Dr Jason Arday: Reviewing a Culture War Lynching

We mourn his death because it was plainly predictable, and so easily avoidable. Leading media institutions could have prevented this. They could have stopped when he was initially cleared by the university that awarded him his PhD. They could have stopped when they were warned about how the media frenzy was taking a toll on his mental health. They could have stopped when he resigned. And yet the media continued.

Dr Arday was bombarded with multiple requests from journalists every day. Dr Kehinde Andrews told BBC Newsnight about having dinner with him recently as a form of moral support. We also privately offered some encouragement. But it was a drop in the ocean against the onslaught of media coverage.

Five years ago Dr Arday published a paper titled; “No One Can See Me Cry: Understanding Mental Health Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Academic Staff in Higher Education”.  His experience at Cambridge provides a bitter irony.

His professorship at Cambridge came at a time when the university's record on serving Black and underprivileged communities was under immense scrutiny. Cambridge had been shown for having just 75 Black academics out of 6,180 that’s barely 1.2% and just 0.3% of all their professors. Jason’s appointment offered a response to the criticisms that Cambridge had structurally failed Black and underprivileged communities.

They made him into their poster boy of their supposed commitment to racial equality. They courted the media attention with a distinction that he was “youngest ever Black professor”. As such Jason Arday was hounded from day one, when the trickle of criticism turned into an avalanche, Cambridge stood back and watched him get buried. This affair reminds Black people our value is contingent on our utility to serve white liberal or other racialised interests. Our lives are quickly disposable.

He was brought down by the fatal avalanche that was set in motion by the white supremacist Nathan Cofnas. A self-described “race realist” whose Cambridge academic career was terminated because he claimed that under a true meritocracy, Black people would "disappear from almost all high-profile positions." Dr Arday was faced with racism from all sides, used as a token and pushed to and beyond the brink. We deeply regret that our intervention to support him came too little and too late. 

Jason Arday was proven not to be a plagiarist. We signed the Good Law Project solidarity letter because he had been cleared by the University that awarded him his PhD against plagiarism allegations. His credentials were good enough for two prestigious universities, Glasgow and Cambridge. He was not perfect and admitted to some mistakes but when he needed them most, they did not defend him. They did not support him. They did not treat him like other imperfect academics.

Consider the case of an actual Cambridge plagiarist professor, Dr William O'Reilly. He admitted to copying thousands of words from a student's essay and from published articles. His punishment was to keep his job. The news coverage was less than half a page of coverage in the Financial Times. It didn’t make talk radio. No national conversation about Cambridge’s academic standards.

Like any human being, Dr Arday undoubtedly made mistakes. He was not perfect. But his treatment was grotesquely disproportionate. The underlying story was that if he could be so poorly appointed whilst being a fantastist, then all Black academics were suspect. He was made the sacrificial lamb to crucify all Black academics.

That is the duality of tokenism. When you are Black, you do not represent yourself. You represent your entire race for good or ill. Structural inequalities are solved by a sprinkling of Black individuals. Individual bad actors are used to marginalise entire groups. This racist function serves white supremacy. It allows the problematic behaviour of those racialised as white to be individual and minimised while perceived failures of non-white people - real or imagined - are collective and magnified. It is this racist idea that caused Jason’s fall to become the indictment of every Black scholar in the country.

Black Lives Matter UK is not an advocate or a supporter of liberal initiatives like DEI. We do not trust symbolic appointments which distract from real anti-racist systemic change. We do not believe in using one Black man as a human shield to protect a racist institution.

We believe that real change comes from removing structural barriers and using redistribution of resources to correct ongoing injustices.

We know poverty is a key factor to determining who goes to university and who doesn’t. Abolishing tuition fees and funding education from general taxation would be one major step. Even without that, Black students make up 8% of UK undergraduates but receive just 1.2% of funded Research Council PhD studentships. This funding gap systematically excludes Black talent before their academic career even begins.

We know at the hiring stage, Black applicants are 45% less likely to receive job offers than white applicants. If they beat the odds to get a job, Black academics face racial harassment, opaque advancement processes, and insecure contracts that prioritise neither their research nor their promotion. This resulted in the rarity of Dr Jason Arday until recently being part of the exceptional 1% of UK professors that are Black.

Real anti-racist change comes from redistribution of resources to remove financial barriers in education, funding PhDs for qualified disadvantaged students, abolishing student loans, investing in schools, using transparent processes to dismantle racial bias in recruitment, and holding institutions accountable when they fail.

Jason was committed to an anti-racist academia, not to the kind of smoke-and-mirrors diversity offered up by Cambridge. Black people do not want crocodile tears, toothless reviews or new tokens. We want real change. 

In honour of Dr Jason Arday, who is now gone, we must demand it.