Was Jason Arday just the perfect victim?

[KellyK2026]

Surely I can’t be the only one that feels like Jason Arday was a victim, right? Yesterday he was found dead and I feel bad for him. Here’s the reasons why I think he was a victim:

1. It is absolutely insane to me that Cambridge University would appoint him as a Professor when he was in the early stages of his career. It’s practically unheard of. At any university you typically have to earn your dues (which means working as an academic for many years) OR do something truly special, like a Nobel Prize nomination, to be promoted to Professor. I cannot imagine the amount of pressure he had been under to prove himself and likely had a tremendous amount of imposter syndrome. Cambridge let him down.
2. I’ve worked in academia for many years, and let me tell you, academics are under a tremendous amount of pressure to publish. This pressure can compromise quality. Arday isn’t the first nor will he be the last to publish questionable papers.
3. As I’ve worked in academia for years, I’ve experienced academics make racist and sexist remarks first hand. One white academic I worked with got drunk at a work get together and started a rant about how Black people shouldn't be president (this was when Obama was in power), that Obama was a Muslim and interracial relationships were ‘disgusting’. What made this somewhat even worse was that this particular academic wrote about racism in the public sphere, so he profited from writing about Black struggles while harbouring these personal views. There was no repercussions for him, despite presenting himself as something other than what he was.
4. I’ve also been sexually assaulted at a conference by a male academic. No repercussions for him either and he no doubt pretends to be a feminist in his work.
5. I don’t think it’s in doubt that Arday had autism. Now I don’t know how it affected him personally, but, again, that must’ve been extremely difficult and perhaps even blurred what is and isn’t acceptable in higher education.
6. He was also cleared of plagiarism but, again, so many academics have plagiarised ideas and papers, but they haven’t been strung up like Arday has been.

So, long story short, I feel like Cambridge let him down. And I feel like he was targeted because there’s plenty of other examples but they never get called out and nobody cares. It was a witch hunt. But I’d be interested to hear what others have to say on this matter.

I see the Good Law Project have a new petition up to have an inquiry into the press treatment towards JA.

If you're going to reap the rewards of bullshitting your way through life then you also need to understand the consequences of your actions when you can't bullshit your way out of it anymore. Sadly this is what happened. No one likes a bullshitter, a conman, a manipulator.

So he should have said no when Cambridge offered him the professorship. It was their responsibility to properly vet his record before appointing him. Many people embellish their CV, but don't end up paying for it with their life.

He hasn't paid for anything with his life.

He chose to go for a job that he was not qualified for. He chose to lie about lots of aspects about his life. He chose to elevate himself into the public sphere.

I just cannot fathom this narrative.

An academic, Dr Iain Overton, has tweeted:

"I’ve been teaching journalism at Universities for over 15 years. If I found that any of my former students had been part of a media hounding that led to the suicide of their subject, I’d be sick to the stomach. Those who were involved in the assault against Arday should be deeply ashamed."

Sorry, but how DARE someone suggest that students should feel ashamed for speaking out about their lecturer, having tried to raise their concerns over his poor teaching with JA himself and Cambridge, only for them to be accused of racism! Those students or their parents paid huge sums for first class teaching and didn't get it. They have every right to feel aggreived and they shouldn't be made to feel they contributed in any way to his suicide. That's disgusting.

Dr Overton has, of course, made it so that people can't respond to his post.

He had a PhD and had already been given a professorship at Glasgow. He was qualified on the surface and probably met the required criteria on paper, so he had every right to apply for it. Cambridge was the one assessing the applications. You can’t put that on JA.

I think that Cambridge is greatly diminished by this as is, unfortunately, sociology. It’s a topic that is popularly disparaged but it very much has its place in the study of peoples, culture and systems

He wasn't because the job required a proven record of supporting PhD students through their these yet he'd never stayed anywhere for the required 3 years to do so

He's talking about journalists - people who used to be students, those to whom he taught jounalism, including ethics, I expect - not Jason Arday's students.

That said, students are often asked to complete evaluation forms at the end of semester and you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be students insisting that the hardest working academic is lazy, unapproachable and unavailable.

