On Sunday 16 August I joined the vigil for Professor Arday in London’s Trafalgar Square in the summer’s heat, packed tight with thousands of protestors marking their respect, holding bunches of flowers aloft, and placards reading, ‘Rest in Power Professor Jason Arday.’ Heads bowed, hundreds around me in tears—the words of his students unbearable, our anger craving a response.
Professor Arday is dead. Murdered. Yet again another Black person has been killed—pilloried in a public execution orchestrated by a profoundly racist press, and organised fascists.
The vigil spoke to the structural racism that shaped Professor Arday’s life and death. I was struck by British MP Diane Abbott’s comments on the Black experience in the UK and the racism encountered daily. This daily experience is engrained in British institutions, the press and political life.
His family commented about the outpouring of grief and fury, describing their emotions: ‘The public cruelty Jason was subjected to was too much for any man to bear. The outpouring of love, support, and grief since his death means so much to us. Although it is bittersweet now, kindness is needed in life, not just in death.’
Bittersweet indeed—the kindness, support and grief were essential but too late.
Professor Jason Arday—the Black professor of sociology at Cambridge University—was hounded to his death by a racist campaign to unseat him from his position. In the 22 days leading to his suicide, there were 249 articles in major newspapers in the UK, continual coverage on TV, radio and blogs. This had followed a repeated effort to undermine Arday since he became a professor at the university in 2023.
The noise from this pogrom—accusing him of plagiarism, lies, bombast, academic fakery—was overwhelming. Many people who should have known better joined the chorus. The UK’s mainstream liberal paper, The Guardian, launched an investigation into Arday’s scholarship. I encountered family members who joined in the chorus—denouncing Arday, ridiculing his claims, and his work.
On 5 August, Arday resigned from his post; the following week, on 14 August, he committed suicide. A man described by his students as ‘gentle’, ‘caring’, ‘compassionate’ and ‘inspiring’ was systematically broken—destroyed in a campaign which led directly to his suicide.
Arday was murdered.
This was the objective—Arday’s suicide was the logical outcome. Leading the recent crusade was the racist scholar, Nathan Cofnas, who published on his Substack the blog, ‘DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge’, on 21 July 2026. A vile man who targeted and conducted his own investigation into Arday’s work—charging him with plagiarism, which confirmed Cofnas’ thesis that Black people are inferior, unworthy of senior academic positions.
Cofnas is a symptom of our times. A marginal, bigoted voice that once would have remained largely undetected in the swamp is now amplified by a mainstream, racist agenda. In the global North, these voices have reached fever pitch—finding traction in a political climate that has seen right-wing governments elected, and racist policies normalised in daily political speech.
To say these developments are worrying is a grotesque understatement—these are clarion signs of our current and deepening crisis, and the irredeemable racism of our political and economic system. This cannot be absorbed and understood simply as a British thing. We see the same tightening of the screw in the personal attacks on International Criminal Court judges and the normalisation of genocide.
There are three observations that I want to make in this piece. Firstly, I want to look at two political parallels—one that prompted the global mass movement, Black Lives Matter, a few years ago, and the second when antisemitism was denounced by the French author Émile Zola at the end of the 19 th century. Finally, I want to say a few things about plagiarism and academia.
On 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis, George Floyd was stopped by the police, then wrestled to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin—clips of his slow death over nine minutes were beamed across the planet. Chauvin was later convicted of murder. George Floyd was choked to death by Chauvin, who pinned Floyd to the ground, as he died—filmed by the incredibly brave 17-year-old Darnella Frazie — he was heard saying,‘Mama, mama, mama’, ‘Momma, I love you,’ and ‘Momma! I’m through.’
George Floyd was murdered in front of all of us—his final words also ours. Like millions around the world, in the U.S., the UK, Nigeria, South Africa, I came out onto the streets. The police were unable to do anything as the Black Lives Matter movement emerged during the Covid lockdowns. I marched in London on 31 May 2020 at a demonstration bristling with anger and heartbreak.
Professor Arday’s vigil was organised by anti-racist campaigning organisation Stand Up to Racism (copyright Leo Zeilig, 2026)
Professor Jason Arday’s suicide is another such moment—as horrific, and urgent. He was murdered—make no mistake about it. A systematically organised lynch mob orchestrated his death. The response needs to be as loud and clear as the protests five years ago.
Another observation needs to be made. In 1894, the Jewish French officer Alfred Dreyfus was targeted in an antisemitic campaign organised by the press, right-wing and racist politicians and the military. Accused of passing on military secrets to the Germans, convicted of treason and sent to Devil’s Island off the coast of the French colony of Guiana—antisemitism played a major role in Dreyfus’ vilification. His dismissal signalled the dawn of 20th-century antisemitism in Europe.
