On August ۱۴, Jason Arday, the youngest Black scholar to be appointed professor at Cambridge University, was found unresponsive in his home in London. Just three weeks 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 ۴۱-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 ۴۰-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. There is plagiarism, but also rampant unethical conduct in relation to research communities. We debate these issues at our conferences, sign letters to ask our institutions to act, and colleagues go through accountability processes.
None of these should involve public shaming or racist glee. That lynch mob was a unique feature of Arday’s case. Indeed, rarely do calls for consequences resound so loudly even in cases where academics have been found to have engaged in sexual misconduct with their students and colleagues.
Take the case of former lecturer Peter Hutchinson, who in ۲۰۱۵ was accused by ۱۰ students of sexual harassment at Cambridge University. After he breached the sanctions imposed on him following an investigation, he had to withdraw from college affairs, only to be reinstated two years later. His case did not become a nationwide scandal.
There is another, quite central, aspect to Arday’s case. The key instigator in this instance was Nathan Cofnas, a self-professed “race realist” who has widely written on his claims that Black people lack intelligence.
He came under criticism and was eventually dismissed from Cambridge in ۲۰۲۴ after he published a Substack post claiming that Harvard University would have no Black professors if they were hired on merit alone. Cofnas has long been a darling of the free-speech crowd in Britain.
In ۲۰۲۴, when students at Cambridge called for an investigation into him, an esteemed group of senior scholars published a letter defending his freedom of speech.
The throughline from Cofnas’s dismissal to his successful instigation of the bullying of Arday is the academic and media establishment’s enduring failure – even by figures who would undoubtedly call themselves antiracists – to recognise systemic racism.
Fascist talking points worm their way into legitimate public discourse by weaponising supposedly objective measures. Just because Cofnas’s graphs and statistical measures make the “race science” of intelligence appear authoritative does not mean they are worth treating as legitimate ideas for debate in public forums.
And for any media outlet that claims seriousness to fail to investigate the intensity of the pile-on that Arday experienced, and its origins within a eugenicist’s fantasy of ridding universities of Black professors and antiracist scholarship, is profoundly irresponsible.
If there was a story in the public interest in this case, it was that there is a growing legitimacy given to race science and eugenics even within major universities, and that this is putting Black and antiracist scholars at enormous risk. In an interview with conservative media personality Rob Montz, posted to YouTube on the day Arday died, Cofnas admitted what happened to Arday was not really about plagiarism, which he noted is common in academia, but about his “exalted position”. He goes on to fantasise about one day becoming head of a department of race science and eugenics at Harvard.
Many of the problems in the reporting of the allegations against Arday feel deeply familiar to me. For decades in India, where I am from, caste elites have insisted that “merit” in academia requires the ending of affirmative action policies for caste-marginalised scholars.
As Harvard scholar Ajantha Subramanian’s work on this issue shows, “merit” in South Asia is the logic of caste made secular: a seemingly objective measure that allows the reproduction of a violent system of exclusion and dehumanisation. This is precisely the story that underlies Arday’s violent harassment in the British press.
With this context in mind, it is worth drawing on the framework that Dalit scholars have advanced to narrate such deaths: that of institutional murder. The phrase first gained salience after Rohith Vemula, a Dalit PhD student, took his own life in ۲۰۱۶ after prolonged persecution by the University of Hyderabad.
The idea of institutional murder allows for a systemic analysis of deaths that result from entrenched violence, narrowing the conditions of liveability. To use this framework is to reject an individualising narrative, or indeed calls against the political reading of such deaths.
Arday’s harassment and death are not idiosyncrasies: they are very much a case of institutional murder by a system infused with anti-Black racism.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
