The Apostrophe in the Title

“Not very bright, not well educated, but a great sense of wisdom and heart.” Jean Stapleton

On Edith Bunker, Cambridge University, and the difference between knowing things and knowing people

When I was carrying my first son, I went out on maternity leave about six weeks before he came. Six weeks is a long time to sit in a house waiting on a baby. I filled it with reruns. Mork and Mindy in the afternoons. All in the Family whenever I could find it.

I loved that show. I loved Archie, who was a bigot and a hard worker and, underneath all of it, a man with a warm heart he was too proud to show anybody. I loved that Norman Lear set it in Queens in the early seventies, at 704 Hauser Street in Astoria, in a neighborhood that was changing block by block and a man who could not stop it from changing. That is a real American story and the show told it without flinching.

What I loved most was Edith.

The household had a hierarchy and everybody in it knew where they stood. Archie sat in the chair and told you what was what. Mike Stivic, the son-in-law, had the education, or was working on it. He was a graduate student living rent free in Archie's house, and he never let a conversation pass without letting you know he had read something you had not. Gloria was somewhere in the middle, half her father and half her husband. And Edith was the dingbat. That was the word. Archie said it to her face for nine seasons and the audience laughed every time.

Edith was also, in nearly every episode, the only person in that house who understood what was actually happening.

Books were not her friends and classes weren't a pastime. She took care of her family and her neighbors. She paid attention to what people did rather than what they announced, and she held onto a moral sense of right and wrong that she never once had to look up. The educated man in the room would argue himself into a corner and Edith would say one plain sentence and the corner would disappear. Everyone came around to her eventually. Nobody ever admitted that was what had happened.

      *

I have been thinking about Edith Bunker all week because of a man who died in London on Friday afternoon.

Jason Arday was born in 1985, just four years before my son crossed over into life. His parents were Ghanaian and he lived on a council estate in Clapham. He earned a doctorate from Liverpool John Moores University. In March 2023, at thirty-seven, he was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. The university announced that he was the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship in its eight-hundred-year history. Cambridge's pro-vice-chancellor for education called him "an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education."

Let me say plainly what I think about that appointment before I say anything else. A Black man from a council estate reaching a professorial chair at Cambridge is a good thing. It should happen more. The institutions that kept people like him out for centuries owe a debt they have barely begun to pay, and I have no interest in joining the chorus of people who are delighted this week because they never wanted him there in the first place.

Here is what happened to Jason.

In July, allegations of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis became public. The Telegraph commissioned an analysis and reported more than a hundred passages identical or nearly identical to a 2009 thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a doctoral student at Brunel University, on a closely related subject. Dave Harris, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University, went on the record saying that important sections of the thesis and of subsequent published articles appear to show serious plagiarism, and that he had alerted both Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores about it in 2023. Two years before any of this reached a newspaper, somebody told them.

On the first of August, the Guardian published an investigation by Lanre Bakare into the biography itself. Arday had said he ran six hundred miles in six days. He had said he raised more than five million pounds running thirty marathons in thirty-five days. He had said a masked man came to his workplace and threatened him, and the Guardian found nothing on the CCTV and no colleague who saw it. He had said a pig's head was sent to his parents' home and that the police traced the butcher, and the Metropolitan Police said no such inquiry took place. When Bakare pressed him on the missing evidence, Arday answered: "I thought you'd just believe me. Why would I lie?"

He resigned on the fourth of August. He denied the plagiarism to the end, while acknowledging that he had made some mistakes during his doctorate. He was found unresponsive at an address in Battersea on Friday the fourteenth and pronounced dead at forty-one. The police have said the death is unexpected and not believed to be suspicious. A file has gone to the coroner. His family says a campaign of abuse and misinformation killed him.

It was tragic to hear of Arday's death indeed, and I am aware his family are grieving. It is true nothing I have to say is worth adding weight to that. So I am not going to attempt to write about what was in his heart. I am going to write about what was on the front of his dissertation.

      *

The thesis is four hundred and one pages long. This is its title:

An exploration of peer-monitoring among student teachers' to inform reflective practice within the context of action research

Read it again. Student teachers' to inform. There is a possessive apostrophe sitting there with nothing to possess. That is no subtle error. It is also not a matter of British usage versus American usage. It is the kind of thing that stops your eye on the first pass, and when the Telegraph prints that title it now marks the spot with a bracketed sic so nobody thinks the newspaper made the mistake.

That title was on the front of a document that a supervisor guided. It went to examiners who read it and questioned him on it and passed it. It sat in a university repository. It went onto a curriculum vitae. It traveled through appointment committees at Durham, at Glasgow, and finally at Cambridge, where people whose entire professional standing rests on their ability to evaluate scholarship looked at his record and called him exceptional. Somewhere in that chain are dozens of highly credentialed men and women, and not one of them fixed an apostrophe on a title page.

