Discussing what happened to Jason Arday
Gwai
Epiphanies Host
in Epiphanies
When we talk about the Jason Arday case, we have to be careful because there are many things we don't know, at the time I am writing this.
What we know: Professor Jason Arday was found dead after days of racist attacks accusing him of plagiarism. He was an autistic man and the youngest Black full professor at Cambridge. The university that awarded his Ph.D did not uphold the accusations that they investigated. Also, Nathan Cofnas, the man at the center of Arday plagiarism row, was dismissed for views on race
As we discuss this, I think it is very important to consider various opinions besides just the shallow version one can easily get in a single article
During an interview on Channel 4 news, "Kehinde Andrews, an academic specializing in Black Studies, and a friend of Jason Arday" was adamant in calling it a lynching: "This isn't just a tragedy, a man was lynched yesterday." … "I would have said before it was metaphorically a lynching, but like I said, he's now dead because he's black. What else do we call that but a public lynching of this man?"
I'm trying to limit my links because there are so many good ones, but this take from Kate Manne has helpful context: https://katemanne.substack.com/p/gossipy-academics-helped-kill-jason
Also, here are a couple takes from Black commentators with lived experience of hounding:
https://karenattiah.substack.com/p/jason-ardays-death-and-the-age-of
https://theemancipator.org/2026/08/15/ideas/the-media-lynched-jason-arday/
His relative Afua Hagan delivered a heartfelt plea that I think is important to consider too.
What we know: Professor Jason Arday was found dead after days of racist attacks accusing him of plagiarism. He was an autistic man and the youngest Black full professor at Cambridge. The university that awarded his Ph.D did not uphold the accusations that they investigated. Also, Nathan Cofnas, the man at the center of Arday plagiarism row, was dismissed for views on race
As we discuss this, I think it is very important to consider various opinions besides just the shallow version one can easily get in a single article
During an interview on Channel 4 news, "Kehinde Andrews, an academic specializing in Black Studies, and a friend of Jason Arday" was adamant in calling it a lynching: "This isn't just a tragedy, a man was lynched yesterday." … "I would have said before it was metaphorically a lynching, but like I said, he's now dead because he's black. What else do we call that but a public lynching of this man?"
I'm trying to limit my links because there are so many good ones, but this take from Kate Manne has helpful context: https://katemanne.substack.com/p/gossipy-academics-helped-kill-jason
Also, here are a couple takes from Black commentators with lived experience of hounding:
https://karenattiah.substack.com/p/jason-ardays-death-and-the-age-of
https://theemancipator.org/2026/08/15/ideas/the-media-lynched-jason-arday/
His relative Afua Hagan delivered a heartfelt plea that I think is important to consider too.
Comments
I also think authorities at Cambridge should be deeply ashamed of themselves, as they set Arday up for this. Jason Okundaye wrote in The Guardian (before Arday's death):
Arday does seem to have been a fabulist about his non-academic activities (e.g., claiming to have run 30 marathons in 35 days and done charity work with a charity that doesn't do what he said he did) -- but if he were white would anyone have even bothered looking into these claims? Would he have felt he needed to make them? A racist institution seems to have wanted to appoint someone who felt like a star, someone charismatic and attractive who they could point to and say, "See? Progress! Good on us." I don't know details about the other finalists, except that two of them were women of color -- were they not showy enough for Cambridge? Not a good enough personal story?
That's a big part of the latent racism of this situation; white men think that they deserve to be in the best professorships and anyone else who got there must have cheated.
It's not a great character trait either, but it's one a number of politicians have been guilty of without anything like the same hew and cry being raised. It seems an inescapable fact that Arday was targetted because of his race. Black people with impeccable academic or professional credentials still get pilloried if they offend right wing sensibilities. You only have to look at how Diane Abbott (and to a lesser extent David Lammy) are treated.
Sure - I don't think anyone serious believes that someone like Nathan Cofnas, or perhaps the press pileon, would have gone after a white academic with a dodgy background in the same way.
It is certainly possible for both things to be true: that Dr Arday was targetted because of his race, and that he wasn't really qualified for the job he had, but I'm not in a position to judge that.
There is tons of bias in play here: there's racist selection bias by people like Cofnas choosing whose career to challenge. There's racist bias in the press coverage (because Dr Arday was one of a limited number of black men holding such a prestigious post, the sharks scent blood in a way that they wouldn't if he was just a random middle-aged white man.
There are biases in the post-scandal reports of people who say they have been Dr Arday's students: there's a confirmation bias where people like to feel good about themselves and their judgement by putting the boot in to someone who has been identified as having done something wrong; there's also a "me too" style bias where people who might have genuinely had a bad experience but didn't feel they could say anything because they risked being accused of racism now feel more confident about speaking up.
Which all goes to say that coming to a conclusion about Dr Arday's competence based on press reports is "very difficult indeed".