But this antisemitism also faced enormous resistance.
The celebrated article by Émile Zola ‘J’accuse’ was an open letter written in response to the Dreyfus affair and published on 13 January 1898 in the Parisan daily newspaper, L’Aurore. Zola, writing to the president of France, Félix Faure, accused the government of antisemitism and the illegal imprisonment of Dreyfus. Zola denounced the trumped-up charges, and antisemitism which had played a major role in the conviction. The letter appeared on the newspaper’s front page and sparked a major reaction in France and internationally—it signalled Zola’s greatest moment as a champion of equality, and France’s republican values.
Zola was prosecuted for libel and found guilty in February 1898, forcing him to flee to England until 1899.
Dreyfus was eventually cleared of all charges in 1906, restored to the French army, but at a lower, humiliated rank. As a mark of respect for the man who had launched the campaign for his freedom, during the ceremony transferring Zola’s ashes to the Panthéon on 4 June 1908, Dreyfus joined the ceremony only to be shot and wounded by a right-wing journalist. Though Dreyfus was begrudgingly rehabilitated the ‘affair’ represented the descent of Europe into a quagmire of antisemitism and mass murder.
Zola’s letter is often mentioned but rarely cited—it is terrifyingly prescient:
… what a nest of vile intrigues, gossip, and destruction …We are horrified by the terrible light the Dreyfus affair has cast upon it all, this human sacrifice of an unfortunate man, a “dirty Jew.” Ah, what a cesspool of folly and foolishness, what preposterous fantasies … what inquisitorial, tyrannical practices! What petty whims of a few higher-ups …ramming back down their throats the people’s cries for truth and justice.
Indeed, it is a crime to have relied on the most squalid elements of the press … the vermin of Paris… It is a crime to lie to the public, to twist public opinion to insane lengths in the service of the vilest death-dealing machinations. It is a crime to poison the minds of the meek and the humble, to stoke the passions of reactionism and intolerance, by appealing to that odious anti-Semitism that, unchecked, will destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man.
Like so much of the French left then and now, Zola had illusions in the secularism of the French state and its revolutionary origins, but his rage needs to be ours.
The murder of Professor Jason Arday is our Dreyfus affair—not simply a diabolical warning shot, but an illustration of the growth of fascism in the context of capitalism in crisis. It is not simply another wake-up call, or an appeal of ‘never again’, but a challenge to the left to understand more clearly what we are confronted with.
Cambridge University is also complicit. Why was an early-career scholar appointed to a chair and then given no support despite everything he went through? The university placed him in a position of extraordinary exposure and failed to support him as the racist campaign gathered momentum.
The final point I want to make about Professor Arday’s murder is more personal. I have worked for much of my adult life as an academic. Nearly every academic I have known has blurred the lines of ethical, scholarly practice—these were the specific charges levelled against Professor Arday.
Today, there are intolerable pressures to publish in addition to teaching, marking, fund-raising and administrative work in neoliberal universities. I remember co-writing a book with a colleague years ago and finding, in a draft chapter he had sent me to review, page after page of text copied verbatim from a recent, well-known book—no citation, no reference, no apology. Other colleagues constantly recycle their own work—the same arguments, the same words from articles and publications written years before.
I have seen student research ‘borrowed’ by hard-pressed supervisors who need fresh copy. The fervour to produce, write and research is so great that many of us are not even fully aware that we are guilty of plagiarism—entering a frenzy to be seen, a fever to be published, and closing our eyes to our own practice. I have done some version of each of the above throughout my academic life.
Into this frenzy, AI has added an entirely new and insidious dimension to academic publishing. What is original work? What is truly ours? Who among the academics and scholars we know does not use the technology? Universities now pay massive sums for AI software, and tell students, and train academics that it is a ‘useful tool’ if handled ‘responsibly.’
Yet, the truth about Professor Arday is that he was not guilty of plagiarism. Cleared by Liverpool John Moores University where he completed his PhD following a formal investigation once accusations gathered pace after his Cambridge appointment. He was accused by the racist mob and investigated by far-right scholars and newspapers who found nothing on him. In this, I would argue, he was an outlier.
Many people declared at the vigil on 16 August that this must not be allowed to happen again, but it will—again and again. Indeed, it is surely happening as I write to Black academics in the UK who will feel the full force of this fallout.
Professor Arday’s murder is our tragedy. Our voices and protests were too late, and our movements too easily broken and undermined. A life had already passed when we finally stood up.
The answer to this predicament—the age-old issue for those opposing the relentless violence and racism of capitalism—may sound hackneyed and tired. Still, it needs to be repeated, as it was said in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair and the murder of George Floyd: nothing short of a sustained and unyielding struggle against the causes of Professor Arday’s murder will save us.
Nothing.