The Fresh Prince of Cambridge

Britain has recently been engaged in one of its periodic bouts of national pearl-clutching, this time over the late Professor Jason Arday.

Arday became the youngest Black professor at Cambridge University in 2023 after telling an extraordinary story. Allegedly diagnosed with autism and something called ‘global developmental delay’, he said he could not speak until he was 11 or read and write until he was 18. He nevertheless obtained a degree and a doctorate, became a professor, ran dozens of marathons for charity without ever getting any kind of media attention for the feat, and acquired a long list of academic and personal achievements.

Then parts of the story began to unravel when questions were raised about plagiarism in his 2015 doctoral thesis and other published work. Former classmates offered conflicting accounts of his childhood, with some remembering a quiet lad receiving special assistance at school. Others remembered someone who talked, joked and sang advertising jingles. Further questions were asked about his athletic feats, medical history, fundraising and academic appointments.

Arday denied deliberate plagiarism but acknowledged mistakes in citing sources. Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, investigated and cleared him of academic misconduct, but then Cambridge began its own investigation, citing new information about his qualifications and honorary appointments, and Arday resigned within hours in early August. In his resignation statement he said the accusations had taken “a profound toll” on him and those he loved, and insisted his decision should not be mistaken for an admission of the claims against him.

Days later, on Friday, August 14, he was found dead, aged 41, at an address in Battersea, south London. Police described the death as unexpected but not suspicious, and a file is being prepared for the coroner, who will decide whether an inquest is required. Addressing a vigil in Trafalgar Square, British politician Diane Abbott said she believed the vicious media campaign had driven him to his death, though she did not give details of how this was done.

Several of Arday’s friends have since told the media that they spoke to him shortly before his death, in one case only hours earlier. Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge professor who directs the university’s own Autism Research Centre, told the BBC that Arday had sent him voice notes that morning saying he could not go on, and that he was too frightened to leave his house.

There is a bleak irony worth sitting with here. The last documented lifeline was not a crisis service, but a conversation with the country’s foremost authority on the very condition at the center of Arday’s disputed biography, and even he could not describe any attempt to get Arday into emergency care.

They may have believed he was safe, particularly given his mother’s own background as a mental health nurse, and Cambridge says it had already provided him with counselling and various security measures after his resignation. Nevertheless, if responsibility for his death is now to be publicly assigned, the actions of those who knew of his condition deserve examination alongside those of newspapers, universities and strangers on social media.

Another pertinent question is how several respected British universities assessed Arday’s work, checked his biography and appointed him to increasingly prestigious positions. Cambridge is now investigating its own appointment process and Glasgow University in Scotland, where he previously held a professorship, is also reviewing its decision. Former Conservative home secretary James Cleverly suggested Arday had been used as bragging rights by institutions more interested in his fantastical story than his actual scholarship.

Having said all that, I do have some sympathy for Arday. Universities, publishers and newspapers helped turn him into an inspirational public symbol. Once serious doubts appeared, many of the same institutions seemed surprised to discover that symbols are still human beings. If they placed him on a pedestal without performing ordinary checks, they cannot avoid responsibility when the pedestal crumbled.

We are now frequently told that Arday was hounded to death by the press and social media. That is a serious allegation, and in the days since his death it has hardened into an organized campaign rather than a passing sentiment.

Thousands attended a vigil in Trafalgar Square, hundreds more gathered at Cambridge, and a letter organized by the Good Law Project gathered roughly 30,000 signatures demanding a public inquiry into the media coverage he received. Prime Minister Andy Burnham called the death “a tragedy on so many levels” and urged a “moment for reflection,” while stopping short of promising the inquiry Arday’s supporters want. A fundraiser for his family has passed £150,000. None of that, on its own, proves the press killed him, but it does show how far this has traveled beyond a media story.

His family says that he endured years of abuse, and Cambridge reportedly provided panic alarms and screened his email. There may be appalling private messages that have not been made public. One analysis, by the media monitor NewsCord, counted at least 188 articles about Arday across nine days, which is a lot of e-ink but not, by itself, evidence of a coordinated pack of journalistic hounds rather than the usual ordinary, if repetitive, news coverage of an unfolding scandal at a famous institution.

Some conservative commentators did give the story considerable prominence. A former Cambridge researcher called Arday a “DEI fraud,” and the case was used to suggest that unqualified Black academics were being elevated for ideological reasons.

On the other side, an Oxford academic complained on air that Cambridge had paraded him like a trophy rather than quietly helping him with his problems, and further afield, American commentators have already described his death in the language usually reserved for lynching. It is not difficult to see how a legitimate inquiry into one appointment could be exploited to stir resentment against Black academics generally, and equally easy to see how genuine grief can curdle into rhetoric that forecloses the very inquiry Arday’s own family says they want.

But that does not make the underlying questions illegitimate.

It is possible that Arday was subjected to racist abuse and that serious questions existed about his work at the same time. One fact would not cancel the other. Until someone produces clear examples of the supposedly vicious social-media campaign, beyond the volume of ordinary news coverage, “hounded to death” remains more of an interpretation than a documented account.

England’s biggest impostor so far was probably Perkin Warbeck.

In the 1490s, Warbeck claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, the younger of the two Princes in the Tower of London who had mysteriously disappeared, presumed dead. If Richard had survived, he certainly did possess a powerful claim to the English throne. Warbeck was acclaimed by several European rulers, married a Scottish noblewoman and attracted thousands of supporters.