But let me ask a related-but-hypothetical question: suppose there is a college president, or an endowed chair, or some other senior academic who is a member of some minority group. Suppose that this person is targetted by bigots, and suppose the bigots produce evidence that this person has engaged in significant academic dishonesty: not just that they have cribbed a few relatively trivial paragraphs here and there, but that the entire foundation of their scholarship is someone else's work, or they have fabricated experimental data left right and centre or something.
What should the response of the institution be?
Whether the pile-on is press, news media, or social media, or any combination of the three, they show little or no concern for the impact on the target.
Journalistic scrutiny degenerated into hounding years ago. I agree with Karen Attiah’s characterisation that the additional online impact amounts to digital terrorism. There is terrorising going on under the spurious justification of free speech.
In this case I am convinced there has been a racist element to the terrorising. But racism is not the only form of prejudice demonstrated by hounding.
And I have no idea how the disgusting and poisonous effects are to be managed or controlled. I am sure there will be further tragedies.
I agree with @Ruth and @Arethosemyfeet - and would add that I see echoes of the UK media treatment of Meghan Markle, but to an even more vicious and ultimately deadly extent. I know a lot of Black Americans are continually astounded by the levels of anti-Black racism (and other kinds of racism) in the UK media that gets no legal or professional censure at all. The UK journalist class is utterly rotten. I would agree with Kehinde Andrews in calling it a lynching.
Wow. Just wow. He actually did this. I've read probably five different articles and opinion pieces from reputable news outlets that cast doubt on it without apparently doing basic fact-checking or the search that would have found this article. And I believed them.
Is there any reason their response should differ from what it would be if a white person in that position did this?
Really shows how dangerous it is to lose press independence. I have been expecting that he was innocent of most of the things he was accused of, but I figured he'd exaggerated this sort of thing because I just assumed the press had done a fact check. Ouch. Lesson learned.
I probably wouldn't have survived something like that either.
I don't think so, no, but there are some commentators who think that the fact that the accusations are brought against some minority group member by a bigot should alter the response. And, frankly, it makes me feel uncomfortable to treat an accusation seriously when I know it is being brought in bad faith, but if it is brought with enough actual evidence to make a credible case, I don't see that I would have a choice.
I'm not even sure banning social media would solve the problem. There were cases of people being hounded to death by the press before it was invented.
Welcome, and thanks for posting that.
Doublethink, Admin
Would it be pre-judging things to suspect that an enquiry in to the circumstances surrounding Dr Arday's death would end up being about as unsatisfactory as Hutton? Hutton spanked the BBC for making allegations against the great and the good in government without sufficient foundation, but rather washed his hands of the idea that anyone could have realized that the pressure Dr Kelly was put under could contribute to his suicide.
I agree with you that an enquiry is warranted. A man has died following a large-scale media pillorying. I'm not hopeful for an outcome that would diminish the chances of a repeat occurrence.
I agree that it would be dangerous to lose press independence, but isn’t the greatest threat to that a lack of press responsibility? In the long term the media can easily lose credibility and effectiveness if it publishes or broadcasts falsehoods.
Excellent prior example, while digital terrorising was in its infancy.
I was thinking about that. The Observer story involved a lot of work interviewing participants and double checking claims. Unfortunately this pile-on seems to mostly have been started from a disgruntled blogging ex-Cambridge academic and the claims were recycled in the right-wing press.
As I said before, some of the claims are not checkable. An article in a 15 year old local newspaper is not evidence that the thing happened, just that the story was told to a local journalist.
But basically there's not a lot here. It seems highly unlikely to me that an academic working at Manchester University or Birmingham or Exeter who had to revise a published journal article would have led to their employer being asked why they were employed in the first place.
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/jason-ardays-tragic-death-moment-of-change-britain-4711758
Since I've seen that link, the Byline Times has published an article pointing out that Jason Arday really did many of the things that he was ridiculed for making up. From that story:
"Arday’s claim to have raised or helped raise £5 million for charity was also widely ridiculed by newspapers. When asked by the Guardian if his general figure of charity fundraising of £5 million was accurate, Arday said that the money had been raised through “many fundraising collectives over a two-decade period”, and that the other people who had taken part had signed NDAs to stop them from being identified.
A Byline Times analysis of the publicly identifiable charities Arday was associated with for two decades found that they had a combined gross income of approximately £1.4 billion to £1.5 billion – putting his £5 million collective fundraising claim at well under 1% of their overall income."
It also goes on to say that he always said "we" raised .. - he never said he personally raised ....
There's a lot more in the article which is looking at the right-wing influences involved in this story and where a lot of the money came from.
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I’ve read the Bylines Times article. Looks OK to me.
So do I. And yet here we are, after any number of public inquiries. They're not much use if the government ignores their findings.
