via REUTERS/Royal Borough of Greenwich via Y

Jason Arday was found dead at a home in south London on Friday afternoon, a week after he resigned from Cambridge. His family said the campaign against him “was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”

Arday was 41, and just last week he’d stepped down as Cambridge’s professor of sociology of education, saying the “personal cost” of the scrutiny had become “too great.” Police found a man unresponsive at an address in Battersea on Friday afternoon and say his death is being treated as unexpected but not suspicious.

His 2023 appointment at 37, as Cambridge’s youngest ever Black professor, was celebrated as a landmark. Only 1 percent of professors at UK universities are Black. He earned his PhD and rose through Durham, Glasgow, and Cambridge.

The row began when Nathan Cofnas, a self-described “race realist” who was sacked from his own Cambridge role in 2024, said he found instances of plagiarism in Arday’s work. Arday denied plagiarism but admitted errors, saying some traced to his autism and his reliance on mimicry to process information. “I didn’t murder somebody,” he told the Times this month. “I think the cruelty that I’ve experienced and the positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable.”

Jason Arday, who went on to become one of Cambridge’s youngest Black professors, in a screen grab from a Royal Borough of Greenwich YouTube appearance. Photo via REUTERS/Royal Borough of Greenwich via YouTube.

Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his PhD in 2015, concluded he had not plagiarised. Cambridge had announced an independent review of his appointment days before his death.

Friend and fellow academic Kehinde Andrews told BBC Newsnight that Arday was “very down” after resigning, had stopped leaving the house, and had lost a lot of weight. Jolyon Maugham of the Good Law Project called the death “a tragedy” and asked “what the public interest was in continuing to hound him after he resigned.”

Arday’s memoir, Great And Unfortunate Things, was released in the US earlier this week and had been set for UK publication on August 27. Last weekend, he cancelled an event promoting it.

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