The Rot in Academia: On Jason Arday and the Crises We Refuse to Name

Reflections from a Canadian Context

I have been sitting with the news of Jason Arday’s death, and I cannot shake the feeling that we are all complicit. Not in the sense of direct responsibility, but in the way we have normalized a system that consumes its own, especially when those consumed are Black, Brown, Indigenous, or otherwise deemed “unworthy” of the spaces they occupy.

This is not a distant problem. This is happening here, in Canada, on our campuses, in our institutions. And we need to talk about it.

The Lynching of Jason Arday

Let us call it what it was. A Black academic was accused of plagiarism by Nathan Cofnas, a self-described “race realist” (aka white supremacist) who once argued that in a meritocracy, Black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” The university where Arday earned his PhD, Liverpool John Moores University, investigated and concluded that he had not plagiarized his dissertation.

And yet. The British media hounded him relentlessly. In just 22 days, 249 national press articles were published substantively about Arday – 188 of those in the final nine days after he publicly resigned, stating he had reached “the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.” More than 20 articles a day. A single human nervous system had to endure this national pile-on.

The Cambridge chancellor, Lord Chris Smith, called it a “racist feeding frenzy.” Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, described it as an “unacceptable public hounding.” His family said he was subjected to a “campaign of sustained abuse” since his appointment in 2023.

His friend and mentor Simon Woolley described seeing Arday a week before his death: “He said he felt hounded to death, his words, that he couldn’t see a way out. On that day, we saw a man half his body weight and desperate beyond belief.”

The Media’s Complicity: A White Supremacist Institution

We need to be clear about what we are talking about when we discuss the media’s role in what happened to Jason Arday. The media is not a neutral actor. It is a white supremacist institution. Not simply because individual journalists hold biased views, but because the entire structure of mainstream media is built on white supremacist logics that determine who is protected, who is destroyed, and whose humanity is recognized.

The British media’s treatment of Arday was not a failure of journalistic standards. It was the system operating exactly as designed. The media exists, in part, to police the boundaries of who belongs in positions of power and authority. When a Black man dares to occupy a space of intellectual prestige – especially one as visible as Cambridge – the media’s job is to tear him down. To remind other Black people of their place. To reassure white audiences that the natural order has not been disturbed.

Consider the proportionality. When Cambridge academic William O’Reilly had a plagiarism complaint upheld against him in 2023, there was just one national press article. One. Arday’s case generated 249. The difference is not about the facts of the cases. It is about race. A white academic’s transgression is an individual failing. A Black academic’s transgression, whether real or, as in this case, fabricated, is treated as evidence of a systemic problem. It becomes a cautionary tale. It becomes proof that diversity initiatives are “lowering standards.”

This is white supremacy in action. It is the presumption that Black success must be illegitimate. It is the refusal to extend to Black people the same grace, the same presumption of innocence, the same benefit of the doubt that white people receive automatically.

The media’s treatment of Arday followed a well-worn pattern. They weaponized his past, a single tweet he had made years earlier, which was described as “homophobic” and used to justify the relentless coverage. Never mind that Arday had apologized, that he had grown, that he was a scholar who had dedicated his life to inclusion. The media needed a villain, and they found one in a Black man whose humanity they refused to see.

The right-wing press, in particular, used Arday as a symbol of everything they despise about “wokeness.” He was a Black man in a position of prestige. He had spoken about diversity and inclusion. He was, in their eyes, a fraud who had been given opportunities he didn’t deserve. The fact that his PhD had been validated, that his scholarship was sound, that he had earned his place – none of it mattered. What mattered was that he was Black, and that he was visible, and that destroying him would send a message.

The journalist Ash Sarkar put it this way: “The way the media turned someone being found not guilty of plagiarism into a national scandal and his subsequent death into a culture war sideshow is the product of a media system where the humanity of Black people is always negotiable.”

