I had been planning for a while to write something about the racist harassment campaign against Jason Arday, but the news of his death yesterday takes this whole situation to another level. It's the most outrageous thing that has happened in UK academia in my recent memory, and there's no point hoping the perpetrators will learn anything from it because they got exactly what they wanted: a successful Black man hounded to his death.
I actually read through all the allegations against him last week, and I found them really odd. As someone who is both a former distance runner and a former academic in UK academia, I felt like I had some context for things that other people might not have, so I'll run through a few of them here to show what I mean.
One was that he claimed he ran 30 marathons over a period of 35 days, something all his critics seem to think shows unbelievable levels of fitness. But it is honestly not that hard for a physically fit person to do that, because you can literally walk 95% of the distance, lightly jog the rest, and still say you "ran a marathon". It's really a question of whether it is possible to for Arday to have walked 26.2 miles 30 times in 35 days, which, yeah, of course it is. The vast majority of people who say they have "run a marathon" have walked some or all of it, that's normal, that's a standard colloquial understanding of the phrase "run a marathon" that no one normally nit-picks. It is also perfectly plausible that he ran all of them too, not at the pace he would use in a race of course, but at an easy speed. You don't need to be an elite to do that, just a talented runner who isn't injury-prone. There are a lot of "advanced amateur" runners out there running 150 miles per week at an easy pace, with one weekly rest day, and if you do that for 5 weeks you've essentially done what Arday says he did, it's not that unusual tbh.
Another is his "running 600 miles in 6 days" claim, which I've seen variously described as "on a treadmill" or "between London and Edinburgh". And like, yeah, it's unlikely that anyone but an elite ultra runner was able to run a 600 mile route from London to Edinburgh in 6 days, because he would basically have had to be moving non-stop, with all those elevation changes and road crossings, and had a support team refuelling him, providing water, toilet facilities, recharging his head torches, swapping out his shoes and socks for clean pairs, etc etc. But imagine if he ran 100 miles in 24 hours on a treadmill at home, able to go to the bathroom or get fuel and water whenever, then took 6 days off and did it again the next week, until he had done it six times. I can understand how someone would describe that as "600 miles in 6 days" because 6 days was the amount of time he was on his feet, and I can imagine him describing that as "London to Edinburgh" to give some context for the scale of the distance. It's totally plausible that he did this, even if it is framed in a way to make it sound as inspirational as possible, framing your achievements this way is not actually lying and is such an incredibly common thing for people to do that criticising him for it is really weird. If your friend said that at the pub and you found out they meant 6 sets of 24 hours rather than 6 consecutive days, you might say "ohhh, I thought you meant 6 days in a row", but you probably wouldn't make a substack post trying to get them fired over it.
Then there's his PhD thesis. There were sentences in it that were identical to sentences in other academic work by other people, so characterising this as "plagiarism" makes sense I guess, since it literally is. But copying whole paragraphs from other people's papers and changing a couple of words is incredibly common behaviour for academics. Particularly in the Introduction section of a paper, you are expected to give a potted history of the subject, citing as many of your peers as possible since they will be the ones reviewing you (and getting annoyed if you didn't praise them). You really just want to publish your results, but the form of academic journals demands that you be a historian of your subject as well as a practitioner of it. It's not surprising that academics under pressure to publish as quickly as possible will plagiarise the parts of their paper that they consider irrelevant busywork just to get it over with: they simply don't think it matters, it's not the point of the paper. Personally, I always wrote specific introductions and didn't even self-plagiarise (which is something 99% of academics do) but, as readers of my blog will know, I actually really enjoy writing long and rambling histories of things and most academics really really don't.
Additionally, PhD theses are generally things you write at the very end of your PhD, compiling work you have already done and writing thousands of words of connecting text to attempt to join everything up into a single narrative even if there isn't one. It can be a really frustrating experience because you know no one is ever going to read it but you still have to do it because the PhD examination system is so archaic. I reckon if you ran the PhD theses of every professor in the UK through a plagiarism algorithm, you would find that the majority of them had lifted whole sentences from other people's work just to speed up what is fundamentally a waste of everyone's time, and it doesn't say anything about the legitimacy of their actual research at all.
