This week, the British academy was rocked by a scandal that curdled into a tragedy.
Jason Arday, a neurodivergent Black Cambridge professor who was feted as a wunderkind by some and denigrated as a fabulist by others, resigned earlier this month amidst accusations of plagiarism.
After experiencing several weeks of hounding by the British press—including dog-whistly suggestions that he was a DEI hire, under-qualified from the start—Arday was found dead at his home last Friday of apparent suicide. He was 41 years old.
In an editorial published today explaining their role in the investigation, The Guardian positioned the professor’s death as an alarming bellwether. Whatever his intellectual indiscretions, editors wrote, Arday, the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s 800 year history, “became an exhibit in an ideological, almost Trumpian campaign against diversity and inclusion.”
In his death, the editors insisted, we must locate a lesson. But of what, exactly?
And who is ‘we?’
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Arday’s case became the subject of international fascination in part because it rhymes with a conversation happening on this side of the Atlantic.
For the past year, the Trump administration and its too-ready-to-comply henchmen in higher-ed have been hard at work dismantling Black and Africana Studies programs on charges of “woke ideology.” (Northwestern University’s program is the latest on the chopping block, as of this week.)
The scapegoating is singular, but convenient in the same way. Where English racists cry DEI hire, American ones cry DEI curriculum. All with the same net effect: diminishing the work of Black and POC scholars. And alas, the baddies are winning. Big time. Even the liberal backlash against DEI programs begins to take on the rhetoric and tone of its initial conservative haters.
In fact, it’s a no good, very bad time for all the FKA woke folk. Though it’s sometimes been hard to hear this bell over the death knell for American college, in general.
All across the States, university enrollment is down while tuitions are soaring. Meanwhile, degraded working conditions—see, the adjunctification discourse—make academic professionalization less and less sustainable. This financial reckoning neatly coincides with the ongoing ideological assault. And the bottom line bodes ill for all current seniors.
As Joel A. Schlosser and Tommaso Bardelli wrote in a recent analysis for the Los Angeles Review of Books, college skepticism in the States is no longer a particularly partisan issue.
“Whether driven by rising tuition costs and student debt or ideological polarization on campus,” Bardelli and Schlosser observed, “a growing number of both Democratic and Republican voters have become less certain of the value of a four-year college education.”
All this makes for tough ground to defend, and a climate that’s all too hospitable to reactionary explanation. It’s easy to imagine the institution’s defense. When kids can’t afford the sticker price full-stop, how do we make the case for something like Black Studies? Always a precarious field, in a racist country?
And if you follow that aggrieved line of thought, and accept the terms of debate set by the powers-that-be, how could you possibly forgive a person who appears to cheat at the rigged game?
Goat, meet scape.
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The Guardian is right to perceive Arday in context. In July this side of the Atlantic, another Blackademic came under fire amidst plagiarism accusations.
The historian Kerri Greenidge lost her job at Tufts University and had a book contract canceled after a peer review found several misattributions in her 2022 book, The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family.
Greenidge, an award-winning public historian, refuted all charges, and told the New York Times that attacks on her scholarship were racially motivated. As in Arday’s case, online debate about the scholar’s alleged crimes quickly became unhinged before key details could be verified.
Presidential historian Alexis Coe argued in a recent newsletter that it’s significant this shaky story was made public at all.
In her own defense, Greenidge pointed out that prominent white historians have been granted far more interpretive latitude than she received. And though this context does not prove racial discrimination was at work in her case, Coe argues “it does make race and power legitimate subjects of inquiry rather than rude interruptions of a supposedly neutral process.”
Coe also points out that the nature of Greenidge’s scholarship is relevant to the “supposedly neutral” process of her public shaming.
In The Grimkes, Greenidge explores “how slavery’s violence continued inside a family celebrated for transcending it.” Her take on the famous sisters “demonstrated how white feminist history manufactures usable ancestors” while considering “who must disappear to make them usable.”
Like Coe, I’m of the opinion that readers deserve to see receipts for any project aspiring to history. But the target, the substance, and the timing here are hard to ignore.
Though the jury’s still out on her case, you get the sense that someone’s won, when all accusations bend away from substance and back toward scandal. And it wasn’t the scholar, in this case.
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Guardian editors were more frank about the role racism played in Arday’s downfall. Though some accusations seem to hold water, the headline is his hounding in context. “White academics are generally allowed to fail as individuals,” editors wrote.
Black ones are not. Arday may have had questions to answer; that did not make black academics collectively answerable for him. A society committed to equality must allow black people the same freedom as everyone else: to be flawed, to make mistakes, and even to fail, without their failure becoming an indictment of their race.
This Blackademic read this defense with a huge sigh. Because the words are so worn, so obvious, it feels like they could have been written fifty years ago. Which is precisely the trouble with accepting debate terms established by the racist country or institution in the first place.
If you’re a Black scholar caught cheating the (rigged) system, somehow, you wind up having to defend your entire humanity. Instead of apologizing for a mistake.
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Plagiarism is an interesting charge for the unique moral taint it carries. As we see in cases like Arday’s or Greenidge’s, the very accusation often confers guilt. Burden of proof is reversed: you must prove yourself innocent to the peer review, the public opinion. Meanwhile, the charge of intellectual theft has often landed on the least powerful. And as Coe implies, that’s rarely a coincidence.
In a recent newsletter, the political theorist Corey Robin considered how the charge of plagiarism has been weaponized against what some of us never stopped calling “DEI hires.”
“There are cases of plagiarism where people don’t bat an eye or the person gets exonerated (the ones I am thinking of involve white men) and others where people, often of color, are brought down,” Robin noted.
Like Coe, he is able to hold two ideas in head when it comes to untangling crime and context.
I am not—I repeat, I am not—saying that plagiarism is different if it’s committed by a scholar of color or a white scholar; it’s not, and it should be handled as the serious breach that it is. But I do think the cultural valence that gets provoked, disrupted, imbalanced, what have you, is different for scholars of color…plagiarism scandals provoke a similar crisis and discourse of authenticity in the context of scholars of color—the idea being, essentially, you don’t belong here in academia.
And this, I fear, is the “lesson” too many will take from these unsettling stories, in this oh-so-unsettled time. Arday and Greenidge are distinct cases, distinct human beings. Who have also (and so easily!) been made into symbols. Ideological exhibits. Proof, for either side of a bad faith debate, that the invitation to the Ivory Tower is contingent for most of us.
We will talk about the ways they did or did not play crooked far longer than we’ll talk about the way the game stays rigged.
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