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 think lots of people disagree with your view.

Personae

Where do you work, OP?

And lots agree. It’s a divisive topic, that’s why.

You can’t ask people for their personal data lol

Lol

Are you really an academic? An educated person would know the correct plural of persona.

Just sayin’. Lol

I never said I was an academic lol

Do you know what personal data means? What are you talking about ‘persona’?

• Cambridge ‘had a duty of care for him. They knew the state of his mental health and did nothing. They could’ve rejected his resignation and said to him that they will provide support while they carry out an investigation. JA’s colleague said he was crying out for help before he took his own life. They were quite happy to use him as a poster boy for diversity when they employed him and then they threw him to the wolves when he got media attention that they didn’t like.’

Cambridge claim that they offered him a huge amount of support including counselling.

According to JA’s colleagues he wasn’t offered help. The people who visited him from Cambridge did so off their own backs. There was no process put in place. I’d also now take anything Cambridge says with a very big pinch of salt.

This is now just sounding like a get at Cambridge thread.

Baffled that you think they should have refused a resignation.

I think all the universities that employed him had a responsibility.

baffled? You are aware that I’m not the only one that thinks this and there’s been multiple academics in the media who have said the same? Yes, I think they should’ve refused his resignation while they ran a full investigation and offered him proper support. It’s not a revolutionary idea.

I’m 44, got my PhD in 2008 and don’t remember it going through TurnItIn or whatever. I can’t remember if the essays that my undergrads wrote did at that point either, but by 2010 when I was a seminar tutor at a different institution, they did.

And that's fine. But plenty disagree. And that's fine too.

The damage has been done.

And you do actually realise that, if they refused JA’s resignation while they ran a full investigation, it would’ve potentially supported your argument further? Cambridge didn’t accept JA’s resignation because it was in the best interests of its students, it did it because they hoped that by doing so that the whole controversy would come to an end. They said as much. They were hoping they wouldn’t have to do anything after JA handed in his resignation. Actually if they had done what I just suggested, it might’ve unpacked it all (whatever that was) and JA might still be alive because he would’ve still been a Cambridge University employee during the time of the investigation and would’ve had greater access to help.

My ds has just had to submit his PhD thesis to a plagiarism site before formal submission.

He resigned because he got the job by lying and was accused of plagiarism, I don’t see that Cambridge had any duty of care to him once he had resigned, and even before then he had got himself into this mess, I’m not sure what an employer could realistically do. At some point we all have to take some personal responsibility.

Well it’s not necessarily important whether you agree or not, the fact of the matter is an employer, by law, has a duty of care to an employee. Especially a place like HE. There are policies in place to prevent things like this from happening.

Out of genuine interest, why is the duty of care especially present in HE?

What do you mean by a duty of care? Short of sending someone to sit by him 24 hours a day to make sure he didn’t harm himself what could they actually do? I know my employers idea of duty of care is a phone number to something they call ‘employee services’ that they outsource. But if I resigned I wouldn’t be able to use their service.

Every organisation has its own employee health and well being policies. In HE it’s pretty rigorous, or supposed to be. But not always followed. As I’ve said in a previous comment, I think they, knowing his state of mind and the circumstances, should’ve rejected his resignation while they carried out a full investigation. This would’ve 1. Allowed the facts to come out without loads of needless speculation, 2. Enabled better support for JA. Instead they picked the route that they hoped would allow the university to move on quickly and quietly, which was never going to happen. People were entitled to know what went wrong and JA was entitled to better support.

I think people need to accept that him having his autobiography published in the midst of this with some challenging claims was not the most helpful of moves, but then on the grounds of "no publicity is bad publicity", maybe that was the intention.

Either way, I don't think anyone should be driven to suicide whether from their own actions and certainly not from public vilification. Unfortunately this wasn't a witch hunt, there were valid concerns that needed to be investigated.

On the other hand, several posters have questioned the role of the family in terms of duty of care in relation to MH issues. We can only speculate now about their role but there’s an irony in the employer being pilloried for inadequate duty of care and the family being unimpeachable because , amongst other cited reasons , the issues may have been hard to discern.

I should also add that many of his former students have started a webpage commemorating JA and sharing stories of him where he helped them: https://leilacancode.github.io/everythinggood-about-jasonarday/

let’s not forget that people are nuanced. Some students will have not liked him, others loved him. He did raise money for charities by running marathons, but perhaps not as many as he previously reported. It’s not so simple to say he was an awful teacher and an awful person, he also did many good things and helped a lot of people.

But what support, exactly? Because he was hardly likely to want to have to face his colleagues who now all know about his lies and will be talking about him behind his back? An investigation wasn’t ever going to end well, was it? An employers can’t reject a resignation, and if they did would it not be worse to only go on to fire him down the line. His life was in tatters, he’d been shown to be a fantasist in the national papers and it would come up any time anyone did a Google search on him in future. I don’t think there was any way out for him with any amount of support.

But he did face his colleagues as numerous colleagues came to his house to support him in the days after. And even they have spoken openly about the lack of support from Cambridge. These are people who knew him and know Cambridge could’ve done a lot better and chose not to.