The most important lesson of the sad Jason Arday tale isn't that "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" (DEI) practices lead to a deterioration of standards in organizations that adopt them (they obviously do, with merit necessarily downgraded). Or that they establish a fertile environment for fabulists and frauds within which to operate.

No, and as true as all that might be, the most important lesson is that DEI turns people into cowards.

Arday was able to rise to the very top (youngest black professor at Cambridge and media celebrity) because at every step along the way it appears colleagues and administrators didn't dare vet his credentials and claims in the same way they vetted those of different pigmentation; they were afraid to look too closely out of fear of what they might find, and what would happen to them if they then revealed it.

Apart from the serial plagiarism (beginning, extensively, with his doctoral dissertation), some of Arday's claims were so inherently preposterous--that he was illiterate until age 18, that he once ran an absurd 600 miles in just six days, that he appeared in a BBC documentary that actually aired more than 20 years before he was born, that he ran 30 marathons in 36 days, some with a broken leg--that it is almost impossible to measure the........

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