In the Dark

I read the terrible news about the death of Jason Arday on Friday evening. The first thing I want to do is express heartfelt condolences to his family – especially his wife and two children – and his friends and former colleagues and my hope that the media who hounded Prof. Arday to his death will at least give them some space to mourn his loss.

The word “tragedy” is often misused, applied to any event that is sad which this certainly is. The case of Jason Arday is a true tragedy in the sense arising from Greek drama: the central protagonists are always flawed characters who makes bad decisions, but are propelled relentlessly towards their fate by forces entirely beyond their control. Once the right-wing media lynch mob got hold of this story they were never going to back off. This is just some of the coverage from one newspaper, The Daily Telegraph.

Yes, Arday did bad things, but the media attention was utterly disproportionate. Nobody could be expected to withstand such treatment. How did the people churning out these articles think this would end?

I find this whole saga bleaker than anything Sophocles wrote, because nobody comes out of it with any credit at all. Not Arday himself, nor Cambridge University, nor the press, nor Nathan Cofnas, the white supremacist blogger who brought everything out into the open. The latter may have exposed academic misconduct, but his motivation was rooted in his racist views and undoubtedly malicious.

Of course academic misconduct is wrong, but it does not warrant a death sentence. And where was the media furore when a (white) History professor at Cambridge, William O’Reilly, was found to have plagiarised his own students essays? Professor O’Reilly, incidentally, remains in post. That’s just one example. I’m sure there are dozens more that we know nothing about, because they couldn’t be used to further racist ends. If standards are not applied equally then they can be used to reinforce prejudice, as they have in this case. It’s called hypocrisy.

The usual Culture Warmongers are using this case to further their agenda against the principles of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion which are supposed to be adopted in universities and other institutions. For myself, this tragedy demonstrates that EDI* principles are not satisfied by mere tokenism, a facile form of window-dressing that does nothing to change the culture within the organisation.

(*For any Americans reading this I use the UK/European EDI in preference to the DEI used in the States which reminds me too much of OPUS DEI.)

In a slightly different context, this is why I have become cynical about the “widening participation” efforts by many higher-education institutions to recruit students from disadvantaged backgrounds. These may succeed in bringing more such students into courses – and hence greater income to the university – but they are rarely backed up by the support needed to enable them to succeed. Many institutions do not even track the outcomes of these students, not because they can’t but because The Management doesn’t care: once they’re in through the door that’s “job done”.

I came from what some people would call a disadvantaged background, although I don’t think of it that way. That I have had a career in academia is a result of an enormous amount of luck, starting way back in primary school. I would dearly like to see a system in which luck wasn’t so important, but what is being done now is not the way to achieve that. If we’re going to do EDI – and we should – let’s do it properly.

UPDATE: 20/8/2026. Nathan Cofnas has been suspended by Gent University pending a disciplinary process.