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.

The plagiarism isn’t really the interesting part of the story. It’s ridiculously easy not to plagiarize, but obviously people cheat and sometimes don’t get caught.

He decided to build up an ethos around himself. He chose to turn himself into a myth. We can discuss the social situation that allowed him to get away with that, but it is a difficult conversation to have. Doing so requires acknowledging the current flaws in the anti-racist culture we want to encourage. Instead it is easier to blame the witch hunt at the end.

Totally didn't understand the point I was making.

Fair enough not everyone will get the issue here.

Two words:

Due diligence.

This situation would never have happened if Cambridge had done proper due diligence.

It could have happened at multiple points. It did not. It should never have reached the point where it became a media story.

There were multiple opportunities.

You cannot claim someone is a victim when the entire situation was entirely of their own making.

There is a person I'm concerned about at work who many people are very much concerned about and have tried repeatedly to help. Due to parallels with parts of this case I'm horribly worried that they'll kill themselves, as this kind of news can increase the risk of suicide in those already vulnerable to it.

Being sacked is a consequence of lots of situations - rarely does it play out so publicly in so immensely damaging a way to a vulnerable individual.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, but I sure as hell know that this treatment was inhumane.

I’m not JA so I don’t know what was going through his head at the time. He may have felt genuinely harassed, I don’t know. Would I have reported it to the police? Unlikely, but I don’t know the circumstances surrounding it or JA’s mental state at the time and he’s not here to defend himself. And that’s why it’s pointless. JA has a right to report it but the police are trained and should’ve known better, which they’ve acknowledged. There’s absolutely no point in trying to guess a dead man’s motives or his feelings at the time. So you can continue talking about the same point over and over again but it’s not going to go anywhere because it’s a case of ‘what-ism’. The best you can do is say ‘well, he might’ve wanted the journalist investigated’, but you’ll never know for sure but we do know that 1. He didn’t ask for the journalist to be investigated, and 2. The police, as the professional authority in the situation, made that decision themselves.

FAFO.

The main driver was female and she intended to co-present that material with a male colleague at a conference at which I was keynote. This is why the conference organisers tipped me off at the abstracts stage. Imagine how that could have looked?

There is no question that it was lifted from my work. I had to present her university with evidence, and the evidence was clear.

The male colleague may well not have known this and I think was drawn in involuntarily. But he now actively avoids me. I consider that unfortunate. In his position I’d likely feel the same but would have emailed the academic concerned, apologising and explaining that I’d had no idea the content wasn’t original but acknowledging that I should have checked. If he’d done so, I’d have understood.

The professor with the atrocious monograph was indeed male.

“He himself attributed his mistakes to his autism”.
Oh well that’s proof he was autistic isn’t it. 🙄🙄🙄🤦‍♀️
HE WAS A LIAR.

A ‘teacher who taught him to read and write at 18’ could not corroborate autism!!
You saying he was autistic is your opinion.
Unless I see a report of an autistic assessment on him conducted by someone who is trained and registered as being able to assess autism then my opinion is that he wasn’t autistic. He lied about that too IMO.
It would hardly be a surprise now that he lied about that too would it.
Stop saying he was. You do a disservice to everyone who is autistic, who struggles daily and who manages to try and navigate through an alien world without lying about anything and everything to advance themselves.
A lot of Jason Ardays behaviour is utterly at odds with so many autistic traits.

I wish we wouldnt keep using MH issues. He lied and lied. He was paid over £200k. He asked Carter Ruck to represent him when he realised that his lying was catching up with him. Who paid the bills?

Cambridge found someone that they could boast about and should have stopped all of this. He clearly wasn’t Cambridge level at all but they wanted to tick the DEI box. He also seemed to have conned his students and when some queried his marking he told them they had white privilege.

To be honest it’s Cambridge that have blood on their hands.

Was he estranged from his family as well as his wife? Seems odd that his mother and I think his brother are/were mental health nurses, but that they didn't get him support by any means necessary. His mother seems to have been his greatest advocate in his early life.

"You’ve got a genocide going on."

I'm sorry but exactly what "genocide" might you be talking about?

The genocide of Christians in Nigeria perhaps?

The mass internment of Uyghur Muslims in China?

The persecution of the Rohingya people in Myanmar (formerly Burma)?

Frankly, I don't quite see what relevance, for example, the murder of tens of thousands of Christians by Muslim extremists in Nigeria has to do with the case of Jason Arday.

Would you mind explaining how this is relevant?

@serafinasGoose Given the fuss over plagiarised schoolwork or bots writing it, you'd have thought it would be prosecuted on behalf of the person doing all the work at a higher level. Almost like there is an incentive to cheat.

Bit harsh!

How can me saying he’s autistic be my opinion? He claimed to have autism and since I’m not trained in it and I haven’t assessed him myself I don’t know. The same way I have to take your word for it that your children have autism. Im not sure what your point is.

Maybe it’s because it was a Times journalist who tried to ask him questions and he threatened legal action and made a complaint to the police.

The point is that the lying liar who lied may also have lied about this. You seem to be very willing to take the words of a clear fantasist at face value, just because he is dead.

Yes, my argument is that JA has been used as a distraction from bigger issues. Simple, really.

Nobody 'has' autism, they ARE Autistic.

I’ve said I don’t know if he was autistic, but this isn’t a Thread about whether people think he was autistic or not. Nobody here has assessed JA so of course we have to go off what he’s said.

Yet you chose to make a thread about him rather than the world being on fire or an unspecified genocide.
Isn’t that a tad hypocritical of you?

I have a friend who refers to themselves as having autism.

Because it’s the boy who cried wolf? He’s the world’s worst reliable narrator

Possibly the stupidest thing I have read about him, given how clear a fabulist he is. "we have to go off what he's said"? No, we really don't.

What the fuck?

Why do you think Arday is comparable to Epstein?