As you will have seen and read over the last month or so, Professor Jason Arday wrote about his experience of racism in the academy, Normative Whiteness, racial micro-aggressions and the difficulties for Black doctoral students navigating British higher education. Most hauntingly, he wrote No One Can See Me Cry, an examination of the mental-health consequences experienced by Black and minority ethnic academics encountering overt and covert racism within universities.
Now he is dead at 41.
We must begin with care. His death is under official consideration and we must not be seen to establish a cause that has not been determined. Grief should not become evidence. But neither should uncertainty prevent reflection.
Arday’s death affects me deeply because I too am a Black academic, working within British higher education and researching whiteness, racism, power, symbolic environments and the processes through which inequality becomes normalised.
Accountability must not become dehumanisation
Serious allegations were made concerning plagiarism in Arday’s PhD and irregularities elsewhere in his academic record. Of course, academic integrity matters. Black scholarship requires no exemption from scholarly standards, and equality cannot mean immunity from legitimate criticism. Arday denied deliberate plagiarism while acknowledging he had made mistakes, and some remaining questions concerning his work were being investigated when he resigned from Cambridge.
But accountability and dehumanisation are not the same thing.
When does legitimate scrutiny become spectacle? When does investigation become a pursuit? How on earth does an individual Black academic become a symbolic battlefield upon which arguments about race, diversity, merit and black intellectual legitimacy are fought?
This is where Whiteness must be understood – not simply as identity, but as institutional power: the power to define what appears normal, to invite suspicion without proof and to determine whose mistakes remain individual, and whose become evidence about an entire group.
A white professor can fail as Professor X.
A Black professor can too easily be made to fail as ‘the Black professor’.
The mistake no longer belongs only to the individual. Suddenly, it’s evidence against Black intellectual capacity. A CV is picked apart and presented as an argument against diversity. Scholarship is questioned as a referendum on decolonisation. The individual’s presence becomes retrospectively framed as an exception, an experiment or an institutional error.
Symbolic harassment and the academic environment
This connects with what I describe in my doctoral research as symbolic harassment. It does not necessarily require a racial slur or single discriminatory act. It can operate cumulatively through repetition, visibility, institutional practices, silence and messages that position particular bodies as perpetually provisional.
The body gradually learns the environment: You are being watched. You must over-prove yourself. Your mistake may not remain yours. Your success requires explanation. Your failure may be generalised.
Through my EtuPath Six Sense Continuum of Collective Self (ESSCCS) – a framework that explores how individuals and communities perceive, absorb, interpret, and transform symbolic environments – I understand this as an environmental process. Human beings do not merely occupy institutions; we continuously receive them. We absorb institutional signals, condense them into embodied knowledge, transform them, transmit responses and carry their consequences forward.
I believe this changes the question universities should ask. It is not enough to ask whether support exists after somebody experiences harm. We must also ask:
“What kind of institutional environment continually produces the need for that support?”
We cannot create harmful organisational environments and then report their consequences only as private psychological difficulties isolated to that individual.
When race changes the temperature of scrutiny
Arday’s scholarship examined the cumulative psychological weight associated with racialised academic life. There is therefore a painful irony in seeing a scholar who examined these conditions become the centre of such an intense public and academic controversy.
We should not pre-empt official findings, instrumentalise his death or transform uncertainty into narrative certainty; yet we must uphold two principles simultaneously:
Academic integrity must be investigated; human beings must not be destroyed through the process of investigation.
We must also consider whether, when race becomes a factor, the level of scrutiny shifts.
This matters beyond one professor or university. It concerns the conditions under which black academics attempt to belong within institutions historically constructed without them at their centre.
Representation without protection is not liberation
There is another difficult lesson for British higher education: representation without protection is not liberation.
Entering an elite institution does not mean escaping power. Visibility can become vulnerability; recognition can become exposure. The celebrated “first”, “only” or “youngest” can simultaneously become the most scrutinised and symbolically burdened.
Universities must therefore think beyond representation. Who is appointed matters. Who progresses matters. But we must also ask who is permitted complexity, vulnerability and imperfection after arriving.
My concept of Ancestral Intelligence Khapital (AIK) proposes that intellectual survival cannot depend entirely upon institutional validation. We also carry knowledge into institutions: ancestral memory, communal knowledge, lived experience and inter-generational intelligence.
Khapital is therefore not simply capital. It is continuity: what we inherit, hold, interrogate, transform and transmit forward.
The academy must also study itself
Jason Arday’s death should encourage British academia to confront difficult questions.
Who protects academics when legitimate critique becomes public spectacle? Who can distinguish genuine responsibility from a slow, cumulative disappearing act? Why can Black success become evidence of institutional diversity while Black difficulty becomes evidence against diversity itself? What happens when an academic becomes a symbol rather than being celebrated as a person?
For those of us who are Black academics, these are not abstract questions. We research, publish, teach and supervise while sometimes becoming both subjects and analysts of the structures we study.
Sometimes the hardest intellectual labour is not producing knowledge. It is preserving our individuality and personality within institutions that are capable of celebrating our presence while simultaneously questioning our legitimacy.
Jason Arday studied aspects of that condition. His life and death should now encourage the academy to study itself. Not to abandon standards. Not to silence criticism. Not to suspend academic integrity.
But to ask a more difficult question: “Who is allowed to be imperfect and still remain fully human and valued?”
Until British higher education can answer that question without race changing the answer, everyone’s work of confronting whiteness as institutional power remains unfinished.
May Professor Jason Arday rest in peace.
And may we build an academy in which belonging does not have to be earned through perfection, but rather an appreciation of all our scholars as unique and talented individuals.
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