And then, after the spectacle, after the death, the same media that had hounded him offered condolences. They wrote articles about compassion. They expressed shock that this “gentle soul” could have been driven to such despair. This is the cycle: destroy, then mourn. Never ask if the destruction was inevitable. Never ask if you were part of it.

There is a sick irony in how we have become “particularly good at discovering the language of compassion retrospectively,” as one commentator noted. “We urge kindness once a pile-on has become uncomfortable to remember, once tragedy forces us to rediscover the human being underneath the trending name. Kindness that arrives only after the spectacle has ended is of little use to the person who had to endure it.”

The media’s complicity in what happened to Arday is not incidental. It is foundational. The media is the institution that transforms a Black person’s life into a spectacle, that manufactures outrage, that dehumanizes its target, and that walks away satisfied when the damage is done. And then, after the death, it wrings its hands and offers platitudes about compassion.

We need to stop pretending this is anything other than white supremacy. We need to name it. The media’s coverage of Black academics – the scrutiny, the suspicion, the disproportion – is not an aberration. It is the system at work.

The Canadian Context: A Pattern of Institutional Failure

This is not just a British story. Canada and academia here have their own deep rot – and I have witnessed it firsthand.

The normalization of sexual violence in Canadian universities is not a series of isolated incidents. It is a pattern. It is the culture. And when survivors speak out, they are often met with the same response: institutional denial, procedural delay, and quiet settlement.

Consider what we have seen at some of our most prominent institutions:

At the University of British Columbia, faculty members who faced allegations of sexual harassment have been quietly reassigned or retired with their pensions intact. A 2020 investigation revealed that a professor had been the subject of multiple complaints over decades, yet was allowed to continue teaching and mentoring students.

At the University of Toronto, students and faculty who have spoken out about sexual violence have been met with institutional indifference. In one high-profile case, a professor was accused of harassment by multiple students over several years, yet remained in his position while investigations dragged on.

At McGill University, complaints have been handled with opacity and delay, with survivors often pushed into confidentiality agreements that silence them. In 2023, a tribunal found that McGill had failed to adequately protect a student who reported sexual assault, citing a pattern of procedural failures.

At Memorial University, a faculty member’s sexual harassment complaint led to a human rights tribunal, exposing decades of institutional failures. The university was found to have created a “poisoned environment” for the complainant, who had been subjected to harassment by a senior administrator.

These are not anomalies. They are the predictable outcomes of a system designed to protect itself, its reputation, and its powerful faculty members, at the expense of the vulnerable.

The Misogyny and Gender-Based Violence Crisis

Academia has a profound misogyny problem. The power asymmetries that allowed Jason Arday to be destroyed by an unaccountable media mob are the same asymmetries that allow senior academics to prey on students and junior colleagues with impunity.

We talk about “institutional failures,” but we rarely talk about how these failures are gendered, how they compound with race and caste to create conditions of profound vulnerability for women scholars—especially women of color, Indigenous women, and trans women.

I think of Sara Ahmed, the feminist scholar who quit her tenured position because her university refused to take sexual violence seriously. She wrote about how universities claim to care about sexual harassment and assault, but when complaints are actually raised, they are “managed” rather than addressed. The institution protects itself, not the victims.

UPEI: A Case Study in Institutional Rot

Let me speak more personally about the University of Prince Edward Island, because this is the institution I know, the institution I was part of, and the institution I witnessed fail its community.

In December 2021, Rubin Thomlinson LLP was retained to conduct an independent third-party investigation following allegations of misconduct against the former president. The resulting 112-page report confirmed that the workplace environment was “toxic, where bullying and harassment is widespread and condoned at an institutional level.” The report described “dire” problems on campus that “should raise alarm bells and spark urgent action.” Staff reported a “culture of fear and intimidation,” with instances of screaming and yelling, belittling managers, gossiping, favouritism, and the targeting of students by faculty. One staff member described UPEI as “the most miserable, soul sucking place of work I have ever experienced.” The report also found that non-disclosure agreements had been used to “buy survivor’s silence.”

