The summer before I began studying as an undergrad at the University of Oxford, I braced myself for racism. I spent several hours each day preparing by scrolling through blogs, newspaper articles, and social-media posts. Across these platforms, Black students documented racist encounters with white students, and occasionally, staff. Stories about campus guards blocking Black students from entering campus, tersely questioning their credentials; one where a group of white men joked about Black women’s genitalia and sexual viability at fancy dinners; instances of being mistaken for other Black students with whom they shared no facial characteristics; inappropriate touching of hair and faces; uncomfortable staring at clubs or on the street. Once I landed at St Hilda’s college, these experiences recurred with exhausting banality. They felt both routine and normalized, despite the obvious distress they caused. At some point, it was more practical to stop mentioning them.

I would soon learn that these instances were not relegated to social life but extended into academia itself. For one, there was the dearth of Black academics in the humanities, and the appalling figure of under 1 percent teaching at the university: a proportion in line with the national picture, where Black academics still make up only around 1 percent of all professors in the United Kingdom, according to the Society for Research into Higher Education. A Black visiting professor from an American university made a joke during a lecture that by teaching at the university, she had raised their statistics on Black professors from less than 1 percent to 1 percent. At the end of my time there, I was told in no uncertain terms by an American professor that if I wanted to study anything related to Black people, I was better off leaving the institution as soon as possible and heading to the United States. He emphatically pointed out that there was really no place for that kind of research or thinking to flourish there. It was a shame, but he was also right. Experiences like these showed me that our intellect and contributions were not respected, funded, or even desired.

I noticed however, in the recounting of this distress to friends and family, a peculiar tension: a gnawing sense of “who are you to be speaking about this?” or “is your experience really that bad compared to what people are experiencing outside these institutions?” One white classmate once actually asked me, “Do you really feel like you’re being oppressed?” in a sarcastic tone that implied I was anything but. To be silent about these experiences was to participate in a process of subjugation, in the predations on one’s mental health and well-being, but to speak up about them was to be ridiculed for not simply ignoring disrespectful comments and soldiering on, grateful to be “accepted” in the first place.

As a former student at both Oxford and Cambridge, I expected two things: that this kind of racism would be perpetrated in daily encounters, but also that it would be minimized as belonging to a lower order of microaggression—one that paled in comparison to the larger structural racism that prevented Black people from accessing places like Oxford and Cambridge in the first place—rather than being recognized as its counterpart. Part of the reason for this stems from a wider societal tendency to undermine or relegate the internal and external sufferings of Black people in a racist society, a phenomenon that is well documented in the psychology of Black mental health patients. Because Black patients are perceived as “emotionally tougher” than their white counterparts, they are frequently undertreated, misdiagnosed, or deemed not to require intensive mental health interventions even when these might be necessary. This is the “Black superwoman/superman” phenomenon: an expectation that Black people can triumph, persevere, and surmount obstacles easily, and that we possess an ingrained and limitless strength; a belief that also leads to Black people like Jason Arday to be failed persistently by institutions of all kinds.

The poisonous exceptionalism that followed Black students and staff at Cambridge was accompanied by the fact that Black students were tolerated as interlopers—an alien, if benign, species let loose in their cherished institution for people to gawk at, speculate about, and undermine. This was encoded not only in the social relationships at the university but also intensified by the wider political climate in the UK.

As an international student during the era of the mid-2010s when the British media and politicians compared immigrants to cockroaches, called them rapists, murderers, and infiltrators, I know that racial animus and hatred was actively stoked in the process. One of the first acts required of international students from non-white, non-Western countries was to report themselves to the police upon arrival, criminality already presumed, expected even. Another element of this racist profiling was “the prevent strategy,” which unfairly targeted Muslim students at universities and alienated them out of fear of potential radicalization. Experiences like the ones outlined above were not aberrations but formed as part and parcel with the dual and mutually reinforcing modes of fetishization and criminalization that the university held Black people in thrall to.

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September 2026 Issue

On August 14, 2026, Jason Arday, 41, professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge and a professorial fellow at Jesus College, was found dead at his home in Battersea, south London, just nine days after resigning from his position, and one week after the US publication of his memoir prompted renewed press scrutiny of his life story. Police described the death as “unexpected” but not being treated as “suspicious.” The resignation came after weeks of attacks by the press and online trolls over allegations that Arday had conducted academic plagiarism and biographical fabrication. The accusations of plagiarism were originally raised by Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge philosophy researcher and self-described “race realist” who was himself later dismissed by the university over his own remarks in a Substack article. Cofnas had argued in a 2024 blog post titled “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution” that under a strictly meritocratic, colorblind system, Black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” He accused Arday of plagiarizing passages of his 2015 PhD thesis and cast doubt on his account of his own life—including his claim to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, raised £5.5 million for charity, and been nonverbal until age 11 and unable to read or write until 18. His biographical statements were at the time of his death never ascertained as false, and Liverpool John Moores University, which had awarded the doctorate, had already investigated the plagiarism claims years prior and found no evidence of academic misconduct; the allegations nonetheless produced close to 250 articles from the UK press in little over three weeks. In other words, people jumped at the opportunity to take down a Black scholar.

Professor Jason Arday’s passing, following this pile-on by the press and the spurious, racially motivated accusations of Nathan Cofnas, cannot be understood outside of Cambridge’s wider failure to safeguard and support Black students, and the broader neglect of Black people in academia so pervasive at Oxbridge. Arday inherited a highly visible position of “outsideness” simply by virtue of being one of the only Black professors in the institution. To be Black was to be asked to pose in university advertising, even while alumni and staff would say smugly, “It’s so nice to have people like you here.” Black academics like Arday were actively used as props for a university strategy to appear more diverse than it was, with little respect for the needs and experiences of Black students once they arrived.

