When I first read about Jason Arday, he had just resigned from the University of Cambridge. Accusations of plagiarism reminded me of Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University, who resigned after accusations of plagiarism surfaced. There certainly was more to her resignation than accusations of plagiarism. She was also accused of antisemitism following her congressional testimony. Her story ended with her becoming the shortest-serving president in the history of Harvard.
When a second article about Arday caught my eye, he had been found dead at his home in South London. To this day, suicide has not been named as the cause of death, but I find myself speculating that it was suicide, given the circumstances surrounding his death and the absence of any reported foul play. I imagine many of us are wondering the same thing.
I think about his last days. On August 5, the university announced that it had accepted his resignation and would open an investigation into allegations concerning his academic qualifications and honorary appointments. He was found dead nine days later. It must have felt like hope being vacuumed out of his life, leaving nothing, not even anger. There is a certain calmness that cannot be explained unless experienced, one that can gently blanket a path toward death. Knowing that it will end, whatever “it” may be, can be soothing, quieting even the fear of the ultimate unknown: death. Words like painful and dark are inadequate to describe what it takes to choose death.
What he must've felt, and all that may have pushed him toward death, we helped create that.
I didn't know Jason Arday. When Cambridge appointed him Professor of Sociology of Education back in 2023, making him the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at the University, it did not register in my newsfeed. Perhaps it did and I just don't recall.
We don't need to have known him. We don't have to be the individuals who accused him of lies, false claims, and plagiarism. Simply having complacently lived in a world where a Black man may have felt the need to lie about his life, even in part, to achieve, and then felt that achievement itself was not enough, until his accomplishments had to become extraordinary, perhaps even superhuman, just to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his colleagues, makes us part of the world that created that pressure.
If you want to argue with me, start here: Only 0.3% of professors at Cambridge identify as Black. Consider the pressure he must've experienced as not only the university's youngest Black professor, but, as we now understand more clearly, one of its extraordinarily few Black professors.
He isn't getting a free pass from me because he is dead or because he is Black. He claimed to have been a visiting professor at Ohio State University's Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Ohio State confirmed that it had no record of Arday ever being employed there in any role. He also claimed to have been a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow. While he held a genuine professorship at Glasgow, the university denied that he had previously held a visiting professorship there. While he had worked at Durham University, his claim that he remained an honorary professor was also contradicted by the university. Birkbeck, University of London, told the Guardian it could find no record of Jason Arday having studied there, despite his claim that he had earned a master's degree in psychodynamic practices from the university.
He also claimed to be the author of a published book, Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, with Palgrave Macmillan. The publisher confirmed that it had accepted a proposal, but the book was never published. He had claimed that he ran 600 miles in six days, a claim later revised to 12 days. He apparently ran 30 marathons in 35 days, finishing the final nine after reportedly suffering a hairline leg fracture during an epileptic seizure. I'll quote ChatGPT on that particular claim: “Unconfirmed, but physically possible.”
The list of disputed and unconfirmed claims continues, somehow making the accusations of plagiarism pale beside the apparent embellishments and contradictions in his biography. He didn't need to lie. His confirmed academic accomplishments were significant without embellishment. He earned his PhD from Liverpool John Moores University. He was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Roehampton, an Associate Professor in Sociology at Durham University, and a Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Glasgow before arriving at Cambridge to become its youngest Black professor.
So, why lie? And why lie about accomplishments that can so easily be verified through records?
Allegations of plagiarism are more complex than most of us presume. Arday received his PhD from Liverpool John Moores University back in 2015, and the university investigated his thesis when it first received allegations in 2023. It concluded that the problems it identified amounted to “honest and reasonable error” rather than research misconduct and did not revoke his doctorate. Two years later, the university received another allegation, which it found substantially overlapped with matters it had already investigated, and it did not open a new investigation. Earlier this year, allegations of plagiarism surfaced again, this time through outside scrutiny. In particular, the Telegraph reported finding more than one hundred passages in Arday's thesis that were identical or nearly identical to passages in an earlier thesis.
Plagiarism in academia is not black-and-white. There are varying degrees, and not every instance of unattributed or improperly attributed text is treated as deliberate academic misconduct. Is it possible that Liverpool John Moores University's investigation was biased in Arday's favor because he was Black? It is possible. Then isn't it also possible that the university may at times have been biased in the same way when investigating white scholars?
Didn't we in our diversity, equity, and inclusion programs ask for exceptions rather than fairness? And didn't that framing of exceptions in these programs make Arday a target? Not just a target of scrutiny, but also make him feel like he was given access he didn't earn and was given it because of the color of his skin? So, did he build a narrative that he didn't otherwise need in order to prove that access was earned?
And if so, didn't we make it impossible for Jason Arday to live the life he had earnestly earned?
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