More on the Jason Arday Controversy
Whenever I discuss the Jason Arday case, I get accused of “whataboutism.” As I’ve argued at some length, I find this an unimpressive criticism, but there’s a simpler and more obvious way of putting things than I previously did. The fact is that there is no way to avoid whataboutism when discussing the Arday case, and no one is in fact avoiding it. The people accusing people like me of whataboutism are simply blind to their own engagement in it. The issue is not whether to engage in whataboutism, but which whataboutism to engage in. About what should we be whatabout-ing?

To state the obvious: Jason Arday is dead. So discussions of The Arday Case can no longer be about what to do about him. His death solves that problem by default. Any further discussion about The Case must therefore be about the larger topics broached by his conduct, and by the accusations made against him. All discussions of “the larger topics broached by his conduct and the accusations made against him” are whataboutism. They ask: take the facts of the Arday case as settled; what about what those facts imply for larger issues beyond Arday himself?

And that’s exactly how Arday’s critics have framed things. Jesse Singal’s New York Times essay is representative of the general trend: “A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows that Universities Don’t Get It,” is the title. This says: what about what the Arday case says about university cluelessness in general? The article is not, and doesn’t purport to be, a discussion of the Arday case focused exclusively on Arday, and conducted as an end-in-itself.

Here is how Singal explicitly puts the larger issues that go beyond Arday himself:

If interest in this story peters out, that would be unfortunate, because what’s needed now is genuine accountability. This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but by acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny. Their decisions were both wrong and further damaged the reputation of higher education at a time when it has come under withering and sometimes unfair attack.

This is whataboutism. It says: the real issue is not Arday as such. It’s larger. We should therefore not confine ourselves to the Arday case per se. We should ask questions about other things as well. What about accountability? What about academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics? What about Cambridge and other institutions’ general tendency to circle the wagons, not confined to this case? What about the lack of scrutiny given to DEI hires quite generally? What about academia’s reputation? What about academia’s future? The only guarantee of prolonging the controversy is to engage in whataboutism. The more whatabouts we raise, the longer it lasts. The longer it lasts, the less danger that it “peters out.”

If The Issue was Arday himself, the controversy would have died with Arday’s death. It has not died because it was never exclusively about Arday in the first place. Arday was a stand-in or proxy for other things. When an issue is not exclusively about X, it’s partly about something else, Y. If topic X connects with topic Y, then comprehensive inquiries about X require us to ask questions about Y. This is another way of saying that discussion of X requires asking: what about Y? Which is another way of saying that such discussions require whataboutism. Welcome to the realm of cognition.

Three things are worth pointing out here. First, contrary to Singal and many others, the facts of the Arday case are not settled. They’re highly contested and highly contestable. This piece by Middle East Eye lays out the particulars.* As it makes clear, many of the accusations made against Arday are either false or unproven. If the facts themselves are in dispute, and they clearly are, we’re entitled to ask: what about that? What about the fact that so many people have treated contested facts as incontestable? Why have they done so?

Second, Singal’s account of the particulars is typical: he gives few particulars and provides few sources; he makes no effort to deal with counter-evidence or to deal with hypotheses at odds with the ones he adopts, and in general, makes no effort to deal with the uncertainty that attends every accusation made against Arday. I simply mention this for now, since I intend to devote a whole post to the breathtaking shoddiness of Singal’s handling of the evidence. For now I’ll just say: if the facts are in dispute (as they clearly are), and someone gives us a blatantly handwaving account of the evidence, disingenuously pretending to a certainty he hasn’t earned (as Singal clearly does), we’re entitled to ask: what about that? Why are so many people demanding so imperiously that we accept one narrative of this case, and treating open-ended inquiry about it as sympathy for malfeasance–malfeasance whose very existence begs the question?

This post by Stephen Hicks illustrates the trend in an even more extreme way. Hicks has so far done nothing to prove the bill of particulars against Arday. He has, without argument, and without consideration of any of the details of the evidence, assumed that the entire bill of particulars against Arday must be true. Having done so, he fast-forwards to a cosmic, well-poisoning account of the whole affair. Either you oppose Arday, he implies, or you’re a partisan of what he calls downstream postmodernist insanity–“a generation of semi-psychotic, semi-neurotic, ignorant, and hostile whim-worshippers.” The minimum that can be said is that it’s paradigmatic whataboutism. It says: never mind the facts; what about what the Arday case says about my Big Thesis about postmodernism? The actual facts matter less than the mileage to be gotten from hypothetical ones.

