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Jason Arday: Killed by the racist establishment media

Jason Arday: Killed by the racist establishment media

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A vicious, racist harassment campaign by the establishment media has led to the tragic death of black Cambridge professor Jason Arday. This fiasco had nothing to do with academic integrity, and everything to do with sowing racist, culture-war division.

Over the past month, a vicious, targeted harassment campaign has been unleashed across the pages of the establishment press – both right and ‘left’ – against the University of Cambridge’s youngest black professor Jason Arday.

Arday was accused of academic plagiarism, and lying about his own sporting and charitable achievements, as well as his personal experiences of facing learning difficulties and racist abuse.

Due to the unbearable public pressure, Arday resigned from his position at Cambridge two weeks ago. Tragically, nine days later, he was found dead at home in South London. According to his family, the campaign of misinformation was too much for Arday to bear.

Racist smear campaign

It’s clear to millions of people that this vitriolic public hounding had nothing to do with genuine concerns about plagiarism and academic integrity. Rather, it had everything to do with the colour of Arday’s skin.

Arday’s main ‘crime’ – in the eyes of the right-wing culture warriors – was that he was a black man from an underprivileged, working-class background, who had risen to a high position in a prestigious institution that has traditionally been the reserve of rich, white men.

It’s worth noting that the smear campaign against Arday was started by a self-professed “race realist” (read: racist) and eugenicist academic, Nathan Cofnas, who likely had an axe to grind after being sacked from the same university two years ago for his overtly racist views.

Cofnas has openly claimed that race is linked to intelligence, and that without Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, there would be no black academics at Harvard, and that black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sport and entertainment” due to their low intelligence.

And yet – despite the fact that this man makes no attempt to hide his overt racism – his spurious accusations against Arday, posted on his personal blog, were taken as gospel. Within hours, his claims were amplified by The Times and The Telegraph – supposedly some of Britain’s more ‘sensible’ and ‘authoritative’ outlets.

What ensued was an unparalleled smear campaign across the British press – from the conservative Spectator to the so-called ‘left-wing’ Guardian. In 22 days, 249 articles were published about Arday, probing into his academic career and his personal life – which included throwing into question his disability and his experiences of racism.

Sickeningly, 181 of these articles were published after Arday had resigned, saying that he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure” and that the public scrutiny had taken “a profound toll on me and on those I love.”

 

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His own friends and colleagues had warned that Arday was at risk of committing suicide. Several weeks ago, the university’s own autism research centre warned that there was a potential safeguarding risk, given Arday’s vulnerable position.

Disgustingly, the Tory-aligned Spectator even posted an article after Arday’s death with the headline “Jason Arday wasn’t the victim of a ‘racist witch hunt’”.

Double standards

It is entirely irrelevant whether Arday was guilty of the plagiarism and dishonesty he had been accused of. All that we know for certain is that the claim of plagiarism in his PhD thesis had been investigated and dismissed.

But that’s besides the point. What has shocked and outraged hundreds of thousands of people is the blatant double standards that have been applied to Arday, who was scrutinised many times more harshly than a white professor or public figure would have been.

There are countless examples to illustrate this hypocrisy.

In 2023, Cambridge academic William O’Reilly remained in his post after being found to have plagiarised material from his own student’s essay. There was no media outrage then.

Another Cambridge academic, Nicola Morrison, was also forced to apologise for copying passages from a student’s dissertation without attribution. Again: silence from the media.

Orlando Figes – a rabid anti-communist historian – was caught red-handed faking positive reviews of his own books, and negative reviews trashing the work of other historians. He remained a professor of history at Birkbeck until his retirement, when he was made Emeritus Professor.

Slavoj Zizek – another high-profile academic – was found to have plagiarised from a conservative magazine, as well as from his own previous works. He remained in his position as International Director at Birkbeck until last year, before moving to a professorship at New York University.

The list could go on and on. Plagiarism and academic misconduct are rife in academia. According to one study cited by the London School of Economics (LSE), close to 3 percent of researchers have admitted to plagiarism. Another global survey pins the figure at 7 percent.

In many cases, such shortcuts are the inevitable product of academics being forced to churn out research, under an increasingly marketised model of higher education.

None of this is even taking into account the countless cases of sexual misconduct that are quietly swept under the rug at a whole number of universities. At the LSE, the university administration’s botched handling of one sexual misconduct case had to be exposed by the student press.

And when George Holmes, former vice chancellor of Greater Manchester University, was convicted of fraud for mismanaging over £1 million in university funds, it barely even made it into the national news cycle.

Beyond the world of academia, former chancellor Rachel Reeves was caught lying on her CV, as was Labour MP and former business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, as was current housing minister Angela Rayner. Former Bank of England head Mark Carney was found to have plagiarised several passages in his PhD thesis – he is now the Prime Minister of Canada.

None of these individuals received anywhere near the public flogging that Arday received. They all remain alive and well – and in highly-influential positions, in many cases.

In fact, Arday faced more scrutiny, investigation, and public pressure than any of the dozens of prestigious academics and scientists that had close links with the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein – from Larry Summer, to Noam Chomsky, to Steven Pinker.

All of this serves to underscore the point that this media harassment campaign had nothing to do with genuine concerns about the ‘sacred’ institution of academia, which is full of intellectual dishonesty – and worse.

Rather, Arday became the latest target of the establishment’s insatiable, reactionary culture war.

This culture war was instigated by the very same racist media, who week by week whip up fear and prejudice with their scandalous lies about Muslims, asylum seekers, ‘mega dinghys’, and ‘Asian grooming gangs’; by the same racist media which portrays black victims of state murder like Mark Duggan and Chris Kaba as violent gangsters.

