Further Reflections on the Jason Arday Case

My post on the Jason Arday controversy, “Black Plagiarism Matters,” has gotten more-than-usual traffic for posts at this blog, much of it via Roderick Long’s Facebook page (thanks, Roderick), where there’s an extensive discussion of the post (much of it admittedly point-missing and pointless). One common criticism I’ve gotten there is that my bringing up the Martin Stone case (as a contrast to the Jason Arday case) is an instance of “whataboutism.” Like so much Internet slang, “whataboutism” is a package deal concept.  One part of the package captures something real and significant; the other embodies a confusion.  A criticism involving an uninspected package deal ends up committing a fallacy of equivocation, which is my response to all of these criticisms. All of them commit a fallacy of equivocation.

In one sense, “whataboutism” refers to a fallacy of diversion. Suppose that we’re arguing about p. Someone then randomly decides to change the subject of conversation from p to q. Suppose that the aim of doing so is to divert attention away from p so as to discuss q on the premise that p taken straight is too unpalatable to discuss. As one logic textbook puts it, “The fallacy of diversion consists in changing the issue in the middle of an argument” (David Kelley, The Art of Reasoning, 4th ed., p. 131). And I agree that that is a fallacy.  

Notice that to commit a fallacy of diversion the person committing the fallacy has to change the original subject to a separate and irrelevant subject in order to divert attention from the original subject. Satisfaction of the italicized phrases is necessary and sufficient for committing the fallacy. If you’re going to accuse someone of committing a fallacy of diversion, then, you have to show that they’ve changed the original topic to a new one; that this new topic is irrelevant to the old; and that the “whataboutist” is “whatabouting” so as to divert attention from the old. This implies in turn that the accuser needs a principle that shows when one topic has changed into a new one; a principle that shows when this new one is irrelevant to the old one; and evidence that the aim in introducing the new topic is to divert attention from the old one. You can’t just mouth the phrase “whataboutism” and call it a day.

A demonstration of intent is, I admit, a tall order. So I would say that you can accuse someone of diversion in a lesser sense without demonstrating intent. But you still have work to do. You still have to show that a new topic has been introduced, and that this new topic is irrelevant to the original one. My critics haven’t done that or even tried.

It’s worth noting that since I’m the author of my own post (no one has claimed that I plagiarized it), I am the one introducing the topic here. My topic is: the discrepancy in coverage between the Martin Stone case and the Jason Arday case. You may not like that topic (in which case you’re free to ignore it), but you can’t accuse me of “whataboutism” if I discuss my own topic on my own terms. If whataboutism is at issue, I should be accusing my critics of “whataboutism” for fixating on Jason Arday while ignoring Martin Stone. But there are so many accusations to make of them–they’ve served up so much nonsense–that it’s easy to miss one.

In another sense, “whataboutism” is just another word for “inquiry.” All inquiry takes the form of connecting one issue to another, and so, takes the form of asking “What about this?” to some original that. If this is what my critics are objecting to, they’re objecting to thought as such. I don’t regard this as a cogent objection. It’s not clear what the objection is supposed to be, or how one makes it without self-refutation.

To put the point in somewhat more technical terms, what we’re trying to do in inquiry is to be epistemically justified in our beliefs, where part of the task of epistemic justification is achieving coherence, or reflective equilibrium. For any belief p, what a truth-seeking inquirer is trying to do, qua truth-seeking, is to put p into a larger logical and explanatory context. If p is a candidate for belief, she wants to make sure that p is at minimum consistent with her other beliefs (or in the case of a group, with their shared beliefs). Going beyond this, she wants to check the coherence of her beliefs beyond mere consistency. The issue isn’t just whether p contradicts other beliefs she holds, but whether acceptance of p is broadly plausible or sensibly fits with her other beliefs. To do this, she needs to ask questions about implications and explanatory relations: supposing that p is true, what else is also true? If q is what else turns out to be true, why did it turn out to be true?

There’s no way to engage in that sort of inquiry without “whataboutism.” “Whataboutism” is just a word for the relevant inquiry as such. It’s also a word for the epistemic virtue we call “curiosity.” If this is what you’re excoriating, what you’re attacking is reason, not me. Feel free to attack reason, if you like, but don’t blame me if it bites you back.

Norman Daniels puts the point this way in a famous paper about reflective equilibrium:

Wide reflective equilibrium keeps us from taking considered moral jugments at face value, however much they may be treated as starting points in our theory construction. Rather, they are always subjected to exhaustive review and are ‘tested,’ as are the moral principles, against a relevant body of theory. At every point, we are forced to assess their acceptability relative to theories that incorporate them and relative to alternative theories incorporating different considered moral judgments (Norman Daniels, “Wide Reflective Equilibrium and Theory Acceptance in Ethics,” reprinted in Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory and Practice, p. 28).

