I learned that Jason Arday had died at the age of 41 after
spending several days watching the controversy surrounding him unfold with
increasing discomfort. Throughout that time, I deliberately resisted joining
the rush to pronounce him either guilty or innocent. I did not know the full
facts, and investigations were under way. Serious allegations had been raised
concerning plagiarism, alongside questions about aspects of his academic and
professional record. Those allegations deserved to be examined properly, and
academic integrity requires nothing less.
Yet, as the story developed, I became increasingly troubled by something else. It seemed to me that somewhere along the way, the investigation of allegations was becoming the public investigation of a human being. The questions multiplied. What began with questions about plagiarism expanded into questions about where Arday had worked, what he had claimed about his professional history, who had appointed him, who had believed him, what students thought about him, what his appointment said about Cambridge, and eventually what the entire affair supposedly revealed about diversity, DEI, merit and the political left. Each new detail seemed capable of generating another headline or another round of commentary. I found myself wondering, long before his death, at what point legitimate scrutiny becomes something else. At what point is enough, enough?
This matters to me because I did not first encounter Jason Arday as a newspaper headline. I knew him through his scholarship.
I have used his work on race, racism, higher education and mental health because aspects of what he described corresponded with experiences reported by Black participants in my own research. Some of it also resonated with experiences I recognised as a Black academic myself. That does not mean that everything he ever wrote must therefore be correct, nor does it mean that scholarship should be protected from scrutiny because its conclusions resonate with our experiences. Scholarship must withstand examination. But neither can I pretend that the phenomena Arday wrote about suddenly cease to exist because serious questions have subsequently been raised about the scholar.
One of his papers carries a title that is particularly difficult to encounter now: No one can see me cry: understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic academic staff in higher education. Arday wrote about racism, marginalisation and isolation within universities, and about the difficulties minority ethnic academics can encounter in accessing mental-health support that adequately understands racialised experience.
I have heard some of these experiences articulated by research participants. They exist within a wider scholarly literature. I have also spent enough time within higher education to recognise some of these institutional dynamics myself. Whatever investigations may eventually establish about particular aspects of Arday’s scholarship or professional history, the experiences he and others documented cannot simply be erased with the collapse of his reputation. Ideas and social phenomena do not automatically become false because the person associated with articulating them becomes controversial.
None of this diminishes the importance of academic integrity. Plagiarism matters. Accuracy about qualifications and professional experience matters. Universities have an obligation to investigate credible allegations concerning both, regardless of the race, politics, reputation or institutional status of the person involved. If wrongdoing occurred, it should have been established through evidence and dealt with appropriately.
But accountability and humanity are not opposites.
There is a difference between investigating allegations and publicly dismantling a person. Over the course of this controversy, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the momentum surrounding Arday. Details that appeared increasingly distant from the original allegations became material for public consumption. His career, personality, students, previous institutions and the people involved in appointing him became part of an expanding story.
Most troubling to me was the way his individual case began to be absorbed into a much larger ideological argument about diversity. The discussion was no longer confined to whether Jason Arday had committed particular acts of misconduct. His story became material for arguments about DEI, supposedly lowered academic standards, “woke” universities and the legitimacy of diversity initiatives themselves.
That transition matters.
When somebody from a minoritised group succeeds, we are often told that identity should be irrelevant and that individuals should be judged on their own merits. Yet when one of those individuals is accused of wrongdoing, there is a disturbing tendency for the individual suddenly to become representative. A white professor accused of misconduct does not ordinarily provoke a national conversation about whether universities have employed too many white academics. The individual’s alleged behaviour remains, largely, the individual’s alleged behaviour.
One Black professor should not become a referendum on the legitimacy of Black academics.
This controversy therefore raises another question that extends far beyond Jason Arday: what does an institution owe a person while it investigates them?
I do not mean protection from legitimate scrutiny. Nor do I mean immunity from consequences, interference with independent journalism, or institutional declarations of innocence before evidence has been examined. I mean something much more basic: a duty to remember that the person being investigated remains a human being.
Universities have sophisticated mechanisms for dealing with allegations of misconduct. They have committees, regulations, human-resources departments, communications teams, legal advisers and governance structures. Yet I wonder whether our procedures for protecting academic integrity are always accompanied by equally serious thinking about what happens to the person standing at the centre of them.
Who asks whether that person is sleeping? Who asks whether they are eating? Who asks what it is like to wake each morning knowing that another headline, another allegation, another recollection or another social-media discussion may be waiting? Who makes sure that investigation remains investigation rather than becoming social punishment before findings have been reached?
I do not know what support Jason Arday received privately, and it would be wrong for me to claim otherwise. His friends, family, colleagues or university may have provided support about which the public knows nothing. But the broader institutional question remains important. When Arday resigned from Cambridge, he spoke publicly about the profound emotional toll that the accusations, speculation and commentary had taken on him and those close to him. Whatever else we think about the allegations, those words should matter. Behind the controversy was a person experiencing its consequences.
At the time I am writing this, Jason Arday’s cause of death has not been established. Police have described his death as unexpected but not suspicious, and the matter will be referred to the coroner. We therefore should not manufacture an explanation for his death simply because the timing invites us to do so.
I will not do to him in death what troubled me while he was alive: fill gaps in evidence with certainty.
