Helio (@Jupiterbaal on instagram and most other non-tumblr platforms) and Joris Lechêne have had a lot of scathing things to say about the effective social murder of Jason Arday, which you should check out.
For anyone not in the know, a Black university of Cambridge professor was accused of plagiarism--multiple times, in previous cases the accusations were unfounded, and his most recent accusation was still being investigated. Since 2023 he has been harassed, accused of lying and plagiarizing and falsifying documentation. He has had to respond to multiple periods of smear campaigns where police were involved because he was being hounded so severely.
Given that this man taught sociology and specialized in Critical Race Theory and adjacent social concepts, it's not the least bit shocking that he had everything possible thrown at him. Damn near every academic in that field has been. Where this man is peerless is in where he taught. Prestigious elite academia. He was the youngest Black academic to ever teach at Cambridge.
He spoke a few years ago about how right-wingers will levy plagiarism and academic integrity accusations at socially-progressive academics to hide their underlying bigotry behind language of "fairness." This apparently was "suspicious" to attendees, who began to investigate him for plagiarism again. A man says "hey racists have a tendency to accuse you of things like fraud because it's a softer way to remove you than just being openly racist" and a room full of listeners said "hey what a great strategy."
His most recent investigation was covered extensively and exhaustively by British press. He was being talked about EVERYWHERE. And the potential of his academic fraud did not just reflect on him, but was explicitly declared by countless papers to reflect poorly on the field of Critical Race Theory (as if he is remotely the only large-platformed academic in the world or in the UK) and that it reflects poorly on Black people as a whole.
White academic fraud is a lone wolf outlier mistake. Black academic fraud is an inherent flaw of Black people. This is the base we are operating from.
Ultimately the abusive and repulsive dogpiling resulted in Arday's resignation before the investigation was ever completed, and about a week after his resignation, he was found dead in his home. He was 41.
This entire process is of course appalling if the accusations are false, but there is nothing redemptive about it if the accusations were true.
People who are not still navigating academic spheres maybe don't know how common plagiarism accusations are. There are sooo many cases that are falsely flagged, especially in the age of AI. And there are sooo many cases that are found to be true that not only do not become the center of a nation(and western world)-wide harassment campaign, but do not result in major punishment either. A lot of plagiarism is "solved" with corrections. A slap on the wrist. Nothing that he was accused of lying about resulted in harm, it did not cause death, it did not heavily impact legislation, it did not put anyone in danger. The accusations were primarily about embellishment.
There are scammers who get people killed, who ruin people's health, there are falsified scientific studies that change how society operates, that change how care is standardized--none of these things are the scale of harm accused of this man, and many people accused of those things remain in their posts, at their jobs, in the sphere of influence after a simple correction, but Arday is driven with pitch forks and racist tirades into an early grave.
It simply cannot be overstated how much his accusers wanted him lynched and in an indirect way they got their wish.
His treatment was utterly appalling before his death, but certainly now that he is dead. Papers are issuing retractions, posts are getting deleted, because rather than quietly remove him from public life, remove his public conversations about the relationships between people to each other and people to systems, he is dead visibly, and that makes people uncomfortable. If he disappears out of shame, that's one thing, if he's dead, well now you start to feel a little complicit. Not guilty enough to stop being a racist death mob, but guilty enough that you know it makes you look like less of a Good Guy.
Helio and Joris both make it clear that Arday is not an outlier in the way academia can mobilize to push out undesirables. It is not remotely lost on me that a professor in a highly controversial (unnecessarily but yknow white supremacy) field is the subject of this, because the field dissects the complicity of the establishment in the barriers that minorities--in this particular case people of color--are subjected to that bars them from accessing necessities. How it affects housing, healthcare, education, jobs--everything.
A man said "the system will work very hard to keep people like me out" and the system said "we'll kill you for that."
Jason Arday is going to become such a political cornerstone because if you still cannot see the way the system converged to make him dead, you will continue to be blind to the things the system is trying to prevent you from seeing. Arday was pulling back the curtain and the establishment said "you lied about how high up the curtain was raised" to shift conversation away from the very forces that drove him and countless others to death.
(His resignation letter from August 5th)
