A Black and reportedly autistic man touted as the youngest scholar of color to serve as a chair at the University of Cambridge was accused of plagiarism before authorities say he took his own life last week. If that were the only headline following professor Jason Arday’s death at age 41, then it would be tragic enough.
However, the feeding frenzy that followed the plagiarism allegations, the way Arday was hounded relentlessly online and in print regarding his credentials and biography, and the way his story became an opportunity for the left and right alike to promote their own beliefs are headlines that implicate our larger society. Now all that’s left is Arday’s broken family, his grieving friends and supporters and the smug satisfaction of some of his critics — including those who don’t respect any scholarship produced by Black people and who believe they’re righteous for having exposed Arday to public ridicule.
All that’s left is Arday’s broken family, his grieving friends and supporters and the smug satisfaction of some of his critics.
His is a story about the academy, race and the need for universities to reckon with how they can protect their educators (and their institutions as a whole) from malevolent forces inside and outside the academy that are bent on destroying scholarship and the lives of those who create it. Arday is one of many academics who have been attacked for things like social media posts, classroom lectures and plagiarism (alleged or proven), and for being “uppity,” in his case thinking he deserved to hold a position that racists didn’t think he should.
To be clear, Arday did himself no favors by reportedly embellishing his biography. His bizarre claims included running 30 marathons in 35 days, raising $5 million for charity. He also claimed to be illiterate as late as age 18 and to have had various serious diseases, including a brain tumor. People who knew him and have spoken to the media have contradicted those claims. Cambridge, an 800-year-old institution that was rightly criticized for having few faculty of color, used Arday to defend itself against that criticism. Then Cambridge failed the professor by waiting to address the plagiarism allegations against him. A race science aficionado was among the detractors who gleefully piled on to expose Arday’s transgressions.
As a professor who has trained doctoral students of all races and ethnicities, I was pained by Arday’s story. An important part of academic mentorship is confronting students about the weaknesses in their writing and scholarly presentation. One hopes that somewhere along the line in Arday’s career, someone who cared about him or his scholarship confronted him about his weaknesses — whether it’s the fantastical stories or the plagiarism allegations regarding his dissertation. We do know, though, that the consequential challenges came from those who were not his immediate professors or peers, and Arday is said to have either shut them down, called them bullies or enlisted others to go after them.
But even after Arday resigned, that didn’t stop the public shaming.
The multiple attacks we’re seeing on universities — and in particular Black people there — are not coincidences but have been coordinated and engineered by ideologues pretending to be experts. In the States, people such as Christopher Rufo have led a charge on the autonomy of universities and on the professors who work there. Rufo, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow who is best known as an antagonist of critical race theory, was part of the reason why Claudine Gay, a Black woman, resigned as president of Harvard University. Rufo alleged that Gay had plagiarized part of her dissertation.
Arday’s nemesis was Nathan Cofnas, who on Substack provided numerous examples of what he cited as Arday’s plagiarism after Cambridge’s initial failure to investigate earlier claims.
Cofnas was fired from Emmanuel College at Cambridge after he wrote a blog post arguing that Black people have low intelligence, and he flogged the Arday case daily. Then, after Arday was gone and people gathered in Trafalgar Square to lament his death, Cofnas said the rally to mourn Arday was a hate rally against him.
SMDH.
People such as Rufo in the U.S. and Cofnas in the U.K. have declared themselves arbiters of what constitutes education and what kind of education is appropriate. Both countries are reckoning with the degradation of educational institutions by those who have shown themselves to be uncomfortable with an open, democratic engagement of ideas. And their destructive advocacy highlights the places universities have failed. Instead of calling to account what matters — research, integrity in research and teaching, and support for professors — they are on the defensive against outside arbiters who do not care about their institutional standards for scholarship and research.
Arday apparently couldn’t cope after seeing his career crash down. That is a tragedy.
What universities can do now, both here and in the U.K., is take a hard look at how they have treated their vulnerable faculty members. It is institutional malfeasance to allow poorly trained outsiders and pundits who mean no good to vet their faculty.
To repeat, Arday embellished his own record, and though he never fully admitted to plagiarism, he admitted to mistakes while working on his doctorate that he said fell short of academic fraud. In the academy, plagiarism is a mortal sin. What he did not deserve was the pile-on by race scientists and the press, and he deserved a university that didn’t wait so long to address and correct the mistakes it and Arday made. Of course, no acknowledgment of those failures will bring Arday back to life.
What universities can do now, both here and in the U.K., is take a hard look at how they have treated their vulnerable faculty members. They should also acknowledge that it is institutional malfeasance to allow poorly trained outsiders and pundits who mean no good to vet their faculty. The governance and reputations of storied institutions are failing in part because, like their racist and sexist detractors, some within these universities act as if they believe that the professors of color they have hired somehow are deficient — even when their academic records are stellar.
As so many professors of color can attest, we have to work twice as hard to be recognized half as much. Arday’s embellishments, then, will have repercussions for all of us who’ve been presumed unqualified simply because of gender or the color of our skin.
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