The Real Meaning of the Jason Arday Scandal
A couple of years ago, a self-styled “race-realist” named Nathan Cofnas wrote a blog post about racial difference. His dogma was well trodden, minus the usual antisemitism (Cofnas was raised Jewish), including the pronouncement that, in a meritocratic world, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” That sort of thing. The post roused enough attention that Emmanuel College, Cambridge, released Cofnas from his post as a research associate; the broader University of Cambridge, however, found no issue, and he carried out his contracted research untouched. The “race-realist” thereafter found a new gig at Belgium’s Ghent University, which, despite an outcry numbering thousands of signatories, defended its hire, who has continued his work.
It must have stung, though, not staying on at Cambridge, and Cofnas later joked that the events that followed were “what happened if you don’t give Cofnas a job.” What happened: the “race-realist” found “a hook for a story,” as he recently told the conservative video podcaster Rob Montz, one that would embarrass champions of equality and confirm his prejudices. His target was Jason Arday, a Black professor at Cambridge, though some have argued that it was the institution, Cambridge, that painted the bull’s-eye.
Arday’s story, as he’s told it, has been splashed from pillar to post: growing up in South London as the son of Ghanaian immigrants, he was diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder when he was three, did not speak until he was eleven, and could not read or write until, with intervention from two beloved tutors, he was eighteen. He pressed onward, receiving a Ph.D. in educational studies in 2015 and going on to hold professorships at Durham University and the University of Glasgow. Then, in 2023, at the age of thirty-seven, he was appointed a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge, becoming the youngest Black person named to a professorship in the university’s history. These scholastic triumphs were joined by other recounted hardships—diagnoses of epilepsy and dyslexia—and feats such as pushing through an epileptic episode and a resulting hairline fracture to complete thirty marathons in thirty-five days, for charity. (Arday was, according to his memoir, inspired by the comedian Eddie Izzard, who ran forty-three marathons in fifty-one days, in 2009.)
The story sounded, in toto, extraordinary—a biography of the sort you might expect one to possess to become historic. Simon & Schuster acquired Arday’s memoir; the now unfortunately titled “Great and Unfortunate Things” was published last week in the U.S. Until last month, Arday’s trajectory was fêted as a feel-good story, letting the involved institutions—academia, the media—leave off wondering why a Black and neurodivergent professor at a revered place of learning would be such a rare thing.
Cofnas had his own answer—“in a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%,” he wrote in that 2024 blog post. And, after a tip from a faculty member at Cambridge, he claimed, he had his hook. The allegation was that Arday was a “plagiarist and fabulist”; and, as would later become publicized, Arday’s scholarship had in the past received scrutiny for accusations of plagiarism. In late July, the “race-realist” went long on Substack, alleging, with the assistance of a plagiarism detector, instances of plagiarism throughout Arday’s work.
The post spun coverage of Arday, weeks before the release of his memoir, into another direction. Some classmates, as published accounts revealed, recalled him speaking as a child. Birkbeck, University of London, where Arday said he had completed a master’s, reported that they were not able to find record of his attendance. Many of his other claims also came under scrutiny.
Other prominent figures have been received with levity when their stories have unravelled in public. But Arday was not greeted as a risible scammer endemic to the times. Suspicions surrounding this person demanded an exorcism. Arday defended his biography and his work. On August 5th, as media reports and online spectators tore into what was starting to look like a specious pile of achievements, Cambridge announced that it had opened an investigation after new information had emerged about Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments,” and noted complaints of “academic misconduct.” Arday resigned that day. Last Friday, he was found dead in South London. He was forty-one.
News of his death, and its circumstances, has been cloaked in journalistic language that implies suicide, emulating the opacity of suicide itself. When all we know is that a life has ended, conjecture rushes into the gap. It is hard not to factor into Arday’s death the preceding media blitz—a disproportionate fixation that set off a social-media furor likely accompanied by harassing messages to Arday and anyone within his orbit, and that has been appropriately described, by some, as gleeful. One British journalist called the story “delicious”—her remarks were reposted by J. K. Rowling.
Other, less cartoonish responses have lingered on Cambridge’s comparable glee in brandishing Arday in the first place. Staid as they may appear, prestigious institutions love king-making and star-fucking—and precocious minorities are far from the first to inflate at the touch of the sceptre. Was this not a lapsed duty of care from Cambridge, or any of the places Arday passed through without much apparent scrutiny of his personal and professional labors? A lust for diversity set Arday up for failure, is one line of thinking. And yet the relish in the unmasking, flung out across our debased online watering holes for anyone to see, has belied any professed piety when it comes to the topic of honesty and academic standards.
Ours is not a society that loathes charlatans; look who’s running things. Academia—like business, electoral politics, and the tech sector—has loads of fabulists and tons of bunk. (And, despite so much single-minded scrutiny of the humanities, the sciences, social and otherwise, are struggling in this regard. A recent audit published in The Lancet found that the number of fabricated references in biomedical papers has increased dramatically in the past few years.) Academic-integrity cases that do reach public attention tend to be strategically muddied, their claimants taking advantage of a general audience’s general ignorance about citation practices; so-called plagiarism detectors, for example, can often incorrectly flag the summary necessary for restating prior scholarship as intellectual theft.
The hues of persons whose cases attract rabid notice are also conspicuous; as the journalist Mona Chalabi pointed out on Instagram, Arday’s name, along with that of another prominent Black academic who resigned after charges of plagiarism, Claudine Gay, has reverberated throughout the press with an intensity unlike those of white figures who have recently been accused of plagiarism, such as the Cambridge associate professor William O’Reilly and Rachel Reeves, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. (Harvard stated that Gay did not violate its standards for research misconduct, and Reeves’ team denied claims of plagiarism.) Or, for that matter, those of Simon Goldhill and Herbert Huppert, two disgraced professors at Cambridge who recently underwent internal investigations that upheld allegations of sexual harassment. (Goldhill was allowed to quietly resign.)
I will sing no ballad for the Black professor; that genre is also well trodden. Yet I distrust the consensus that has crystallized in the days since Arday’s death. “Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness,” the Atlantic staff writer Tyler Austin Harper wrote last week. “And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.”
The parallelism sounds nice, and the essay is not wholly incorrect in its rendition of the respective small-“p” parties in question; however, the proportions are off. Feckless D.E.I. measures (which have garnered sharper, and more class-minded, critiques than Harper’s from leftist academics such as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Adolph L. Reed, Jr.) and right-wing interests are not, in fact, equal and opposite forces. The bombastic hiring, research, and teaching incentives, both spiritual and institutional, of D.E.I. initiatives are child’s play compared with the corporate and financial inducements that direct universities’ decisions. Harper’s take on the crisis of higher education today suggests—wrongly—that affirmative action and related policies have sullied the research and educational mission of the modern university more profoundly and consequentially than the long-standing influence of tech companies and the military.
I do agree with Harper that Arday, sanctified before the fall, was not seen as a person by the people and institutions to whom his story would be of use—only “a hook for a story,” as Cofnas said on Montz’s podcast. Arday is dead and still being propped up as an example of various crises, by commentators unconcerned with his memory. As for the “race-realist” at Ghent, he told Montz, “I’m still waiting for the revolution to happen, and then I’ll get another job.” He added, jokingly, “After the revolution, I’ll be the head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard.” ♦