False Self-Construction

Until last week, one of the most prestigious positions in global academia was occupied by a 37-year-old Black man who had received his PhD just eight years ago. He served as professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, holding a professorial fellowship as well at Jesus College. His colleagues dubbed him “the best in the world” in the field of race, inequality, and education, and the university considered him “an exceptional scholar” and “renowned sociologist.”

His name is Jason Arday, and today the places he occupied at Cambridge sit vacant. Arday resigned from his positions after the university announced its investigation into his academic and personal record, with charges of plagiarism and academic fraud having been leveled against him. Further, Arday’s astonishing, impossible life story – a story that had been central to his professional success – had also come under fire, and it has since been exposed for what it really was: in fact impossible.

Stories like Arday’s are, unfortunately, not the first. Recent years have seen universities plagued by accusations of falsified research on the part of their professors, with scholars taking to desperate tactics amidst a cutthroat professional market.

Less common, though, has been professors’ falsification of their own identities. Perhaps the strangest detail of Arday’s story is how far he went to present himself as just what he knew academia was looking for: a person who had triumphed over adversity, particularly race- and neurodivergence-related adversity. Arday claimed, for instance, to have been unable to speak until the age of eleven, to have been illiterate until eighteen (despite passing two academic qualification exams at the age of sixteen), to have developed epilepsy after being physically attacked as a teenager, and to have suffered a car accident that put him in a three-month coma. He also claimed that he was threatened twice by a masked intruder while studying at university on account of his race, and that he was mailed a severed pig’s head at his parent’s home, all while also receiving multiple rape and death threats. And that’s just a fraction of the narrative he’d concocted.

So what’s going on here? Why would Arday go to such lengths to get his foot in the door, and why did academia believe him for much longer than one would think? This First Things piece detailing the story suggests that Arday was operating “within a professional field and society obsessed with identity and self-construction.” He was living in a world obsessed with the individual, in other words, one which glorifies someone’s capacity to be who he is, free from the fetters of oppression or societal judgment. He had therefore become expert at casting himself as the very person our culture wants someone to be: unique, transparent, and true-to-self, beating the odds with self-constructed identity intact. As a result, Arday was able to walk through an open door. Everyone wanted to believe in him, for their sake as much as his.

Perhaps, though, that’s not the only thing going on here. The irony of this story is that in order to pursue academia’s standard of “identity and self-construction,” Arday in fact gave up his identity and self-construction. He invented a life story that was not his own, and he entered his professional life false to himself, operating out of a cover for his real identity.

The irony is suggestive of something that lurks under the surface of Arday’s sad fall from grace. Our culture may say that we want big, self-sufficient identities for ourselves, but that isn’t actually what we want. What we really want is to belong to something that goes beyond just us: we want a shared, common identity. Arday, for instance, was securing for himself some kind of acceptance into a wider community – whether that be the academic or Black or neurodivergent one. It would be unfair to speculate too widely on his motives, but it does seem reasonable to say that without the allure of that kind of acceptance, the big, self-sufficient identity he was crafting for himself wouldn’t have been quite so attractive.

Our mode of discourse today asserts how wonderful it that we’re able to create ourselves, to become whomever we want to be. The problem is that who we want to be is not just me. As soon as individualism has taken root in our culture, people have begun lunging after some sort of communal identity, too – a phenomenon as much at the heart of our “identity politics” as notions of self-construction. And this should come as no surprise, given the way we were made: God put us together as individuals who belong to communities, providing for us the community of the Church most of all. We are individual as well as social, intrinsically and necessarily. But when we’ve stripped God from being the basis of our communal identity, as we have in the West, we have to look around for something that signals for us communion with others. And we’ll go to any lengths to belong to what we want to.

The Church, though, does indeed offer an alternative. One of the gifts of Christianity is that it is truly individual and truly communal. In fact it is the only seriously organized multinational institution in the world, welcoming people as precisely who and what they are into a body that goes beyond but genuinely incorporates them. To have abandoned that option as we have was probably to set ourselves up for a tragedy like Jason Arday’s: where to find the community we need, we risk having to give up precisely who we are.