Handsome, lean, athletic, until 12 days ago, Jason was a professor of sociology at Cambridge University.
Members of the public walk past floral tributes to remember academic Jason Arday, attached to the railings outside Senate House in the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, eastern England on August 15, 2026. JUSTINE GERARDY / AFP
Do you remember when all South Africans were a shade of green, in that strange era of the ’90s when (white?) people stopped describing others by skin colour because it was deemed racist, and instead started using dark green or light green, which was hardly different?
“This dark green employee at the bank,” I vividly recall someone starting to tell me, before I butted in to ask if race was relevant to the story.
It was, they said, and continued with their tale of dark green incompetence, which was apparently different from sage or mint green incompetence, although how so never became clear. Unless, of course, I missed the part where no pale green person had ever messed up before… I thought of this when I heard that British academic Jason Arday had been found dead, presumably by his own hand.
Handsome, lean, athletic, until 12 days ago, Jason was a professor of sociology at Cambridge University. Appointed in 2023, he was a lad who funded his studies while working as a PE teacher. He was also conveniently black at a time when diversity was – still is – an issue at British universities: in 2021, only 155 of more than 23 000 UK professorships were held by black people In a blink, Jason became Cambridge’s diversity pin-up, the youngest black professor they’d yet appointed and, man, they told everyone about it.
It’s called the glass cliff. Jason was paraded right to the edge and then left to fall. Because when it transpired that parts of his doctoral thesis were potentially plagiarised he became global headlines. However, would the story – essentially “Academic Didn’t Properly Credit Sources” – have made the news at all if he was a white academic? Hardly.
When plagiarism happens within academia, the system usually absorbs it. White Cambridge professor William O’Reilly is still there, after all.
There’s a long history of plagiarism in public life too. In 2012, the Hungarian president’s PhD was revoked over extensive plagiarism; ditto the German minister of defence in 2011. Both resigned. Both continue to thrive.
The president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has been accused of academic plagiarism; Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s thesis is suspect, yet he was re-elected. But in Jason’s case, the baying mob howled and tore him apart. The man was literally hounded to death.
