Our Statement on the Death of Professor Arday

Professor Jason Arday was found unresponsive at his home in Battersea on the 14th of August.

Jason was forty-one when he died.

His family say he had been subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years, since the day he accepted the Cambridge post, by people “who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him”, and that it had become too much for him to bear. They describe a gentle man who wanted to see the best in everyone. We take them at their word, and extend to them the fullest solidarity, and all the love, our hearts can muster. We urge you, too, to support the family however you best can.

Nine days prior to his death the University of Cambridge announced an investigation into him, and he resigned his chair and his fellowship at Jesus College the same day. He was clear that this was not intended to give any merit to the accusations.

There are around twenty-six thousand professors in Britain. Around two hundred and seventy are Black. That is one in a hundred, in a country where Black people are four in a hundred.

Arday was one of that hundredth. He left school with two GCSEs. He took his degrees at St Mary’s Twickenham and Liverpool John Moores, and became the youngest Black professor Cambridge had ever appointed. British higher education did not build him a road, but as every Black academic is required to, he built one ahead of himself – and crucially, he strove every step of that journey to build it for those walking behind him, too. It is this necessary vigour which means that Black British academics punch so greatly above their 1% weight within British academia – despite efforts to restrict their voice and access to such institutions in the first place.

Jason Arday has never been found to have plagiarised anything, by anyone. In 2023 Liverpool John Moores University reviewed complaints about his doctoral thesis and concluded he had not plagiarised it. That is the only completed investigation there has ever been, and it cleared him. Every headline since Friday calling him a plagiarist states as established a thing no process anywhere has established, and most have not troubled their readers with the fact that a university examined the central charge three years ago and rejected it.

The dossier against him was assembled and published by Nathan Cofnas, whose fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge was terminated in 2024 after he wrote that in a meritocracy the number of Black professors at Harvard would “approach zero”. A man who has made a career of the claim that Black academics do not deserve their posts spent months building a case that one Black academic did not deserve his. The Telegraph, the Times and the Guardian then carried the material into the national press. The journalists who did this work did not need to share his views to do so, and while it seems likely many of them did, there’s no need to throw blunt accusations. Not when we can simply state the facts: they took a self-described hereditarian’s file, printed it, and largely declined to tell their readers where it came from or that its central charge was already dead. Perhaps we can trust our readers to understand why those journalists would make those choices – but what is obvious is that it can’t have been good faith.

And there is more to this.

Cambridge announced an investigation and accepted a resignation inside a single working day. We want to know what passed between the two. Universities do not typically shed professors in eight hours, and a resignation extracted under pressure is hardly an ideal working environment, to say the least.

Arday’s own statement that day was that it should not be “mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me”. Cambridge should say publicly who spoke to him on 5 August, what was put to him, and what he was told would follow if he stayed.

For three years Cambridge employed an autistic man who was the target of an organised campaign, and they knew he was. An employer’s duty of care does not lapse at the point the employee becomes inconvenient. We do not claim to know at this early stage what killed Jason Arday, and we will not pretend to. Yet an institution which spent three years enjoying the credit of his appointment and eight hours disposing of him must be made to account for what it did to keep him safe, and that this needs an independent inquiry with power to compel documents, not a review run by the body under scrutiny.

And a despicable argument is already being made in public: that this is what comes of lowering standards, that Black and disabled people are set up to fail by their own inclusion, that the kind thing would be to stop letting them in. You will have read the deeply sad people espousing these opinions on social media, we expect – many of them the same people who spent the last weeks attacking Jason Arday.

But those who face marginalisation understand well how often it arrives dressed as concern. What these people mean really is that the bullying is a law of nature and will continue, and that the correct response to a man being hounded to death is the removal of people like him from the places where hounding happens. A system is what it does, we remind you all.

One detail also needs real focus, we feel, because it is being used to imply a deeper lie than simple plagiarism.

Arday said he was non-verbal until he was eleven. Former classmates have said they remember him speaking. These do not contradict each other, and anyone who has spent ten minutes among autistic people knows it. “Non-verbal” and “non-speaking” are shorthand for a person who does not rely on spoken language. Neither has ever meant silence.

Non-speaking people have words. Many have some speech: situational on the good days and not the bad ones. The older term is being retired precisely because it implied an absence of language rather than an absence of speech. To take a man’s account of his own childhood, in the vocabulary available to him, and set against it what people who sat near him thirty years ago say is not journalism but is in fact just more bullying in a flavour that the average person is likely to miss.

What is most crucial to call out here, and which we have left til last to say plainly very deliberately, is that this entire vicious tragedy is racist. It is rooted in institutional racism; it was perpetrated by personal racism; the people who acted in bad faith did so gleefully because they found space in which their racism was liable to be accepted.

So we close with this: the answer to “how do we ensure that no-one is ever hounded in this way ever again” is simple:

We fight racism everywhere we find it.