Public figures have joined friends of Jason Arday to call for a public inquiry into the “witch hunt” the former Cambridge professor faced before his death.
Labour MP Diane Abbott, actor Jameela Jamil and Green Party leader Zack Polanski are among 30,000 signatories of a letter to the prime minister about the "relentless harassment" Arday was subjected to as allegations about plagiarism, and questions about some of his claimed achievements, dominated the news. Last night, thousands of mourners gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square for a vigil organised by Stand Up to Racism. Addressing the crowd, Abbott said she believed “the vicious media campaign drove” Arday “to his death”.
‘Institutional murder’
The Spectator and The Telegraph ran “article after article about Arday” but there were also attacks from the left, including Novara Media, said University of Oxford professor Sneha Krishnan on Al Jazeera. “Many academics are investigated for misconduct in their scholarship” but “none should involve public shaming or racist glee”. Arday’s “harassment and death” is tantamount to “institutional murder” by a media ecosystem that has repeatedly shown itself to be “infused with anti-Black racism”.
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Getting to the bottom of plagiarism allegations is “in the public interest” and, for the sake of Cambridge University and its academic integrity, “exposure does matter”, said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. But in this case, the coverage was never free from “a miasma of race”. Even after Arday had “taken the decision to step away from the spotlight”, he continued to be held up as “talking point in a row about DEI”, his shortcomings highlighted “not just as the usual failures” of academic rigour but “as exceptional proof” that diversity efforts at Cambridge had “gone too far”.
This was a “death by a thousand headlines”, said Alan Rusbridger in Prospect. “Torrents of verbiage cascaded” from journalists but none of it was directed at the “troubled history” of Nathan Cofnas, the “race realist” who “claimed the credit for unmasking Arday”. Unfortunately, “Fleet Street in full pursuit can only manage one narrative at a time”.
‘Out of his depth’
“The basic job of the press is to find out the truth,” said Charles Moore in The Telegraph. And it discovered “substantial untruths, seriously damaging to the reputation“ of one of our greatest universities, “and reported them”. “What else could it have done?” (Arday denied allegations of plagiarism but acknowledged errors in his work.)
It was the University of Cambridge, “not the press”, which was “obsessed” with the colour of Arday’s skin. It paraded its youngest-ever Black professor “like some exalted tribal chief captured by colonising explorers in the 18th century”. Arday was not a villain but “a young man out of his depth”, and a responsible institution would “quietly have nurtured his talents and sorted out his problems”, rather than leave them to be publicly exposed.
“The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly,” said Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. The leftist spin is that “hacks hounded him into despair” but the truth is that journalists “found a story and they told it” – unlike Arday’s colleagues who “failed to prize merit over identity”.
