Jason Arday and the Assault on DEI

Colleges should not give up on diversity.

By Rafael Walker and Bryan L. Sykes

So far, it has been a farcically bad month for DEI. It had already been thoroughly hobbled by the 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, where the Supreme Court held higher ed’s prevailing approach to implementing affirmative action in admissions unlawful. There were, admittedly, problems with the system in place before, as one of us argued in these pages shortly after the decision. However flawed the application of affirmative action had been, though, we didn’t think it necessary or wise to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

As Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion made clear, he didn’t either. When he wrote, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life,” he was inviting institutions to ditch the deeply flawed practices of yore for more nuanced ways of evaluating how race had helped or hindered applicants on their journeys toward higher education. And, as Justin Driver has shown in these pages, constitutionally viable workarounds do exist — and might be even more effective.

But then came 2024, when the right sailed into power, having won the presidency and both congressional chambers, and wasted no time in trying to finish the job that the 2023 SFFA plaintiffs had begun. On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed a bevy of executive orders meant to banish diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts from the government and from government-funded entities, chief among them colleges. The administration’s successes, while lamentable, have been unmistakable, prevailing in institutional fact even when they failed in the courts. Many campuses have watched their leaders buckle, sometimes not even in response to an actual threat but preemptively, in response to merely the threat of a threat.

We are certain that the Arday affair teaches us something about major flaws in the implementation of DEI, but it’s not the lesson that DEI’s enemies would like us to think.

The scandal of Jason Arday’s exposure for plagiarism and subsequent resignation from the University of Cambridge — excessively covered by the media, to our minds — served for DEI’s opponents as proof positive that concerted efforts at diversifying enfeeble colleges, polluting the academy with masses of unqualified (black) people. The numbers reveal that that couldn’t be true. Given the small percentage of the faculty identified as black (1 percent of faculty in the UK and 7 percent in the United States), even if every single black faculty member were unqualified, our aggregated incompetence wouldn’t be enough to impinge appreciably on the otherwise impeccable intellectual environment that DEI resentniks imagine to have preceded our invasion.

We are certain that the Arday affair teaches us something about major flaws in the implementation of DEI, but it’s not the lesson that DEI’s enemies would like us to think. We are staunch supporters of the broad principles of DEI — not the cartoonishly anti-intellectual version propagating “struggle sessions” and imposed political orthodoxies but, rather, one generally concerned with ensuring that our institutions mirror and support the diversity of our society. As such, we offer our criticisms in the hope of improving DEI, not as a step toward dismantling it — a longtime goal of the right and recently, it seems, of the liberalish center.

The Guardian’s editorial board rightly decries a “glee” in the latter reporting about Arday’s downfall. (We are reminded of the disproportionate, gleeful coverage of the allegations against Junot Díaz compared to the paltry attention paid to his acquittal.) They go on to criticize the profoundly racist tic of extrapolating from Arday’s alleged misconduct anything about other black academics. “Mr. Arday,” they observe, “is an individual.”

But the awe-stricken reporting on Arday’s rise was predicated just as much on suppressing his individuality as the bigoted postmortems of his demise. This observation gets at one of the errors we discern in the way that DEI efforts often play out: They put too much representative weight on isolated individuals. (Some have joked that the I in DEI stands for isolation.) There are real, and damaging, psychological consequences when individuals are constantly reminded that they are different or special — one of the few from their demographic groups to beat the odds and valuable to their institutions largely because of their difference from virtually everyone else in the faculty ranks. This “special minority” complex can manifest in at least two different ways: narcissism or chronic self-doubt. These outcomes are two halves of the same thought, each the product of a tokenizing system.

During the racial reckoning of the early 2020s, colleges were keen to diversify their faculties but were even keener to show that they were doing so. For that and perhaps more insidious reasons, higher ed was very attracted to such figures as Arday, black quasi-celebrities whose work and biographies made great demands on their white colleagues’ sympathies but slighter ones on their intellects, whose views on race might occasion them a tickle of guilt but not move them to shame. In the United States, Boston University pursued this strategy through its high-profile hiring of antiracist guru Ibram X. Kendi, whose appointment, probably not accidentally, came on the heels of increased scrutiny of its jaw-droppingly low enrollment numbers for black students. (Three years later, the university would appoint its first black and first woman president in its nearly two-century history.)

Afua Hirsch calls this a “pattern” “where the disproportionately few black people who are selected by white gatekeepers are sometimes chosen for reasons that seem to have little legitimacy among black peers.” The resistance of Howard University to Kendi’s appointment after BU — a move Kendi made after BU’s institutional guilt and love affair with him had subsided — helps to situate him as part of the pattern Hirsch identifies.

In different ways, both Arday and Kendi exemplify the pitfalls we’ve observed in DEI approaches that seek to insulate institutions from criticisms over their diversity by making a few highly visible hires. In addition to his feel-good story of flying through all of Hercules’s 12 labors, Arday, like Kendi, offered white readers Pollyannish roadmaps for ending racism that went down like water. Their work was popular and ripe for the post-Floyd moment, but, while administrators loved the reach of their work, much of the work of these scholars would not pass — and has not passed — muster in expert circles. Kendi might not have plagiarized, but the books that he has published in the years following his acclaimed Stamped From the Beginning (2016) increasingly suggest that his exchange of rigor for modish gains might be more than temporary.