For women of colour on campus, the situation was even more dire. The report noted that because there were relatively few women of colour, it could not provide anonymized examples without identifying them. “Suffice it to say, they described a state of affairs in which they were profoundly disrespected, ‘othered,’ and subjected to unwelcome conduct.” The university ultimately acknowledged that it had “failed to create a safe, respectful, and positive environment for working and learning for all members of the community.”

While I was there I had seen some improvements. There were moments of hope, of genuine effort to address the culture. But not long before I was fired I started hearing that things were actually getting worse than they were during the time the investigation covered. The progress was performative, the external pressure faded, and the system reasserted itself.

Anti-Blackness in Academia: A Unique and Virulent Form of Hatred

Anti-Blackness in academia deserves its own section because it operates differently from other forms of racism. It is not simply one prejudice among many. It is foundational, unique, and especially virulent.

Black people are seen, in the academy as in society, as intellectually incapable. There is a deep-seated presumption that Black bodies do not belong in spaces of knowledge production. This presumption operates before a Black scholar even submits an application. It operates at the admissions stage, the hiring stage, the promotion stage – every stage of the academic pipeline.

The numbers tell the story. In the UK, only 1% of professors are Black – just 270 people out of more than 26,000 professors. Canada’s numbers are not much better. Black scholars are underrepresented at every level of the academy, and the higher you go, the fewer Black faces you see. This is not an accident. This is the result of a system that has, from its inception, viewed Black people as objects of study rather than subjects who study.

What makes anti-Blackness unique is the way it operates as a totalizing presumption. A Muslim scholar may face barriers – Islamophobia is real and pervasive – but Muslims can and do enter academic spaces. The pathway is harder, yes, but it exists. For Black scholars, the very idea that they could be intellectuals is treated as suspect. They have to prove, constantly, that they are not the exception to the rule. They have to be twice as good to be seen as half as competent. And even then, their presence is often read as a diversity hire, a token, an affirmative action case, never as a scholar who earned their place through merit.

This is what Jason Arday experienced. He had a PhD. He had a distinguished career. His institution found no plagiarism. But none of that mattered, because the presumption against him was not about evidence. It was about who he was. A Black man in a position of intellectual authority is always, already, suspicious. The media frenzy around him was not about plagiarism; it was about punishing a Black man for daring to occupy a space that was never meant for him.

When Black scholars are held to standards that white academics have never been expected to meet, when they are scrutinized for minor errors while white academics can commit major ones and remain untouched, when they are treated as symbols to be destroyed as a cautionary tale—that is anti-Blackness operating at its most lethal.

And it is not just about individual acts of prejudice. It is about the structure of the academy itself. The academy was built on the extraction of Black labor and Black knowledge, but it was never built for Black people. Black scholars are guests in a house that was built on their ancestors’ backs, and they are expected to be grateful for the invitation, even as they are reminded, constantly, that they do not truly belong.

Islamophobia in Academia: A Different Kind of Exclusion

Islamophobia in academia is real, pervasive, and destructive – but it operates differently from anti-Blackness.

Muslim scholars can and do enter academic spaces. The barriers are significant – particularly for visibly Muslim scholars, particularly for those who wear hijab, particularly for those who speak out about Palestine. But the pathway, while difficult, exists. Muslim scholars are not presumed intellectually incapable in the same way Black scholars are. They are often seen as intellectually capable but dangerous – as threats to academic freedom, as proponents of “backward” values, as people who cannot be objective because of their religious commitments.

This is a different form of exclusion. It is about suspicion rather than presumed incompetence. It is about the fear that Muslim scholars will bring their “politics” into the classroom, while white scholars who promote Islamophobic views are celebrated as “objective.” Muslim scholars face what has been termed “internal orientalism” and “epistemic extractivism” – the extraction of their knowledge without attribution or reciprocity.

