Certainly without that he'd be alive still. However, the colleges that didn't check his apparently fanciful CV must bear some responsibility for putting him in that position.
About the first commonsense comment made by a lefty on this issue on this forum, but calling his CV "fanciful" is the understatement of the year so far.
His CV wasn't just fanciful, it was outright fabrication - lies made up from whole cloth!
False Institutional Claims:
He claimed to have held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University. This was a lie - he had never held those positions
Embellished Background:
He provided conflicting details regarding severe medical conditions. These were lies
Multi-million Dollar Charity Claim:
He claimed to be a massive fundraiser, claiming to have raised £5.5 million for various charities. This was yet another lie - independent audits could find no records of such funds ever being raised or distributed.
Physically Impossible Endurance Claims:
He claimed to have completed extreme physical feats, such as running 600 miles in just six days and completing 30 marathons in 35 days. Sports and medical experts pointed out that these feats are physically implausible, abd such accomplishments would have put him at the top of the most elite endurance athletes on the planet. Another lie, and one that should have beenm a HUGE red flag.
Fabricated Interview Subjects:
He attributed quotes research participants, but they were lifted directly from previous studies conducted by other people. SO more lies
Impossible Statistical Data:
Some of his papers were found to contain statistically impossible metrics, such as data percentages calculating to 110%. He didn't even check to see if the things he made up could have been consistent with reality
No Ethics Approval:
Investigators found no evidence that he ever secured mandatory institutional ethical approval for research that involved interviewing human participants.
Huge level of Plagiarism:
He STOLE the work of another academic (Brunel University's Paula Zwozdiak-Myers) for his degree. It wasn't just a few phrases here and there, it was whole sections of her work were copied and pasted, word for word. He lifted over 100 passages, some of them whole paragraphs, from Paula's near-identical 2009 thesis. He also used passages from other academics without sources or references.
Yeah, "fanciful" doesn't even begin to describe the level of sheer, bare-faced fraud this guy committed. And since his book has now been published, even more of his lies have been discovered.
So, how did he manage to get a professorship at one of Britain's most prestigious academic institutions? The answer is the Progressive Ideology that infests every aspect of academia these days. They really, really, REALLY wanted all this stuff to be true, they really wanted this guy to be their poster boy for DEI - so much so that they were prepared to overlook the glaringly obvious flaws in his character and his claims.
The media are in no way responsible for driving him to suicide, they were simply doing their job - to get at the truth about a fraud. Nor are any other politicians or bloggers or podcasters or YouTube content creators responsible. Mr Arday chose to be a fraud, liar and a cheat - he chose that path, and that path led him to where he ended up.
And yes, Cambridge University bear a large part of the responsibility for allowing the circumstances that allowed this to happen. They were warned about him, and chose to turn a blind eye. This is what happens when you let an ideology drive your better judgement!
ETA: Lets remember what Cambridge University's initial statement was....
They said, and I quote, Jason Arday is the
“victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”. They also said he had been
"cleared of allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications.”
So they did what eminent institutions always do to when confronted with criticism... they took steps to maintain their eminence. Yeah, they circled the ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ wagons!
ETA2: Cambridge didn't hire him because he was the strongest candidate for the job (which is the standard they should have maintained), they hired him because of the optics, because they knew how it would look... the youngest black professor. His appointment would look great in a diversity report and all the wokesters could pat each other on the back for a job well done.
The problem was that warnings about his work had already been circulating in academia for years. Those warnings went unheeded because the narrative and the optics were deemed to be more important than his competence.
Jason Arday paid the price for affirmative action.
www.bbc.co.uk
