Emeritus

Like a lot of people, I've watched the tragedy of Jason Arday with horror – wondering if I had anything useful to say, especially when others, including people of colour, are writing so articulately. Adding my voice risks talking over better voices. At the same time, silence feels like a cop out. People like me, the academic community, owe Arday something. I’m on the fringe of that community, and he was at its very heart; but community is community. It’s meant to be, at least.   

I come at this topic as someone who glimpsed academic life but never fully pursued it. I did a PhD. I applied one time only for a lecturer’s job, coming a close second to someone much more qualified. It was a sliding doors moment, but I made peace with it easily. Academia didn't quite feel right, not because of race – I'm a Pākehā woman – but because of cultural capital. I’d arrived to postgrad with a cheerfully trashy accent, a hit-and-miss sort of brain, and no real appreciation of the finer things in life. Ultimately, I didn’t fit my own image of an academic.

I don’t for a moment claim to understand what Arday went through. But I spent enough time in his world to make a few observations from a slightly different angle.  

If Arday’s name is unfamiliar, here’s what I’ve been able to glean through the breathless, careless, sometimes vicious reporting of the man and his too short life.

In 2023, at the age of 37, Jason Arday became the youngest black professor in Cambridge University's history. This was an extraordinary achievement. As the media put it years after, once the tide had turned against him, Arday was “lionised by the academic world and became a poster boy for the university’s diversity drive”. In short, he was a kind of academic rockstar. To be a rockstar is not an uncomplicated thing. It makes you a role model for sure, but an object too: a symbol, a comms opportunity, perhaps seen as beholden to the institution that made you into these things. It’s a lot, especially for somebody who maybe just wants to do their job.

I think what happened to Arday is in part about money – and closer to home, Dr Siouxsie Wiles illustrates the point. During COVID, Wiles was our own rockstar. She didn’t face the racial backlash that Arday did, but she wore plenty of misogyny; and when she rubbed up against the university’s business model she paid a hell of a price.

At the start of the pandemic, when the going was good, Dr Wiles was a frequent commentator, pink-haired, plain-speaking and friendly. In her view, and in mine, she was playing a key part of the academic’s role: being what is called ‘the critic and conscience of society’. In short, academics and universities have a responsibility to speak up on important issues for the public benefit. It takes courage, but that’s the job.

Dr Wiles is an accomplished academic, but the fact she wasn’t ‘typical’ made her popular – and her employer, the University of Auckland, was more than happy to go along with that, boosting her profile. After all, good publicity can mean bums on seats, and that’s how universities get much of their funding.

But as time went on and some moods soured, Dr Wiles became a target. Now she was doxed and threatened, with abusers taking gleeful aim at her appearance and weight. She reached out to her employer to help keep her safe: after all, security’s expensive. Reading between the lines, the university saw the going wasn’t good anymore: a costly bill was looming, and a precedent. The university informed academics that talking about COVID now wasn’t part of their jobs. Wiles got told to dial back work that many believed was keeping people alive, and was largely left to deal with the tsunami of harassment herself. She went to court, arguing her employer had a health and safety responsibility to her, and she won – but even after the sum she was awarded by the courts, she was left with legal costs of over $400,000 she ended up fundraising to cover.

They’re meant to be the critic and conscience of society, but universities are still commercial entities. When Wiles’ rockstar sheen began to fade, she moved across the ledger, from asset to liability. Although it can’t explain his whole story, I wonder if another version of the same phenomenon happened to Arday. His move across the ledger was of a different kind, but once he got there, his vulnerability, isolation and fear would have been difficult to imagine. As you read the rest of this piece, I want you to keep the ledger in mind.

Arday’s trials began in earnest about a month ago. Here, I’ll run through the case against him. As far as I can tell, the allegations he faced fell into two groups.

First, Arday was accused of plagiarism. This is a complex topic, and we’ll return to it shortly.

Second, as the media began to probe him for plagiarism, Arday was also accused of making untrue claims about his personal life. He’d said he’d raised many millions of pounds for charity and had run 30 marathons in 35 days. These claims were exaggerated, and when they were questioned, Arday partly walked them back.

