Critics of DEI have rightly focused on its victims. These include both individuals, mostly white men who lost jobs or were denied promotions, and society as a whole, in the form of lower performance standards in vital industries such as healthcare, aviation, and public safety.

Yet DEI also harms its beneficiaries. It not only denies their individuality by dissolving them into an abstraction for political gain, but it also sets them up for ruin.

Every position has objective qualifications. People either meet those standards or they don’t. This includes academia. Good teaching, scholarship, and research have impartial criteria, no matter the discipline. Responsible academics — they still exist, though far too few speak up — know the difference between an excellent scholar, a mediocre scholar, and someone who can’t make the cut.

Arday’s applications should never have passed initial screenings. The fact that he was eventually given tenure and touted as “the best in the world” beggars belief.

Setting aside the plagiarism and outlandish personal claims, a perusal of his work reveals that he cannot clearly communicate ideas or explain how concepts relate to one another. That’s like being a pitcher who can’t throw a strike or a pilot who can’t land a plane. The most basic elements of being a professor lay beyond his reach.

Pointing out this lack of competency is not a moral judgment. Arday is responsible for lying, stealing others’ work, and calling the police on the journalist investigating his fraudulent output. But he’s not responsible for getting into a doctoral program, landing a plum job, and then becoming a celebrated icon among the cultural elite. That fault belongs to Liverpool John Moores University, which granted him a doctorate on a plagiarized dissertation with a grammatical error in the title; Cambridge University, which awarded him a full professorship when he was 37; and every other institution that uncritically promoted him, such as the BBC.

Nobody would know Arday’s name, and he would likely still be alive if any of these places had simply and quietly said, “Thank you for your interest, but this submission does not meet our standards,” at any point during his manufactured career arc. But like a child emperor being feted at court, he was lauded every step of the way.

Who benefits from this systemic failure? Certainly not the students who could tell Arday didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Certainly not the institutions that now have to explain why anyone should take them seriously. And certainly not Arday himself, whose professional life and personal reputation were always living on borrowed time, just one easy discovery away from total collapse.

The only “winners” from this debacle are the people who raised him up in the first place. They profited from his graduate-student days by telling themselves, and others, that they were giving the right kind of person an opportunity to advance. They profited from his professorship by pedestaling his identity and showing him public homage. And they are still set to literally profit from his life, and death, by selling his biography.

The greatest benefit to them, however, is not in his rise to fame but in his unhappy fall.

The narrative has already formed: Arday didn’t take his life because he was caught lying, cheating, and seeking to punish others for noticing. He took his life because of, yes, racism.

If the DEI practitioners can get this charge to stick, that it’s not only racist to call out fraud when “marginalized” groups commit it, but also potentially deadly, then they attain an exponentially higher level of immunity from public scrutiny and accountability.

The lesson is thus clear for anyone considering poking around old theses, CVs, and obscure articles looking for more fraud among Arday’s academic collaborators: “Hey bigots, you wouldn’t want another death on your hands, would you? (There’s no telling how our street supporters might respond).”

THE U.S. IS HELPING CHAVISMO SURVIVE WITHOUT MADURO

Arday benefited the DEI cult on his way up. But he’s now worth more than ever to it on his way out. A DEI martyr, he died so that his crocodile-teared champions may continue enjoying their own unmerited social and economic privileges without being outed as impostors.

DEI didn’t only set Arday up for catastrophic failure. It groomed him into the perfect sacrifice to perpetuate its reign.