Apologies . Thoughts on Arday.

Hello and it has been a while since I posted. My apologies. I broke my collarbone and have been laid low by it to be honest. Some of you live with far worse stuff and just get on with it but I haven’t got on with much in my one -armed codeine haze, gingerly typing on a laptop that doctors told me not to use. Get real!

More X rays to come but I am now definitely over the worst. Let’s hope the bones align and I get out of this sling soon. It’s so hot and itchy besides anything else. Sleeping propped up has been the real pain and now I will stop my moaning.

As a result of this I have turned off paid subscriptions so this is all free until I provide you with a better service and thank you again to those who have stuck with me. It is very much appreciated. Please stay. And please tell me what you would you would like me to write about. Comments and chat from paid subscribers will be enabled so please do join in. I have missed you!

In this time, I have consumed lots of news as usual but felt somehow strangely distanced from it. Low level pain induces passivity. The planet is burning, we have a new Prime Minister, wars continue with no end in sight. Madness abounds. These huge issues have all blurred into each other but I became fascinated like so many others with the Jason Arday story. An individual story is always going to hold our attention.

Here, I am assuming here that you know the details of his case which started off being a minor story about plagiarism and ended up being a global story featuring overlapping contemporary issues, that he was somehow seen to embody.

I wrote a couple of pieces but never published them anywhere not out of any great foresight or moral imperative but because I could not end them satisfactorily.

There was no overarching conclusion to be drawn. Good columns tend to drive to a point and attempt a veneer of certainty. Faking certainty does not work for me. I am not a good liar. If you have no real argument, you are not giving much for the reader to come back with. It’s a strange business and here we are in the middle of it.

It’s happening again. Sorry.

Now that Arday’s life has ended, which is awful, awful , it remains the case that its harder to ‘sit with’ uncertainty as to why this has happened than to publicly apportion blame. Yes it’s racism, yes it’s the media, yes it’s Cambridge, yes it’s his own doing, yes it’s the fault of white liberals, yes it’s the right’s war on DEI etc etc.

This is all being argued out on social media quite horrifically and everyone appears to have chosen a side and stuck to it. Everyone is telling everyone else to reflect but is this really happening? I wish this were so.

I just want to make a few observations here.

Since this has all turned into a left v right issue, then sadly my side or the side that I ‘identify’ with if you like, needs to do better than it seems to be doing. Where is the strong defence of Sociology as an important and worthy subject for instance? Instead of lazily assuming that we can reenact the arguments about DEI that exist on US campuses, let us at this point reiterate a commitment to having a more representative professoriat /workforce. That in ,itself is a principle that we should adhere to. It is no threat to white middle class people. Stop acting as if it is some kind of embarrassing secret. Bring on the DEI especially in terms of class. Actually, do it.

There are multiple problems in universities but underlying much of this is an attack on the Humanities and a huge dismissal of the value of study, of the social sciences. In the wake of Arday’s death, whatever his flaws, let us not be shy in asserting the importance of his subject. Are we now to regard academia as a place for only STEM degrees with possibly History and Philosophy (of a certain kind in certain places) regarded as somehow real? We can’t all be plumbers.

Sure, there has been and there exists a lot of bad work and some unwitting idea that EVERYTHING is some part of a social justice movement. This is the root of the high outrage, low wattage “activism “that abounds. Its mind narrowing for sure.

But forgive me if I insist that understanding what “ideology” means and how it works and how we work within it, as very important. To watch those enmeshed in their various positions unable ever to be aware of their own biases, unable to move much at all is frustrating to say the least. My biases are fairly obvious but dont worry, I am not going to start quoting Gramsci or the SCUM Manifesto at you or tell you to go to therapy. But I will say that my career has meant being surrounded by these stupid, clever folk. By stupid ,I mean inflexible. Bears of very little brain,

If we want academic standards to be higher, then fine push for that. Make the case for the abstract study of how power operates. Do so without using a load of jargon. That would help.

Likewise, I want to argue for my profession. Journalism did not kill this poor man. It was but one of the institutions that failed him. It is impossible to understand that he gave interviews which furthered damaged his case with no guidance from Cambridge or his publisher. Where was the duty of care here?

On a human level this story was undoubtedly compelling. The lies. His savant manner. The “silly season” explanation for the number of stories about him does not feel entirely accurate to me . People wanted to read about him and the combination of image and text drew us in. His face, his open, sweet face was impossible to ignore. His work was poor, his dreamy charisma real. It is deeply sad to think of how he must have felt when his world collapsed ,when what had worked so well for him, no longer did.

There is a wider context here too. There is a whole conversation to be had about neurodivergence and what that means. Still, it is difficult to know exactly what this man’s problems were. This is not to say they did not exist but perhaps not in the way he told his story. From the start it did not make sense that a non-verbal person acquires language skills so late. My experience is that non-verbal kids may get some words but will still be very limited. We, all of us need to understand different kinds of neurodivergence and the accommodations we make for them .

The other thing that has been in the background of this sorry saga is an ongoing reckoning with “Woke”. This is not a word I use most of the time because it’s an all-purpose catch all emptied of meaning. However, it’s a sure sign that it has peaked when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughs off as “crazy” what happened since 2020 as “Woke 1.0” This is a signal of a shift. In the States, we can see the Democrat machine finally start to move. They are ditching some of the more questionable and frankly vote-losing stuff ,for instance on ‘Defund the police’ and the loony tunes trans activist agenda. They are going to utilize the pro-Palestinian cause but try to invoke a more class based policy platform.

Certainly, we not yet in any position to laugh off the extremities of Woke and the abominable cancel culture that has ensued. It’s still too raw. If only there has been such an outpouring of sympathy for female academics, who have weathered the storm of public cancellation and threats to their life for simply not adhering to the current orthodoxy on gender. We know their names. Then there are all those whose names we don’t know , who have been shut down and had their livelihoods removed for voicing the unremarkable opinion that men cannot actually be women . The sheer craziness of all this goes on.

As we can surely all see, racism is alive and well. Both the over promotion and the pulling down of Arday was about race. We take for granted that there is something immutable about race but we are not allowed to say the same thing about sex.

Woke 1.0 has not yet morphed into anything like Woke 2.0 . There are no reparations, no apologies, we stumble on. We are not however, America; there is room for manoeuvre here.

If we are to seize the moment or to reflect in any way , then we cannot keep reinstating entrenched positions. A step back is needed. That’s “the work”. Theoretically notions of “truth” may indeed be relative but practically we need some shared ground or everything is shaky. Arday appears to have said many things that were not true but these things went unchallenged. This was the reverse racism he experienced which did him no good, no good at all. Now he is being turned into a martyr. This all continues to be both disturbing and dishonest.

So as I said, I can find no decent ending to this saga. Who honestly can? Something appalling has happened. Suicide, if it is that, is an act of violence and shattering.

When I was very young and worked with severely autistic children who could become violent often when they were at their most vulnerable, the approach was always to turn down the volume in the room, dim the lights, lower your voice, to try to bring down the temperature. In those days we knew little about autism, but I remember well some of the fine people who would give us guidance on this. Who could have done that for him?

Now we can see frontline emergency services using such techniques all the time with those who need protection and help. In times of crisis. It is a kind of based gentleness. It is never not impressive to me. It is strength.

Recently, I have perhaps more appreciation of it than usual because of the amount of time I have spent in hospital . As one doctor was fixing me up, a guy in the next cubicle was shouting at the top of his voice , threatening and abusing the staff. “Do you get a lot of that?” I asked the doctor.

“It’s been much worse lately” she said.

And she carried on.