Journalists spilt much virtual ink this summer investigating the life, career, and ethics of the late Jason Arday, Professor of the Sociology of Education. According to their account, Arday was a plagiarist, a vacuous serial fantasist, a charlatan, a fabulist, a cry-bull, and Cambridge’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) “poster boy.” They insist it was in the public interest to scrutinise Cambridge, Britain’s elite university, which had gone rogue by employing him and capitulating to left-wing/liberal progressivism at the expense of academic rigour. In contrast, many social commentators retaliated against the journalists, describing them as a racist lynch mob that caused Arday to commit suicide. Arday was at the epicentre of a white-hot media frenzy that lasted three weeks. Intense online, print, and broadcast media coverage, including coverage in the Guardian, made him front-page news, during which hundreds of articles criticising him were written.
I do not attempt here to adjudicate the competing evidence-based claims made by journalists critical of Arday and by those who defend him. It would take days, if not weeks or longer, to examine the details of his employment, become familiar with his body of work, and assess the evidence, or lack thereof, behind his seemingly fantastical stories. My focus is on how Arday, as a figure, has been as much socially constructed as unmasked and on the rhetorical strategies journalists and commentators have used to present themselves as impartial, moral, disinterested investigators of objective truth. In particular, I note that the journalists share more than allegiance to, or adjacency with, the political right—they are all gender-critical.
The Dangers of Woke: Falling academic standards!
After the first exposé by Nathan Cofnas, a “race” philosopher, three weeks before Arday’s suicide, Arday’s life story unravelled piece by piece. Kathleen Stock, a gender-critical academic turned columnist, wrote an article (now removed from the UnHerd website) titled “Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling: Serious concerns have circulated for years.” She described how Cambridge managers and others ignored Arday’s unfitness for an academic role and used him for their own DEI purposes. In a later interview, Freddie Sayers, editor-in-chief at UnHerd, credited Stock with writing the definitive piece on the scandal. After reviewing Arday’s books, articles, and talks, Stock concluded that, by any academic standards, Arday’s work would be classified as “unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible, were it not for the DEI-friendly backstory.” Arday was “a useful idiot” for Cambridge, wandering around “like a modern-day Forrest Gump,” and treated “like a sage” for every strange and incomprehensible thing he said.
Sarah Ditum, a Times columnist and gender-critical feminist, reviewed Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. She describes it as “mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe.” The memoir positions Arday’s life as an extraordinary triumph over developmental delay, poverty, and social exclusion. It is “precision-tuned to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals.” In a Times Radio interview, she notes that Arday’s rise to academic and cultural prominence coincides with Black Lives Matter and current sympathy for neurodiverse people. Arday’s story “ticks all the boxes” of a “sappy Hollywood biopic.”
Allison Pearson, a conservative-leaning, gender-critical journalist for the Telegraph, described Arday as “a fantasist” and “proof that stupid intellectuals are poisoning Britain.” “His tall tales are a devastating case study in how woke ideology turns supposedly brilliant academics [his fellows at Cambridge] into credulous dupes.” Gender-critical commentator Barry Wall, whose current passion is railing against DEI and CRT, pours scorn on the equity targets that have infiltrated the university, which, in his view, are systematically erasing “the engine of progress that has driven our civilization”—meritocracy, intelligence, talent, and excellence, and the application of rigorous principles—only to replace them with “at one end the inept or incompetent and at the other the downright fraudulent, duplicitous and dangerous.”
I have my own experience teaching within the framework of DEI. Two decades ago, I supervised a Black male PhD student in an Education Department at a “new” university, and his first language was not English. One day, I had cause to suggest that he had plagiarised in a piece of work. I was fully aware of the relationship between DEI policies, the university’s economic need for self-funded PhD students, its fear of litigious complaints by students, and the possibility of reputational damage. A charge of racism against me was duly made. My immediate superior convened a meeting. At one point, she grasped the student’s hand reassuringly, insisting that the institution was not racist but supportive. The seriousness of plagiarism became obscured, my authority as a tutor was undermined, and he was marooned without support and guidance. This anecdote doesn’t imply I have a blanket opposition to DEI, since efforts by universities to diversify the workforce and provide access for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and ethnic minorities are not antithetical to excellence. This example highlights the danger of DEI amid the current financial and political complexities of higher education, a phenomenon that a minority of brave academics have struggled to highlight for decades.