I am not a grammarian. Grammar mistakes had been my middle name and I still will overlook many a grammatical mistake. I have fought with my own commas my whole writing life. And I saw Jason's mistake in about four seconds.

So what would have to be true for that title to survive every stage of that process?

I can think of only a few answers and none of them are comfortable. Either nobody read it, or people read it and did not notice, or people noticed and did not think it was their place to say. I will let you decide which is worse. What I will say is that any of the three tells you the same thing about the machinery: at no point did it do the thing it exists to do.

      *

Now let me slow down right here, because there is a question underneath the surface that matters more than the scandal.

What exactly did Cambridge evaluate?

Clearly it neglected to evaluate the prose. We have established that. Did the professors of such a fine and intellectual institution evaluate the scholarship? The plagiarism claim was in their hands in 2023 and yet the appointment stood. Did they evaluate the credentials? His doctorate was real, the teaching posts at Durham and Glasgow were real, the publications existed. Something was doing the work of persuasion, and it was not the pages.

I think it was the story. I think the biography had become part of the intellectual product.

Consider what the institution got. An eight-hundred-year-old university with a documented history of exclusion could point at a man and say: look what is possible here now. The narrative did something for Cambridge that no monograph could have done. And once a person becomes useful as a symbol, examining him carefully starts to feel like an attack on the thing he symbolizes. That there was the trap, and it is worth naming who built it.

      *

Now I want to say the hard thing, because my first pass at this essay was too gentle and I knew it while I was writing it.

These are the intellectuals.

Not people who admire intellect from a distance. Not people who wish they had gone to university. These are the credentialed men and women of one of the oldest and most respected institutions in the Western world, the people who set the standard, who examine the doctorates, who decide what counts as knowledge and who is fit to produce it. Their entire professional existence rests on one claim: that they can look at a body of work and tell you whether it is any good.

A four hundred and one page document with a broken title passed through their hands and they could not see it.

I have turned this over for days and I keep arriving at the same fork. Either they looked and could not see, or they saw and said nothing. I no longer think it matters much which. What matters is that neither possibility can be explained by ignorance, because ignorance is the one thing these people cannot claim. They are the experts. That is the entire premise.

So what moves an expert to ignore what is in front of him?

Guilt will do it. An institution that spent centuries keeping people out develops a powerful appetite for evidence that it has changed, and a man who embodies that evidence becomes precious in a way that has nothing to do with his footnotes. Guilt makes you want the story to be true. Wanting a story to be true is the beginning of not checking it.

Greed will do it. Not only money, though there is always money. Reputational capital. Press coverage. The prestige of being the university that did this. A man who generates that kind of return becomes an asset, and nobody audits an asset that is performing.

Fear will do it, and I suspect fear did most of the work here. Consider the position of a junior academic who reads that title and notices the apostrophe. What does raising his hand cost him? He knows exactly what it costs, because he watched what happened when somebody did. Dave Harris raised it in 2023 and was ignored for two years. When it finally surfaced, Cambridge did not investigate.

Understand what that means. The institution whose job is scrutiny responded to scrutiny by calling it bigotry.

It went further than a press statement. Arday sent a letter from the libel firm Carter-Ruck to a Times Higher Education reporter, Jack Grove, who had assembled a report and asked him for comment. The story had never been published. Arday also complained about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, who investigated the journalist for four months. The Commissioner has since acknowledged the force dropped the ball and should have screened the complaint out. A reporter asking a man for his side of a story was investigated by police for a third of a year.

Every institution in that sentence failed. The university, the press, the police. Not one of them was equipped to look at a plain question and decide whether it was a fair one.

      *

Which brings me to something I want to say carefully, because it cuts against the way this story is being told.

Jason Arday was not the stupid one in this story.

Set aside the dissertation. Whatever he lacked in the scholarly apparatus, he possessed something the professors did not. He read the institution correctly. He understood what Cambridge wanted before Cambridge could have told you what it wanted. He understood which stories would be irresistible, which credentials would go unchecked, which questions could not be asked out loud, and precisely how to make the asking of them expensive. That is not nothing. He told tall tales and made up things that could not have possibly been true, knowing his audience would buy every line and lie as if they were golden eggs laid by a golden goose. That is a real and formidable capacity, and every credentialed person in the building was entranced by the golden eggs.

I will not call Jason's seemingly manipulative capabilities discernment, because discernment is the thing I am arguing they lacked, and the two are not the same. What he had was shrewdness. Scripture keeps these separate and knows the difference well. The serpent was subtle, more subtle than any beast of the field. That is not a compliment and it is not a denial of his capability either. Jesus said it plainly in Luke 16, commending an unjust steward for acting wisely, and then giving the reason: the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

Shrewdness reads people in order to use them. Discernment reads people in order to know the truth. They look identical from the outside, and only one of them can be corrupted into a weapon.

