The Cambridge academic has rightly now resigned. But that won’t end the targeting of senior black figures or the lazy way institutions promote faux equality
‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.” That was the breathtaking response of Prof Jason Arday when the Guardian interrogated the details he provided of an alleged racist campaign of intimidation against him, which involved a severed pig’s head, a masked man wielding a knife and bullets in the post. Arday had been unable to provide evidence, and when the Guardian contacted the relevant parties, including a south London butcher and the police, his claims were either refuted or could not be verified.
Arday, whose appointment as professor of sociology of education at Cambridge became a widely lauded moment in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter, has found himself in the eye of the storm. Allegations of extensive plagiarism in his doctoral thesis, completed at Liverpool John Moores University, recently made their way from the Substack of self-described “race realist” academic Nathan Cofnas into the national press. The defence of Arday had rested on the fact that an investigation had already been conducted, and cleared him of plagiarism. And yet the case has taken on a life of its own. In recent weeks, more of Arday’s story has come under scrutiny: from claims of having installed water points in South America and west Africa with the charity WaterAid (WaterAid said it does not send volunteers abroad), to having run 30 marathons in 35 days, the last dozen or so after suffering a hairline fracture in his leg. After mounting pressure, Cambridge announced that it had launched a formal investigation into his academic qualifications and honorary appointments. Following this announcement, Arday resigned from his positions at the university. Though he has chosen to step aside to preserve his “wellbeing”, this has become a national story that will not go away.