Dr Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, a Black historian and public intellectual, notes that Arday’s story is a morality tale about the persistence of racism in society, exposing the moral bankruptcy of a university that seeks the appearance of racial progress. The university used Arday to repair its reputation as white and elitist, thus subordinating the man to the symbol. DEI has not transformed elite institutions that once operated as neutral arbiters of talent. The proposition that it has done so obscures the extent to which admissions, hiring, and promotion are shaped by inherited privilege, donor influence, and informal patronage networks that overwhelmingly favour the already powerful.
Interestingly, many of the same critics who decry DEI remain silent about legacy admissions, Oxbridge family pipelines, and the entrenched “chumocracy” that routinely advances white candidates whose careers are buoyed by connections. Indeed, Toby Young, the Director of the Free Speech Union, is among them. He described Arday’s alleged fraud as “the gift that keeps on giving,” writing:
Arday is an Ali G-like character designed to test the limits of how unwilling white do-gooders are to challenge the claims of black people suffering from “intersectional oppression”
According to his own account and multiple reports, his father, Lord Young of Dartington, intervened to secure his place at Oxford after he failed to meet the conditional offer.
David Runciman, an honorary professor of politics at the University of Cambridge, notes that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through people’s fantasies about Cambridge. Race, class, snobbery, and wokery are thrown into sharper relief when the setting is “that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations.”
Who Killed Arday?
Since Arday’s death, academics, journalists, and social commentators have made claims and counterclaims about whether the press coverage contributed to Arday taking his own life and about where our sympathies should lie. His death has prompted an uncomfortable question for British journalism: When does legitimate scrutiny become cruel and destructive?
Disquiet about legacy media first began to be addressed while Arday was still alive. The Times journalist Giles Coren writes, “There comes a point in the public excoriation of an individual when the growing national bloodlust begins to say more about the society from which it emanates than it does about the man it has taken against.” Barry Wall has proclaimed with unalloyed conviction that it was not the press but the exercise in DEI branding that killed Arday. He had built a public career on a fraudulent identity story of extreme childhood victimhood, an against-the-odds triumph, and being Black. It was the exercise in branding that killed Arday: “You cannot swim in the poisoned pool of EDI and expect to come away unscathed.”
Tom Slater, editor at Spiked, a promoter of the work of gender-critical feminists, describes the “grim and dispiriting spectacle” of “the woke left,” which has accused the media “of murder, purely for exposing Arday’s plagiarism and lies.” Arday has been turned into “a martyr by “anti-racist” activists, desperate to relive the heyday of Black Lives Matter.” Isabel Oakeshott, a political journalist and supporter of Reform, describes Arday as “a fraud” who wasn’t “tough enough” to face the consequences of his actions and says, “His suicide is not anyone else’s fault but his own.” The right-wing broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer has told those collecting money for his funeral costs to give it to a more deserving cause.
Sarah Ditum asks, “Was it wrong to write so much about Jason Arday?” She offers the “silly season” as one explanation, citing the “childish brazenness of his exaggerations and inventions.” However, there was plenty of material for journalists to chew on despite the summer parliamentary recess—the new prime minister, global warming, and even, if they wanted to be really edgy and actually do their jobs properly, they could have broken the journalistic collusion with Israel by noting that the ceasefire in Gaza is nonexistent.
Ditum doubled down on what she alleges was deserved journalistic scrutiny of “DEI-run-amok.” In a sleight-of-hand transfer of culpability, she tells us she has no regrets about her own role but expresses sorrow “for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about.” In conclusion, the identity politics of race and DEI frameworks at Cambridge provided a compelling intersectional “story” of race, neurodiversity, and class background, coupled with CRT, that it was in the public interest to expose.
