Jason Arday’s death is institutional murder

On August 14, Jason Arday, the youngest Black scholar to be appointed professor at Cambridge University, was found unresponsive in his home in London. More than a week earlier, he had resigned from his job after a vicious weeks-long campaign against him over allegations of plagiarism. The British media, the meme economy online and various commentators dissected every aspect of the professional and personal life of this 41-year-old Black man: from his manner of speaking to his scholarship.

They gleefully claimed to expose his supposed “lies” and plagiarism, pillorying him mercilessly. Members of the media establishment defended what they claimed was their exposure of the “truth”. There was no ambiguity from the beginning that this so-called revelation of “plagiarism” was a cudgel: it was a way to make a point that equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives are supposedly academically dishonest.

The attacks came not just from the right – with The Spectator and The Telegraph running article after article about Arday – but also from the left. Aaron Bastani, for example, the cofounder of left-wing outlet Novara Media, gave his opinion on X that, in a 40-minute lecture available on YouTube, Arday had said “nothing”. He then called him a “conman”.

All of this, we were assured, was in the interest of academic ethics. There was little scrutiny of what was behind this sudden appetite to single out and “expose” one Black scholar in academia. Instead, the lot jumped on an anti-EDI bandwagon: the left hopping on the “identity politics is bad” end, and the right embracing naked racism.

Did Arday plagiarise his thesis or any other work? One investigation found he did not, and another was under way. The basis for the determinations and certainty on social media is a clip economy that has circulated isolated paragraphs of his work in comparison with the work of other scholars.

There was also endless speculation about Arday’s autism and his athletic achievements: gleeful laughter about how ridiculous it all supposedly was. This ranged from rank disability denial to bizarrely petty articles about how Arday was late to give lectures or did not provide what one student considered sufficient citations for his racism claims. Many academics are investigated for misconduct in their scholarship every year.