I was actually thinking about Gareth Bennett, who died in 1987 when Zuckerberg was probably still in nappies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Bennett_(priest)
I bought a copy. Here are a few sentences from the end of Alibhai-Brown's article:
"While much of the focus is on the big institutions of traditional media and academia, few are talking about where the volume of hate was truly amplified. The way we use social media has to change."
"It is up to us progressives to ensure his death was not in vain".
Maybe a successful law case against Meta will achieve something??..
I've read the Samaritans guidelines and I hope it's OK to say I don't think (= I'm jolly sure unless God stepped in pretty personally) I'd have survived it either. Autistic people are far more likely to die by suicide - Simon Baron Cohen posted research that 1 in 4 have planned or attempted it. No-one should be subjected to an awful media pile on unless they really really (= ex-prince Andrew level) deserve it, and there does need to be more duty of care of those whose ability to survive such things is reduced.
How do you distinguish between a media pile-on and investigative journalists applying pressure until the public figure in question does the right thing?
A great many resignations of politicians who have been caught doing things they shouldn't have only happened because sustained pressure from the press has made their position untenable. It is right that those politicians resigned, and in general they would have resigned earlier if they had a shred of honour.
How does one calibrate the amount of pressure that the press might apply that is sufficient to force a resignation, but not sufficient to trigger an attempt at suicide?
Sometimes people who are under police investigation for serious crimes kill themselves. I don't think we'd suggest that the police should back off on investigating those crimes.
I think we could have a discussion about the extent to which the press uses innuendo and poorly-substantiated third hand reports of alleged activities in place of solidly-fact-checked evidence. In these modern days when the effective "press" is a large number of individuals, many of whom may be based outside the UK, with blogs and opinion pieces and so on, it might be hard to control that.
Between July 24 and August 14, The Telegraph ran 32 articles by four different reporters (source: https://newscord.org/editorials/jason-arday-pile-on). According to their bios on the website, Albert Tait covers education, Gordon Raynor and Janet Eastham are investigative journalists, and Charles Moore covers politics. And that's just the Telegraph.
For comparison: Claudine Gay became Harvard's first Black president July 1, 2023. She resigned January 2, 2024. I searched the NY Times during that six-month period and came up with 22 articles focusing on her. She held a more important position than Arday's at a comparable institution, and the articles discussing her cover not only the plagiarism charges but also her testimony before Congress (alongside two other women who were the presidents of UPenn and MIT) about university policies and procedures to protect students from antisemitism. Arday didn't do anything comparable to that, just resigned from his position.
Moreover, more articles were published about Arday after he resigned -- a lot more (look at the chart on the newscord.org site). So I don't think what we're talking about in Arday's case is investigative reporters applying pressure till someone did the right thing.
I suggest that there is evidence of both malice and hounding in both the press and media reporting and the social media comments. Various links and comments on this thread provide evidence in support of my suggestion.
Do not malice and hounding cross the boundary between justifiable investigation and unfainess, even cruelty? Personally I am also in agreement with Ruth. There was disproportionate interest in play, both before and after the resignation.
In principle I am in favour of policies supporting DEI in the work place. Others aren’t.
In this context the assertion of “poster boy” was offensive. The search for fault in the alleged “poster boy” was clearly motivated by the intention to demonstrate that the appointment must have been unjustified and therefore unfair to others. It slso seems quite clear that there was a racist element to that.
These are my reason for believing this particular level of journalistic investigation crossed the line from legitimate public interest to wrongful intrusion. I think the death is a tragedy. I would still believe wrongful intrusion even if the tragedy had not occurred.
He says he is going to be fired.
I am not going to type his name here, the story is in the usual places.
Just looking at the Guardian coverage, which in theory should have been supportive; I'd expect the Times, Telegraph and tabloids to be in attack mode, but not the Guardian. There were six big articles written by Lanre Bakare (published on the 1st, 5th, 5th, 6th, 6th and 12th August), which are further linked elsewhere in the paper (the Full Story and Today in Focus coverage (in that link, on 12 August)), plus the First Edition of 7th August and the Long Wave newsletter of 12 August - four of the paper's email / podcast offerings that go out to subscribers focussed on Jason Arday and all those stories refer back to the Lanre Bakare articles.
The Canary of 18 August carried a story that the Guardian was warned that Lanre Bakare was biased and would do a hatchet job but still published this unrelenting list of articles.
And then the Guardian had the gall to publish this editorial on 17th August when it had been part of the pile on.
Nowhere have there been any corrections to these stories - and the Guardian prides itself on publishing corrections. And I know they've been told that some of the accusations levelled by Lanre Bakare are wrong because I have sent links to the Corrections department showing that Jason Arday did run those marathons, hoping they'd start correcting or pulling their coverage.
