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I would challenge you to identify 3 individuals who (1) are straight white men; (2) are or were professors at mainstream universities; (3) had publicly spun tall tales roughly equivalent to those of Jason Arday (i.e. numerous and highly suspect on their face); and (4) were nonetheless hired and/or promoted in spite of their autobiographical tall tales.
I'm skeptical that such individuals exist. And if they don't, it lends support to the hypothesis that Arday's race was the main factor. That either (1) people knew he was there just to be a black professor and therefore didn't care about this other stuff; or (2) were scared to death of saying anything negative about Arday for fear of being accused of racism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ellis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Harvey_Briggs
"Roughly equivalent" has to do a lot of work and it has to reach back 40 years to find a third example.
Me too. Three bad matches might as well be nothing when you're looking at around a million candidates.
Ward Churchill claimed to be non-white.
Since that claim was disproven(-ish), he is an example of a white fabulist professor.
I don't think he could draw significant protection from that claim if it was quietly known to be false, as (1) If people thought he was just there to be a Native professor, they would object to that fakery, and (2) accusations of racism hold a lot less weight when the target is (or at least will soon be known to be) white.
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But it's necessary work, in my opinion. So for example, as best as I can tell from the Wikipedia article, Ellis became a full professor in 1979 and started BSing about his past some time after 1981. Moreover, the lies he told were not outrageous on their face, or even highly suspect.
In my view, it would have been roughly equivalent if (1) he'd claimed to have been a medal of honor winner who had singledhandedly prevented a massacre of a village; and (2) he had made the claim publicly BEFORE being hired and/or promoted. But I don't think something like that would have happened. Because people aren't (and weren't) afraid to express skepticism about a straight white man in the way in that in 2026 people are afraid to express skepticism about a black person.
I think that most people have met compulsive liars in their lives. People who constantly tell stories which are just not that believable on their face. For the most part, such people just aren't taken seriously. In my view, what's different about this case is that (1) the compulsive liar was a black person; (2) Cambridge University desperately wanted to hire a black person to be a professor; and (3) people in academia are (legitimately) scared to death of publicly criticizing a black academic.
In other words, it seems to me this is all about race and is not just some kind of generalized groupthink phenomenon which could just as easily apply to a white person. A white person who was a compulsive liar would, generally speaking NOT get into a situation like this.
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I don't really think it meets all your criteria, but closest I could search up was Prof. Joseph Ellis back in 2001, who not only lied about Vietnam vet service (including being a platoon leader) and civil rights activism, but also about scoring the winning touchdown during the last game of senior year for his high school football team (which he was not a part of.)
The problem is, those are all sort of plausible lies, even if it is a little weird to be an accomplished academic and still telling stories about your amazing high school football glory days. Honestly, he seems more like the type who is actually quite accomplished, but feels the psychological need to make up more grand and socially legible accomplishments to get the praise he feels he deserves, but isn't getting. A bit like Elon Musk getting caught lying about his video game accomplishments.
I basically agree. I think it would have been "roughly equivalent" if (1) he had claimed to have been a medal of honor winner who singlehandedly prevented the massacre of a village; and (2) he had publicly made the claim BEFORE he had been made professor in 1979.
The world, of course, is full of liars. But a rarer breed is a person who I would call a "compulsive liar." What I mean by this is a person who instead of telling lies which are occasional, calculated, plausible, and difficult to falsify, tells lies which are outrageous on their face (or at least highly suspect), and much less likely to stand up to mild scrutiny.
When a person is a compulsive liar, it usually becomes pretty clear after the second or third whopper, at which point most people stop taking the person seriously.
I think it would be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, for a straight white man to make it through college and grad school and to get hired as a professor if he were a compulsive liar. Because at each level there are recommendations, interviews, etc. and it's difficult to get past these hurdles if (1) people don't take you seriously; and (2) for whatever reason you are unable to stop yourself from making statements which damage your credibility.
So what was different about Jason Arday? It seems to me it's pretty obvious the difference was race. That Cambridge was desperate to hire a black professor and people in the academy are (reasonably) scared to death to question or criticize a black academic.
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