We must not let Arday’s death lead to the triumph of feelings over facts
It’s hard to write about Jason Arday.
It’s hard to even think about Jason Arday. The news of his death was one of those moments that stop you in your tracks. In the days since, there have been any number of stories from his friends about the person they knew: gentle, loving and decent. The man, they argue, who was buried beneath an avalanche of hate.
I was one of many who was transfixed by the Arday story, and tweeted and retweeted about its twists and turns. I’ve been feeling pretty bad about that. But I’ve also found it increasingly depressing to see his death, as well as his life, become the latest fodder in our endless culture war.
Arday’s story came to the fore thanks to a blog by a deeply controversial figure, Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas claimed that — among other infractions — Arday had taken much of his PhD thesis from work by another academic, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. The blog alleged that concerns had been raised within Cambridge but dismissed out of hand.
On July 28 the Good Law Project, a left-wing pressure group, went public with an open letter in support of Arday.
It referred to “baseless allegations”, “smear campaigns” and Arday being “fully exonerated”. Its signatories promised to stand in “unwavering solidarity” with him.
Yet the previous day Retraction Watch — an internationally respected monitor of scientific malpractice — had revealed further details. Not only had Arday apparently lifted focus group findings from another academic, Anjum Memon, but he had used the legal firm Carter-Ruck to browbeat Times Higher Education into dropping the story. It soon emerged that he had also reported the journalist for harassment, leading to a four-month police investigation.
So even if you believed that Cofnas was engaged in an ideological witchhunt, there was already entirely separate evidence that Arday had questions to answer. And the main reason the story kept going is that the questions kept piling up. Because it turned out that there were all kinds of things Arday had said that were downright extraordinary — even beyond the central, inspiring story of the autistic, non-verbal child who reached the heights of academia.
There were the marathons run on a broken leg, the millions raised for charity, passing his PhD viva two weeks after an operation for a brain tumour.
There were claims, for which no evidence has yet been found, that he had been threatened twice at his office by a masked man demanding he resign, once with a knife; that a severed pig’s head had been sent to his parents’ address; that he had been physically assaulted and spat on; that bananas and bullets were posted to him via the university.
Eventually he resigned. In the wake of his death, many people have said that should have been the end of the coverage. Perhaps it should. But his resignation statement — issued via the Good Law Project — did not admit fault.
Instead it placed all the blame on the campaign against him, promising to regroup, recover and return.
Reading it back now, the passages about the pressure he was under are haunting. But it’s hard to blame the press for failing to draw a line under the story, when its subject was still insisting there was no story at all.
In short, the idea that this was a simple case of plagiarism, which received disproportionate attention solely because of Arday’s race, is palpably wrong. This was a high-profile, media-friendly academic, with one of the most prestigious posts in the country, and an imminent memoir and book tour, being defended by many other figures of enormous prestige, over a series of hugely eye-catching and contentious claims.
Of course, it was all too easy to forget that there was a human being at the heart of the story. On social media I was bitingly critical not just of the Good Law Project but the quality of Arday’s academic work. That was because what I read was strikingly poor: endless variations on the theme that higher education was prejudiced against black academics, who were “continuously encountering violent racial episodes”, in papers littered with clumsy language and typographical errors. It seemed to me that it said something important about the state of academia, and the way it privileges ideological congruity over research quality. But I was clearly also caught up in the endless blasts and counterblasts of right v left, us v them.
Amnesty was founded to defend freedom but now demands media censorship
If the publication of the Retraction Watch piece was the first moment that the heat could have been drained from the story, Arday’s death was the second.
Instead, it became further inflamed. The Good Law Project, without pausing for a minute, published a new open letter calling for a public inquiry and press regulation, arguing that “there cannot be any doubt that racism lay at the heart of this story”. Organisations such as Amnesty International, founded to defend freedom, demanded media censorship. We were even treated to the grotesque spectacle of Alastair Campbell lecturing others about people being hounded to their deaths.
And this is why I’m writing about Jason Arday, even though it’s the last thing I want to do. Because the reaction to his death reflects some pretty alarming trends in our society.
The first, most obviously, is polarisation — not just of opinion, but information. The people denouncing Arday, and those mourning him, have not just differing but utterly incompatible views of his character and behaviour. One of the key drivers of American-style factionalism is when people lose any sense of a shared narrative. And we are already perilously far down that road.
The second, accompanying trend is the triumph of feelings over facts, of absolutes over nuance. Arday cannot be a mix of good and bad, of flaws and nobility. Instead he must be wholly good, or wholly bad. Likewise the newspapers that examined his career must be damned in toto — even, or perhaps especially, those on the left that dared to betray the tribe.
Finally, it is another example of quite how illiberal we have become, on both left and right. Many people believe, very deeply, that much of the coverage went too far. Yet it is still striking how quickly they leapt at the need for the state to muzzle the media — at a time when Zack Polanski has already been calling for inquiries and insisting the press needs to be “sorted out”, and Nigel Farage too has been threatening vendetta. But there is a reason freedom of the media is such a fundamental principle. Just look at the many, many powerful people, of all political persuasions, inconvenienced by the reporting of this very newspaper.
And that, in the end, is why I am so depressed by the Arday saga — and just a little scared. Because a man has died, and his death has been barely a speed bump in the discourse. Because we seem to have lost the ability to talk with each other, rather than at each other. And because it’s getting harder and harder to see how we can put things right.
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