DEI made Jason Ardays career and its cult of woke killed him

Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity.The tragedy of Jason Arday — the Cambridge professor found dead of apparent suicide amid an ugly plagiarism scandal — is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI.The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of “decolonization” and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unraveled, as it inevitably would.No one can deny it now: Wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies.Journalists found a story and they told it; it was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs.The death of Arday is not only dreadful — it is enraging.It feels like a catastrophe foretold.Indeed, some of us wondered out loud if Arday had friends around him as the media storm over his alleged fabulism grew and went global.It was reckless in the extreme for the intellectual elites to fashion a new “black genius’’ and then say “Oops” when his carefully curated legend started to fray at the seams.They condemned him with their fawning.This is the poison chalice of the state religion of diversity.It lays traps for the very people it celebrates.It hand-picks members of “the oppressed’’ for moral anointment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials.That’s the toxic bargain of identity politics: It builds teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace is often twice as fatal.And what a pedestal they made for Arday.They worshipped him as “the best in the world.’’They beatified him as a black wunderkind whose very presence in a place such as Cambridge might help to wash away its sins of whiteness.They canonized him as a living monument to “decolonization.”It was precisely this, their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black savior, that made them turn a blind eye to the questionable elements of Arday’...