So the professors were not beaten by a superior scholar. They were beaten by a man who understood them better than they understood themselves, which is an ancient story and always ends the same way. Where there is no discernment, shrewdness wins every time. It does not have to be brilliant. It only has to be awake in a room full of people who are not.

      *

Now let me say the part my own people need to hear, because I am not writing this for Cambridge.

The man who made the plagiarism allegations public is a philosopher named Nathan Cofnas, who calls himself a race realist and who was fired by Cambridge's Emmanuel College in 2024. I want you to hold two things at once, and I know how hard that is.

The first is that the textual analysis does not become false because of who ran it. The Telegraph commissioned its own. An emeritus professor with no stake in any culture war raised it in 2023 and was ignored. Evidence is evidence no matter whose hand carries it in.

The second is that a great many people are celebrating this week for reasons that have nothing to do with a dissertation, and they will take this story and use it as proof of exactly what they always said about us. That is coming. Some of it is already here.

Which is why I am not willing to let either side of that argument do my thinking for me.

We rejected long ago the lie that American Black people are intellectually inferior. We were right to reject it and we should never stop. And we have to be equally suspicious of the opposite reflex: the assumption that a Black man who reaches an elite institution must be brilliant because he reached it. That is the same lie standing on its head. It still lets the institution do our thinking. It still makes the credential the proof.

Neither racism nor racial pride is a substitute for carrying out your own responsibility and reading the work.

      *

Now come home, because I did not write all of this about an English university.

The same failure is running here and it has been running a long time.

Let me be exact about what I am claiming, because these cases are not interchangeable and I will not blur them. Only one of the people I am about to name faced the accusation Arday faced. The offenses differ. What does not differ is the pattern around them: an institution elevated a person before it examined the person, and then defended the elevation when the examination finally arrived. The failure I am describing is never the individual's. It belongs to the room.

Start with Harvard, because Harvard is the mirror.

Claudine Gay became the thirtieth president of Harvard University in July of 2023, the first Black woman to hold the office. Ironically she was appointed the same year as Arday. In October, the New York Post approached the university with a list of possible instances of plagiarism in her scholarship. Harvard's response was to threaten the newspaper with a defamation suit and to call the allegations demonstrably false.

Then Harvard reviewed the work itself.

The review found duplicative language without appropriate attribution in her 1997 doctoral dissertation, and more of it in published articles. She submitted corrections to the dissertation and requested corrections from journals. Roughly fifty allegations eventually accumulated across a third of her published work. The independent reviewers called the conduct regrettable and said it violated the university's citation policies. Then they concluded it did not amount to research misconduct, because misconduct under the applicable policy requires intent or recklessness.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is the whole disease in one sentence. Harvard looked directly at the thing. Harvard saw it. Harvard wrote it down. And Harvard had a rule ready that made what it saw not count.

The policy that produced that conclusion governs faculty. The rulebook that governs students is stricter, and colleagues said out loud at the time that an undergraduate who did the same thing could have been suspended for it. Two rulebooks in one institution, and the gentler one belongs to the people who grade the others. When the New York Times went looking for faculty who thought the allegations were serious, it found that almost none of them would say so with their name attached.

She resigned the presidency on the second of January, 2024, six months into the job, after a congressional hearing that had nothing to do with citations. She kept the endowed chair. She is a professor of government and of African and African-American studies at Harvard today, and this fall she is teaching a tutorial for sixteen students titled What is a University.

Again I must be fair about the other half of this, because I am not interested in a version of the truth that only cuts one way. The allegations against her were assembled and driven by conservative activists who wanted her gone for reasons that had nothing to do with footnotes, and she said in her resignation letter that she was subjected to attacks fueled by racial animus. I believe that she was. Both things sit in the record together. Her enemies were operating in bad faith and the duplicated language was still there, and an institution that could not hold those two facts at the same time chose to hold only the first one, and then only until the political cost of holding it got too high.

Look at the sequence one more time, because Cambridge ran it two years later almost step for step. Question arrives. Institution threatens the newspaper. Institution reviews, finds the thing, and explains why the thing is not the thing. Faculty go silent. Then the ground shifts underneath, and the institution that was threatening lawsuits is suddenly investigating itself.

Joy Reid rose to a nightly hour on MSNBC. In 2017 and 2018, homophobic posts surfaced from her old blog. She apologized for the first batch. When more appeared, she said an unknown party had accessed the blog and fabricated them, and her lawyer announced the FBI had opened an investigation. The Daily Beast examined the evidence and reported that it fell apart. The Wayback Machine had the posts archived at the time they were written. She eventually said she could not prove a hack, apologized again, and stayed on the air for years afterward.