The Byline Times article debunks many of the "fantastical stories" Jason Arday has been accused of making about his past life, as have other articles in the press across the world. Somewhere, there is evidence that he ran a treadmill challenge of 100 miles a day for several days (I'd have to dig to find it). There's more coverage showing he did play semi-professional football.
Plagiarism is really difficult to prove and/or pin down. My daughter had to rewrite a chunk of her PhD when her supervisor used the presentation she'd given to the department in a paper. She'd been asked at short notice to provide this seminar as she knew the subject, and had used her existing work. She was lucky - it was a public presentation and enough people remembered her giving it before the paper went out, so she just had a rewrite job on that section. One of her fellow PhDs had to do major rewrites and the plagiarism software no longer worked, because it recognised the first version and threw out anything that it had seen before; there's no time with rewrites on a PhD to completely rewrite the whole thing. Running plagiarism software on an already published PhD tends to fail that PhD.
There are a lot of white professors still alive and in tenure who have been accused of plagiarism who didn't have their whole lives pulled to pieces and ridiculed.
I've worked with a lot of young men on the autism spectrum and that despairing comment quoted across the Guardian "I thought you'd believe me", in hindsight, I read now as "I thought you had done your research and knew I'd done these things", rather than come in with an agenda to take me down.
What struck me were the clichés: These comments amount to a call to inaction, and maybe people who believe in fairness need to engage in action that actually costs us something. But maybe there's a limit to what a British Shia Muslim woman of colour can write as a columnist. I think there are hints of what else might be on her mind:
In the OP, Gwai linked to an article by Karen Attiah, who directly addresses the historic role that media has played, and continues to play, in “removing Black people from positions of influence and power”. Attiah worked for a number of years as an editor at The Washington Post. From wikipedia:
How do you distinguish between a media pile-on and investigative journalists applying pressure until the public figure in question does the right thing? It's never going to be clear cut but the distinction has got to include how much of a public figure someone is, and what other routes or remedies are available. If someone is (say) a prime minister and there is literally no other way to get them out of office than public pressure, then that is a different case to when someone is an academic who is at most a semi-public figure, and where there are proper processes that can be followed to handle the situation.
There have to be gradations. If someone has chosen to be in the public eye and can only be held accountable by public pressure, then relentless investigative journalism is in the public interest. If someone's in a prominent professional occupation then the public is entitled to have an interest in them but any "discipline" should take place via their profession not public shaming which would be unhelpful and disproportionate.
And if the investigative reporting is pursuing the line that there was a professional enquiry, but that that enquiry was inadequate somehow?
There are plenty of cases where the professional bodies in question have whitewashed the sins of people who have since been convicted of very serious crimes, and it took relentless media pressure to amplify the voices of the victims and obtain justice.
The major difference I see between these cases and the case of Dr Arday is that these cases are supported by statements of victims that were willing to speak out, whereas the case against Dr Arday contained a lot of repeated recycled accusations that apparently nobody bothered to check.
A few years ago, there was a rash of high profile cases of racists being videoed being racist, the video and accompanying criticism going viral, and then the racist being fired by their employer, who doesn't want the bad press. I find it hard to shed a tear for the racists, but would you call that unhelpful and disproportionate public shaming?
Well, quite. The comments about 'two courts' are particularly ludicrous. Harry has no political power. Everyone knows that. Are these people saying that nobody is allowed to socialise with him either, if they want to continue associating with the 'approved' royals?
I think there'd be a serious risk of it being unhelpful and disproportionate. How things appear on the surface can be misleading so I wouldn't want people to lose their livelihoods on the basis of how they appear in a short video, even if quite a lot of them are as awful as they appear. Some of them might not be awful - they might be misrepresented or misunderstood.
It's a known possibility, for example, that an autistic person will be the subject of an attack and then arrested themself because the way they communicate is perceived as indicating bad faith and bad behaviour, when what it really is is autism. Just as an example of how things can be read wrong. There's no depth or nuance or understanding to these public shamings - no room for slowing down and checking what was really happening before you go in all guns blazing.
I think in this particular case the volume of reporting about him *after he had resigned* when you would have assumed the story should have moved over to the failings of the institution in question is what constitutes the excess (obvious enough that a number of outlets deleted/altered certain articles after his death was announced).
I think that's a fair point, although it's hard to separate questions of "what mistakes did the University of Cambridge make" from "which things that Dr Arday claimed to have done were inaccurate", because these things are intertwined. In particular, Dr. Arday's resignation statement said that he didn't accept the narratives surrounding him, so his resignation didn't resolve any of the questions of fact about what he had or hadn't done.
As a general rule, new employers don't do much checking on the content of an applicant's CV: they tend to assume that it is honest. Most people are reasonably honest, but every now and then there's a case of someone who has, several years later, been found to have fabricated everything. I wouldn't expect a university to go through someone's CV and check for the existence of every published work claimed, for example, although it might be quite straightforward to give that job to an AI agent today.