Oh come off it! If you want to pay Oxbridge fees that’s on you. Plenty of people, including an in-law of mine, had a terrible experience at Cambridge and had mentioned that the teaching standard was poor, largely because the academics are minor celebrities and are too busy/important to provide brilliant teaching. JA isn’t the first Oxbridge professor to be accused of poor quality teaching. Fact of the matter is if you want a decent experience with present lecturers you’d be better off going to a none-red brick university where the lecturers will be available. The only reason people go to Oxbridge is for the name. I got accepted into Cambridge and I turned it down because I was unwilling to pay an additional college fee and, frankly, I wasn’t impressed with their lack of correspondence.

I'm horrified by the way this man has been treated. There are people still reviling him, joking about him, attacking his widow and calling his memorial fund a grift. He may have been a fantasist, his advantages may have been unfair, but the disgusting way people have gone after him and continue to go after him and his family is way out of proportion. Racism is obviously a huge component in this.

So that’s up to Cambridge to reject him. Most people don’t meet everything on the criteria when they apply for a job interview, that’s why there’s a process in place where applications will be accepted or rejected prior to interview. It’s not on JA to make sure that Cambridge is being diligent in their hiring process.

I think you misunderstand, he received media attention not because he's black but because he represents the idiocy and dangerousness of DEI ( of which patronising black people is a large part of course)
DEI and its negative impacts: demonising white people, infantilising black people, cosying up to transvestites, promoting women to positions which need physical strength etc etc this is something of huge concern to me and clearly many others as shown by the intense interest- it is the use of our money and often our safety being debated here.
DEI is inherently racist against white people and as for the white working class- they can whistle.

edited to add, Jason Arday was very happy to play the game and demonise as racist any who questioned his ability- he was promoted and beatified by Cambridge- he was a public figure, the youngest black professor, the absolute darling of the chattering classes- this is why the story has received so much attention

I didn't say he was blameless. I'm saying that, in the end, he paid for his mistakes with his life, and I find that incredibly tragic. He may have made poor choices and deserved to be held accountable, but that doesn't mean the relentless public humiliation and wider culture-war campaign against him were justified. The way he was publicly torn apart went far beyond what was fair.

Glasgow University has expressed sadness at the death of a former colleague, but earlier they had made clear that he wasn’t a visiting professor as he’d described and had announced that it was to review his past appointment as professor, to understand how this came about.

This is all undeniably so very sad. Sir Simon Baron - Cohen has said: “At the heart of all of this was a man who’d been diagnosed in childhood with disabilities that included autism and language delay and learning differences. He was being subjected to relentless scrutiny, including ridicule, discrediting absolutely every detail of his life, and he wasn’t coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation, and he felt he couldn’t go on.”

But crimes of violence or of a sexual nature are not the only serious crimes. On the face of what is available in the public space, it seems deception was part of this picture, deception in order to secure a roll which, again on the face of it, he was not qualified for, either formally or informally. A deception that appears to have impacted on a bunch of students too who were pupils and were/are seeking the best results they can but, from what they have said, has actually disadvantaged them. So, in many respects, his actions to secure the position were deliberate and calculated, not a mistake, slip-up or anything else. Now, that's not to say the selection panel were not seriously messed-up and failed to do their due diligence, clearly they should have done, and had they, one can only assume he would not have been appointed.
The end result is tragic, there's no doubt about that. But he was not an innocent bystander that got caught up in something in which he had no role, Indeed, the leading role imo.

I believe there are some elements of racism here, I do not deny it, because one of his main US critics has a certain reputation that drove some of this but don't you also think there has to be some concerns for them to build on and his timing could have been better and that he helped create a perfect storm and its not just a witch hunt?

There were verifiable CV discrepancies, external institutions contradicting his listed roles on his CV, concerns raised by multiple academics and at the time this hit the fan, the memoir draft containing disputed claims was released to the press and they jumped on it.

This wasn’t a random racist attack, it was a response to specific evidence but this doesn’t mean every investigation into a Black academic is racist.

Let's not forget the TES journalist that was threatened by lawyers on behalf of JA for asking perfectly reasonable questions about things that didn't add up (and was then investigated by the police because JA - yet again - used racism as a shield) did so a year before this was all kicked off by the substack post (by a deeply unpleasant person himself) into JA's plagiarism.