I have been thinking about the death of Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor whose academic work and life became the subject of extraordinary public scrutiny after allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation were brought into public view. I have also been thinking about Nathan Cofnas, the former Cambridge scholar whose work on race, heredity, merit, and institutional diversity helped move the questions surrounding Arday beyond the academic record of one scholar and into something much larger: a dispute about DEI, Black academic achievement, meritocracy, race, and the academy itself. I do not think we understand what happened if we decide that one of these men must be the villain and the other the victim.

There were serious questions about Arday’s scholarship. Those questions did not originate entirely with Cofnas, and they deserved investigation. Some of Arday’s published work had already required correction, and other allegations concerning his dissertation and publications were serious enough that scholars, journals, and universities had an obligation to determine what had happened. Truth matters, academic standards matter, and race does not exempt anyone from accountability. But determining whether misconduct occurred is only one part of what we are being asked to understand.

Cofnas also has a body of work, and his work has consequences. He has argued that inherited differences among populations should be taken seriously when explaining unequal outcomes, that contemporary institutions too readily interpret demographic disparities as evidence of discrimination, and that a genuinely meritocratic system might produce dramatically lower Black representation in some elite institutions. He has also argued that race can provide information about expected outcomes and that widespread acceptance of hereditarian explanations would change how society thinks about merit, diversity, multiculturalism, and public policy. Whatever we think about these claims, they do something in the world because they relocate the explanation for inequality.

Arday’s work repeatedly asked us to examine what institutions do to the people inside them. He examined what happens when racism, exclusion, inaccessible norms, inadequate mentoring, and institutional cultures shape who advances, who belongs, who becomes exhausted, and who leaves. Cofnas asks us to consider something different: before interpreting unequal outcomes as evidence of institutional failure, we should consider whether some portion of those differences might reflect inherited variation among populations. These are not simply competing opinions. They locate causation, and therefore responsibility, in different places. One directs our attention toward the institution. The other directs our attention toward the population.

There is something important in both warnings. If institutions decide in advance that every disparity must have been produced by discrimination, they can misunderstand what they are seeing. They can construct interventions around the wrong causes, confuse demographic parity with justice, or make legitimate scientific questions difficult to investigate because they fear what an answer might mean. But the opposite danger is also profound. If institutions begin interpreting racial disparities primarily through inherited group differences, they acquire an extraordinarily powerful way to stop examining themselves. History can disappear into biology. Institutional decisions can disappear into population statistics. The consequences of wealth, education, segregation, migration, exclusion, policy, relationships, and accumulated history can become harder to see because the explanation has already been located inside the population experiencing the outcome.

I have been thinking about this as a form of causal compression. Human outcomes rarely have a single cause. Biology, history, institutions, culture, relationships, material conditions, chance, and individual action interact across time. Yet institutions and political movements often need simpler explanations. Once one explanation becomes powerful enough, other forms of causation begin disappearing from view, and the complexity of human formation gets compressed into a story that can be more easily administered, defended, or opposed. The problem is that people then have to live inside the simplification.

Imagine entering an institution in which people have accepted the proposition that very few people who look like you would ordinarily arrive there through merit alone. You may still formally be judged as an individual, but your presence has already become something requiring explanation. People can begin wondering whether you received special consideration, whether the standard was lowered, whether you were selected because of your race, or whether you really belong there. Another person may enter the same room carrying none of those questions because their presence corresponds with what people have learned to expect. The difference is not theoretical. Someone has to carry it. I carried it in my undergraduate college. The projections and allegations were, of course, wrong. I was more than capable of participating in that academic experience.

This is one of the questions at the center of What You Are Asked to Carry. Institutions organize the world through categories, theories, procedures, narratives, and assumptions, but the consequences of those abstractions eventually arrive in human lives and relationships. Someone has to live inside what has been decided. This does not mean that every consequence of Cofnas’s work is something he intends, or that every political use of his ideas can simply be attributed to him. There is a real difference between what a scholar argues, what an institution might do if it adopts that argument, and what political actors later do with it. But consequence asks us to follow an idea beyond the moment in which it is articulated. It asks us to notice what happens when a population-level probability becomes an expectation about a person, when an empirical possibility becomes an institutional assumption, or when an interpretation becomes so politically useful that uncertainty disappears.