It seems like a heady mouthful (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor), but what he’s defending there is precisely whataboutism.

Let me translate Norman Danielese into the present context. We all know that plagiarism and fraud are wrong. That’s a considered moral judgment. At this point, we also know that Jason Arday committed both plagiarism and fraud. That’s an application of our considered moral judgment to a particular case. But we also know from background knowledge that a lot of people, from Joe Biden to Monica Crowley to Doris Kearns Goodwin to Stephen Ambrose to Pete Hegseth to Neri Oxman to Martin Stone, have committed the same offense. And perhaps there are other cases we’ve never heard of.

Yet Arday has evoked a response that the others have not evoked.  Some part of the discrepancy may be explainable by the relative egregiousness of Arday’s offense. But that can’t be the whole explanation. What explains the degree of outrage and the form it’s taken after all the facts are in?

And how does the Arday case fare as against contrasting cases? How did Martin Stone get away with plagiarism for sixteen years? And why is it that once discovered, the Stone case never took off in the mainstream media? How did Joe Biden become President of the United States despite hard evidence that he had plagiarized Neil Kinnock decades earlier? Why didn’t the discovery wreck Biden’s career as it has Arday’s? How did Pete Hegseth become Secretary of Defense despite plagiarizing his senior thesis at Princeton? Why didn’t that discovery wreck his career? How did Neri Oxman manage to destroy Claudine Gay’s career but escape adverse consequences for doing exactly what Gay had been accused of doing? Was it so obvious that Gay was guilty and Oxman innocent? How did Doris Kearns Goodwin manage to have a flourishing career after the revelations about her plagiarism? Does this prove that there is hope for Arday, or does it prove that different standards apply to Arday than apply to Goodwin? And why would they?

Can we ask these questions and get answers by ignoring the races of the individuals involved? Can we take race entirely out of the equation and still understand what’s going on in the Arday case? If race is relevant, how does it become relevant? We have general principles at our disposal for understanding race. How do they fare in this inquiry? And how do they get applied? It’s worth testing them against the case, and the case against the principles. The result should be reflective equilibrium via the asking of “whatabout” questions. Contrary to Daniels, you’re only “forced” to assess the acceptability of your normative commitments if you care about coherence in the first place. But once you do, you are forced. And if you don’t care, the price is incoherence. Up to you.

Here is another twist on the Arday case. If you dig a bit beyond the face value claims of mainstream media, you come to learn that the Jason Arday controversy came about through the concerted efforts of a “race realist” scholar, Nathan Cofnas. In a very real way (so to speak), the Arday case is Cofnas’s story, and Cofnas has structured the controversy around his own ideological fixations.

Cofnas is a “race realist.” “Race realism” is widely regarded as a synonym for “scientific racism.” Common belief therefore entails that Cofnas is a scientific racist. On Cofnas’s framing, the Arday case is meant to be a confirmation of his claim that black people are inferior to whites and don’t belong in academia; they belong largely in sports and entertainment. At a secondary level, the Arday case is meant to be a general indictment of academic life, intended to “prove” that the “rot” in higher education is a fundamentally left-wing phenomenon so that the time has come to stick it to the woke academy. And part of the “rot,” on this reading, derives from affirmative action: there are lots of undeserving black people in higher education, goes the implication, and appeasement of their lack of merit is a fundamental problem in that domain. Jason Arday is therefore just the tip of the iceberg. If you accept Cofnas’s framing, the presence of black people in higher education is a prima facie problem in need of resolution. When you see a black professor somewhere, you should start by wondering what they’re doing in academia, and hold in mind the suspicion that their presence is the result of a DEI fraud.

This framing, though putatively at odds with liberalism, has won a surprising degree of acceptance in mainstream intellectual culture. A paradigm example is Jesse Singal’s August 8 column in The New York Times, “A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows that Universities Don’t Get It.” I don’t mean to suggest that Singal accepts Cofnas’s framing in toto, or that Singal is himself a race realist. I mean that what he’s done is mention Cofnas pro forma, treat Cofnas’s race realism is irrelevant to Cofnas’s own story, then detach the story from that part of Cofnas’s account and sign on to most of the rest. Cofnas, Singal tells us, is “not an ideal messenger.” Ideal messenger or not, Singal echoes Cofnas in insisting that the Arday case is the tip of an iceberg and that it indicates a generalized, structural problem in higher education. Singal provides no evidence whatsoever for this generalization beyond a zealous fixation on the Arday case itself. The fixation turns out to be the strongest evidence Singal offers for the generalization.

