Dutch Scholars Stand in Grief and Outrage At the tragic death of professor jason arday

Friday the 21st of August

Dutch Scholars for Palestine expresses its profound grief and outrage at the death of Professor Jason Arday. We join those demanding a full, independent and transparent public enquiry into the circumstances surrounding the sustained campaign of public vilification, racialised scrutiny and institutional abandonment that preceded his death.

Professor Jason Arday was subjected to a relentless media campaign that ranged from accusations of plagiarism and fabrication of his success backstory to claims concerning his academic credentials. This campaign, initiated by those with an agenda of undermining efforts to promote equality and diversity in academic institutions, amounted to a sustained and racialised assault on a Black, neurodivergent academic that exposed him to extraordinary levels of harm and persecution with devastating consequences leading to his tragic death. In less than a month, 249 media articles were published about him only in the British press [1]. 188 of these articles were published after Arday had already resigned and explicitly asked to be left alone stating that he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.” [2]

The case of Professor Arday should concern us deeply as academics and university workers in the Netherlands and globally. Racial discrimination and vilification as it is enacted in anti-blackness, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism and other forms of racism is not uncommon in Dutch academia. As Afro-Surinamese Dutch scholar Gloria Wekker shows [3], race elicits extreme levels of aggression in the Netherlands even as its denial and disavowal reign supreme. As an academic network consisting of scholars speaking out against institutional complicity with genocide, settler colonialism, and apartheid, including many scholars of colour, we are all too familiar with the abuse of power that is normalised at our universities but often kept invisible from public scrutiny. Beyond Britain and the Netherlands, Arday’s case is the final straw in a long-running witch hunt against scholars whose work, politics, or race have made them targets of hostility. We have seen this pattern before, including, amongst others, the intense backlash against Professor Claudine Gay at Harvard leading to her subsequent resignation and the attacks on scholars such as Professor Ghassan Hage that resulted in the termination of his working relationship at the Max Planck institute. The list is too long to include here.

We are also too familiar with the presence of scholars in positions of power in reputable universities, especially white scholars, who are often sheltered from the consequences of their behaviour, ranging from plagiarism and violating academic integrity to oppressive actions such as abuse of power and even sexual harassment and assault. The public hounding of Professor Arday is a warning to all of us. For Black and People of Colour scholars, for migrants and racialised students, and for Palestinian academics and activists, but also for all who speak out, institutional racism is an everyday struggle. It manifests in diverse practices, from ethnic profiling to the repression of the right to protest and disproportionate surveillance and harassment, amongst other practices. Racialised academics know that institutional legitimacy and credibility is not granted to us on equal terms – that we are too often positioned at the extremes of institutional recognition: either tokenised as diversity success stories, a form of symbolic capital for the university, or vilified for “failures to comply” [4]

Of course, we do not believe that academic integrity and accountability should be abandoned. But when supposed accountability is instrumentalised to unleash hatred and celebrate cruelty as is the case with Professor Arday, it becomes a linchpin for public hounding deeply entangled with racial machinery of power. [5] What this case exposes is institutional racism that we well know never ceased to exist, but that today resurfaces here with a vengeance in a political landscape marked by fascism, increasing economic precarity, genocide denialism, and a war on migrants and racialised communities.

We extend our solidarity to Professor Arday’s family, friends, colleagues and students, and to all those who have been affected by the campaign against him.

We demand that universities exercise their duty of care towards marginalised staff and students. We join the call by the Good Law project [6] for a public inquiry into Arday’s death and we continue to work in solidarity with academics, students, and university workers to struggle against the pervasive racism that academia is built on. As Dawn Butler MP said during Jason Arday’s vigil on August 17th in Trafalagar square: “Now is the time to bring down the systems that do not protect us”.

As a professor of the Sociology of Education in Cambridge University, Arday’s story exposes the violent, and even, deadly contradictions of the university and the wider society we inhabit. To quote James Baldwin in his lecture A Talk to Teachers, delivered in October 1963:

“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which [one] is being educated.”