Jason Arday was a neurodivergent British academic. Jason Arday, born to Ghanaian immigrants, was the youngest Black professor in Cambridge University’s history. Jason Arday quit his post on August 5, after accusations of plagiarism circulated. Last Friday, Jason Arday was found dead in his home in London amid a media tempest dissecting his backstory.
Jason Arday was Black—we all know he was Black; he was never allowed to forget he was Black. His Blackness should have been incidental to his triumphs but was, and still is, integral to his downfall and his treatment in the British press. Though some commentators have blithely refused to see it, there was glaring, latent racism seeping through all of it.
I’ve struggled to formulate a response to this whole sorry mess. Reactively, and selfishly, it feels like a terrible time to be Black and ambitious in Britain. When we achieve something, the merit is questioned, regardless of our quantifiable exertion.
Being told as kids that we must work twice as hard to get half as far as our white counterparts should feel outdated, but even post–Black Lives Matter, there remains the sinking implication that a Black person with status is somehow undeserving. Arday’s 2022 appointment at Cambridge was criticized as tokenism, a grand-dame university reacting to 2020’s riots and reckoning. It was as if Cambridge’s diversity poster boy, as some called him, could not secure such prominence without nefarious means.
Look, an institutional panel had cleared Arday of wrongdoing over allegations concerning his PhD thesis, but I still don’t believe many of his claims. Was he nonverbal until age 11 and illiterate until age 18? Were more than 100 passages from his PhD not lifted from Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s Brunel University thesis? Did he have autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome after a car accident, and testicular cancer? He said he ran 600 miles in six days. He mentioned a brain tumor. There was the £5 million he allegedly raised for charity. There was the $1.4 million memoir advance.
Even with a large pinch of salt, it’s hard to imagine all of those things occurring within a single lifetime. That said, we all know people who embellish, who tell little lies. It’s something I personally loathe; losing my friendship is my personal petty and melodramatic punishment for lying to me. But the penalty for mistruth shouldn’t be an entire country’s media in a coordinated smear campaign against you, your world questioned, your existence relentlessly scrutinized. The public flogging of Arday was despicable. Jason Arday, in my mind, was a fantasist; the sentence for being a fantasist isn’t death.
Cambridge University is inarguably seen as a bastion of intellectualism—despite people of color being wildly underrepresented in senior posts—and some gleefully enjoyed the insinuation that it fucked up by hiring a young Black professor. The university didn’t help matters: A hiring process designed to identify excellence apparently wasn’t designed to withstand controversial scrutiny. If the university had questions to answer about how Arday was appointed, it largely left him alone to answer them, turning an institutional decision into one man’s very public trial.
Arday is not the first academic accused of plagiarism, but if you’re white and you plagiarize, you don’t get Nathan Cofnas, who publicly argues that intellectual ability differs across racial groups, lighting a tinder under you and fanning the flames of your downfall. For Arday, the ensuing three years of harassment and racism in the wake of his Cambridge hire proved too much.
Like I said, I’m struggling to work out what to do now and what to do next. I’d love to be galvanized for positive action, ready to spring into a reactive progression, but the whole thing just feels too bleak to bounce out of today. All I can really do is sit in my feelings, let what happened occupy my thoughts, mourn the avoidable loss of someone I never knew, and wait for the eventual shift into something less sad. I don’t feel angry, just resigned to a system that seems set up for Black people to fail, to lasso them back to earth. Jason Arday was a Black man who flew too close to the sun, but his wings didn’t melt—they were torn from his back.