Look at the shape of that. A woman is asked a question and the answer is a lawyer, a cybersecurity consultant, and a federal law enforcement agency. Arday had Carter-Ruck and the Metropolitan Police. Harvard had its counsel and a threatened defamation suit. There were three people, three separate institutions and one instinct: when the question arrives, do not answer it. Make it expensive to have asked.

Ibram Kendi arrived at Boston University in 2020, in the months after George Floyd, and was given a center of his own. It raised somewhere north of fifty million dollars. In September of 2023 it laid off more than half its staff, and former employees went to the press describing disorganization, turnover, and an output of research that did not match the money. BU audited the finances and found no wrongdoing, and I will say that plainly because it is true. The question that never got a satisfying answer was a different one: how does a center take in that much and produce that little? The center closed in June of 2025 and Kendi went to Howard.

Nobody at Boston University asked what he had actually built before they built it around him. They asked what he represented. In 2020 that question answered itself, and no one wanted to be the person in the room raising a second one.

Three American cases, three different underlying facts, one identical reflex. In each of them the institution had every resource required to examine the person in front of it. Money, expertise, lawyers, archives, time. What it did not have was anyone willing to look first and be told what it meant afterward.

      *

Here is the part of this that I cannot get out of my mind.

The same people who lifted that man up are the ones who let him fall.

In July, Cambridge said he was the victim of a vile campaign. By August the university was announcing an investigation into the circumstances of its own appointment of him. Senior academics signed a letter demanding an independent inquiry into how he was hired in the first place, suggesting he had been a quick fix for the institution's diversity problem. Notice what that letter concedes. They are not saying they had been deceived by a fraud. They are saying this is what happens when an institution embraces a man because of what he looked like on a page of statistics, and they are saying it now, after the fall, having said nothing before it.

He resigned on the fourth of August. He was found dead on the fourteenth. His publisher was still scheduled to release his memoir on the twenty-seventh.

Every one of those parties had an interest in him while he was rising. Not one of them examined him then. When the examination finally came it came all at once and from everywhere, and the institution that had celebrated him loudest was investigating him within days of the crowd turning. They pretend this is accountability. It is not. Accountability is what you do before, and what it costs you to do it. What happened here is that a set of institutions used a man for what he represented, declined to check him because checking him was inconvenient to what he represented, and then abandoned him the moment he stopped being useful and became a liability.

      *

Which brings me back to Edith.

The thing about Edith Bunker is that she had none of the equipment. No degree, no vocabulary, no standing, no chair at the head of the table. What she had was attention. She looked at people and saw them. She could tell when a thing did not sit right, and she said so in a plain sentence, and she was almost always correct, and she was called a dingbat for nine seasons by a man who was almost always wrong.

Our institutions have built themselves an elaborate apparatus for measuring the accumulation of knowledge. Degrees, examinations, citations, publications, the correct vocabulary, the accepted framework. Those things matter. I hold two degrees and I would not give either one back. A child in Camden or Clapham who cannot read is not free, and nobody should tell that child that reading is optional because there are other kinds of intelligence. There are other kinds. That child needs both.

What the apparatus does not measure is the older thing. Can you tell when somebody is not telling you the truth? Can you see what a person wants from you? Can you tell the difference between an argument and a performance of an argument? Can you look at a page and know that something is wrong with it?

That capacity has a name in scripture and the name is discernment, and it is spoken of as a gift, which is to say it is not the same as learning. Solomon did not ask for information. He asked for an understanding heart. He asked for wisdom that he might discern between good and bad. He already had the throne and the library. He asked for the other thing.

Understand what is at stake in its absence. Intellect built every institution we have. It wrote the charters and drafted the amendments and argued the cases that made a people free. Intellect is the instrument by which history moves. What steers it is discernment, and when discernment fails, that same instrument does not go idle. It keeps working. It builds the thing anyway. It just builds it toward foolishness, and then past foolishness into wickedness, and every hand on it the entire way is a credentialed hand. That is the part that should frighten us. The people who took us here were not fools. They were the smartest people in the room, and there was no one left in the room who could tell them what they were looking at.

A man is dead and I take no pleasure in any of this. I do not know what was true about his childhood and I am not going to guess. What I know is that a great many educated people were handed a document with a broken title, and they passed it along, and they promoted it, and when a quiet man said wait, look at this, they told him he was a bigot for asking.

Not one of them lacked intelligence. Every one of them lacked sight.

So here is my question, and I do not think it is only Cambridge's question. What happens to a people when the ones we appointed to recognize the truth have lost the ability to recognize it?

Go find something this week that everybody around you has already agreed is excellent. A politician, a preacher, a program, a policy, an identity, a book everyone says they have read. Read it yourself. Look at it with your own eyes the way Edith looked at that house. Then tell me what you see.