9 thoughts on Jason Arday

What principles should guide how we make sense of this tragedy?

Photo by Dorin Seremet on Unsplash

This is a tragedy

It goes without saying that the death of Jason Arday is a tragedy. Though an official cause has not been revealed, the timing and unexpected nature of his death strongly suggest that he took his own life. And whatever problems there were with his scholarship or the plausibility of his story, do not make his death any less awful.

The journalistic scrutiny of his academic record and background were justified

Many commentators on social media, such as Jolyon Maugham, have already called for a public inquiry following Arday’s death. Others have advocated reigniting the “Leveson 2” inquiry – a planned, but long-shelved follow-up to the 2011 Leveson Inquiry following the phone hacking scandal. The clear implication is that an inquiry would eventually lead to stronger regulation of the press.

This would be absolutely the wrong response.

The problem is that the journalistic scrutiny that Arday received was broadly justified. He was not a random member of the public, unfairly picked out of obscurity for a punishment beating. He was a senior academic at the University of Cambridge, the author of a high-profile memoir, and a public figure who had been building his profile with numerous media appearances over the years.

Given this, no wonder the Times Higher Education (THE) originally sought to investigate claims of plagiarism. And no wonder the wider press took an interest when a high-status public figure was revealed to be a fantasist with a wildly implausible backstory.

And though his death is tragic, it does not retroactively change these underlying facts.

An uncomfortable source does not render true information invalid

What made the Arday story initially controversial was that the story of his alleged plagiarism was originally published not by THE, which had been investigating, but by Nathan Cofnas, a former academic. Cofnas describes himself as a ‘race-realist’, and he once argued that without ‘DEI’ (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hiring policies, there wouldn’t be any black academics.

Whatever motivated Cofnas to investigate Arday’s work (I suspect it isn’t hard to guess), the evidence of plagiarism he revealed was seemingly real, or at least worthy of further investigation.

And this is a very awkward situation to be in, because what is the right thing to do when important, real information comes to light via a source we don’t like?

The closest analogue I can think of to the current situation is the Russian hack of various Democrats’ email accounts in 2016, including those of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the personal email of her campaign manager – which were subsequently released online just before the election.

In that case, the hack didn’t turn up any significant revelations beyond John Podesta’s risotto technique, and the contents were mostly just embarrassing. But imagine if the hack had exposed some genuinely noteworthy scandal that could change the election? Would it have been right to report it?

As frustrating and unfair as it is process-wise, I think that it probably would be. And I think the same is true in the Arday case – just because I don’t like the guy who alleged the plagiarism, it doesn’t make his reporting untrue.

The difficult proportionality question

This brings me to what makes the Arday story particularly complicated, because racism is clearly an important part of explaining why the story captured so much attention. As Stephen Bush wrote yesterday, there was plenty of coverage of Arday that was not just about a ‘professor accused of plagiarism’, but a ‘black professor accused of plagiarism’.

So even though I think the scrutiny of Arday was legitimate journalism, I think it is also true that he was subjected to disproportionate attention because of the colour of his skin, or what he represented in the eyes of racists.

As has been pointed out by Stephen and others, this phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated by comparison with Professor William O’Reilly, a Cambridge Professor who faced plagiarism allegations in 2023, which didn’t become a massive story.

Given this, I can totally understand why black academics, or academics from other minority backgrounds, may feel they are on the receiving end of wildly disproportionate scrutiny, relative to their white colleagues. There’s definitely a question of proportionality here.

To use another analogy with American politics, it’s a bit like how Trump has attempted to persecute his political opponents by investigating them for mortgage fraud, which has turned up real cases, by virtue of applying disproportionate attention to a specific group of people.

So this is arguably part of what happened to Arday, and more generally, I can imagine how this same problem could conceivably be weaponised against other groups too.

For example, imagine if controversial right-wing professors were to receive intense, disproportionate scrutiny from lefty activists? Would it be wrong to report on claims that they used ChatGPT to write their book?

Or to use the single most contentious hypothetical, what if pro-Israel activists carefully picked over the work of academics who are vocally on the Palestinian side of that conflict, or vice versa? What happens if real misconduct is found along the way?

However, here’s the difficult part. Though I can certainly recognise the proportionality problem as a Bad Thing, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do about it. Like, though many people have raised the issue in the wake of Arday’s death, I’m not sure what is supposed to be done about it. What rules could be written, or norms could be developed to mitigate it? What do people actually want to happen?