Anointing these black scholars enabled the colleges to get the most optics bang for their buck, and to do so without having to alter their demographic makeups fundamentally. For the same amount of money that they paid to get Arday and Kendi, colleges interested in diversifying could have hired in large clusters, which would have helped to avoid the creation of special minorities. We can’t help but wonder whether the strategy here was to reap the media attention and diversity points that star hiring garners while obviating the need to diversify.

In any case, appointments of this kind incentivize their beneficiaries toward a narcissism that induces them to continue pandering to the tastes that won them their positions in the first place. They come to feel themselves immune to the assessments of their colleagues, vaulted into the stratosphere thanks to the admiration of a vast public and the support of calculating administrators. So they keep producing work that conforms to these expectations, even if that means giving their adoring audiences what they want — “embellishing [their] character,” as Tim Stanley writes of Arday, “to make it more attractive to the people with the purse strings.” Or, in Kendi’s case, cashing in with titles like Antiracist Baby.

But fame of this sort is fickle. Eventually, there comes a reckoning. Once some white liberals outlived their post-Floyd guilt, the very hype their colleges had conjured around these black scholars put a target on their backs. Arday was subjected to the new, AI-enabled stop-and-frisk practices seeking to expose black academics for plagiarism. As the history of racial profiling has demonstrated, if you stop enough black drivers and pedestrians, you are bound to find something incriminating, even though most people stopped are innocent.

Just as cultivating special minorities within the academy won’t profitably advance DEI’s worthwhile goals, neither will legacy media’s anointing “special” black DEI bashers. We have in mind Tyler Austin Harper’s most recent essay, “Why I Quit the Tenure Track,” a tendentious and highly suspect account of how big, bad DEI chased him away from the academy and into the arms of one of the cushiest jobs an intellectual could wish for. Harper treats readers to a colorful catalog of the gestural DEI performances of the species we all remember from the early 2020s. Ironically, his handwringing over an underqualified candidate who was almost hired but wasn’t suggests that DEI efforts were in far better shape at his former institution than he admits.

In a moment when DEI is utterly besieged, why narrate the story of taking a more congenial job as the unadulterated product of a DEI bogeyman, without even gesturing toward a path for DEI’s repair? Harper may not have intended to contribute to the surging anti-DEI sentiment of Trump 2.0, but his essay certainly does, as the online response suggests. In writing such an essay for the liberal audience of The Atlantic, he has helped to alienate one of the last remaining groups even remotely sympathetic toward DEI from the mission of making the academy and the country at large a more just place. In the wake of Arday’s tragic case, Harper has only fueled doubt about the qualifications of the black academics who have chosen to stick it out.

The imposition of specialness onto minorities in the academy is a flaw in the way that we do DEI, and it is a losing game. As we were finishing this essay, the heart-rending news of Jason Arday’s death broke. We cannot help wondering how differently things might have turned out for him had he found a way out of the straitjacket of specialness in which DEI traps so many. Is it possible to do so? We reached out to Harvard professor Namwali Serpell, one of Harper’s most lucid critics online and, as the first black woman tenured in the history of our oldest university’s English department, well acquainted with specialness. She points to a solution to this predicament: “Being the only one of your kind, in a classroom, in a meeting, in a department, is not easy. But the loneliness of that position — the anxiety, the frustration, the self-doubt — can in fact put you in relation with other people, the other ‘onlys.’ You might find them in your institution, discipline, circle, or community.”

The imposition of specialness onto minorities in the academy is a flaw in the way that we do DEI, and it is a losing game.

“My onlyness,” she continues, “can lead, with some work and generosity and willingness to disagree, to genuine solidarity and even change. I need not reify it into an identity afflicted with grievance; I need not drown in self-pity or lash out in resentment; I need not despair or retreat into nihilism; I need not make myself truly the only one left.”

As Serpell suggests, there are certainly things that individual minority faculty members (and students, for that matter) can do to avoid the “special” trap of DEI lite. But, perhaps more importantly, there are things that institutions can do to halt this false start. The first step would be to cease these kumbaya gestural moves that nobody wants and that embarrassingly single out minorities — kneeling in kente cloths, diversity days, and the like. In place of these empty deeds, colleges should hire larger numbers of minorities rather than focusing on the star hires, the ones that further enshrine special minorities and do little to alter the cultures or racial demographics of the institutions.

Some may worry that such efforts would face the same government-imposed hurdles in hiring diverse faculty that they would in admitting diverse pools of students. But there’s no reason to think that the constitutionally permissible tactics that Driver enumerates for admissions — hiring based on nonracial attributes, such as descent from slavery or immigration history — wouldn’t serve here. And, even when institutions do make star hires, they mustn’t do so without consulting experts in the fields in which they work, confining themselves to candidates who won’t discomfit the donors or the public.

We regret that Harper was not able to find his way toward the enlightened place that Serpell so elegantly describes, but, for the remaining minorities of color in the academy, there is an important lesson here: In order for DEI to work optimally, we must each resist the temptations of specialness, be they temptations toward megalomania or toward crippling self-doubt. And we must work to eradicate the conditions that feed this syndrome. It is hard work, but our very lives may well depend on it in stop-and-frisk academe.

Rafael Walker is an associate professor of English at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Bryan L. Sykes is a professor of public policy and sociology at Cornell University. This is a reprint of an essay published in The Chronicle last month.