This is one of the main functions that the media plays in our society: to sell sensationalist stories with little regard for the truth; to whip up culture-war issues to cut across the class struggle; to distract ordinary people from all the injustice in society, and keep us divided.

The media – along with the whole capitalist establishment – is racist to the core.

Liberal hypocrisy

The reactionary press and the right-wing culture warriors are the instigators of this campaign of hate. They are most of all to blame for this tragic death.

But the University of Cambridge management itself cannot be let off the hook. They buckled to this hysterical media pressure by promising to investigate Arday. It was only after Arday had died that the Cambridge chancellor hypocritically condemned the “racist feeding frenzy”.

And let’s not forget that they were the ones that tokenistically promoted and paraded Arday, in order to distract from valid criticisms that the institution wasn’t diverse enough, in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement.

From there, Arday was pushed into a national spotlight, as an inspiring, uplifting example of how young black people can achieve anything, if they try hard enough. The BBC – one of the most hated and discredited media institutions in the country – also promoted Arday’s profile by inviting him as a panellist on their news and opinion programmes.

Arday was cynically promoted by the education and media establishments to give themselves a progressive veneer, and deflect from any criticisms that they weren’t diverse enough. Meanwhile, to this day only 0.4 percent of Cambridge professors are black, which is less than half of the – already extremely low – 1 percent nationwide.

And then, as soon as the university came under fire from the racist media, the higher-ups completely abandoned Arday, and refused to defend him. They were just as quick to drop him as they had so willingly lifted him up for their own cynical ends.

In much the same way, many big companies cynically adopted DEI practices and liberal identity politics in the wake of the BLM movement. But now that there is a right-wing backlash against DEI, many of those same companies have been willing to drop it just as easily.

This exposes the complete emptiness and cynicism of liberal identity politics – which acts as mere window dressing for a deeply racist system, and is often dropped by its promoters as soon as the wind blows in a different direction.

Glaring inequalities exist within higher education. These are just one expression of the deep, systemic social inequalities that black and brown people face from birth: generational poverty, lack of school funding, inadequate housing, and barriers within the workplace. On top of that, there’s the crushing impact of social prejudice, state oppression, and media discrimination.

The kind of liberal identity politics and performative diversity that is cynically employed by Cambridge University is powerless to solve any of these things, nor is that what they are intended for. These methods can only add grist to the mill of the culture war – which is ultimately fuelled by both sides.

A divisive distraction

This tragedy started with the media whipping up this story as if it was a national scandal.

Meanwhile, many of the real scandals affecting ordinary, working-class people are overlooked, prettified, and ignored. For example, the Epstein affair – one of the biggest scandals in the history of capitalism – has curiously disappeared from the headlines.

All of this has taken place while 35 universities are coming under scrutiny for pushing through controversial plans to form a Defence Universities Alliance, which will aim to accelerate the militarisation of higher education, for the benefit of profit-hungry arms companies.

The University of Cambridge, meanwhile, has been found to be at the centre of efforts by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK’s James Orr to establish a right-wing recruitment pipeline.

We must ask: who is the real threat to academia: one black professor; or the cabal of investors, militarists, and right-wing reactionaries swarming our universities for profit and political gain?

While the country has literally been burning – with near-apocalyptic scenes of wildfires, droughts, train derailments, and crop failures flooding our social media feeds – the greatest minds that the journalistic world has to offer have focused all of their efforts on hounding an autistic black man to death. The working class has nothing but contempt for these gutless wretches.

This is exactly what the establishment’s culture war has always been aimed at: distracting ordinary people from the existing problems in society, and deflecting the blame from those who are responsible.

Campaign groups are calling for an inquiry into the events leading to Jason Arday’s death. As we’ve seen with many other inquiries – from Grenfell to the ‘Spycops’ scandal – all this will entail is years of drawn-out investigations. Some high-up people will apologise and promise to do better, while business carries on as usual.

As soon as the dust has settled on this shameful affair, the press will go back to demonising black and brown people, and attacking Muslims and asylum seekers – if they ever paused in the first place.

The racist culture war is fuelled by capitalism, which can’t live without it. An exploitative system needs division, prejudice, and fear just like an all-consuming fire needs oxygen. To end the culture war, this entire system must be torn down.

‘Spectator’? Instigator.

Patricia Moseley, Wood Green

Professor Jason Arday is dead. We may not yet know the details of his untimely passing, but we can get a glimpse at his last few days of life through the sustained and collective harassment he experienced at the hands of the gutter press.

Journalist after journalist, paper after paper, published numerous articles about Arday, DEI, and ‘the trouble in universities’. Their campaign for ‘justice’ turned into a deadly obsession.

These are the priorities of the supposedly ‘independent’ press: not to hold the powerful to account, but to throw oppressed groups into the organ-grinder of the culture war.

The Spectator, who had to withdraw another hit piece on Arday when it coincided with the news of his death, is owned by Sir Paul Marshall, media baron and hedge fund manager.

He bought the Spectator for a cool £100 million in 2024 – thankfully, his £875 million net worth could take the hit. Marshall also co-owns GB News, another attack-dog of the baron-backed press.

Even in the Spectator’s piece acknowledging Arday’s death, journalist Julie Burchill said she felt “not exactly guilty”. How do these people sleep at night?

As the system sinks deeper into crisis, the bourgeois press will continue to launch divisive attacks which instigate hostel fires, far-right riots, online harassment, tragic deaths (Jason Arday, Brianna Ghey, and many more), and horror without end for whoever the latest scapegoat may be.

The Communist is a refreshing change from the blood-soaked pages of the national media.

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