Jason Arday’s Death Shouldn’t Affect Future Hiring (opinion)

The tragic death of Jason Arday, a young Black professor at Cambridge University, has triggered a debate about the motives of elite colleges and universities in faculty hiring. Arday resigned from his position shortly before his death amid accusations of plagiarism and questions about his memoir. In the wake of the events surrounding Arday’s death, academia’s diversity, equity and inclusion practices have come under renewed attack. Have commitments to appointing faculty of color led to the tokenization of unqualified professors?

The attention Arday’s and other related stories are receiving shifts focus away from a more mundane fact: Academia remains disproportionately white.

I have served as a dean at the New School and department chair at the University of Pennsylvania, where I am currently the university ombudsperson. I have led dozens of search committees and promotion reviews. In my experience, the clear structures and more covert dog whistles that disadvantage faculty of color are far more common than the practice of hiring underqualified applicants because they are Black. I have watched applicants of color make the search committee’s short list, seemingly on track for an offer, only to have doubts raised in the final meeting: Why did it take them so long to finish their Ph.D.? Perhaps we should go with the candidate with the better “pedigree”—a word that should be reserved for animal breeding. Just like that, the applicant’s standing collapses, and the “safe” candidate gets the job.

Academic administrators often blame a shortage of qualified diverse candidates for their failure to change their faculty makeup. The “pipeline problem” is real. But the pattern persists well after hiring. According to a 2024 report by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, as rank increases from assistant to associate to full professor, the proportions of faculty of color decrease. The transition from assistant to associate professor is perhaps the most important because it is when faculty are reviewed for tenure. In 2016–17, there was a three-percentage point gap for faculty of color’s representation when comparing assistant professors to associate professors. This gap grew to nine percentage points in 2022–23, with this widening gap indicative of what the report describes as “significant attrition of faculty of color during a critical period for securing tenure.” This data merits a call to action. Instead, it draws far less attention than the outlier accounts currently dominating front pages.

My fear that Arday’s story will be weaponized to further dismantle the DEI initiatives so many universities have gutted in the wake of Trump’s re-election isn’t hypothetical. Conservative outlets ran pieces treating the case as proof that universities can no longer be trusted to vet any minority hire. Christopher Rufo posted on X, “The DEI regime killed Jason Arday.” Writing in PJ Media, Daniel McCarthy went further, invoking Arday’s case to cast doubt on the credentials of minority professionals more broadly and asking, “If Jason Arday next decides he’s an airline pilot, who will keep him out of the cockpit?”

Arday’s story followed on the heels of Tyler Austin Harper’s The Atlantic cover article, in which he describes a search committee that failed to apply the rigorous standards that should govern faculty hiring to applicants of color. Fed up with the so-called woke environment of Bates College, where he had been hired as tenure-track faculty, Harper, who is Black, resigned from his position after five years. He wondered whether he had been hired “to be visibly Black first and a scholar second, if at all.”

As Harper’s essay is being read by many as corroborating evidence for the anti-DEI argument, perhaps we need a reminder of why we should care about faculty diversity. Here’s one: Several studies reviewed by the New America Foundation linked faculty diversity to student completion rates. Students need role models who look like them.

To be sure, plagiarism, dishonesty and a lack of due diligence in faculty hiring should be taken seriously. Arday’s and Harper’s experiences deserve scrutiny on their own terms. But I worry that these stories are being read as evidence of a broader indictment of diversity efforts, rather than as what they are: two troubling, individual cases. I have sat on the other side of the table when a committee grows anxious about “optics,” and that anxiety rarely produces fairer outcomes. It produces caution, and caution has a way of defaulting to the familiar. If Arday’s and Harper’s stories become the lens through which search committees view every future candidate of color, the casualty won’t be standards. It will be the very faculty pipeline we claim to want to fix.