The Fatal, Familiar Takedown of Jason Arday

I did not know Jason Arday, the youngest Black professor ever hired at Cambridge University. I have never read anything he has written. In fact, I had never even heard his name until a week ago, when my inboxes and timelines were flooded with links to news stories about alleged plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation and in several subsequent academic publications, alongside separate allegations concerning the misrepresentation of academic and fundraising accomplishments on his CV.

Professor Arday is now dead. Despite not knowing him or how he died, here is what I do know: He was a person, and a version of what happened to him happens far too often to high-profile Black male academicians. Here, I publicly mourn the loss of a person whom I never met, express frustration to everyone who found delight in his downfall and satisfaction in gossiping about it, and rebuke the attempted murder of Black men who defy academia’s low expectations of us.

From the beginning, the entire situation frustrated me. As people kept sending me unsolicited articles and posts, I repeatedly asked myself, “Do they know Jason?” “Have they ever read any of his work or reviewed his CV for themselves?” “And why does their outreach to me feel like gossip?” They never asked me one question that Arday deserved: “Even if he plagiarized his work, how can we best extend support to him as the investigation carries on and his reputation is being ruined across continents?”

Days later, I learned of Arday’s death from a faculty friend who is at a slightly earlier career stage than me. He is closer to Jason’s age than mine. He also is another extraordinarily accomplished Black male scholar whose present and future inspire me. Academic stardom undeniably awaits him. I genuinely want the best for him. I hope the vicious envy and violent despising of Black male intellectual leadership will somehow bypass him. Sadly, they probably will not. They have sought to hunt, destroy and kill just about every Black man who has the audacity to be greater than great. I know this firsthand.

“I will pray for you and for all of us Black men who do our work with spectacular levels of impact, excellence, rigor and exposure,” I wrote to my high-achieving Black male colleague. “People who don’t even know us hate us and presume the worst about us. I will pray for those people, too. ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.’”

To be honest, I think I meant the Jesus quote, but I am not sure. For two reasons, I find myself going back and forth. First, many of them do indeed know exactly what they are doing—their assault on Black men is intentional, not at all coincidental or accidental. And second, forgiving the attempted murderers of my brothers, role models, frenemies and me is really, really hard. But my Christianity requires me to keep working on it.

Even though a man died, some will still insist he was a plagiarist. Even if he was, he did not deserve to die. Other academicians, many of them white, make unintentional mistakes or knowingly engage in explicit acts of academic misconduct. They do not die when their transgressions become publicly known. In fact, few of their transgressions become publicly known. Universities rarely terminate them for those transgressions—and when they do, it tends to be quietly handled. There is a different standard by which Black professionals within and beyond academia are judged, especially those whose credentials engender feelings of jealousy, inferiority and insecurity among white co-workers. When we make mistakes, the penalties and public dragging are more severe.

My understandings of racialized punishment inequities are not only experiential and observational, they also are empirical. My and numerous other scholars’ research on Black girls and boys in K–12 schools shows that they are routinely suspended and expelled at exponentially higher rates than their white peers for the same misbehaviors—at times, the white students’ behaviors are objectively worse. In my workplace-climate research, Black professionals across dozens of industries, including higher education, offer disgustingly compelling examples of how the uneven, racialized application of punishment has negatively affected their mental health, reputations and career trajectories.

In previous situations, I have seen the relentless takedown of highly accomplished Black men referred to as “lynchings.” I have always resisted doing so because lynching, at least for me, is a very particular brand of racial terrorism. What I am writing about here reflects another.

Nevertheless, I will acknowledge three common features: (1) putting a Black man on display, (2) recruiting the largest possible audience of spectators to watch in amazement as his torture occurs and (3) publicly beating him beyond the point of humiliation. Death was the big difference for me in previous instances, which is primarily why I resisted lynching metaphors. But this time, it is not lost on me that the Black male scholar put on global display died as his haters, colleagues, journalists and gossipers watched.

I corresponded with another Black male faculty colleague just moments after I heard about Arday’s death. He knew him. “I was worried this would happen,” he wrote. Strikingly, within two hours, I saw five social media posts that eerily included near-identical predictions. They all were from Black men. I do not know if they knew Arday, but even if they did not, personal acquaintance with what happened the days leading up to his death likely informed their fears. I bet they were not attempting to normalize this tragedy. That is not my aim, either. Just because something predictably occurs over and over again does not make it normal. As it pertains to making a spectacle of high-achieving Black men, I deem takedown projects perverted and unacceptably cruel.

Death should not be the price of academic celebrity. As noted, I do not know how Jason Arday died. But I am uniquely qualified to rule his reputational takedown an academic homicide.