In Canada, we have seen this play out in the treatment of Muslim scholars who speak out about Palestine, or who challenge dominant narratives about Islam. They are silenced, surveilled, and excluded. Their research is questioned. Their credentials are challenged. They are told to keep their politics out of their scholarship, even as their colleagues’ Zionism is treated as neutral.

But they can get in the door. They can get the PhD. They can get the tenure-track position. They will face barriers within those spaces, but they are not, as a rule, barred from entering them altogether. This is the difference.

Casteism in Canadian Academia: The Unspoken Hierarchy

We must also talk about casteism – a form of oppression that is rarely discussed in Canadian academic contexts, yet operates powerfully in the lives of South Asian scholars. And it is not, as some would frame it, “lateral violence.” It is vertical. It is hierarchical. It is rooted in a centuries-old system that places certain bodies above others.

Let me speak from my own experience, as a South Asian Muslim of Pakistani origin, born and raised in Canada. My father taught at UPEI for many years. For much of that time, there was another South Asian professor at the university – an upper-caste Hindu who held significant institutional power. This professor was on the promotions committee. And while he served on that committee, it became remarkably difficult for other South Asian faculty to get promoted, especially Muslim South Asians, and especially anyone this professor perceived as beneath him.

This is not lateral violence. Lateral violence suggests peer-to-peer harm among marginalized groups. But casteism does not operate horizontally; it operates vertically. In the South Asian context, upper-caste people are structurally above caste-oppressed people, Dalits, and Muslims. When an upper-caste Hindu professor uses their institutional power to block the promotions of Muslim or Dalit scholars, that is not “lateral” anything. That is caste oppression functioning exactly as it has for centuries.

Historically, upper-caste Hindus have worked very hard in academic spaces to distinguish themselves from Muslim South Asians. To say, in effect: we are the good brown people, and they are the bad ones. This separation serves a purpose. It allows upper-caste Hindus to position themselves as “model minorities” within predominantly white institutions – acceptable, assimilable, civilized, worthy of proximity to power – while casting Muslim South Asians as problematic, foreign, uncivilized, unworthy.

This dynamic is rarely discussed in Canadian academic discourse. There are no task forces on casteism. No equity frameworks that name it. No training that addresses it. The only people who talk about it are those experiencing it – the Muslim and Dalit scholars who know, intimately, what it means to be systematically blocked, excluded, and diminished.

And because it goes unnamed, it goes unchallenged. The upper-caste Hindu professor on the promotions committee can continue to deny promotions to his Muslim colleagues. The institution can continue to see these as individual “personality conflicts” rather than what they are: the reproduction of caste hierarchy in a new context. And when people like myself challenge it in my personal social media posts, upper caste faculty complain.

We need to name this. We need to understand that casteism travels. It did not stay in South Asia. It came here with us, and it operates in our academic institutions, often invisibly, often with the full complicity of diversity frameworks that refuse to see it.

The Legacy of Extraction: Stealing from Black, Brown, and Indigenous People

We also need to talk about what academia has always been.

Historically, universities have extracted from Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. They have stolen knowledge and called it “discovery.” They have taken the intellectual labor of colonized peoples and renamed it “anthropology,” “ethnography,” “sociology.” They have built entire disciplines on the backs of people they refused to recognize as scholars.

In Canada, this history is especially acute. Universities like the University of Toronto and McGill were built with colonial wealth, often on land stolen from Indigenous peoples. This is not ancient history – the Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented how the Canadian university system was complicit in the residential school system and the broader project of cultural genocide.

But here is the bitter irony: when Black, Brown, and Indigenous people enter the spaces created by this extraction, they are scrutinized in ways that white academics – who have been the primary beneficiaries of this extraction – never are.

A white professor can build a career by “studying” Indigenous communities without ever including Indigenous scholars in their work. That’s called “expertise.”
A Black scholar who challenges the methods of that white professor is called “difficult.”
An Indigenous scholar who insists on Indigenous research methodologies is called “unscientific.”

