Editors’ Notes
There are days this job feels complicated — and this is one of them. Normally I don’t hesitate to share the left and right perspectives on an issue, but when the issue is someone’s life and death and the opinions are people extrapolating a real person’s suffering into some convenient argument about academia, the press, or diversity programs, I hesitate. It feels disrespectful in a way that arguing about the economy doesn’t.
Ultimately, these arguments are being made regardless, and readers deserve to hear all of them and decide for themselves what, if anything, can be taken from this tragedy. I always end up coming back to the AllSides framework as the best approach to difficult issues because I don’t deserve to be the arbiter of what is true more than anyone else. I’d only ask that in addition to considering arguments about higher education, race, and the media, you also consider what it means to make someone’s life into a symbol.
News about Jason Arday
Jason Arday was the youngest black professor appointed at Cambridge University. He resigned from his post on August 5th, following plagiarism allegations from several major British newspapers. His case sparked larger conversations about race, diversity programs, and the state of academia. On August 14th, Arday was found dead.
Read more:
Analysis and Opinions about Arday’s Case
Opinions from the right and some in the Center focused on the broken educational system that promoted Arday. The left was more likely to focus on race and the extensive media coverage on Arday that may have led to his death. Some opinions on both the left and right defended free press in the wake of Arday’s death.
Alexander Kustov (Center), public policy professor at Notre Dame said, “Sorry folks, but the whole Arday thing is absolutely breaking me. While many lament the loss of trust in higher education or the media, the bigger issue is clearly the loss of our trustworthiness.
Regular people are not supposed to do their own research on things like masks, plagiarism, or racism—they should just be able to take what institutions like Harvard, Cambridge, or BBC tell them for granted. But now they can't. And they seek populist alternatives on social media that are even worse.
I mean, I'm not sure I'd trust Cambridge administrators and many other universities myself now. And it's not just the replication crisis or DEI scandals—there are some disciplines like education where the standards are so low it's not even clear whether anything they produce can be replicated or falsified at all by design.
I'm still a professor though, because I believe universities can be valuable and because I see a lot of great people around me doing serious work in the pursuit of truth and the public interest, even within social sciences. But to change course for the better and restore trust, we should start by restoring trustworthiness and calling out bullshit on our own side even when bad people on the other side exist and attack higher ed for the wrong reasons.”
An Al Jazeera (Lean Left) piece said, “There was no ambiguity from the beginning that this so-called revelation of “plagiarism” was a cudgel: it was a way to make a point that equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives are supposedly academically dishonest…And for any media outlet that claims seriousness to fail to investigate the intensity of the pile-on that Arday experienced, and its origins within a eugenicist’s fantasy of ridding universities of Black professors and antiracist scholarship, is profoundly irresponsible.”
A writer for The Spectator (Right) said, “The pinning of blame for Arday’s death began swiftly after the news broke last Friday. Arday’s supporters have suggested he died because of the press coverage of his case…To use Arday’s death as an excuse to clamp down on journalists would be an appalling abuse of the man’s legacy, an intentional misremembering of recent history and an assault on the liberties that make such investigations possible. It would obscure the failings at the University of Cambridge, and across higher education, which Arday’s swift rise and rapid fall revealed, and prevent legitimate questions about diversity initiatives and progressive dogma…A tragic death should not be reduced to a progressive parable of journalistic malice.”
Sam Kriss (Center) wrote, “Since his death, some of the people who think they’re on his side have tried to rewrite history. He was really just an ordinary academic, hounded to death by the right-wing media, because they couldn’t accept that a black man might deserve a professorship at Cambridge. Or, in the more condescending version, he was the hapless victim of all the smug white liberals, who kept promoting him way above his abilities to burnish their diversity quotas. No: this is an insult. He was brilliant at what he did. He blagged his way through the world with nothing but brio and good looks.”
He added, “If a lot of people seem to have suddenly started making very different noises in the last few days, it’s not because any of the substance has changed. Everything they said is still true. The allegations against Arday are the same, and the evidence is still overwhelming. The only difference is that it’s not fun any more…He lived an extraordinary life, and he was made to suffer for it. He lacked the cold knot of fear and suspicion most of us carry: we know that everything conspicuous and vulnerable gets torn down in the end, and the best way to get along in life is to be as small and petty as everyone else. But he loved largeness. He loved it more than he feared the danger. He gave us a more richly embellished world, and he must have thought we might appreciate the gift. Look at what we did to him instead.”
