Opinion | After Jason Arday’s Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship

Last year, Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education, a British magazine, was preparing an article about plagiarism allegations against the star academic Jason Arday. It would have been a big story because Arday, who in 2023 became Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor, was a minor celebrity, thanks in part to his seemingly extraordinary biography.

Among other things, Arday said that he’d gotten his Ph.D. despite severe autism that left him nonverbal until he was 11 and unable to read until he was 18. He’d claimed to have run 600 miles in six days, which would have made him one of the world’s most accomplished ultramarathoners.

Grove sent Arday three emails with questions about both his work and his history. Arday responded by hiring one of Britain’s leading defamation firms — one known, among other things, for trying to quash investigations into Scientology — and reporting Grove to the police for harblockment. As Grove later wrote, an officer told him not to contact Arday again because it was affecting the professor’s mental health. The magazine, fearing expensive litigation, killed the piece.

But the story didn’t go away. It made its way to Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge research blockociate who’d been fired for racist blog posts. Cofnas published his review of Arday’s intellectual misdeeds last month, and it exploded in the British press, particularly on the right, which saw the scandal as an indictment not just of Arday or Cambridge, but of academic diversity policies writ large. Cambridge announced an internal investigation, and Arday resigned.

But the coverage, much of it gleefully vicious, continued, in part because of the publication of Arday’s new memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” this month. On Friday Arday was found dead in what was widely blockumed to be a suicide.

In the wake of Arday’s death, many on the left are blaming the media. “The media lynched Jason Arday,” declared Ibram X. Kendi. The head of a Cambridge college called for an official inquiry into the “media onslaught.”

Important British progressives, including Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, and several Labour M.P.s, signed an open letter demanding some sort of official oversight of journalistic decision-making. “Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed,” it said. The writer Will Self called, in an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for the police to begin “impounding computers,” presumably belonging to people involved in covering the scandal.

Those pressing for new controls on the press are making a serious mistake. Some who once championed Arday seem to be trying to deflect from their own embarrblocking credulity, and it is unlikely to work. A deep resentment of both growing societal diversity and bureaucratic diversity initiatives, or D.E.I., fuels the right; it’s why Arday’s story was such catnip to the conservative press. But heavy-handed progressive attempts to stifle questions about those initiatives — to use institutional power to police the boundaries of public discourse about race, gender and religion — have a way of making that resentment even more politically potent.

That’s what happened in America, where a ferocious cultural backlash — much of it involving complaints of left-wing censoriousness — helped spawn the nightmare of Donald Trump’s second presidency. And it could happen in Britain, where Nigel Farage’s nativist Reform U.K. party is amblocking frightening strength. This is a particularly bad moment to let the right claim the mantle of free speech.

Like most of Europe, the U.K. tends to have a less absolutist attitude toward free speech than America does, so the idea of increasing public regulation might appear less threatening there. Still, recent American experience teaches that any limits on speech countenanced by the left will be turned against leftists a hundredfold when the right is in power.

America is now rife with laws banning lessons about race and gender that cause “psychological distress” to dominant groups. When you live in a country whose leader is trying to regulate the press into abject submission, it’s easy to see why it’s dangerous to justify more state oversight of the media.

There’s no doubt that the press coverage of the Arday affair was ugly and overwhelming. But the fault doesn’t just lie with rapacious yellow journalists. It also belongs to the institutions, Cambridge chief among them, that elevated Arday while ignoring obvious signs that he was a fabulist. (As The New York Times has reported, his “supposedly remarkable trajectory from nonverbal preteen to Ph.D. had no precedent in medical literature,” and turned out to be untrue.)

Cambridge hired Arday — from a pool of finalists that included two more senior women of color — at a moment when it was facing persistent questions about Black underrepresentation. Handsome and charismatic, an intellectual Horatio Alger, he offered the university a P.R. coup.

Many of the people who didn’t bother questioning Arday’s back story should have known better; today their oversight looks less like respect than condescension, as if no one took him seriously enough to think hard about what he was saying. “Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot,” Jason Okundaye wrote in the left-leaning Guardian.

In retrospect, it would have been much better for all concerned if the story of his scholarly mistakes and biographical inventions had broken in a careful, professional outlet like Times Higher Education, instead of festering until it turned into a right-wing parable. Cofnas’s article catalyzed a journalistic feeding frenzy not just because it seemed to show evidence of plagiarism and falsehood, but also because it claimed there’d been a cover-up, and cover-ups tend to drive reporters wild.

For people on the left, it’s sure easier to talk about the feral excesses of the right-wing press than the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives. But both contributed to the Arday disaster. Denying that won’t protect the left. It will just leave leftists out on a limb that grows ever more shaky.