The University That Consumed Jason Arday

In the spring of 2023, the University of Cambridge could not photograph Jason Arday enough. Here was a working-class Black man from a Clapham council estate, diagnosed with global developmental delay as a child, a man who learned to talk at eleven and to read at eighteen, who had run thirty marathons in thirty-five days for charity and carried the Olympic torch, now appointed professor of sociology of education at an institution eight hundred years old. Cambridge announced him as its youngest Black professor. The press releases glowed. The photographs circulated across the world as proof that the doors of the elite university had finally opened.

On Friday afternoon, Jason Arday was found dead at an address in south London. He was forty-one. The Metropolitan Police said his death was unexpected but is not being treated as suspicious. He died a week after resigning from Cambridge amid allegations of plagiarism and fabrication, allegations that had been seeded through a Substack post and amplified into a media frenzy, a frenzy his family says he had been living inside for three years. Their statement deserves to be read in full and slowly: "Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for the more than three years since he accepted the role of Professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him. The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone."

I did not know Jason Arday. I knew his scholarship, which sat close to my own concerns: work on decolonising the curriculum, on the mental health of Black and minoritised staff in higher education, on why the academy remains so hostile to the very bodies it parades in its brochures. There is a terrible circularity in the fact that the scholar who documented how the university breaks Black academics has now been broken in full public view. Whatever the truth of the allegations against him, and due process exists precisely so that such questions can be answered with rigour and fairness, no investigation required a man to be fed to a three-year campaign of abuse while the institution that had claimed him as its trophy watched from behind a statement about process.

This is the story I want to tell, because it is a story about a class of people rather than a story about one man. A vulturist, extractive managerial class has taken over our universities. Its organising principle is self-protection. Integrity, commitment, rigour, the values that the university claims as its foundation, are precisely the values this class has hollowed out, because integrity is costly, commitment creates obligations, and rigour takes time that the brand cannot spare. The managerial university runs on extraction: of academic labour, of student fees, of community goodwill, and, in cases like Arday's, of the symbolic value of Black and brown and Indigenous bodies whose presence launders the institution's whiteness.

Consider what the appointment of one Black professor concealed. When Cambridge celebrated Arday in 2023, he joined only five other Black professors at the institution. Across the United Kingdom, the most recent Higher Education Statistics Agency data count roughly 270 Black professors among more than 26,000, a share that has sat at one percent year after year. Advance HE's statistical report shows that just 3.8 percent of UK Black academics hold professorships, the lowest of any ethnic group, while Black staff are disproportionately trapped on fixed-term contracts. In the United States, Black scholars make up 6.1 percent of full-time faculty and are concentrated in the junior and precarious ranks, while the full professoriate remains overwhelmingly white.

Here in Aotearoa, where I write from, the pattern repeats with brutal clarity. Tara McAllister, Joanna Kidman, Olivia Rowley and Reremoana Theodore asked in 2019, in a paper whose title still indicts the sector, Why isn't my professor Māori? Their answer: Māori made up about five percent of academic staff across our eight universities, against roughly fifteen percent of the population, and the representation thinned further with every step up the hierarchy. Sereana Naepi's companion paper found Pacific academics at 1.7 percent of the workforce and half a percent of senior staff. Fewer than four percent of professors are Māori and around one percent are Pacific, and the same body of scholarship notes that Indigenous peoples are under-represented in universities across the settler colonies, in Australia, in Canada, in the United States, wherever the settler university sits on stolen land and recruits Indigenous faces for its annual report. Naepi named the diversity policies of our universities for what they are: window-dressing.

Window-dressing is the business model of the managerial class. Hire the singular showcase example. Photograph him. Put him on the prospectus and the alumni mailer. Let his story of triumph over impossible odds do the communicative work of suggesting transformation while the structures of exclusion, the casualisation, the promotion pipelines that leak Black and Indigenous talent at every joint, the everyday racism that Arday himself spent his career documenting, remain wholly intact. The showcase hire is cheaper than structural change and photographs better. It is extraction wearing the mask of inclusion.

And when the far right comes for the showcase hire, the same managerial class that harvested his image discovers, with remarkable speed, the language of neutrality. We have watched this choreography across jurisdictions: a coordinated ecosystem of Substack provocateurs, culture-war media and anti-DEI campaigners, an ecosystem whose declared project is the dismantling of public education and the purging of critical race scholarship, selects a target, and the frenzy begins. The Arday scandal was seized upon precisely as ammunition against diversity initiatives, against the very idea that a Black working-class man belongs at Cambridge. The institution's obligations at that moment were clear. Employers in the United Kingdom carry a statutory duty under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 to protect the health, including the mental health, of their staff, a duty mirrored in the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 here in Aotearoa and in the psychosocial risk regulations now embedded in Australian law. A duty of care is a legal architecture, and it exists precisely for the moment when a worker is drowning in a coordinated campaign of abuse. Whether that architecture held in this case is a question that Cambridge, and the sector, must now answer in public, because the family's statement suggests a man left profoundly alone. Arday's own resignation letter, days before his death, spoke of the profound toll the relentless accusations, speculation and commentary had taken on him and those he loved. After his death came the vice-chancellor's expression of being desperately saddened. The grief of institutions is always most fluent after the fact.

The psychologist Jennifer Freyd calls this institutional betrayal, the wound inflicted when the institution a person depends upon fails to protect them at the moment of greatest need. For Black academics, the betrayal is structured in advance. The university that recruits you as evidence of its virtue has already priced in your abandonment, because the managerial calculus that made you valuable as a symbol will, the moment the symbol attracts fire, recalculate you as a risk to be managed at arm's length. Investigation and care are treated as incompatible when they are nothing of the sort. An institution can pursue allegations rigorously and simultaneously wrap the human being at their centre in support, in counselling, in protection from a media mob, in the basic ethic of accompaniment. Choosing process without care is itself a choice, and it is the signature choice of the extractive managerial university.

So the work in front of us runs deeper than another equity charter or another glossy commitment. The hollow managerialism itself has to be dismantled: the vice-chancelleries run as corporate brands, the communications offices that treat human crisis as reputational exposure, the metrics regimes that reward the photograph of diversity while punishing the labour of it. In its place we need what my colleagues and communities in the culture-centered tradition have long called voice infrastructures, structures through which those at the margins of the university, Black staff, Māori and Pacific staff, Indigenous staff across the settler colonies, casualised staff, hold real decision-making power over hiring, promotion, protection and care, so that no scholar ever again faces the mob as the institution's lone and disposable emblem. That means cohort hiring instead of showcase hiring, tenure of belonging instead of tenancy of image, unions and collectives resourced to defend members against coordinated harassment, and university leaderships legally and publicly accountable for the psychosocial safety of the people whose labour they consume.

Jason Arday's family have told us that a gentle man who wanted to see the best in everyone was subjected to three years of sustained abuse, and that it was too much. The universities of the world put his face on their story of redemption. They owe him, at the very least, the truth about their own, and they owe every Black, Māori, Pacific and Indigenous scholar still inside their walls something his institution never gave him, which is the certainty that when the vultures circle, the university will stand between its people and the sky.

I acknowledge the support of Claude (Anthropic) in copy editing this essay.