“We cannot win,” Cofnas writes of his racist “hereditarian” colleagues, “without bringing a substantial number of the elites to our side.” Singal’s acceptance of Cofnas’s framing proves that Cofnas is winning, and winning with the eager acquiescence of supposed liberals like Singal himself. It’s remarkable that Singal regards Arday’s presence in academia as a world-historical scandal, but regards Cofnas’s presence as totally uncontroversial. He can do this only by fixating on Arday while evading what Cofnas has to say about his explicitly racist ideological project. This is not because Cofnas has been shy or reticent about his beliefs or aspirations, but because liberals like Singal want to pretend that they have the luxury of ignoring them.

We might wonder, beyond this one case, how all of this is supposed to work. How does fixation on a single case produce evidence for generalizations beyond the case? The Arday case does not, by itself, prove any of the things Singal wants to say about higher education. The latter are assumptions he’s brought to the table, and then supposedly confirmed by the case. That’s precisely why “whatabout” questions need to be asked. Singal has achieved what epistemologists call narrow reflective equilibrium–the Arday case proves his larger verdict on higher education–but wants to urge it on us as though it was wide reflective equilibrium. He wants us to accept a general diagnosis without considering the broader range of evidence relevant to such a diagnosis. That’s why the contrast with the Stone case is so instructive. Once you introduce the contrast, it becomes clear that plagiarism controversies are driven by a larger political subtext. If the subtext is there as in the Arday case, you get a controversy. If it isn’t, as in the Stone one, you don’t. How does that cohere with the claim that the Arday case proves what’s wrong with higher education? Why doesn’t the Stone case prove something, too?

What people like Singal have not really grappled with is that the larger subtext in the Arday case has been supplied by the far Right. The far Right is not simply “not an ideal messenger,” but the vanguard of a fascist subversion of liberal democracy as such. The Stone case doesn’t matter to such people because it doesn’t fit their fascist script. The question then becomes: why doesn’t it matter to people who claim to reject that script? As my friend James Stacey Taylor of The College of New Jersey correctly reminds me, he’s written hundreds of pages about the scholarly malfeasances of white scholars. None of that has found its way into mainstream coverage. More to the point, none of it has served to structure generalizations about “the nature of the problem with higher education today.” All of it is routinely written off as somehow irrelevant to any such generalization. Why?

There are many tips of many icebergs in higher education, many of them flatly inconsistent with the framing of the Arday case. As a casualty of one of these icebergs, I know that in more intimate detail than almost any of the journalistic hacks running with the Arday story. I was pushed out of higher education six years ago by a Trump supporting donor to my university who admitted to handing out grades to students despite not teaching the class he was hired to teach. He spent class time curating his social media instead of doing his job. He failed one of my advisees despite this admission, forcing her to re-take the class at her own expense. The student was black, and there was some evidence of racial animus against her. The university accepted this person’s fraudulent grades by demanding that I keep the whole matter on the “down low.” When I pressed the issue, they accused me of “creating a hostile work environment” for a self-admitted fraud who had admitted that he hadn’t been coming to work, but had been handing out grades anyway. His absence from work is what occasioned the conflict in the first place, along with the admitted, known fraudulence of the grades he submitted with the full knowledge of the Registrar, along with the demand that I cover up everything I had uncovered. 

Faced with the certainty of being found guilty of the hostile workplace charge, I resigned on the spot. I lost my job, my career, my home, my possessions, and my wife in the process. When I say “I lost my wife,” I mean she died: she committed suicide from the duress of the ordeal. The guilty party (who was Cuban, i.e., either white or Hispanic, depending on your preferences) suffered no adverse consequences whatsoever. He’s a big name in right-wing media in New Jersey. No one has ever written my case up in The New York Times, the Guardian, or Times Higher Education. Not that I want them to. I don’t trust these incompetent hacks any farther than I can throw them.

I mention my case not to elicit sympathy but to point to a double standard. It’s not just speculation but knowledge that my case is one of dozens like it: academic malfeasance that simply does not fit the script of the “woke academy” doing its woke thing. And these are just the cases I personally happen to know. The more you look, the more you find. A Trump supporting donor who defrauds a university, and the white leadership of the university that accepts the fraud and then demands silence of a whistleblower (while retaliating against him), is not a case of a woke university engaged in wokeness. It’s a case of an ideologically unscrupulous university placating a right-wing donor and throwing a thirteen-year veteran of the institution under the bus to do so. It’s not my fault that my story doesn’t fit the reigning script. Nor is it my fault that the arbiters of contemporary discourse have a script. The culpability lies with people who insist that their script overrides reality.

The Jason Arday case should, by rights, now be over. The case against Arday is essentially overwhelming, and Arday himself has resigned. Why isn’t the case over? Why are people still talking about it? Because it represents something beyond the case itself. Well, so do a lot of things. What about those things? A question worth asking.