If the media is to blame, so is the public

According to an organisation called NewsCord, 249 stories were published about Arday in the 22 days leading up to his death, which is supposedly more than there were about Peter Mandelson in the weeks following the publication of the Epstein files.

I’m not sure how real those numbers are,¹ but what’s clear is that there were certainly a lot of Arday stories in the British press, and it isn’t hard to imagine what toll that level of negative attention can take on someone’s mental health.

But why were so many stories written? The answer isn’t just cartoon villain newspaper editors with a racist axe to grind – it’s because stories about Arday were clearly drawing significant audience attention. The news media is not a profitable business at the best of times, so when a story hits, there’s a strong incentive to cover it more.

So this is what frustrates me about the knee-jerk attacks on the media coverage. It’s not just the journalists – to a significant extent they are serving audience demands for more. The public are complicit for clicking, reading, watching and talking about it.²

Plagiarism isn’t what made the story viral

What makes the Arday story difficult to untangle is that there were essentially two different stories compounded into one.

The first was a relatively narrow story about academic misconduct and plagiarism allegations. This is where the comparison with William O’Reilly broadly holds.

But I do not think this is why the story captured so much public attention. What really propelled the story was the unravelling of the non-academic parts of Arday’s life, and the many fantastical aspects of his backstory – because the sheer volume of mad claims was objectively funny.

I made this observation myself before his death, rather unfortunately writing last week that I found the story “tremendously entertaining”.

He was a guy in a high-status position, who variously claimed to have been non-verbal until he was 11, who claimed to have suffered and recovered from numerous serious illnesses, who claimed to have run multiple back-to-back marathons to an extent that would make him one of the world’s greatest runners, and who claimed to have played football to a semi-professional level. He also claimed to have raised £5m for charity, but that his co-fundraisers had signed a non-disclosure agreement, and that a severed pig’s head was sent to his family.

This is self-evidently ludicrous – and over the last few weeks, every new story that emerged revealed that he made even more wildly implausible claims about his own life.

So this is why I don’t think citing simply racism and drawing a sober comparison with other alleged academic plagiarists fully explains the story. Though racism clearly played a part, he was still a fantasist in a high-profile role. A better model to understand why the Arday story ‘cut through’ is perhaps previous similarly bizarre stories, like ‘canoe man’ John Darwin, ‘Cat Bin Woman’, or even an incident like Dominic Cummings’s trip to Barnard Castle, where more than any technical political story about Covid policy, in that case the public could smell bullshit and it came wrapped up in a compelling story.

The organisations and institutions that elevated Arday have some difficult questions to answer

It is, of course, deeply unwise to speculate why Jason Arday appears to have taken his own life. You never know fully what else is going on inside someone’s head.

But what is clearer is that the Arday story would not have blown up if he hadn’t been failed by multiple institutions over the last few years. And these institutions should reflect on their role in elevating him.

For example, why did the University of Cambridge hire someone whose backstory is almost self-evidently absurd? Did nobody ask about the marathons during the interview?

And according to Retraction Watch, concerns about his scholarship were first raised in May 2023, two months after he was first appointed. Why wasn’t more done to scrutinise or investigate the allegations then? If Arday had lost his job back then, the story would have quickly disappeared.

Then most recently, why didn’t the publishers of his new memoir raise any questions about the wildly implausible claims he makes in the book? This was, after all, supposed to be a work of non-fiction. If there had been any scrutiny of his manuscript before publication, the book would never have been published. Given this follows not long after the Salt Path controversy, doesn’t this suggest the publishing industry needs to get better at vetting and fact-checking the authors it publishes, even if they have a great story to tell?

I also think the Good Law Project should reflect on its role in the controversy. It was quick to defend Arday after the initial coverage, launching a petition calling for people to ‘stand in solidarity’ with Arday, which was co-signed by a number of prominent people. But in effect, it was making a similar error to Cambridge – of elevating Arday. It turned Arday from an academic with questions over his record into a political fight over what he represented. Which, of course, added more fuel to the fire and drove more attention.

The ‘DEI’ angle deserves interrogation

One of the reasons Arday was seized on by the right is not just because he was black. It’s also because of how his appointment has been linked to ‘DEI’ – an Americanism that stands for ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’.

