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Early this year, we were in Manchester to attend the British Sociological Association’s 75th annual conference. Sitting among hundreds of academics, we were deeply intrigued by the title of Professor Jason Arday, the former Cambridge scholar’s plenary talk – ‘Wanted dead or alive: The playbook’. Arday, with great enthusiasm but also visible pain, laid it out for all of us. In a chillingly prophetic way, he discussed how Black, Asian, Minority and Ethnic community scholars who could establish themselves across elite educational institutions within the UK and the US have been on the academic ‘hitlist’ of far-right racist attacks, discrediting and hounding.
In his speech, he remembered his Black colleagues who were subjected to institutional racism and media trials. Subsequently, some were forced to leave their prestigious jobs, while some took their own lives. His arguments warned us not to treat these experiences in isolation. Instead, through the ‘playbook’, he exposed the mechanisms of systemic hatred disguised as merit, scrutiny, procedures and academic standards.
Recently, we woke up to the news of Arday’s death. He was found dead in his home in London, days after resigning from his professorship at the University of Cambridge. He was accused of ‘plagiarising’ his doctoral dissertation, which initiated an institutional enquiry and a cruel media trial within the UK and outside.
In his resignation, he described his stepping down as “the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.” Months after his plenary, he became another victim of the racist playbook that he cautioned us about.
Academia has come to celebrate the idea of diversity when it can be photographed and make up for a good resilience story. Arday’s trials and tribulations, however, once again expose the contradictions of ‘western’ academy. Historically, elite Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have been celebrated as sites of transformative politics grounded in equality and inclusion. However, their underbelly hides innumerable stories of slavery, genocide, racism, misogyny, casteism, classism and discriminatory ableism.
The 2021-22 Higher Education Staff Statistics (HESS) for the UK revealed that 88% of professors are Whites while Blacks account for less than 1%, with other ethnic minorities constituting the remaining share. In a context where affirmative action in the form of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies is required to ensure even the bare minimum representation for historically racialised and minoritised groups, Jason’s recruitment as the youngest Black professor at Cambridge University would not have come easily.
Arday’s appointment earned the university accolades for setting an example on ‘fair treatment’, representation and inclusion. Hence, Arday became evidence of not-so-white Cambridge.
Arday was described as ‘a diversity poster boy’ by the media. It is important to unpack this term called diversity. Superficially, it appears desirable as it means people from historically disadvantaged backgrounds are entering spaces which they were structurally excluded from. Interestingly, neither did it create the requisite enabling conditions and accountability mechanisms, nor did it ask for any structural changes.
The presence of a few Black academics aimed at “enriching” the White educational experience by exposing them to the “other” experience and preparing them for the multicultural world. In this context, the tragic label ‘diversity poster boy’ becomes unbearably literal. Presenting people as posters strips them of personhood and disallows them to commit mistakes or deserve another chance. Their alleged ‘mistake’ presents itself as evidence against this political project called DEI and exposes its limits.
Even marginal attempts at institutionalising DEI policies created anxieties among an academic community dominated by the Whites– signalling the continuation and re-entrenchment of racial supremacy and chauvinism that governed the Western academy. The allegations against Arday gained traction when Nathan Cofnas, a White “philosopher of biology” and a self-proclaimed “race realist”, wrote on Substack claiming the former’s PhD dissertation to be plagiarised.
Subsequently, Cofnas was repeatedly quoted by several leading British dailies, a campaign that Arday described as “racially motivated”. Cofnas became a representative face of the racist right-wing hatred for DEI policies that bypass ‘meritocracy’ and promote ‘compromised’ and ‘substandard’ academics for their ‘diversity value’. In this background, academics like Arday with a brilliant record were put to the test against humanly unachievable standards that none of his White contemporaries, even those facing charges of misconduct and fabrications, get to face.
Arday’s idea of playbook also helps contextualise the recent Reservation Hatao Andolan and UGC Regulations row in India. The resonance of the ‘myth of meritocracy’ found among the oppressor castes in India and the Whites in the West is chillingly similar.
In the wake of recent student protests and the subsequent resignation of the then Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, an anti-reservation tirade flooded social media. A page named ‘Reservation Hatao Aandolan’ gained millions of followers within days, claiming to lead a movement for complete overhauling of the education system that discriminates against ‘upper’ caste people through affirmative action policies in the form of reservations for Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes. We saw a similar nationwide unrest when the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026 were announced in January 2026.
These regulations were the result of long deliberation about ever-persisting caste discrimination and what some activists would describe as “institutional murders” in HEIs. They primarily aimed at eradicating discrimination and promoting equity, along with the mechanisms of Equity Committees, helplines, and institutional accountability in HEIs. It was contended that Regulation 3(c) excluded the ‘upper’ caste from the scope of caste discrimination. The upper caste students protested, fearing ‘false complaints’ and alleged ‘reverse discrimination’.
In their narratives, regulations were accused of being divisive and of reproducing caste instead of eliminating it. They not only problematised the idea of discrimination; it was, instead, an attempt to reverse the very logic of why these regulations were introduced. The language advanced here is jarringly similar to that of the Arday’s press trial. It comes straight out of a ‘playbook’ that envisions DEIs and other affirmative action programs as a threat to the idea of inclusive HEIs. This ‘playbook’ endangers the democratic vision that seeks equality and substantive representation.
The charges of plagiarism against Arday remain unproven. Tragically, he is no longer able to defend himself. But his idea of ‘playbook’ remains as a lingering threat to the egalitarian and inclusive claims of elite academia across the world. We are once again reminded of Rohith Vemula’s last words, an aspiring scholar whose institutional murder continues to haunt India’s HEIs – “The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust.”
It is another heavy moment, a recurring alarm to the global academic community of its own institutional prejudices and apathetic lack of solidarity that led brilliant scholars like Jason Arday and Rohith Vemula to a tragic end.
We write this as two women in academia – one from a historically privileged caste group, another a Bahujan woman – with ardent hope that nobody should ever have to become over-performing and over-achieving diversity posters simply to belong. It is another difficult moment of reckoning, in fact an unfortunately grievous one, which calls for critical reflection on the institutional cultures and transforming them into spaces of compassion and belonging.
Khushbu Sharma and Anuradha Singh are doctoral researchers at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. The title is derived from the phrase ‘Chronicle of an academic death foretold’, suggested by Dr Amir Ali, Assistant Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
Views expressed are the authors' own.
