White Supremacy in Academia: The Killing of Jason Arday

White Supremacy in Academia: The Killing of Jason Arday  

CW: Racism, Self Harm

Orlando Bright

On 24 July, the first of a staggering 249 newspaper articles were written about Professor Jason  Arday, surrounding accusations of plagiarism. On 14 August, just three weeks later, he was found dead in his home. This was not significant because he was an academic at a top ranked university, nor because he was autistic or young, but because he was Black. Jason’s death tells a  story. A story about the ruthless business model of mainstream media, about the exploitation of  BIPOC scholars to build social capital for academic institutions, and, most of all, about the white supremacy underpinning it all.  

The media obsession with Jason’s story and the viciousness with which his entire life was  scrutinised was not in any way proportionate. Many have pointed out the number of high-profile  academics who have similarly been accused of (and were even guilty of) plagiarism, which led to  little, if any, media attention. All of those academics were white. Even white professors who had  been found guilty of sexually harassing students received vastly different treatment by the media.  This follows a larger racialised reality Black scholars know all too well—the impunity white folk  experience, treated as individuals, set against the vicious persecution of Black folk, where an  example is used to cast aspersions across Blackness as a whole.  

Major media outlets like The Times used paid advertisements to boost salacious articles about  Jason’s life. All the while, this avalanche of articles about him was being published against the  backdrop of war, climate disasters, and political upheaval—issues with materially higher stakes than alleged plagiarism and some embellishments in an academic autobiography. This says everything about the poor state of journalism in the UK (and in the West generally), the readiness of the racist populous—waiting in the wings to jump on the faltering steps of a Black man who stuck his head too far above the parapet—and of the British media, whose business model is centred around grabs for attention rather than the public interest.  

It was Nathan Cofnas—an ex Cambridge professor who was sacked for his racist views after over  1200 complaints were made by staff and students—who continued pushing the narrative of Jason as a plagiarist after he was cleared. Cofnas, now a researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, espouses the view that Black people “would disappear from all high profile positions outside of  sport and entertainment” under a true meritocracy. Instead of being called out as a white  supremacist and discredited for his lack of grasp on the basic concept of race being socially  constructed (we learnt this in ANTH101), Cofnas was reported by mainstream media using his own  self-identifier as a ‘race “realist”’ and his motives went largely uninterrogated.  

The media happily took up the accusations of a disgruntled white supremacist. No one seemed to stop and question the motives of a man who said openly in an interview with Rob Montz, a low-level, right-wing podcaster: “...after the revolution I'll be the Head of Eugenics & Race Science at Harvard.” Or better yet, why was it not Cofnas who became the scandal? Dr. Karen Kelsky wrote, sadly post-Jason’s death, a scathing Substack article about Cofnas in which she called him a poster child of academic incels and said: 

“the entire story he supposedly “broke” was nothing but the vendetta of a bad pseudo-scholar against an institution that had rejected him.” 

This would have been a far more worthy use of journalism.  

Jason was hired by Cambridge in 2023 and lauded as their youngest Black professor in history.  They paraded him out to the masses for exultation, emphasising his late speech development,  autism, and poverty—his triumphs over adversity. In marketing him as such, Cambridge was able to  convert his visibility into something they truly valued: social capital. Hiring a brilliant, young Black  professor with an interesting bio enhanced the Cambridge brand without requiring any  transformation of its systemic issues. As soon as Jason posed a threat to that brand, Cambridge  dropped him to preserve its reputation. “He was eagerly elevated as a symbol, ruthlessly scrutinized  as an anomaly, and callously discarded as a liability. His rise and fall expose the moral bankruptcy  of a system that wants the appearance of racial progress without the work of structural change”. 

My heart aches for Jason, his two surviving children, his partner and mother, friends, colleagues, and students. His death has been described as a modern-day lynching. Jason’s death is yet another  warning about lessons we have failed to learn—lessons about what happens when institutions use  diversity to symbolise change so they can maintain the underlying structures that exclude people.  

No institution or person is immune to ideologies. As a student, I have definitely witnessed the  influence of white supremacy in our classrooms here at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University. I  have seen other cultures and traditions subjected to scrutiny that the dominant culture (whiteness) is 

placed above. I have seen professors unwittingly stoke the latent supremacy of students’ whiteness  by failing to question vital underlying assumptions and cultural norms. This needs to be treated less  as a scandal to be defended, and more as a piece of work to be focussed on. As we have seen with  Jason and so many others, lives are literally at stake. As students, we can apply our knowledge  now, and demand tangible transformation of ourselves and our institutions. It is not idealism. It is  the work needed to build a future without fascism.