CALGARY—There will be a reckoning for elite western universities and media in their complicity with the rise in fascism and coddling of white supremacy. In the meantime, however, their direct involvement in that ideology comes at the expense of the life of an autistic Black professor, Jason Arday.
Arday, 41, was a Cambridge professor—the youngest Black person to hold that title in the university’s history—who was found dead at his London, U.K., home on Aug. 14 amid weeks of harassment by the university, media, and the public following accusations of plagiarism. In July, the allegations were picked up by right-wing mainstream British news outlets, including The Telegraph, which published parts of the so-called academic plagiarism. “Notwithstanding the two universities’ insistence that Prof. Arday’s work has been checked and cleared, several respected academics have urged them to look again arguing that computer programs designed to detect copying might have missed instances in which a few words have been changed or a sentence has been paraphrased.” The professor who The Telegraph cited as making accusations against Arday—David Harris from Plymouth Marjon University—was himself temporarily stripped of his emeritus title for his “controversial” “self-published research.” The controversial topic was critical race theory, which was a made-up crisis designed to kick Black people out of privileged spaces. In addition, “self-published” research means it’s not peer-reviewed, and, therefore, does not rise to the level of quality that a peer-reviewed academic journal requires. But The Telegraph didn’t let that stop them.
As reported by the BBC, academic Nathan Cofnas—”a U.S. researcher whose role at a Cambridge college was terminated” after posting anti-Black, racist rhetoric—was instrumental in the latest round of targeted harassment against Arday. According to The Observer, “In February 2024, [Cofnas] published a post on Substack in which he claimed that race is linked to intelligence and that without DEI initiatives there would be no Black academics at Harvard and that ‘under a colour-blind system’ Black people ‘would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sport and entertainment.’ He called for a ‘revolution’ against the ‘DEI devil’ and for people to ‘accept that talent is not distributed equally within or across groups.’”
In March of that year, students at Cambridge organized petitions and protests, and the university’s Emmanuel College received 58 complaints about Cofnas, including that he was “endorsing the logic of a eugenicist.” In April 2024, Cofnas was fired, which clearly fomented a lot of resentment from the junior research associate.
And thus, the campaign of targeted harassment began, mainly on the word of two ostracized academics whose politics and ideologies were brought to the mainstream through a right-wing publication with zero scrutiny of—or even curiosity about—the accusers. Newscord, an anti-bias media watchdog, recorded 249 articles about Arday in 22 days: “Jason Arday told the press he was at the limits of what anyone should endure. It answered with 188 more articles. He is dead at 41.”
Ironically, in a video interview, Cofnas acknowledged that plagiarism was normal in academia, but that Arday was special: “And he had such an exalted position that the mismatch between the quality and the prestige was so enormous that there was a hook for a story. That was what was special about him. Not that he’s a fraud, not that he’s a worthless scholar. It’s that there was a story. There was a basis for a news story that would capture people’s attention.”
Arday was used by dishonest academics and racist right-wing mainstream news media in the United Kingdom to rewrite his story to one where a fraudulent Black man was smart enough to get a prominent position in an elite white institution by subterfuge, yet too stupid to hold said position—and in between, there’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices that co-signed the swindle. This framing is riddled with Jim Crow-era, minstrel show concepts of Black people that have once again become mainstream in the West.
In 2023, the University of Cambridge’s paper, Varsity, wrote about associate professor William O’Reilly, who is white: “More than 12 pages of an article published under O’Reilly’s name had been lifted almost word for word from two essays by one of his students.” The Financial Times reported that “the complaint of plagiarism had been upheld by a university tribunal, but that the professor would keep his job,” and that decision “to leave O’Reilly in post casts doubt on the internal disciplinary processes of Cambridge, which rely on academics judging their peers.”
Meanwhile, Arday had already been investigated for plagiarism arising from Harris’ complaint, and nothing was found. A new investigation was launched on the word of Cofnas. White people have the power to ruin the lives of Black people through rumours and innuendo, regardless of ulterior motive. That is white supremacy.
Erica Ifill is host of the Bad+Bitchy podcast.
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