The Sorry Saga of Jason Arday Points to the Need For More Press Freedom in Britain, Not Less

Cambridge’s terrible decision to appoint Jason Arday a professor when he was obviously hopelessly unqualified was enabled by a British legal environment that suppressed press scrutiny and allowed Arday to sic the police on the academics and journalists trying to scrutinise his credentials. The result, argues Jesse Singal in the Dispatch, was institutional racism in reverse. The racism here was exhibited by Arday‘s defenders, not his critics, and the whole sorry saga points to the need for more press freedom in Britain, not less. Here’s the kernel of Singal’s argument:

In the hours immediately after Arday’s death, I was back on X, arguing like everyone else. I couldn’t help it; I found the outrage following this tragedy particularly deranging because of the almost perfect, 180-degree extent to which it misses the point. 

I mean that in two senses. First, the call for more scrutiny of media, or even outright censorship of it, is astonishing in light of the facts of this case. It was because of the U.K.’s lack of press protections that this story took so long to come out, which, in the end, increased the damage done to Arday. Times Higher Education had a story in the works last year, but Arday sicced an infamous British law firm, Carter-Ruck, on the outlet, killing it. That would not have happened in the United States, because our defamation laws are much more media-friendly (as strange as that might sound during the Trump era).

Arday abused not only the civil system but the criminal one, too. In 2023, mere months after Arday’s hiring, the first academic to notice oddities in his work emailed him to ask about those oddities. Arday responded by reporting him to the police. Last year he also reported a member of the Times Higher Education team, Jack Grove, to the police on similar grounds. Here in the United States, cops would likely respond to such a complaint with the American version of “bugger off” – in the U.K., while both criminal complaints were eventually dropped, they were apparently taken seriously by police at first. A cop even told Grove that while he wouldn’t be investigated further, he shouldn’t email Arday again. That’s direct law enforcement interference with the press in what is supposed to be one of the freest countries in the world. 

These are all signs that in British society, it’s very easy to weaponise the law against good-faith media or academic inquiries. To come out the other side of this horrible story wanting to give more power to those who would crack down on journalistic inquiry beggars belief. To be sure, none of this is to deny that there are elements of British tabloid culture that are a bit bloodthirsty, but as my examples have hopefully made clear, anger at the media has gone well beyond those outlets. (And while it’s ill-advised to pin suicide on any one cause, anyway – a point to which I’ll return shortly – does anyone actually think the excesses of the right-wing tabloids are more likely contributors to Arday’s death than his entire life and career falling apart in a short period?) 

The complaints of racism – that “Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys,” as the academic Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz put it – constitute an even more extreme example of point-missing. Look: In much the same way some of the media coverage was excessive, of course, amid the broader online circus, there has been racist commentary. There always is when a person of colour is the subject of public scrutiny and shaming, especially in a situation like this where the story really does involve a dispute about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But to claim that Arday was unfairly singled out on account of his race is to ignore the very important other half of the ledger: He was elevated to an untenable position because of his race! You don’t need to take my word on that. Just read the very end of the Times of London‘s contemporaneous article about his hiring, if you can stomach it:

Professor Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, said hiring Arday was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.

She told The Times: “Not only is Jason Arday a world-class scholar, he also brings a wealth of experience that can help us to take forward our efforts to widen participation at all levels.

“Hopefully it is becoming increasingly clear that with concerted effort and a genuine commitment to change, those barriers that still exist either to working or studying at top universities can be overcome.

“To any students or prospective colleagues who are wondering if Cambridge is a place where they can belong, the answer is, emphatically, yes.”

Even more dyspepsia-inducing is a BBC segment from that same period that, to me at least, gets harder to watch every day. In it, Cremin approaches Arday and takes his hand as though he is some sort of messianic figure. A bit later, during a strange sit-down centred on her complimenting him, she explains, “The Board of Electors on your interview, they were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you.” Then she looks him dead in the eyes and lies to his face: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

In the article that the NewsHour co-anchor would later describe as “ghoulish,” the New York Times revealed damning details about that hiring process: “A review of internal Cambridge documents and interviews with former colleagues and associates shows that, in addition to passing over more experienced candidates for the job, administrators gushed publicly about Dr Arday’s scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work,” the Times reported. A bit later: “Dr Arday’s claims about not speaking were false, a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him [said]. His supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature, experts in developmental and speech delays say. That should have set off alarm bells for the Cambridge hiring committee, which included a child psychiatrist who had done research on autism, experts said.”

There’s a word for what Cremin and her colleagues did here: racism. It is racist to respond to someone’s skin colour by pretending they are something they are not. It’s not racism in the way lynchings or slavery are racism. But it’s racism nonetheless. And anyone with a passing familiarity with this story knows that Arday was appointed to his post precisely because of how Cambridge thought the colour of his skin would reflect back on the university itself – precisely because of what the current crop of censors might call systemicproblems within that university. 

Worth reading in full.