After a period of reflection, Stock re-entered the debate after Arday’s death, claiming, as do I, that in death as in life, “misleading narratives are being built around Arday.” She argues that it is too simplistic to think there is a single causal or moral path that led to Arday’s suicide. The search for a scapegoat, now unfolding on both sides of the culture war, “feels absurdly punitive and crass.” The left is “obsessing” over the fact that Cofnas is “a race scientist,” ignoring that “more neutral” journalists have corroborated his detailed findings. It is thus irrelevant that Cofnas is a eugenicist thinker if what he revealed about Arday’s “misconduct” was accurate. Interpreting the press coverage as a racist frenzy entails forgetting that Arday and his backers constantly signified Arday’s blackness as a defining feature of his inspiring ascent. Stock argues that it is to the shame of the left that it was up to the right to make the point that an assessment of someone’s ability by the university should not be based on skin colour, whether that is white or black. This position “only counts as viciously racist if you are nuts.”
What interests me is the lacuna in Stock’s thinking and her claim that delusions belong to Arday’s supporters, who offer scant evidence to corroborate his stories. She dismisses the role of “race” in the extensive coverage as irrelevant. Perhaps the moral of the Arday story is that gender critics should turn their attention not away from, but toward, CRT for its explanatory potential regarding the obsessive news coverage. A central tenet of CRT is a critique of formal equality, neutrality, objectivity, and “colour-blind” approaches. Although laws and social policies that discriminate have largely been eliminated, racism remains deeply embedded in social norms and everyday practices.
It is impossible to know whether, if Arday had been a white, middle-class dissembler and plagiarist at Cambridge, gender-critical journalists would have become so excited. Zeleza points to evidence that journalists have traditionally ignored or given little attention to the misconduct of academics with whom they identify. I suggest that the public shaming of Arday, while failing to shame Cofnas, is one such example. Helen Joyce, a gender-critical feminist journalist and Director of Advocacy at Sex Matters, describes Cofnas as a free-speech whistleblower and treats the investigation and media focus on Cofnas’s troubled relationship with Cambridge and the allegations of racist ideology as retaliatory and unjust rather than a legitimate response to his writings. Cofnas may be politely described as a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ or impolitely as a professional racist who was fired by his college at Cambridge for lack of evidential data and an unproven theory about race. He insists that, in a meritocracy, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”
It will be interesting to see whether gender-critical journalists who criticise university misconduct selectively ignore the recent scandal involving James Orr, an associate professor of philosophy of religion at Cambridge. Orr has just resigned as a senior adviser to Reform UK leader Nigel Farage over a secret plot to break the law on party donations. A Financial Times profile highlights safeguarding concerns at Cambridge regarding his conduct with students, including unprofessional boundaries, and his role in recruiting students for right-wing politics. It also discusses his Christian nationalist views and his ties to figures such as JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and the gender-critical feminist Mary Harrington. Orr and Cofnas are linked through overlapping conservative and national-conservative networks at Cambridge and beyond, particularly regarding the eugenicist movement. Orr is a member of Toby Young’s Free Speech Union Advisory Council. He does not support same-sex marriage and is strongly opposed to abortion in all circumstances, including rape. However, he opposes identitarian politics, critiques transgender ideology, argues that sex is binary and biologically determined, and calls “gender-affirming” medical care the “mutilation of children.”
For the eminent Black sociologist, Professor Paul Gilroy, responsibility for the row lies with the “culture warriors” who appointed Arday, as well as with “racist critics”—and it comes at a critical time for the higher education sector. “The unthinking culture warriors who have supported [Arday] unconditionally share responsibility with his racist critics for making life harder for Black academics and for dragging UK higher education deeper into the mire.”
Feminists and right-wing adjacency
Over the past decade, prominent gender-critical feminists in the public domain have dangerously drifted to the right, an accusation many vociferously deny. However, their journalism in the Arday case demonstrates that the accusation is true.
For years, gender critics were excluded, vilified, and dehumanised as transphobic dinosaurs for deconstructing “transgenderism,” “transwomen,” and “the transgender child.” The allegedly progressive “be kind” to “transwomen” diktat has fostered a righteous refusal among women to passively capitulate to the erosion of their rights by men. Unfortunately, in some instances, that rebellion has devolved into a gleeful feminist machismo of “Don’t be kind.” From the cold exclusion of cancellation, many gender-critical feminists are now excluded, vilified, and pathologised in turn and are warmly embraced by the right wing, which, of course, knew all along that a woman is a woman and a man is a man.
