Speaking to BBC Newsnight, Professor of Black Studies Kehinde Andrews, a friend of Arday, described him as “very down” after resigning from Cambridge.
“He was very upset. He felt that there was no way out. He effectively wasn’t leaving the house. He had lost a lot of weight,” Andrews said.
“There should be a wakeup call to just how bad black academics actually have it in academia.”
Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy also told the programme “the idea that an academic would be dragged through this amount of media scrutiny is unheard of”.
On Saturday Scotland’s First Minister John Swinney said that people who “made many hard comments must now consider the impact of their words”, describing it as a “deeply concerning and very sad case”.
Prior to his appointment at Cambridge, Arday had worked as a professor at the University of Glasgow.
Shadow communities secretary Sir James Cleverly said he was angered by the “tragic” death and said “a number of people at a number of academic institutions have serious questions to answer”.
When asked by the BBC on Saturday if the University of Cambridge needed to answer questions over its duty of care, Cleverly said the university should “ask themselves how he got into this position, how he ended up being in the eye of the storm, what could and should have happened to prevent this long before it got to this tragic situation”.
Arday had denied plagiarism – but admitted errors in his work – and said the recent controversy had led to “an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack”.
The row first erupted after another academic – self-defined “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024 – said he found numerous instances of plagiarism in the professor’s work.
Arday said some errors in his early academic work arose because of his autism, as he relied on using mimicry to make sense of information. Similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academics, he said.
Questions were also raised about parts of his life story, including that he ran 600 miles in six days and that he had raised £5.5m for charity.
He later said the run was actually completed over a 12-day period to allow for rest days – and that the huge sum was raised with the help of others.
Arday’s appointment as Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor at the age of 37 in 2023 was hailed at the time.
Announcing his resignation last week, Arday said the “personal cost” of the scrutiny of him had become “too great”.
He said: “While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement.
“The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.”
He stressed that his resignation should not “be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me”.
Earlier this week, Cambridge announced an independent investigation around the circumstances of Arday’s appointment.
Liverpool John Moores University – which awarded Arday his PhD in 2015 – concluded that he had not plagiarised work.
In a statement on Saturday, a spokesperson for the university said it was “saddened to hear of the tragic loss of Professor Jason Arday”.
About The Author