This is where the encounter between Jason Arday and Nathan Cofnas becomes much larger than either of them. Arday had become extraordinarily important symbolically. Cambridge did not simply appoint a professor of sociology of education. His appointment was publicly understood as evidence of institutional progress. He was a Black professor, a neurodivergent scholar, and a person whose biography appeared to demonstrate that someone once excluded from conventional pathways could reach one of the most prestigious universities in the world. People could see possibility in him, but that also meant that he began carrying meanings that did not belong only to him. He carried Cambridge’s claims about inclusion, part of the public meaning of DEI, aspirations about Black academic achievement, and a story about neurodivergence and possibility.

When serious questions emerged about his scholarship, those meanings did not disappear. They reversed. If Arday had been made evidence that inclusion worked, he could also be made evidence that inclusion had failed. One person’s scholarly record could suddenly become evidence about Black scholars, DEI, Cambridge, merit, and race. That is a dangerous amount for one human being to carry.

And we cannot speak about consequence here only as an abstraction. Jason Arday died in the midst of this. His family has described years of harassment, misinformation, and pressure becoming too much for him. We should not claim a medical or legal cause that has not been established, but neither should we sanitize what occurred by speaking only about institutional credibility and academic procedure. By the end of this process, Arday was dead. Whatever conclusions are eventually reached about his scholarship, the human cost cannot be separated from the story. A man who had come to carry the academy’s aspirations about inclusion also came to carry its conflicts about race, merit, credibility, and legitimacy, and he did not survive the period in which all of those contradictions converged around him.

This brings me back to After the Academy, because the argument there is not that the academy once had a complete relationship with reality and has somehow recently lost it. The argument is that the academy’s relationship with reality has always been incomplete because knowledge production was never adequately organized around consequence. The academy developed extraordinary ways of knowing through disciplines, methodologies, peer review, credentialing, specialization, standards of evidence, and forms of expert judgment that have produced enormous amounts of human knowledge. But those same systems also created distance. Knowledge production did not systematically require those producing and authorizing knowledge to remain in relationship with what happened when that knowledge entered the world.

A theory could be published without the theorist carrying what happened when it governed institutions. A category could be created without the people who created it living inside the lives that category organized. A policy recommendation could move from scholarship into government while its consequences were carried by families, workers, communities, and people far from the institutions that authorized the knowledge. The problem, then, is not simply that the academy sometimes gets things wrong. Every human institution does. The deeper problem is that one of the ways reality corrects knowledge has never been adequately centered within the academy itself. Reality does not only answer through more data. Reality also answers through consequence. What happens after an idea enters the world is part of what the world is telling us about the idea.

This does not mean that a terrible consequence makes an idea false, or that a desirable consequence makes it true. Consequence tells us something different. It can reveal relationships we failed to see, effects our abstractions did not capture, variables we left outside the frame, or ways the categories we created begin changing the reality they were meant only to describe. Consequence is not a substitute for evidence. It is part of the relationship with reality through which what we think we know is tested, complicated, and sometimes transformed.

This is why I think the academy’s current credibility crisis may be something more than a decline in public trust. It may be the exposure of an epistemic limitation that was present all along. The academy has often treated its processes as though they were sufficient evidence of its relationship to reality. A claim survived peer review. A scholar was credentialed. A committee investigated. Experts reached consensus. Procedures were followed. All of those things matter, but none of them, by themselves, tell us whether knowledge remains coherent when it encounters the world it is describing.