Jo Bartosch, a gender-critical commentator, seemed to take pleasure in describing the exposure of “the Arday story” as “delicious.” “But the problem goes well beyond race and academia.” J.K. Rowling retweeted Bartosch’s post. After Arday’s death and amid criticism, Bartosch defended her post, clarifying that her intent was to expose the consequences of DEI in universities, not to express personal satisfaction with what was happening to Arday.
Julie Bindel, a gender-critical feminist journalist who writes for right-wing legacy media (The Times, The Spectator, The Telegraph, The Sun, and Daily Mail), portrayed Arday as unqualified and dishonest. She described watching YouTube clips of Arday’s interviews two years ago, when rumours first began to circulate: “He came across as thick as a brick, dense as hell, and a bit of a muppet.” She shared a video of Arday speaking and wrote, “Here he is … wanging on about nothing and having no theories or intelligence. He’s clearly as thick as mince.” In her most-engaged-with post on the topic, she writes:
I know, personally, two women, both from disadvantaged backgrounds, who lost out on jobs because of Arday. He was promoted over one and got the job over the other. Both are great in their field and WAY better than him. In my view, he is not the innocent victim in this.
Although she offers no evidence that bias was at work on the interviewing panel or that the women’s CVs were superior, she portrays the panel as engaging in positive discrimination, thereby conferring male privilege on Arday. The story thus shifts from a DEI issue to a feminist issue and an injustice against women.
Before Arday’s death, Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading autism researcher and friend of Arday, posted about the elevated suicide risk among autistic people and expressed concern about media coverage. He wrote that Arday was being “systematically discredited,” called it “relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man,” raised safeguarding issues, and said, “It’s time to stop.” Helen Joyce responded, “This is moral blackmail. It is beneath you,” and later Baron-Cohen said he should be privately ensuring Arday had suitable support, “not posting uselessly and performatively.” After Arday’s suicide, left-wing investigative journalist Iain Overton argues that we must rage against the journalism of cruelty. Arday’s death “shows the casual conversion of humiliation into entertainment by a media running on monetised hate and cruelty.” Left-wing journalist and Novara Media co-founder Aaron Bastani issued a public video apology, stating that having previously called Arday “a conman,” among other things, he now reflects that “professionally I erred, but ethically I really screwed up.” Joyce replied that she had been “extremely surprised” when Bastani had originally made “sensible comments” critical of Arday but noted that in apologising, “normal service has resumed.”
Although gender critics see themselves as neutral, objective defenders of free speech and meritocracy, they, too, have a troubled relationship with truth and morality. As conservatives or conservative-adjacent, aligned with a politics opposed to identitarianism, they expose double standards. Rather than, as with transgenderism, conducting a critical analysis of the ideas, social structures, and institutions that help construct racial identity, gender-critical feminists have become caught up in sneering, reductive dehumanisation. With varying degrees of subtlety in their writing, they have reduced Arday to an exemplary type, a symbol of all that is wrong with the “woke” identity politics of which they were once, and still are, the victim. In a sort of reverse panopticon, they have helped put Arday, who was made of flesh and blood and, according to friends, wounded beyond measure, under a spotlight for the last three weeks of his life, with multiple surveillance points publicly scrutinising him and magnifying every flaw, inconsistency, lie, and fear.
I suggest that multiple factors have contributed to Arday’s rise and fall and to his tragic end. It would be foolish to frame his suicide as the sole result of press surveillance and racism, although I cannot see how to discount these as powerful contributory forces. The Arday story is more than a parable about the dangers of left-wing inclusion and identity politics; it’s about the politics of race and the shift toward the right whose political interests are served by racism, bloodlust, and the dehumanisation of the “other.” The conviction of gender-critical journalists and commentators that they are objective and morally virtuous should be taken as a grave warning and portent: when individuals feel most righteous, the values they are steadfastly upholding can be corroded.