The extraction is perfectly fine. The exploitation is perfectly fine. It has been normalized as simply “how academia works.” But when Black, Brown, and Indigenous people show up as ethical scholars, as moral beings, as people who refuse to participate in their own exploitation or the exploitation of their communities—they are held to standards that white academics have never been expected to meet.

This is the racism at the heart of the academy. Not explicit, perhaps. But structural. The kind that kills.

The Zionism Problem

And then there is the Zionism problem. It manifests in multiple directions. We are seeing a chilling effect on academic freedom for scholars who criticize Israel, with some institutions treating such critique as disqualifying. Simultaneously, we must reckon with the fact that Zionist ideology has often been given a pass in academic spaces, creating hostile environments for Palestinian scholars and students.

This is not about choosing sides. It is about recognizing that academia should be a space where critique is possible, where evidence matters, where intellectual inquiry is not constrained by political or ideological litmus tests.

In Canada, Palestinian scholars and students have reported being silenced, surveilled, and excluded from academic spaces. At the same time, we see Canadian universities accepting funding and partnerships from Israeli institutions without accountability for human rights violations. The double standard is stark.

A Reckoning Is Overdue

Jason Arday was 41 years old. He leaves behind two children. He was, by all accounts, a “gentle soul” who “cared deeply about his subject.”

His death is a tragedy, but it is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a system that treats Black academics as either inspirational tokens or fraudulent interlopers, with no middle ground. It is the product of a media ecosystem that profits from outrage without accountability. It is the result of universities that claim to value diversity while refusing to protect the people they claim to champion.

And Canada is not exempt. Our universities have their own graveyards of broken scholars, of people who were pushed out, silenced, or destroyed. The names are less famous, perhaps. But the pattern is the same.

We need a reckoning. Not the kind that produces more statements of condolence and DEI task forces. The kind that actually reckons with the media’s role in destroying lives, with the way racism and casteism and misogyny and Islamophobia structure academic careers, with the violence we enact when we treat people as symbols rather than human beings.

Academia needs to ask itself: Who gets protected? Who gets destroyed? And what does it say about us that we can watch a lynching unfold in real time, call it “scrutiny,” and move on to the next story?

A Canadian Call to Action

So what do we do in Canada?

We name anti-Blackness. We understand that anti-Blackness is unique and foundational. We do not collapse it into other forms of racism. We center it in our equity work and demand that institutions take concrete action to address the unique barriers Black scholars face.
We name casteism. We stop pretending this is “lateral violence” or “personality conflicts.” We name it for what it is – a hierarchical system of oppression that operates in our institutions. We demand that caste be included in equity frameworks, in training, in policies.
We hold our universities accountable. Not through task forces, but through action. We demand transparent investigations into sexual violence. We demand that complaints are taken seriously. We demand that powerful faculty are not protected at the expense of the vulnerable.
We challenge the media. We call out the media as a white supremacist institution. We refuse to accept coverage that disproportionately targets Black, Brown, and Indigenous academics as “neutral” or “objective.” We demand accountability for the harms the media enables.
We build solidarity. We recognize that anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, casteism, misogyny, and Zionism are connected. We refuse to treat them as separate issues. We stand with all marginalized academics.
We protect each other. We don’t wait for institutions to act. We act. We show up for our colleagues who are under attack. We speak out when we see injustice.
We demand accountability. Not just for individual acts of misconduct, but for the systems that enable them. We refuse to accept “this is just how it is.” We refuse to accept performative change that collapses once the pressure is off.

As the Prime Minister said, this is a time for “reflection.” But reflection without action is just another form of complicity. The question is what we do with what we have seen.

In memory of Jason Arday, and in solidarity with every scholar who has been destroyed, silenced, or pushed out by this system we call academia. May we build something better.

Further Reading and Resources:

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life
Rubin Thomlinson LLP, University of Prince Edward Island Review (2023)
Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) reports on equity and sexual violence
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action
Black and Indigenous scholar collectives in Canadian universities
Solidarity networks for Palestinian scholars and students
Scholarship on casteism in diaspora and academic contexts