Before I Write Another Word About Professor Jason Arday: The Person, the Spectacle — and What We Are Becoming
Before I Write Another Word About Professor Jason Arday...
The Person, the Spectacle — and What We Are Becoming
Before I publish the piece I have been writing about Professor Jason Arday, eugenics, inclusion, exclusion, merit and the insularity of institutional power, something is still gutting at my insides. Beneath all the intellectual arguments now surrounding his name, I keep returning to a more elemental question about ourselves and this extraordinary machinery of public judgment we have created.
Somewhere inside this tragedy, I am watching the ancient ritual of the public square being reconstructed through social media with a ferocity that sometimes feels almost medieval. We no longer gather physically around the accused, but we gather nevertheless. The village square has become the feed. The crowd has become the comment section. Accusation travels instantaneously around the world, and judgment no longer requires proximity, complete information, deliberation or even recognized authority. Everybody can participate. Everybody can pronounce. Everybody can contribute another piece of kindling to the fire.
And now Professor Arday is dead. Yet death has not ended the argument. If anything, it appears to have enlarged the audience for it.
His scholarship, his appointment, the allegations against him, his critics, his defenders, Cambridge, DEI, race, intelligence, plagiarism, merit and the circumstances surrounding his final days have all become pieces of an expanding digital conversation. One commentary produces another. One accusation generates a rebuttal. The rebuttal generates another reaction, another podcast, another clip, another expert and another self-appointed authority explaining what Professor Arday supposedly represents.
And truth be told, we feed it.
For however long this story remains combustible, the machinery will continue finding reasons to place some variation of it before us. Professor Arday, the people who accused him, the institutions that employed him, the scholarship being examined, the politics surrounding DEI, the arguments about race and intelligence, and all the many vagaries that others will posture to describe with the certainty of their scripted authority will continue to glut our systems.
We have seen versions of this machinery before. Prince died and the stories continued. Whitney Houston died and another industry of retrospection emerged. Michael Jackson died and death itself became another beginning. Archives reopened. Interviews resurfaced. Allegations were revisited. Documentaries appeared. Witnesses returned. The dead remained endlessly available for examination while possessing no ability to answer what was subsequently said about them.
There is something profoundly unsettling about that.
The person dies. The content does not.
Perhaps that is what has been disturbing me as I try to write about Professor Arday. I do not want to contribute another piece of kindling to the fire while persuading myself that because my intentions are thoughtful, my hands somehow remain clean. I am part of this system too. I read. I watch. I search. I interpret. I write. I publish. I invite other people to consider what I think.
I too participate in this extraordinary surround sound of contemporary life, this bubble of alternate human capacity in which almost every occurrence becomes something to share, like, stream, podcast, comment upon, react to and compete over for our own two cents of visibility.
That acknowledgment matters to me because the very machinery I am questioning is the machinery through which I will publish the essay that follows this one. And perhaps that contradiction is precisely why I needed to write this precursor first.
There is extraordinary democratic value in giving ordinary people access to information and a public voice. Institutions no longer possess complete authority over who gets heard, and that has allowed people historically excluded from public discourse to speak for themselves. But somewhere inside that liberation, something else has happened. Access to a microphone can begin to feel like possession of authority. Information becomes expertise. Reaction becomes analysis. Repetition becomes evidence. Popularity becomes credibility. And an algorithm capable of detecting what agitates us can return that agitation to us again and again until we begin mistaking its ubiquity for its importance, or its repetition for truth.
That is where Professor Arday begins connecting, for me, to the much more difficult piece I am preparing to share.
Because once a human being becomes content, something consequential can happen to the way we see that person.
The person becomes evidence.
Professor Arday is no longer being discussed merely as Professor Arday. He becomes evidence about Cambridge. Evidence about plagiarism. Evidence about DEI. Evidence about merit. Evidence about Black professors. Evidence about intelligence. Evidence about institutional standards. Evidence for arguments that existed long before most of us knew his name.
And once the individual becomes evidence, the next transformation becomes dangerously easy.
Evidence becomes category.
Now we are no longer discussing what one man did, what one institution did, or whether particular allegations withstand scrutiny. We begin asking what his story tells us about them — about Black academics, diversity appointments, intelligence, race, who deserves access to elite institutions and whether inclusion itself has somehow corrupted standards.
And from category, history teaches us, there is a very short intellectual distance to rank.
That is where my thoughts return to something I wrote in November 2025, months before Professor Arday's death placed these questions under such a brutal worldwide spotlight.
I was writing then about eugenics, but increasingly I realize that what I was really trying to interrogate was insularity: the human proclivity to reproduce our own likeness, protect our own circles, construct institutions around our own reflection and eventually mistake historical dominance for evidence of natural superiority.
I wrote then:
“Ideas, like genes, need diversity to thrive. Strip away new blood, new thought, new empathy, and brilliance folds in on itself until only fear remains.”
And elsewhere in that same piece, I described what I called:
“The quiet inheritance of eugenics reborn as entitlement.”
Those words have returned to me differently now.
Because before eugenics became sterilization policy, before human beings were officially classified as fit or unfit, before governments presumed the authority to determine whose reproduction should be encouraged and whose should be prevented, there had to exist something more fundamental: a way of thinking that converted human difference into human rank.
That is the line I am following in the piece that comes next.
Not because criticism of Professor Arday is eugenics. It is not. Not because allegations concerning academic integrity should be suppressed. They should be examined on their evidence. Not because DEI should be immune from scrutiny, or because difficult research concerning heredity, intelligence or human variation should somehow become forbidden.
My question is more difficult than that.
And what happens when those arguments emerge within institutions whose definitions of merit, authority, intelligence and belonging were themselves constructed through histories in which enormous numbers of people were systematically excluded from the opportunity to qualify?
That is where my November 2025 writing about eugenics, enclosure and the insularity of power meets what I am witnessing now. And that is why I needed to stop before publishing the next piece.
Because somewhere beneath the accusations, scholarship, politics, racial arguments, algorithms, podcasts, commentaries and competing declarations of expertise, a human being has died.
Professor Arday should not have to become a saint because he is dead. Neither should his death transform every criticism of him into cruelty. Evidence still matters. Truth still matters. Accountability still matters.
But personhood must matter too.
Perhaps that is the part of our collective humanity I am most afraid of sacrificing in this new digital public square — the ability to examine another human being without first converting that person into spectacle, specimen, evidence, category and finally ammunition for whatever argument we were already waiting to make.
CONTENT BECOMES EVIDENCE.
EVIDENCE BECOMES CATEGORY.
CATEGORY BECOMES RANK.
AND RANK, LEFT UNCHALLENGED, CAN BECOME IDEOLOGY.
That is where my next piece begins.
And before we decide what Professor Jason Arday proves about anything, perhaps we owe the dead — and ourselves — one final discipline of humanity:
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