But refusing to speculate about the cause of his death does not require us to stop asking questions about what preceded it. A man publicly described the profound emotional toll that relentless accusations, speculation and commentary were taking on him. Shortly afterwards, at the age of 41, he died. Whatever the eventual findings concerning the cause of his death, surely that chronology should make us pause—not to speculate, but to think seriously about the human cost of the way academic controversies are conducted in public.
There will presumably still be investigations and findings. Questions may eventually be answered about his thesis, his publications, his professional claims and the institutional processes surrounding his appointments. Some allegations may ultimately be substantiated; others may not. We should allow evidence to determine that.
But Jason Arday will never read those final findings. He will never have the opportunity to respond to whatever conclusions are reached. If some allegations are rejected, he will not be here to rebuild the corresponding parts of his reputation. If others are substantiated, he will not be here to account for them.
That leaves higher education with a question considerably larger than one professor: what kind of accountability are we creating?
Due process exists because an allegation is not a finding. Investigation exists because evidence must be examined rather than assumed. And human dignity should not become something temporarily suspended while that process occurs. Even a person eventually found responsible for wrongdoing remains a human being. Someone whose case has not yet been determined certainly does.
I cannot pretend that I experience this story only as a detached observer. I am a Black academic. I write about race, inequality and institutional life. Watching questions about the conduct of one Black scholar expand into commentary about diversity and the legitimacy of Black advancement within universities has been deeply unsettling.
It carries an implication that many Black academics will recognise. If one of us is accused of failing, will our individual conduct be examined, or will our presence itself be put on trial? Will the question be what this particular individual did, or whether people like us should ever have occupied these spaces in the first place?
Those are profoundly different questions.
Jason Arday should have been accountable for Jason Arday. If he had committed academic misconduct, the evidence should have established it and the appropriate processes should have followed. But he should never have been required to carry the legitimacy of Black scholarship, Black professors or diversity in higher education on his shoulders. Neither should any of us.
There is, however, another consequence that will remain after the immediate controversy has subsided. The integrity of other Black academics has been dragged, unnecessarily, into a case that was supposed to concern the conduct of one man. Once commentary begins speaking of “Black mediocrity” in academia, diversity appointments, lowered standards or institutions supposedly privileging race over merit, the accusation is no longer directed solely at Jason Arday. It casts suspicion over Black academics more generally.
That is what I find particularly damaging.
There are Black academics across British universities who obtained their doctorates legitimately, passed examinations, survived vivas, published through peer review, competed for fellowships and jobs, taught students, secured grants, wrote books and built their careers through years of intellectual labour. They should not now find themselves silently required to prove that they are not another Jason Arday. Nor should a Black professor entering a lecture theatre have to wonder whether colleagues or students are looking at them and asking whether they are genuinely qualified or merely the beneficiary of diversity.
This is the damage produced when allegations concerning an individual are transformed into an argument about a group.
And who repairs that damage?
If the investigations ultimately substantiate serious misconduct by Arday, that will establish something about Jason Arday. It will not establish that Black academics are mediocre, that diversity and excellence are incompatible, or that Black scholars have somehow entered universities without meeting academic standards. If some of the allegations are ultimately rejected, the same question of repair becomes even more urgent, because the insinuations about Black academic legitimacy will already have travelled considerably further than any subsequent correction is likely to travel.
There is an asymmetry here that should trouble us. Black academics can spend decades establishing their individual credibility, yet the alleged wrongdoing of one Black academic can suddenly be mobilised as evidence against the collective. We are made individual when we succeed and representative when we fail.
Who, then, takes responsibility for restoring what has been damaged? Who tells the doctoral student, early-career researcher, lecturer or professor who has watched this unfold that their presence in the academy is not now presumptively questionable? Who corrects the suggestion that Black scholarship itself should be approached with greater suspicion? Who repairs the damage when the language of individual accountability has already become the language of racial judgement?
Black academics should not have to perform that repair ourselves. We did not create this collective accusation.
Academic integrity must be defended vigorously. But so must the integrity of academics who have done nothing wrong. If we genuinely believe in individual responsibility, then we must practise it consistently. Jason Arday’s conduct should be judged on the evidence concerning Jason Arday. The scholarly legitimacy of thousands of other Black academics was never on trial.
And so I return to the title of that paper: No one can see me cry.
There is something painfully difficult about those words now. Jason Arday wrote about mental health, racism, marginalisation and isolation within higher education. Today, he is gone.
I do not know what caused his death. I do not know everything that happened privately during these final weeks of his life. I do not know what the investigations would ultimately have concluded. Precisely because I do not know, I refuse to manufacture certainty now.
What I do know is that academic integrity matters. Due process matters. Racism matters. Mental health matters. Human dignity matters. We should be intellectually and morally capable of holding all of those truths at the same time.
Perhaps that is what troubles me most about everything I have watched unfold. Somewhere within the allegations, investigations, headlines, political arguments and social-media commentary, it became remarkably easy to lose sight of the person at their centre.
Jason Arday was not an allegation. He was not a diversity initiative. He was not an argument about DEI. He was not a newspaper spectacle.
He was a human being.
Whatever those investigations would ultimately have concluded, he was entitled to remain a human being while they took place.
May he rest in peace.
