pre_historian

I watched the Jason Arday lecture Aaron Bastani repeatedly circulated to 1.4 million people as supposed proof that Arday was a “conman” – someone who, he said, could speak for more than 40 minutes while saying “nothing”. That is an extraordinary characterisation of what is actually in the video, playing well to the racist gallery. Arday’s delivery is undeniably repetitive. It is discursive, jargon-heavy and often far less concise than it could be. Some empirical claims are asserted rather than demonstrated. One would be free to take issue with that. But Bastani did not merely say: “I think this is a weak lecture.” He said Arday was a “conman” and “literally a con artist”. And the lecture simply does not substantiate that allegation. Arday quite obviously does say things. His central argument is that racial inequalities in universities are reproduced not only through overt discrimination, but through what gets taught, who determines what counts as legitimate knowledge, who teaches it, and whether students from different backgrounds can meaningfully participate in academic life. He argues that an “inclusive curriculum” cannot merely mean letting everyone through the door while leaving the substance and culture of the institution untouched. He argues that overwhelmingly Eurocentric academic canons marginalise histories and intellectual traditions outside Europe. He links curriculum, belonging and participation to racial awarding gaps. He calls for students to participate in constructing curricula rather than simply completing module feedback forms. He argues that unconscious-bias training is inadequate without deeper discussion about racism. He criticises academic hierarchies which make it difficult for students to challenge lecturers. And one of his strongest themes is that responsibility for combating institutional racism has disproportionately fallen on women of colour – including while men of colour have sometimes benefited from that labour – when it should instead be a collective responsibility. You can reject every one of those arguments. You can say the language is fashionable, the theoretical framework is wrong, the evidence is insufficient, the presentation is meandering, or the whole thing could have been said in a quarter of the time. But you cannot seriously say he “says nothing”, unless you are deliberately attempting to perpetrator your own con - or are literally, yourself, utterly ignorant of the concepts he is discussing. More importantly, the actual lecture is considerably more nuanced than the caricature subsequently constructed around Arday. He explicitly distinguishes “whiteness” as a structure of power and privilege from white people themselves. He acknowledges his own privilege “as a male or as a black male”. He says everybody carries biases, including himself, and uses his own possible prejudice towards middle-class people – rooted in his working-class upbringing – as an example. He argues for putting yourself in uncomfortable intellectual spaces. He advocates difficult conversations rather than censorship. He says students should be able to challenge academics. This, of course, doesn't prove every argument Arday made was correct, or that he was a brilliant lecturer. But where, precisely, is the "con"? Calling someone a con artist is not an academic judgement. It is an allegation about their honesty. A rambling keynote making arguments you disagree with is not evidence of a con, and never was. There is a vast evidential gulf between: “I think this lecture is bad.” and “This man is literally a con artist.” Repeatedly telling hundreds of thousands of people to “Watch it!” does not bridge that gulf. Bastani did not make this accusation once in passing. He repeatedly jumped onto the Arday story and returned to the “conman” allegation, helping turn a contested argument about one academic’s work and career into an attack on his basic honesty and legitimacy. Only after Arday’s death has Bastani now acknowledged that he should not have called him a conman – while accompanying that concession with a lengthy boring self-assuaging justification of why he regarded the wider story as newsworthy. But saying afterwards that the word should not have been used does not erase what happened . Bastani had no evidence in this lecture that Arday was a con artist. What he had was his own racist contempt for Arday’s performance. He transformed that subjective judgement into a sweeping allegation of personal fraud, repeatedly broadcast it to a huge audience, and encouraged others to treat watching the video as though it somehow proved the charge. This was an evidential sleight of hand which helped egg on a much wider public pile-on against a man already being witch-hunted across the media as a fraud. Who was the "con man", really?