When Compassion Is Conditional
Jason Arday's public hounding and the failure of common humanity
OVER THE PAST FEW DAYS I’ve been feeling somber and sad as I’ve reflected on the apparent suicide of Jason Arday, a Cambridge University professor who experienced a multi-point societal failure that turned his life upside down and ultimately led to his death.
For those that missed the media frenzy or avoid X.com, where the peanut gallery made Arday’s story trend in the United States, Sangita Myska of The Nerve brings us up to speed:
Jason Arday’s story – as he tells it – was nothing short of extraordinary. He grew up on a council estate in Clapham, south London. [...] Jason was diagnosed with autism, global developmental delay and dyslexia. He claims he was non-verbal until the age of 11, and could not read or write until he was 18. Yet, by 37, he was appointed a professor of sociology at a world-class academic institution. [...]
Now, serious questions have arisen over his backstory. There are allegations that he heavily embellished his CV. His claim that he was non-verbal at primary school has been undermined by a former classmate who says Jason Arday was so talkative as a child that his nickname was “chatty-patty”. Then there were his undocumented descriptions of racial harassment and stalking. Significantly more serious than all that were the accusations of plagiarism – that he stole other people’s research without sufficient attribution, change or development. Arday has admitted to “mistakes” in his PhD but denies the claim of plagiarism.
But, as Karen Attiah writes:
The allegations trace back to Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded Arday’s doctorate, previously investigated plagiarism claims, and did not uphold them. The latest campaign was reignited in part by Nathan Cofnas, a prominent anti-DEI academic who published his accusations under the headline “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge.”
Cofnas, by the way, published his claims on this platform (Substack). Karen is being charitable calling him an “anti-DEI academic;” he calls himself a “race realist” and was fired from Cambridge for asserting that there would be “close to zero” Black professors at Harvard if it were a meritocracy. Back to Attiah:
Arday resigned on August 5th from his dream position at Cambridge, citing that “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary” had taken a “profound toll” on him.
Nine days later, he was dead.
Arday’s story has brought up some serious questions about the academy and about publishing. For instance: Did Cambridge fully vet Arday before they hired him, or did they set him up to fail? Why, in this day and age, did Simon and Schuster not subject Arday’s memoir, which the carrion crows of the internet picked apart over the past few weeks, to a thorough legal and fact-checking read to protect both their author and their investment?
However—and as usual—this trumped-up scandal wasn’t focused on serious inquiry or making real change. It was about hounding a person out of their job and ruining their life—and in this case, tragically, ending it.
Jason Arday’s story shows that the right wing’s targets can do everything they demand—resign, admit to wrongdoing—and it still won’t satisfy the rabid online mobs.
Not even Arday’s death will.
Instead, they are moving on to other targets they claim enabled Arday, while continuing to malign and ridicule a 41-year-old father who can no longer defend himself—and his family. Yesterday, I was sent a post from a member of the UK’s right-wing reform party that ridiculed the fundraiser as a “family grift.” Arday left behind a wife and two children, and the mobs who targeted him would begrudge them financial support equal to a few years’ of his salary.
Carole Cadwalladr wrote eloquently about mainstream and social media’s role in Arday’s story. As she points out, after Arday’s resignation, and his request to be left alone, “the media hounding didn’t just continue, it increased,” with some outlets buying ads to amplify their grotesqueries masquerading as “opinion” and “investigation.”
“The cultivation of targets that can be righteously attacked is the business model,” Carole writes. “This is what surveillance capitalism has given us. A recursive feedback loop that sees an ad team select a publication’s most clickbaity articles that leads to an increase in traffic that signals the “public interest” aka appetite to publish more articles. It’s a money machine.”
Carole also ends her piece with a list of ways to support targets of harassment. I shared the following with her:
I worry about the many people who will undoubtedly make themselves smaller after this campaign of hate. The people of color, the women who will eschew a life that has any public component for fear of what might be unleashed on them. Even if dismal human beings like [Nathan] Cofnas don’t succeed in literally policing academia or publishing, they may succeed in their campaign of self-censorship, unless institutions develop much more robust support structure for targets of networked harassment campaigns like this.
It’s those support structures—providing mental health support; assisting those who have been doxxed move to a second location; proactive monitoring and communications that don’t just protect the institution, but the individual target—those are the things that can bring people back from the brink.
A lot of institutions still subscribe to the idea that “keeping your head down” and “waiting for the scandal to blow over” are part of a winning strategy in the internet age. They couldn’t be more wrong.
Despite his resignation, the right-wing, racist, bloodthirsty mobs of the internet and the media sector that encouraged them would have continued to attack Jason Arday, were he still alive.
I know, because more than four years after experiencing my own digital witch hunt, my detractors still regularly find reasons to bring me up, to malign me, and to wish violence upon me and my family. Just this week, a “satire” news site (that deeply buries this label) claimed that I had died after being imprisoned in GITMO. Apparently this passes as a joke in MAGA land. As of this morning, two days after publication, the “article” has more than 30,000 views. It has hundreds of comments from people who clearly haven’t all read the site’s disclaimer about its content—one particularly nasty example reads “HANG HER DEAD CORPSE NOW !!!!! 🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪.” (This “parody” site has also raised over $400,000—where are the right wingers aghast at the grift?)
Study after study has established that people with intersectional identities (a fancy way of saying people who represent multiple minorities, like Arday, who was Black and autistic) experience online abuse at higher quantities and levels of severity. (Here’s a very fresh study from University College London that demonstrates this phenomenon.) We’ve known this for years—the first study I did that made this conclusion was published in 2020, and I was far from the first person to reach it.
Yet here we sit, in 2026, shocked at what antiquated institutions, the media, and the internet have wrought. We should not be.
There will be postmortems, investigations, further speculation and ridicule. Some institutions may publish lessons learned and make feeble, bureaucratic attempts at protecting their people, while others will have learned a completely different lesson: that stories like Arday’s are moneymakers, humanity be damned.
In all but the most extreme of cases, public harassment campaigns have become normalized, viewed as the “cost of doing business” or the price of speaking out. A target who raises their voice in opposition to their public haranguing is often met with derision—“if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”—or a claim they deserve what they’re experiencing for whatever crime they’re perceived to have committed.
And that’s the core of this tragedy. Multiple systems failed Jason Arday, but perhaps none so much as our common humanity.
We’ve been conditioned to wonder whether a person has done enough to deserve compassion, but when we’re asking that question, we’ve already lost. 🧭
Worth reading in full: