediately apparent to everyone without there even needing to be any public record of it. Perhaps there is some lost evidence of him having a Reddit account as a toddler; one can speculate. Arday was unable to talk until age 11 and has been unable to stop talking ever since, which is fortunate since otherwise many of his unbelievable life accomplishments would now be unknown.<\/p>\n

The range of setbacks<\/a> he has overcome<\/a> boggles the mind. Despite being illiterate until age 18, Arday not only graduated high school, but got into college, where he finally learned how to read good. This is even more incredible when you consider that the same year he discovered what the alphabet did he was beaten into epilepsy by random teens — he forgave them so thoroughly that any documentation of the incident is now gone from police records — and that some unspecified time before that he was in a car accident that left him in a waking coma for months. He studied so hard in college that he gave himself a brain tumor, which he evidently removed by himself in the mirror, since there is no evidence of a surgeon having done so. It may be that Arday has in fact learned to read several times in his life, but keeps getting that knowledge erased by semiannual episodes of CTE.<\/p>\n

Even though he’d accumulated a substantial amount of what for a normal person would be crippling physical trauma over the course of his short time in the world, of the sort that would require medical interventions that would otherwise severely limit active life, Arday rapidly became one of the world’s most elite athletes. He participated in a \u201830 Marathons in 35 Days’ challenge, which was actually somewhat documented<\/a> by an independent contemporary account, in the midst of which he suffered a hairline fracture in his fibula, which he seemingly just shrugged off to complete the remaining nine marathons. This was apparently the last time he ran slowly enough for anyone to witness, however, because his career as an ultramarathon runner who hyperGogginsed his way through 600 miles in six days passed entirely without notice<\/a> by the few other people on Earth who could conceivably do that. He played semi-professional soccer, but was so good that he got bored with it and moved on before anyone could write his name down on a roster. Along the way, Arday became one of the best snooker players in Britain, with a skill level far beyond the need to participate in any public tournaments, other than the single amateur contest he entered but was too gracious to the other players to win.<\/p>\n

He surmounted the intellectual challenges involved in becoming a PE teacher, and from there went on to earn a Ph.D as a black man, with his thesis largely consisting of arguing that it’s easier to do well in academia if you’re not closely supervised. It was so convincing a premise that his doctoral committee at Liverpool University evidently forewent actually reading the dissertation, perhaps also having concluded that his proximity to their whiteness had burdened him enough already. It was thus that Dr. Arday came into being, following a path blazed by Ibram X. Kendi as a bedredlocked black man writing about being black while being black blackly in a world basically controlled by the bad guys in Caddyshack<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On Substack Notes<\/em>, Michael Southon<\/a> also points the finger at the people who enabled Arday’s rise and attributed racist beliefs to anyone who asked questions:<\/p>\n

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Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.<\/p><\/div>\n

Cambridge University was so proud of its choice of Jason Arday that they invited the BBC to film Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, welcoming Arday to his new post. In the clip you can hear Cremin gushingly tell Arday:<\/p>\n