The university’s need to prove its diversity without the laborious work of self-inquiry and transformation might be better explained through some historical context. It was a time of protest around statues—those honoring Rhodesia founder Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, and Edward Colston, a slave trader commemorated in Bristol. It was a time when Claudia Rankine’s Citizen was read widely, and student groups on campus organized around it. The “Rhodes Must Fall” movement kicked off in 2015, when South African Rhodes Scholars highlighted Oxbridge’s retention of statues celebrating known racists and colonizers as emblems of institutional majesty and grandeur, alongside the lack of professors of color and the lack of diversity in reading lists and curricula. It was also a larger movement to acknowledge how the institution had profited from slavery and colonialism, and to look at history and legacy from the perspective of the outsider rather than the dominant power. It sought to advance significant and underacknowledged historical, philosophical, and political thought around reparation, restitution, and racism, and to bring that into the forefront of public consciousness. Students and staff who participated in this movement were often vilified and used as bogeymen by the right, who actively despised discourse around Black Lives Matter and decolonization, and would have preferred that those students cease to exist in the first place. The context of the 2010s, and the movements for racial justice and the charges of complicity faced by institutions like Oxford and Cambridge, gave way to a self-congratulatory instinct—parading the success of alumni and staff of color. But as the protest decade has ended, at Oxbridge and universities around the country, there has been an intense right-wing backlash over anti-racist activism in universities, the previous decades’ victories have been put on shakier ground.

Black staff like Arday, in the triumphant announcement of his academic credentials and qualifications, were already highly vulnerable to this type of attack. Cambridge’s desire to, in a sense, “blackwash” its own racism is responsible for the bullying he faced. This is not in any way to undermine Arday’s work, academic background, and achievements, but rather to say that those achievements do not matter when the machinery of racism is in full motion. When he was appointed in 2023, at 37, as Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor, there were only five other Black professors at the university across disciplines. Professor Arday was branded a fraud and a liar. Never mind that the plagiarism allegations had already been investigated and dismissed by his awarding university and the jury was still out on the biographical claims; they were nonetheless permitted as points of bullying to portray him as unqualified and to denigrate his character and professional status before the world.

The vitriol endured by Jason Arday is a clear example of how Black people are punished far more severely than their white counterparts for the same offenses. There are clear parallels in academia. On instagram Mona Chalabi released an infographic showcasing prominent white intellectuals accused of plagiarism, none of whom resigned or lost public favor, alongside Claudine Gay at Harvard, who held her post as president for just six months—the shortest tenure in the university’s history—and Arday, whose bullying resulted in his tragic death. White people have falsified documents, résumés, and credentials in sport to business—Ryan Lochte, Martha Stewart, Lance Armstrong, to name a few—yet have successfully revived their careers and continued with their lives. The drive to punish Jason Arday in this case shows that no matter how high Black people climb in society, it does not undo the existence of racism. The tragic fallacy of representation is that under the right circumstances, racists will weaponize it. Lanre Bakare, in a recent piece for The Guardian, noted that some academics have argued that Arday’s alleged plagiarism poses a crisis of trust for other Black academics, who will likely have their own positions attacked as a result. I was saddened by these accounts, as they demonstrated that in certain corners of academia, it was pragmatic and safer to distance oneself from Arday rather than rally around him, potentially risking professional or reputational damage.

I cannot fathom how incredibly lonely, isolating, and alienating it must have been for Arday to endure this kind of bullying and still feel as though one has made things worse for other Black academics. But the lesson of Arday’s death is not that he was some lone fraudster who sneaked into a professorship at Cambridge; it is that Black people in high positions are expected and demanded to be infallible. Any mistake will be seized upon and used to attack not just them but all Black people in these elite white spaces. In this schema, Arday stands in for all Black academia. He must either be a villain deserving of international disgrace or otherwise extolled as a blameless saint, his memory paraded as a mascot for racist victimization that only obscures discussion of the social forces that triggered this attack in the first place. Both racist and unjust binaries that stop us, ultimately from viewing him in the fullness of his humanity.

The urgency of support for Arday is not just to mourn his death, but to argue strongly that Black people do not have to be superhuman to deserve existence and space within public life. There is obviously a clear difference between the investigation of plagiarism conducted by Liverpool John Moores University and the racial bullying and denigration of character Arday endured in his final days, a fact intensified by Cambridge’s toothless response of capitulating to the attack in the first place. Cambridge should have stood 10-toes down in light of Liverpool John Moore’s investigation last year. Arday’s case demonstrates a widespread failure to acknowledge the humanity of the individual at the heart of this awful assault, one that propagated the myth of the Black superhuman.

That myth is dangerous and deeply racist, and it needs to be done away with for good. During a meal just days before he died, Arday told his friend Simon Woolley that “they’re hounding me to death” and he “couldn’t see a way out.” To those closest to him his vulnerability was clear, but to the press he was just a Black fraudster, a spectacle for their racist appetites.

The American professor who warned me away from Oxbridge was right. There is no place for Black people there, except within a razor-thin margin, and their tired attempts at inclusion do not include people of color but often only further alienate and divide them in service of their own self-righteous ends. The irony of this unfortunate attack is that Jason Arday was best placed to educate the public and his students on this horrific racial illogic, but his death brings that possibility to an end. We have seen the snuffing out of Black talent, intellect, and potential in real time.