A racist campaign

Most of you reading this will be aware of the awful news regarding the Autistic Professor Jason Arday. Jason was literally hounded to death by the newspapers, with certain papers being the main culprits, but all guilty in my opinion (they are still hounding his poor family outside their home!). Jason resigned from his position at Cambridge University in early August where he had been appointed Professor of Sociology of Education aged only 37. He was the youngest ever Black professor at Cambridge.

4 years later, aged 41 he is dead.

It was a very dark day when Jason passed. We do not yet know how he died, we can assume, but prior to his death Jason had undergone a vicious, racist witch-hunt that was started by Professor Nathan Cofnas, a controversial ‘race scientist’ who essentially teaches that Black people are less intelligent than white people. He accused Professor Jason Arday of plagiarism in parts of his PhD and described his appointment at Cambridge University as ‘DEI ideology’. 

Students at Cambridge did complain about Cofnas, according to the Observer newspaper article on Aug 16th, 26. The students alleged that Cofnas was ‘endorsing the logic of a eugenicist’ and that the college were ‘encouraging discriminatory and bigoted rhetoric’. Despite the student’s many complaints, Cofnas won a lawsuit with support from ‘The Free Speech Union’ and Cambridge University actually then changed their rules on free speech to ‘allow controversial or unpopular opinions within the law’. 

What if the student’s complaints regarding Cofnas had been upheld? What if the very institution that had employed Jason had weighed in to fully support him from a man clearly bitter and twisted about the fact that a Black man was still working at Cambridge. 

The claims of plagiarism against Jason Arday were found to be false, but the accusations of lying and falsification continued. According to ‘NewsCord’ a total of 249 newspaper articles were written about Jason Arday in just 22 days before his death.

Jason wasn’t just Black, he was also Autistic and therefore vulnerable, in as much as Autistic people are more likely to experience mental health difficulties, burnout and trauma.  Autistic people are also more likely to be victimised and to take our own lives. One out of every four Autistic people have made an attempt to end their life, compared to 1 in 37 of the general population! (Figures ironically published in a Cambridge University research paper). Think about that for a moment. Let that sink in. A professor who once worked at Cambridge was targeting a man who was vulnerable to suicide according to the same university’s own research!

Jason was victimised. He was targeted and viciously bullied by Cofnas and other academics also, all white. And then the press joined in the deeply unfair fight; like a bunch of thugs they completely destroyed him. It was a public lynching! Even psychotherapists and psychiatrists weighed in, diagnosing him with personality disorders. When Autistic people are experiencing distress or burnout this is often misinterpreted and misdiagnosed by clinicians as traits of a personality disorder. 

Clinicians who had never met Jason and yet publicly pathologised him in this awful way. What were they thinking? Trained clinicians who should know that this kind of exposure would be hard for anyone but especially someone neurodivergent. Why vilify him this way? I think we all know the answer to that question.  The day before he died The Daily Mail published an article where a Psychiatrist who has never actually met Jason, talked about Jasons’s ‘state of mind’. He should be struck off and never be allowed to practice again, what he and others did goes way beyond what is appropriate or within the boundaries of therapeutic and clinical standards. The hypocritical oath is clear, did that psychiatrist forget ’first do no harm’. 

Seems to me that many do.