One of his more contested claims was about his autism. In Arday’s telling, he was non-verbal until the age of eleven. The media went on an obsessive and distasteful quest to find people who’d known Arday as a child, pushing them for details. For all that Arday may have stretched the truth, I believe him on this point: and not because I’ve weighed the evidence like an academic should, but because I’m a mum. Some outlet or other found a picture of him as a little boy. I recognised, deeply and intimately and tenderly, the gentleness in his face. The moment stayed with me.

I want to come back to the plagiarism accusation against Arday – in part, because it unleashed such extraordinary racist vitriol. Much of this vitriol came from people who wouldn’t know plagiarism if it bit them on the backside. There’s a whole lot to unpack here so we’re going to spend a bit of time on it.

Plagiarism is taken seriously by universities, and rightly so. Essentially, it means copying someone’s ideas without giving them credit by referencing them. This sounds like the simplest thing, until you’re actually writing an academic piece. Here we get a little technical. The easiest way to avoid the risk of plagiarism is directly quoting somebody. But if you keep directly quoting you get told off: that’s unoriginal scholarship. You can try using different phrasing to the original somebody, but if you change their meaning that breaks another rule. I spent about 80,000 words grappling with all this. When Arday was originally investigated for plagiarism in his PhD he was cleared, but found to have made mistakes. I understand how these mistakes can happen.

But it gets trickier. Stepping back, plagiarism rules are part of a system for upholding the ‘ownership’ of knowledge and what counts as knowledge in the first place. For example, as a Pākehā academic, I could quite happily write an article that draws on mātauranga – and maybe does so inappropriately – but get away with not referencing it, because mātauranga isn’t ‘owned’ by an individual academic, but is collectively and generationally held. Worse still, if another academic then wanted to draw on the mātauranga in my writing, they’d have to reference me, basically giving me kudos for taking someone else’s knowledge.

And, much as indigenous and postcolonial knowledge have made inroads into academia, not every academic thinks mātauranga is worthy of kudos at all. A couple of years ago, I attended a session of an internationally-renowned British academic who talks about public sector reform. He was asked about the role of indigenous knowledge in his work. His answer should have been short and respectful: he wasn’t familiar with this kind of scholarship. Instead, he waffled something as confusing as it was colonial. Indigenous knowledge can be helpful because sometimes migrants in the UK don’t learn the language or understand the culture. I’ll let you gape at that one just like I did.

It’s possible that Arday’s subsequent work involved plagiarism – and not of the ambiguous type I described above. These allegations haven’t been investigated, so I won’t speculate. What I will say is this. If Arday disrespected the rules, the rules themselves have not evolved to fully respect the work of academics like Arday.  

Last month, as the clouds gathering around Arday broke into an international storm, Cambridge University, Arday’s employer, defended him at first. As more allegations were published, Cambridge changed tack, launching an investigation into Arday and appealing to the public to show compassion and respect. I don’t think this was wrong. Like we saw, academics are meant to be the critic and conscience of society – and they can’t act in the public benefit if the public doesn’t trust them. But I want to come back to the idea I floated before. There’s a ledger, assets on one side and liabilities on the other. When the going was no longer good, Arday, once the rockstar academic, found himself in the wrong column.

One of the most important perspectives I’ve found on the plagiarism argument comes from a group of Arday’s colleagues. Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of postcolonial studies and courageous commentator on race issues, has led a call to investigate how Cambridge came to hire Arday so early in his career. As she puts it:

“The extent to which this appointment was paraded in the media by the university … raises questions about whether the university sought public kudos for itself rather than teaching and research from this appointment.

… the university bears no little responsibility for the grotesque racism which this whole business has unleashed, and for the harm done both to the individual in the line of fire, to Black academics as a group, and the broader field of critical race studies.

When the going was good, Cambridge did just fine out of Arday’s rockstar sheen. But it was foreseeable the going wouldn’t always be good – and when it wasn’t, it was Arday, not his employer, who was always going to face the racist frenzy. After a couple of weeks, he couldn’t take it anymore. On 5 August, he resigned from his role.