Had Arday, the implication was, been elevated by Cambridge not on the merits of his scholarship, but in an act of positive discrimination? If this is the case, the fact that Arday turned out to be a fantasist and alleged plagiarist would be a serious mark against ‘DEI’³ hiring policies.

Now, to be clear, I’m extremely sympathetic to institutions proactively supporting greater diversity. We should want our universities – and our politicians, publishers and Hollywood adaptations of Ancient Greek myths – to better reflect the modern world, and we should want shared institutions in which everyone feels like they have a stake.

But it appears that good intentions may have gone badly wrong in the case of Arday, as clearly there is still a balance to be struck between someone’s personal characteristics and their actual ability to do their job.⁴

As things stand, the extent to which ‘DEI’ weighed on Arday’s appointment still isn’t clear. In fact, before his death, Cambridge announced plans for an independent inquiry into his appointment.

But there is some circumstantial evidence that these motivations may have played a role here. For example, Cambridge has a set of policies designed to increase the diversity of its workforce. Then when Arday was appointed, the university made his background a triumphal part of the announcement, highlighting the challenges he claims to have faced growing up, and the fact that he is the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at the university.

And more broadly, his appointment in 2023 was at a time when issues of race and racism were extremely culturally salient, particularly in left/liberal-ish institutions. It was still the post-George Floyd ‘woke’ moment culturally, and there was significant political energy directed towards performative diversity, particularly in academia, politics and the media.

So you can imagine why, given that context, Cambridge may have been persuaded to hire Arday – not just because he was black, but because his particular specialism was “improving the representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people in higher education”. Then add on a compelling backstory that intersects with other ‘vectors of oppression’, and it adds up to a compelling case – even though there are presumably many more eminently qualified black academics with less exciting backstories, who haven’t plagiarised, who could have been given the job instead.

Nobody knows what principles apply, or should take precedence

If there is a through-line in many of the above thoughts, it is that it is unclear on what principles many of the reactions to Arday were operating, or which principles should take precedence when there is a clash.

I was struck by reading this short reflection on the Arday story by Dmitry Grozoubinski. I agree with his frustration at what he calls the ‘grifter-right’, which uses its megaphone to amplify culture war fodder like the Arday story in bad faith – and at the frustration of trying to operate with principles when your opponents do not.

Dmitry writes:

• If we treat every allegation as credible we create incentives for terrible people to bury us in them, paralysing us with investigations the results of which will be weaponized regardless of outcome as either ‘gotchas’ or ‘conspiracies’.

• If we give a right wing outrage oxygen, the fire behind it grows, often vastly out of proportion to any alleged wrongdoing - and with consequences far beyond the formal.

• Yet if we ignore the hints of smoke and do not ever search for fire, we sacrifice doing what’s right for the sake of the broader culture war and give up our own integrity and that of our institutions.

• I suppose the answer could be that we must exist as Caesar’s wife, above reproach, but the world is vast and full of potential targets, full of humans, and full of sins.

But what’s striking about the above is that you could substitute the word “right” for “left” above, and you’d have an almost word-perfect critique of ‘cancel culture’ that could be levelled at the left over the last decade.

And I think this illustrates exactly why it’s important for good-faith operators to not give up on having principles.

A while back, I wrote about why the reason I’m not a fan of the Good Law Project is that despite what the name implies, it does not appear to be guided by any particular philosophy or doctrine on what is considered ‘good law’. Instead, it uses the law as a tool to pursue somewhat arbitrary political goals.

But the truth is, if we want to make sense of a terrible tragedy like the death of Jason Arday, we need to understand the principles on which we’re working. Only then can we design institutions, norms and rules about what allegations are considered acceptable to scrutinise, or proportionate to cover.

1. Honestly everything about the source of those numbers screams “total nonsense”, but they help me illustrate a point.

2. A friend of mine observed that it is like criticising the oil companies for drilling enormous quantities of oil to be burnt. Sure, that’s bad in an abstract sense – but the reason they’re selling the oil in the first place is because people want to buy it.

3. British institutions and organisations tend to more commonly call it ‘EDI’ – Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. But unsurprisingly this story has become very America-brained.

4. This is a bar that will be different in every sector. I am entirely happy to see diversity rules applied to the casting of films, but I’m also a strong believer that airline pilots should qualify based exclusively on their technical ability to fly a plane.