By Jesse Singal
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
There’s an exceptionally annoying thing writers do in the
internet age: We type something like “I really didn’t want to talk about this,”
and then we talk about it anyway, at length.
I’m going to do that here, but I can explain.
You’re probably familiar with the Jason Arday case by
now. In 2023, when he was 37, Arday was appointed the youngest black professor
in the storied history of the University of Cambridge, quickly becoming a minor
celebrity in the process. As I summarized in the New York Times last week, drafting
off the impressive investigatory work of a group of dogged scholars and
journalists, it soon became apparent that Cambridge may have made a mistake in
hiring him.
To make a long story short, Cambridge knew since at least
2023 that Arday appeared to have plagiarized some of his work and to have
fabricated some of his interviews but refused to engage in anything like a full
investigation. This led to some disgruntlement within Cambridge; someone there
leaked his or her concerns to Nathan Cofnas, an American academic with
controversial views on race and IQ, and he published
a Substack post in July that went viral, spelling the beginning of the end
of Arday’s career.
As Cofnas wrote, in addition to the other allegations,
Arday appeared to have plagiarized significant portions of the Ph.D. thesis he
completed at Liverpool John Moores University. Cofnas also shined a spotlight
on a number of questionable claims from Arday’s inspiring life story, including
that he had run 30 marathons in 35 days, 600 miles in six days, that he had
been nonverbal until age 11, and that he had been unable to read or write until
18. Those claims, alongside the Cambridge appointment, helped Arday gain far
more media attention than the average academic, including segments and
interviews on top outlets like the BBC.
None of the four institutions involved in the academic
facet of this scandal—Cambridge, LJMU, and the two journals notified of
apparently plagiarized material—responded in a sufficient manner. Rather, all
four seemed to prefer to cover for Arday—in July Cambridge sent me and other
inquiring journalists a statement describing the accusations as a “vile
campaign” to undermine him. But Arday had no meaningful track record in
academia; he hadn’t produced anything of note and openly stated that due to his autism, when he was at work,
“90% of the time I don’t know what is going on but I am having to pretend I
know what is going on.” Despite that, he had been appointed to an “established
chair at Cambridge,” as the New York Times later explained, which is “a
permanently funded position that comes with prestige and research support [and]
is among the academic world’s most sought-after jobs.” The scrutiny mounted
shortly before the release date of his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things,
a major title published by Simon & Schuster on August 11 for which Arday claimed to have received a 1.4 million advance, according
to the Guardian, though he didn’t specify whether he meant dollars or
pounds.
Eventually Cambridge folded, announcing an investigation
last week. Arday announced his resignation just hours later. Then, this past
Friday, he was found dead in London’s Battersea neighborhood after an apparent
suicide.
What I mean about not actually wanting to write
about this: If I somehow controlled the internet, I would have enforced some
sort of 72-hour cooldown period. Everyone go for a walk, hug your loved ones,
reflect on life’s preciousness. No insta-takes in response to a man’s tragic
death; no using a corpse that hasn’t yet been laid to rest to promote your own
politics. But we live in 2026, so that wasn’t what happened. Instead, there was
an instant explosion of outrage directed at racists, the media, and racist
media. This explosion is so misguided, so driven by misunderstandings about
what actually happened, and so censorious that it warrants a robust response.
I’m not nutpicking here. The MacArthur-winning American race
scholar and activist Ibram X. Kendi described what happened to Arday as a “lynching.” The
co-host of PBS NewsHour, Geoff Bennett, derided
a fair and important New York Times postmortem of the scandal as
“ghoulish.” In the U.K., Labour MP Dawn Butler published a letter to the head of the Independent Press
Standards Organisation, an independent regulatory body, arguing that “Jason
would still be alive today if not for the relentless and pernicious coverage by
the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator, to name a few,” and calling for
(unspecified) “decisive action” in response to his death. The British
journalist and broadcaster Will Self took things even further, posting a
lengthy open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for a crackdown
that sounds far more Moscow than London. Self argued that the Crown Prosecution
Service “should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding
computers” before claiming that “This is not an attack upon a free press—it is
a necessarily immediate defence of one.” An
open letter arguing that “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively
failed” was signed by a number of British academics and politicians, including
Green Party leader Zack Polanski.
As far as fighting over a corpse was concerned, I
admittedly became part of the problem: In the hours immediately after Arday’s
death, I was back on X, arguing like everyone else. I couldn’t help it; I found
the outrage following this tragedy particularly deranging because of the almost
perfect, 180-degree extent to which it misses the point.
I mean that in two senses. First, the call for more
scrutiny of media, or even outright censorship of it, is astonishing in light
of the facts of this case. It was because of the U.K.’s lack of press
protections that this story took so long to come out, which, in the end,
increased the damage done to Arday. Times Higher Education had a story
in the works last year, but Arday sicced an infamous British law firm,
Carter-Ruck, on the outlet, killing it. That would not have happened in the
United States, because our defamation laws are much more media-friendly (as
strange as that might sound during the Trump era).