But we’re entitled to ask in return: what about the evidential weakness of the entire exercise? Why the indifference to facts by this apostle of reason? What about the well-poisoning involved in his presentation, and the unwarranted inferential leaps he makes, and demands of his readers? What about the fact that the author seems to be exploiting Arday’s death to promote his pet theory, dancing on his grave to grow his audience, and generally treating the whole affair as an opportunity for career advancement?

If the anti-Arday authors are all going to engage in whataboutism (as they all do), we’re entitled to ask why their whatabouts matter more than any other whatabouts. There’s no a priori reason to assume that Jesse Singal’s or Stephen Hicks’s concerns about academia matter more than anyone else’s. If whatabouting is permissible, as it clearly is, it’s an open question what we’re to whatabout about.

I’m a former academic of twenty-six years’ experience, forced out of my academic position after blowing the whistle on a Trump supporter at my university who had committed fraud on the job, and admitted to doing so. I have editorial experience at three academic journals (Academic Questions, the Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, and Reason Papers) and for the U.S. Department of Education (through NAEP), and in that capacity have observed (and had to rectify) some eye-popping malfeasance by supposedly respectable scholars.

All of these scholars were white. All were well-respected and well-credentialed. Some were famous. All acted as though their particular brand of intellectual malfeasance was, given their stature, a God-given right that no mere editor, fact-checker, or intern should dare to question. I either had to override them or find a way to induce someone else to override them, lest they commit fraud in the pages I was tasked with editing or checking.

I won no prizes, accolades, or public attention for preventing their frauds from happening; they earned no discredit or disapprobation for attempting them. All that happened was that the publications in question dodged some bullets, and life went on, year after year, decade after decade. I am far, far from the only person in this position. All academic editors, sub-editors, copy-editors, fact-checkers, compositors, and editorial interns can tell such stories. It’s what we talk about when we get together. Given that, I see no reason to take the concerns or framing of non-academic observers-from-afar like Jesse Singal to be conclusive or overriding of mine. As someone who has known Stephen Hicks for decades and regards him as a disingenuous, fact-challenged, opportunist hack, I don’t find his framing obvious, either.

If we’re all whatabouting at this point, then it’s an understatement to say that my whatabouts are at least as good as anyone else’s. What the Arday case implies about “larger issues” depends on a prior understanding of what you think the larger issues are. I don’t think that the relevant larger issue is wokeness, or DEI, or postmodernist psychosis, and there’s no reason why the Arday case, by itself, should convince me otherwise. What I have seen over a lifetime is a totally non-ideological distribution of malfeasance in intellectual life, explained exclusively by the purely individual vices of the offender. Dishonest people do dishonest things, regardless of what creed they profess. The explanation for their dishonesty rests with their own agency and their own character, and each person exercises the one and forms the other on their own. No particular form of dishonesty looms larger than any other. I’ve seen them all, and seen people get away with them all.

What the Arday case shows, in my view, is the politicized selectivity of outrage when it comes to matters of intellectual integrity. When a case confirms prior beliefs about the evils of wokeness or DEI, it becomes a cause celebre. When a case fails to do so, it’s ignored and brushed aside as an irrelevancy or anomaly.

The question that I regard as worth asking is why this happens, and happens so often. Why Arday but not Martin Stone? Why Arday but not Pete Hegseth? Why the focus on Arday’s mentors, but not Hegseth’s, i.e., Patrick Deneen? Why Arday but not William O’Reilly? Why Arday but not Bernard-Henry Levi? Why Arday but not Alan Dershowitz? Why Arday but not Joe Biden, Stephen Ambrose, or Doris Kearns Goodwin? Why Claudine Gay and Jason Arday but not Neri Oxman? Why Arday but not Walter Duranty? Why the refusal to consider the claims of plagiarism experts that the issue is not DEI but academia as such? Could it be the outsized, unearned influence possessed by certain parties to the controversy, who exercise selectivity about what matters, and who claim, without argument, that their selectivity mirrors the structure of the world? What about that? Or are we not allowed to ask?

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*There have been some access problems with this site, but if my link doesn’t work, the article is Imran Mulla, “Jason Arday’s marathon challenge and other claims found to be true after his death,” Middle East Eye, published August 20, 2026, 11:03 BST.