The Jason Arday story which gripped us with incredible revelations one after the other seemed to have reached its natural conclusion with his resignation and the announcement of multiple investigations at Cambridge last week. However, the tragic demise of Arday yesterday, amid reports that he may have taken his own life, has blazed this story back to life. We are nowhere near the end of this tragedy.
On the surface this is a story of a particular young man and his frailties. Arday had an incredible backstory that catapulted him into prominence as an academic ‘superstar’ who was feted for several years by a happy confluence of mainstream media and many academic institutions. In recent weeks his story fell apart spectacularly and he was the primary target. He should not have been.
Despite the mind boggling details of the expose, it should have been made clear that the real targets were the noxious politics of race and diversity, the corruption of academia and the curious blindness of mainstream journalism. The targets were and should remain the powerful gatekeepers who promoted, used and shielded Arday from scrutiny by accusing critics of racism, dismissing student complaints and ultimately hanging Arday out to dry when their own positions became indefensible. And now with his death, we come a full circle and those enabled Jason Arday’s deceptions will blame the people who exposed them as a relentlessly vicious and racist rightwing smear machine. Are we all mindless cogs of this “machine”? If we are decent human beings, we should pause and ask ourselves this question.
I confess to being shocked by Arday’s end. My reading of his statements was that he was defiant and I assumed, resilient. I also assumed that he was being supported through the media firestorm. These were bad assumptions to have made. I wish his family peace and privacy in their bitter loss.
However, the questions raised about the institutions that brought Arday to prominence need urgent answers. The larger story is not about Arday. It is about our society, our racial politics and our growing loss of trust in people who endlessly present themselves as academic experts and, increasingly, as superior moral arbiters.
There is institutional rot. There are other victims. There are other dubious academics who have already been named. And if we are serious about what happened to Jason Arday, we cannot simply close the book with his resignation and his death. We need to ask how the Arday mythology is still being constructed : his death is a handy tool to shut down critics.
