Musaazi NAMITI | The Founder’s Mind Space
If you have seen any post on social media about Cambridge University’s academic, Jason Arday, there is a good chance that it is condemning the media for hounding him, blaming racism for bringing him down and/or causing his death.
Dr Arday, who was a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge, resigned amid intense media scrutiny over plagiarism accusations and was found dead days later at an address in south London. He was 41.
The outpouring of grief leads you to think that he was an outstanding scholar who had genuinely earned his accolades and then, out of the blue, the media launched a vicious campaign to wipe out everything he had achieved.
Tens of thousands of comments on social media, from both modestly and highly educated people, have harped on the fact that Dr Arday, who was born to Ghanaian immigrants, would probably be still alive if it was not for the right-wing media.
But many people posting to say they were shocked and saddened by his death did not even begin by evaluating facts. The Arday plagiarism saga is a prize example of how emotions can easily trump facts.
Looking at facts objectively would have changed the picture altogether. Those claiming, for example, that Dr Arday was the target of a vicious media campaign would have done better if they had started by asking: Why did he attract media attention in the first place? If the media had questions and he answered them all satisfactorily, why would they continue to pursue him relentlessly?
In over 30 years I have been a journalist, I have learned that professional journalists pursue a story relentlessly because there are compelling reasons. Dr Arday had become a towering figure in academia and was always going to be a target for the media for both positive and negative coverage.
Six reasons you should trust what you read on this website—and share it with confidence
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Our founder and editorial director, Musaazi NAMITI, brings more than two decades of serious newsroom experience, including eight years as an editor at Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, and consulting for the African Development Bank, UN agencies and Globe Media Asia in Cambodia. His global exposure anchors OJ-UGANDA.COM in professional rigour and fairness—standards that too often slip in Uganda’s crowded media space.
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News, it should be noted, carries more weight if it is bad—at least in the eyes of journalists. If a journalist gets a tip that a professor at a prestigious university, like Cambridge, plagiarised his PhD dissertation, they are not going to rest unless their preliminary investigations strongly suggest that there is nothing to pursue.
Dr Arday did not help matters by resorting to intimidation. That only deepened media interest in his case. And as days turned into weeks, he was beginning to realise that what he was trying to hide was unhideable. He resigned, but resignation could not save him.
The headlines that followed his resignation were about his own death. The world had become too small for him. A columnist writing for The Sun newspaper, Julia Hartley-Brewer, was brutally frank on X. “The only person responsible for Jason Arday’s death is Jason Arday,” she wrote. “He was a liar and a fraud who was rightly exposed for what he really was by academics and journalists who were simply doing their job. No one forced Arday to make up lie after lie about his life. He chose to do that.”
US academic Nathan Cofnas, who exposed Dr Arday’s plagiarism in July, wrote a Substack article that he has shared with me, and it shows—beginning with the blatant lies the columnist referenced—dozens of pages containing text he identified as evidence of plagiarism.
The truth is easy to defend, and the questions many people, who are looking at Dr Arday’s case objectively, are asking are why he failed to answer simple questions about plagiarism. Why did he react angrily when he received emails from fellow academics raising issues about the quality of his work?
If Liverpool John Moores University, where he studied his PhD, cleared the dissertation, how could he fail to answer journalists’ questions about the dissertation—and the questions Dr Cofnas’s article raises. If there was really nothing to hide, why did he resign?
Only he could have answered these questions, but the takeaway from this saga is inescapable: Those who have leapt to his defence are relying on emotions.
READ MORE FROM MUSAAZI NAMITI
🔴 Musaazi Namiti is the Founder and Editorial Director of OJ-UGANDA. He previously led the Africa Desk at Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, worked for Globe Media Asia in Cambodia and writes a widely read column for Uganda’s Weekend Monitor. His work has been quoted by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Jeune Afrique, The Africa Report—not for playing it safe, but for saying what others will not.