Another thing mentioned is that Arday was supposedly an inadequate supervisor for research projects. I find this criticism so odd as a former academic because it is a common opinion among research students that you generally shouldn't choose a professor ("Professor" is a senior academic title in the UK) as your supervisor because they are never going to give you nearly enough attention. They are so busy that they will either get a PhD student or postdoc to supervise you instead, or they will try to supervise you personally and be terrible at it because they don't have the mental space to handle it. The best supervisors are junior research fellows or junior lecturers, because they actually have time for you, they are often enthusiastic, and they're actually closer to the cutting edge of research because they are more junior. The number of UK research students complaining about a professor being an inadequate supervisor must be in the thousands annually, but most of their complaints don't end up on the front page of The Times.
Another thing that is brought up is how this story marks the supposed fall of the once-great University of Cambridge. For context, I have never been directly employed by a Cambridge college as Arday was (he was a Fellow of Jesus College), but a lot of researchers who work for Cambridge University, as I once did, don't do so through the collegiate system. I have worked for two different Cambridge research institutes, been to their fancy dinners, given multiple seminars to Cambridge academics, been managed by Cambridge professors, and supervised the research of Cambridge students, so I have a fair amount of experience with the place. The majority of Cambridge University academics are as clueless and incompetent as academics at any other university. Universities that have a "world-leading reputation" continue to have that reputation due to a self-fulfilling prophecy: when a journal editor receives a paper that says "University of Cambridge" on it, they are much more likely to publish it; when a funding organisation receives an application from Cambridge they are much more likely to fund it; and so Cambridge gets more funding and produces more high-quality journal articles than other universities, so its reputation stays high. But there's nothing special about it really. The majority of Cambridge academics I have met are simply better-connected, not smarter, than their peers at "lesser" universities. Most Cambridge academic appointments are essentially nepo hires in my experience: someone on the interview panel owes a favour to another professor, that professor wants their student to get a research fellowship, and so their student gets it, irrespective of how competent they are. I'm not saying this out of bitterness: although I was peripheral to most of this stuff I sometimes benefitted from this system too, and got the occasional academic appointment or award out of being lucky enough to befriend the right person at the right time. It is commonly said by those outside Oxford and Cambridge that there is no point applying for a position at those universities because they will always give preferential treatment to those who are already part of the Oxford or Cambridge ecosystem. That makes Arday's appointment all the more impressive because he actually did come from outside.
This whole saga began when Nathan Cofnas, a white-supremacist "philosopher", published a substack post highlighting all the inconsistencies he had found in Arday's work. That post got picked up by the rightwing and centrist press (the UK has no leftwing press) and was basically the top story in all UK newspapers for over a week, until Arday finally resigned. Tumblr users will be very familiar with the playbook here: we have all seen that certain demographics (notably Black people, trans women, and especially Black trans women) seem to attract obsessed stalkers who rake through everything they have ever said to find supposedly problematic things to take out of context and blow out of all proportion; and that the wider public, already primed to think the worst of these demographics, just lap it up. What was unusual in this situation was that the harassment was carried out on the front pages of UK newspapers rather than on social media. Arday was put in a position where he couldn't even leave his house without someone recognising him as the guy from the news.
In a particularly tragic twist, Arday was well aware of this phenomenon and even delivered a lecture about it in April this year called "Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook". He explained how conservatives were trawling through the work of every single Black academic, in both the US and UK, trying to find anything at all they could use to bring them down. He begged his colleagues to not stand by and let it happen, that they had to take a stand against this kind of thing.
It is so hard to try to explain to people who don't share your marginalisation that it can manifest as severe overreactions to minor offences, because they just won't accept it. They will ignore your point and instead focus on scolding you for those same minor offences, no matter if they themselves have done the same things. Anything but perfection is enough to bring you down, and even if you are perfect they will still be able to find something they can take out of context. Meanwhile white academics can get away with even major offences without consequence, because no one is trawling through their PhD theses in the first place, and even if someone did, that someone is unlikely to be taken seriously by the rightwing press, and even if they were, everyone would be primed to forgive the academic rather than hound them to their death. It's so sad to know that Arday was aware of the very thing that was soon going to happen to him, and that his attempts to convince his peers to be aware of the nature of white-supremacist harassment was simply ignored.
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