I started my own PhD at age thirty. I’d had an inkling I might be smart, but both my grades and my CV had refused to confirm it. I grasped for what I now feel is a daft symbol of smartness – but maybe you see why. A PhD seemed like a wee bit of an F you from the first of her family to go to university. Maybe I was indulging fantasies of my own; but whether or not I belonged in the academic world, I decided I was going to take my place.   

I got the best PhD supervisor I could have hoped for, and without him, I simply wouldn’t have finished. But if I expected academia to be some kind of hallowed place, I was disillusioned pretty quickly. Most of the academics I crossed paths with were fine. But some were astonishingly lazy. Some nursed petty grievances against colleagues or even students. Some graded arbitrarily, knowing there were almost no checks and balances to rein them in. Some brazenly rode the coattails of their own students’ work, adding their own names to publications their juniors had slogged over. Almost all of them were Pākehā.

Jason Arday resigned from his professor’s job, but do you know who still remains in employment? A man named Nathan Cofnas. On 21 July, it was Cofnas who made the first allegations of plagiarism against Arday – allegations of which he’d been cleared. It was Cofnas who set in train everything that would follow.

Cofnas, like Arday, was once employed by Cambridge University, up until 2024. He calls himself a ‘race realist’. He got himself in trouble with a blog post about ‘hereditarianism’, or his belief that some groups of humans are innately better than others. The blog post claimed that if people were actually judged by merit, there’d be almost no black students or academics at Harvard. In fact, black people would cease to hold high-profile positions outside sports and entertainment.

Cofnas lost his job because his blog post undermined the values of Emmanuel College, part of Cambridge – this despite taking legal action with the support of the British Free Speech Union and donations of over £85,000.

If I’d been in charge, I would have sacked Cofnas for another reason too.

Arday was forced to resign for plagiarism – but plagiarism rules aren’t the only standards academics are bound by. They’re the critic and conscience of society. Conduct should be measured and ethical. Positions should be evidenced and reasoned. Debates should be robust but professional. By any of these measures, Cofnas’s writing is pitifully lacking. As other scholars have put it:

Whereas Cofnas is concerned that a lack of research into race/IQ may lead to harmful consequences, real scientists are similarly concerned that directing their resources toward nonsensical ideas (such as “racially” discrete hereditary differences in intelligence) would deprive themselves and the rest of humanity of the benefits that would otherwise have followed from pursuing more promising and meaningful lines of inquiry.

Cofnas is like the punchline to an unfunny joke, draping big fake-intellectual words over the smallness of his character. But after Cambridge got rid of him? He went from one prestigious post to the next, finding a new role at the University of Ghent. His background, and the axe he was grinding, weren’t secrets, either to his new university or the media that picked up his allegations against Arday. And that’s what I can’t fathom. There is nothing Arday did, nothing that he could have done, that offended the values of academia the way that Cofnas did and does – yet the system that cast out a black man didn’t just protect a white supremacist. It rewarded him.

Cofnas continues to blog, nowadays against trans people and women. He claims he’s scared of Arday’s supporters – but not scared enough to stop posting. The University of Ghent is investigating him, but I suspect he knows this too shall pass. After all, the Trump administration has already come out in his favour, calling the university dishonest and corrupt.

This too shall pass: that sentiment must have seemed empty to Jason Arday. On 14 August, he was found unresponsive by ambulance staff. He could not be revived. He was forty-one years old.

I imagine Arday years before, agonising over his PhD like I did. A doctorate is a gruelling thing. More than one in ten people who start will not complete. The other nine won’t emerge unscathed, their mental health suffering along the journey. I can’t say what kept Arday going, but I wonder if he, too, wanted to take his place in a world he felt he didn’t belong.

Of course, it was different for him: others too believed he didn’t belong, and with an almost-violent intensity. They said he didn’t have merit – but they actually meant he couldn’t have it, not somebody like him. That was Arday’s undoing, not the plagiarism. He transgressed; and not timidly, but with a confidence not meant to be his birthright.

It couldn’t go unpunished.

He leaves two children behind him. I find myself wondering if the little ones have the same gentleness in their faces.