This is also why what happened after October 7 matters to me in this discussion. Universities suddenly found themselves confronting history, war, antisemitism, Palestinian suffering, colonialism, Zionism, Islamophobia, grief, political power, academic freedom, student safety, donor pressure, and public scrutiny not simply as subjects to be studied at a distance, but as consequences arriving inside the institution itself. Statements had consequences, silence had consequences, definitions had consequences, disciplinary decisions had consequences, and who was protected or exposed had consequences. The distance between knowledge and consequence narrowed, and institutions became unstable.

From the outside, that instability can look like vacillation. An institution protects, then investigates, then distances itself, then exposes. It invokes academic freedom and then discipline. It protects one constituency and then responds to pressure from another. We can call that inconsistency, but I increasingly think there is something more stable underneath it. Perhaps the institution is consistently protecting itself, and what changes is who must be protected or exposed in order for institutional legitimacy to survive. At one moment, protecting a person protects the institution. At another, exposing that same person protects the institution. The apparent vacillation can therefore conceal continuity: the institution remains insulated while consequences move among the people inside it.

Then conflict appears among those people. Students and administrators, faculty and donors, researchers and activists, Arday and Cofnas, Black academics and critics of DEI begin confronting one another. The institution can appear to be managing conflict among people when the deeper question is what the institution itself has not learned how to carry. Conflict can be evidence of where coherence has been displaced.

This changes the questions I think we need to ask. We have to ask who has authority and who carries consequence, who is being required to translate contradictions they did not create, who has been made into evidence for something much larger than themselves, and what the institution itself would have to carry if it could no longer transfer its unresolved contradictions into the people inside it.

None of this requires us to abandon truth. Quite the opposite. If Arday plagiarized, the academy had a responsibility to establish that. If Cofnas makes claims about heredity, intelligence, and racial difference, those claims should be investigated rigorously rather than prohibited because they frighten us. But rigor asks more of us than whether a claim is permissible to investigate. It requires us to distinguish what the evidence establishes from what remains uncertain and to distinguish the evidence itself from the larger interpretation we place around it. It also requires us to notice what happens when we begin organizing institutions and relationships around an interpretation as though it were already settled truth.

And then rigor requires something the academy has historically tended to do much less well. It requires us to follow the consequence. A coherent institution must be able to investigate truth without converting a person into a symbol, hold uncertainty without turning uncertainty into ideology, and distinguish evidence about an individual from claims about a population, accountability from humiliation, and protection from insulation. But even that is not enough. It must become capable of remaining in relationship with what its knowledge does.

The academy is losing the insulation that allowed procedural authority to stand in for a complete relationship with reality. Its processes were never meaningless. They were incomplete. The consequences that once remained outside the institution are increasingly making that incompleteness visible. The choice before the academy is therefore not between expertise and its abandonment. It is between reauthorizing the same incomplete architecture more forcefully and developing a fuller relationship with reality.

We still need expertise, scholarship, disciplined inquiry, evidence, peer review, methodological rigor, and people who devote their lives to knowing things deeply. But knowledge must move closer to consequence. What happens downstream must be capable of revising what is known upstream. People who translate across boundaries must carry authority, not only burden. Lived consequence must be treated as epistemically significant without pretending that lived experience is infallible. Institutions must be able to admit uncertainty, correct themselves, and carry what happens when they are wrong.

That is not the abandonment of the academy. That is what comes after it.

Perhaps this is what the encounter between Jason Arday and Nathan Cofnas is revealing. It is not simply that one scholar may have failed academic standards or that another scholar holds ideas many people find dangerous. It reveals something much older: a system of knowledge capable of telling us many things about reality while remaining incompletely connected to what happens when those things become the world people have to live inside. In this case, we cannot forget that one of the people living inside those consequences died while the academy and the public were still deciding what his life and work meant.

Truth without consequence-mapping is incomplete. We must be capable of asking what is true and what the evidence does not yet allow us to know. Then we must remain present long enough to ask what happens when we organize the world around a conclusion, who will carry what follows from it, and whether the institutions producing knowledge are willing to carry what belongs to them.

The future does not require an academy that simply asks us to trust it again. It requires institutions of knowledge capable of a fuller relationship with reality.