Arday abused not only the civil system but the criminal
one, too. In 2023, mere months after Arday’s hiring, the first academic to
notice oddities in his work emailed him to ask about those oddities. Arday
responded by reporting him to the police. Last year he also reported a
member of the Times Higher Education team, Jack Grove, to the police on
similar grounds. Here in the United States, cops would likely respond to such a
complaint with the American version of “bugger off”—in the U.K., while both
criminal complaints were eventually dropped, they were apparently taken
seriously by police at first. A cop even told Grove that while he wouldn’t be
investigated further, he shouldn’t email Arday again. That’s direct law
enforcement interference with the press in what is supposed to be one of the
freest countries in the world.
These are all signs that in British society, it’s very
easy to weaponize the law against good-faith media or academic inquiries. To
come out the other side of this horrible story wanting to give more power
to those who would crack down on journalistic inquiry beggars belief. To be
sure, none of this is to deny that there are elements of British tabloid
culture that are a bit bloodthirsty, but as my examples have hopefully made
clear, anger at the media has gone well beyond those outlets. (And while it’s
ill-advised to pin suicide on any one cause, anyway—a point to which I’ll
return shortly—does anyone actually think the excesses of the right-wing
tabloids are more likely contributors to Arday’s death than his entire life and
career falling apart in a short period?)
The complaints of racism—that “Jason Arday was hounded by
a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white
guys,” as the academic Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz put it—constitute an
even more extreme example of point-missing. Look: In much the same way some of
the media coverage was excessive, of course, amid the broader online
circus, there has been racist commentary. There always is when a person of
color is the subject of public scrutiny and shaming, especially in a situation
like this where the story really does involve a dispute about diversity, equity,
and inclusion.
But to claim that Arday was unfairly singled out on
account of his race is to ignore the very important other half of the ledger:
He was elevated to an untenable position because of his race! You don’t need to
take my word on that. Just read the very end of the Times of London’s
contemporaneous article about his hiring, if you can stomach it:
Professor Hilary Cremin, head of
the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, said hiring Arday was proof of the
university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.
She told The Times: “Not only is
Jason Arday a world-class scholar, he also brings a wealth of experience that
can help us to take forward our efforts to widen participation at all levels.
“Hopefully it is becoming
increasingly clear that with concerted effort and a genuine commitment to
change, those barriers that still exist either to working or studying at top
universities can be overcome.
“To any students or prospective
colleagues who are wondering if Cambridge is a place where they can belong, the
answer is, emphatically, yes.”
Even more dyspepsia-inducing is a BBC segment
from that same period that, to me at least, gets harder to watch every day. In
it, Cremin approaches Arday and takes his hand as though he is some sort of
messianic figure. A bit later, during a strange sit-down centered on her
complimenting him, she explains, “The Board of Electors on your interview, they
were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you.” Then she looks him
dead in the eyes and lies to his face: “You are the best in the world in terms
of the research that you do.”
In the article that the NewsHour co-anchor would
later describe as “ghoulish,” the New York Times revealed damning
details about that hiring process: “A review of internal Cambridge documents
and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to
passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed
publicly about Dr. Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints
about his work,” the Times reported. A bit later: “Dr. Arday’s claims
about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who
worked with him [said]. His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal
preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in
developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for
the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had
done research on autism, experts said.”
There’s a word for what Cremin and her colleagues did
here: racism. It is racist to respond to someone’s skin color by
pretending they are something they are not. It’s not racism in the way
lynchings or slavery are racism. But it’s racism nonetheless. And anyone with a
passing familiarity with this story knows that Arday was appointed to his post
precisely because of how Cambridge thought the color of his skin would reflect
back on the university itself—precisely because of what the current crop of
censors might call systemic problems within that university.
***
To be clear, Jason Arday is not dead “because of”
Cambridge University’s social-justice-coded racism. Suicide is multicausal and
we should strongly resist the urge to blame it on any one factor, whether
Cambridge or “the media.” But it’s clear that Jason Arday never should have
been within miles of such a prestigious academic appointment. His fall was
inevitable from the first day he arrived at Cambridge. As my friend Sarah Ditum put it, “I do not regret writing
about Arday, but I am sorry for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a
position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about.” That’s
exactly right.
In a saner, fairer world, Jason Arday would have lived
out a happy and healthy life somewhere else, gainfully employed, loved by
friends and family. Maybe his chronic tendency toward fabulism would have
elicited rolled eyes at the local pub, but it never should have caused more
harm than that.
Instead, thanks to a cascade of institutional dysfunction
that will go down in history as uniquely bizarre and condescending—even by the
considerable standards of higher ed misadministration—Jason Arday found himself
in an environment where no one would say no to him, where no one would ask
follow-up questions (at least out loud), and where people covered for him
rather than holding him accountable. As a result, he did significant harm—to
the scholars he plagiarized, the peers he wrongly beat out for a prestigious
position, and (everyone keeps forgetting this) to the parents of nonverbal kids
with autism, who are frequently victimized by false and suspicious claims of miracle cures like Arday’s.
None of this means he deserved to die—of course he didn’t
deserve to die. But it does mean that, if we want to prevent such scandals from
recurring in the future, it is imperative to learn from this rather than to use
Arday’s death as an excuse to rewrite history.
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