Henry VII called him an impostor, although even Henry never established exactly who he was. Warbeck eventually confessed to being the son of a bargee from what is now Belgium, but confessions made in the custody of a Tudor king should not necessarily be treated like answers on a passport application.

Warbecks high hopes of being King of England were soon dashed and he was hanged at Tyburn in 1499–not the desired outcome from his point of view.

Whatever Jason Arday may ultimately prove to have been, he was no Perkin Warbeck. He did not claim to be a missing prince or attempt to seize the throne from King Charles III. The allegations concern plagiarism, exaggeration and possibly a few lies, all serious matters in academic life, but not quite the same as arriving in Scotland and announcing that one is the rightful King of England who had fled overseas as a child.

What makes the Arday story important is not merely whether one individual deceived several universities. It is whether those universities wanted so badly to be deceived that they stopped asking ordinary questions.

A competition for a Cambridge professorship should presumably involve more than being impressed over lunch in a pub with a few pints of local ale. There should be published criteria, examination of the candidate’s research, outside references and a recorded comparison with the other applicants on a shortlist.

One would expect some kind of assessment matrix. It might include the originality and influence of published research, knowledge of the field, teaching, doctoral supervision, research leadership, international reputation, institutional service and plans for future work.

Each candidate could be scored against the same criteria. Such a matrix would not eliminate human judgment, and numbers can create a false appearance of objectivity, but it would at least leave a record of what the appointment panel believed it was doing.

Who were the other candidates for the chair in sociology of education? We do not need their names, but Cambridge should know how they compared. An inquiry could call them Candidates B, C and D and explain why Arday was judged superior.

If no comparative assessment exists, that is more alarming than one questionable footnote. If the record exists but Arday scored poorly on scholarship and brilliantly on biography, that would be revealing too.

Arday’s academic interests included “decolonizing the curriculum,” another phrase that can mean something useful or almost anything at all.

A sensible version means examining whose experiences have been omitted and recognizing that national histories do not stop at modern borders. A foolish version means treating European history as contaminated material that should be removed to make room for something allegedly more authentic.

At this point we may consider the example of Ecuador.

It would be impossible to understand Ecuador without studying Spain. The Spanish language, Catholic Church, colonial administration, legal traditions, racial classifications, hacienda system and wars of independence all helped create the country that exists today.

But it would be equally impossible to understand Ecuador by studying Spain alone. There were societies here before the Inca arrived, followed by the relatively brief period of Inca rule. Indigenous peoples survived the Spanish conquest and continued to shape Ecuador. African Ecuadorians, particularly on the coast, form another essential part of the story.

The histories cannot be decoupled. Ecuadorian history is not Spanish history, but Spain cannot simply be edited out of the history of Ecuador. Colonialism became part of Ecuadorian history, just as resistance to it did.

The same applies to Ghana, the country from which Arday’s parents came. Ghanaian history includes precolonial African states, European coastal forts, the slave trade, British rule, cocoa, independence and everything that followed.

Understanding Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America requires Indigenous history, Dutch and British colonialism, African slavery and Indian indentured labor.

Bermuda cannot be understood without knowing how the wreck of the British ship Sea Venture on a supposedly devil-haunted desert island in 1609 led to permanent settlement, or without studying slavery, maritime commerce, British naval power and the island’s continuing constitutional relationship with Britain.

Nor can modern Britain be understood without British history.

Immigrants and their descendants may bring valuable perspectives from India, Africa or the Caribbean, but those perspectives become most useful when placed inside a shared historical framework. Roman Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, Norman rule, Parliament, the Reformation, civil war, industrialization, empire, two world wars and postwar immigration form a connected story.

One must know the story before confidently announcing what has been left out of it.

That does not mean waiting until students have memorized the dates of every medieval king before mentioning anyone overseas. The connections can be taught from the beginning. British industrialization involved American cotton produced by enslaved labor. Britain’s wars involved volunteers, conscripts, soldiers and laborers from across the empire, sometimes recruited through patriotism and economic opportunity, and sometimes through considerable coercion.

Post World War II immigration cannot be understood without knowing why people in Jamaica, India and other former colonies already spoke English and possessed complicated ties to Britain.

This is teaching British history properly, not replacing it.

Perhaps the best curriculum would neither be colonized nor decolonized. It would simply be connected.

The same standard should apply to academic biography. Include the inspiring story, but connecting it to verifiable facts with attached clippings and scrapbooks. Celebrate people who leap over barriers, but examine their scholarship. Welcome new perspectives, but do not abandon ordinary standards of evidence.

Perkin Warbeck managed to convince kings, duchesses and emperors that he might be one of the princes who disappeared. That was an impressive achievement in an age without birth certificates, searchable publications, plagiarism-detection software or Google, but apparently Warbeck was a very good looking and well-dressed fellow who looked to ordinary folks like he probably ought to be a prince. A modern university has fewer excuses.

The eventual inquiries, whether from a coroner, a parliamentary committee or Cambridge itself, may show that Jason Arday was a charming but compromised would-be academic whose personal story appealed to institutions searching for an inspirational symbol. They may also show that legitimate scrutiny developed into a politically motivated campaign that caused terrible harm, and that a police force meant to protect the public instead helped shield him from ordinary journalism. All three may be true.

Until then, the most useful lesson is not that we should believe every inspirational story or reject everyone.

It is that history, scholarship, and human beings all become that much more interesting when someone bothers to check the footnotes, dot the i’s and cross the t’s.