Jason Arday Had Questions to Answer. So Does the Guardian.

There is a reason I am asking this question of the Guardian.

At its best, the Guardian has understood something about journalism that matters far beyond newspapers. What you first see is not always the whole story. Sometimes an individual case is simply an individual case. Sometimes, if you keep looking, it opens a door onto something much larger.

That is what happened with Windrush. Amelia Gentleman did not discover the Windrush scandal fully formed. She found people. Elderly Caribbean men and women who had lived here for decades, worked here, paid taxes, raised families, and who suddenly found themselves treated as though they had no right to belong. One case became another, then another. The Guardian kept going. It eventually became impossible to sustain the fiction that these were simply unfortunate mistakes. The individual stories exposed a system, and the journalism changed the country’s understanding of what that system had done.

The same instinct drove the Guardian’s phone-hacking journalism. It would have been easy to stop with a rogue reporter, a private investigator, an isolated offence. The paper did not stop. It followed the story upwards and outwards because the real question became not merely who had hacked a phone, but what kind of institutional culture had allowed it to happen, who knew, who benefited and who looked away.

That is serious journalism. Follow the facts, certainly, but follow the system too.

And that is why I keep coming back to Professor Jason Arday.

Because there were two stories here.

The first story was Jason.

Did he plagiarise? Were parts of the remarkable life story told about him accurate? Had he made claims about his achievements that could not be sustained?

Had universities carried out the level of scrutiny expected before making appointments of such significance? Those were proper questions. Journalists had every right to ask them and universities had a duty to investigate them.

Jason being Black did not exempt him from scrutiny. It could not.

I want to be absolutely clear about that because there has been a painful argument among Black journalists and Black academics since his death. Some journalists who investigated Jason have been accused of betraying their community merely because they pursued difficult facts. I reject that. Black journalism cannot mean protecting Black public figures from legitimate scrutiny, any more than racial equality can mean abandoning academic standards when those standards become uncomfortable. That would be patronising, intellectually dishonest and ultimately disastrous for us all.

Hugh Muir has made that point forcefully in the Guardian, and he is right to do so. He has also described what happened around Jason as involving a rightwing and far-right witch-hunt while defending journalists who independently investigated legitimate questions concerning Jason’s record. Those two things can be true at the same time.

But that only deals with the first story.

The second story was what was happening to Professor Arday.

Who had identified him as a target? What were their politics? Why did this particular academic controversy acquire such extraordinary velocity? How did questions about one professor’s work become evidence in a much wider argument about diversity, Black academics, merit and whether equality policies had somehow corrupted one of Britain’s oldest universities? Who was driving that argument, who was amplifying it, and why did so much of the media follow Jason down every available rabbit hole without displaying anything like the same curiosity about the campaign gathering around him?

That is the story I think remains insufficiently investigated.

Not unseen. That would now be unfair to the Guardian.

Hugh Muir has seen it. Afua Hirsch has seen it. The Guardian’s editorial pages have acknowledged the racism surrounding the affair. Today, even the paper’s letters page carries academics arguing that the extreme-right campaign against Jason has been treated as too peripheral, that marginal racial ideologues acquired extraordinary mainstream amplification, and that the prominence given to Jason’s case demands examination in its own right. One academic, Professor Rachel Pain, goes further, describing what she believes is an organised campaign of intimidation against Black and Brown academics. These are correspondents’ arguments, not findings by the Guardian, but they show how far the question has moved.

So my challenge to the Guardian is more precise than it was a few days ago.

You saw the campaign.

Why didn’t you investigate it with the same intensity with which you investigated Jason?

A neutral story does not land in a neutral society.

That is the part of this debate that sometimes gets lost when journalists retreat, understandably, behind the truth of individual facts.

A factual allegation about a Black professor enters a Britain with a history. It enters a country in which ideas about Black intelligence, honesty, competence and belonging did not disappear because institutions learned the vocabulary of diversity. It enters universities where Black professors remain vanishingly rare. It enters a political climate in which equality programmes are now routinely attacked as mechanisms for promoting people who supposedly would not succeed on merit. Then it enters social media, where one allegation about one individual can become an indictment of millions before anybody has finished reading the original article.

None of that makes a truthful fact untrue.

It does not mean the journalist who reports that fact is racist.

And journalists cannot possibly be held responsible for every lunatic or racist interpretation somebody later places upon their work.

But there comes a point when the environment into which the journalism has landed becomes part of the story itself.

That point was surely reached with Jason.

He ceased being discussed simply as an academic facing allegations of plagiarism. He became the Black professor. The diversity professor. The DEI professor. His alleged shortcomings became politically useful because they appeared to offer something much larger than evidence about Jason Arday. They were recruited as evidence that diversity itself had failed.

And once that happened, I cannot understand why the obvious journalistic question was not: who is doing this and why?

Nathan Cofnas was not some politically neutral passer-by who happened across an interesting footnote. He has described himself as a “race realist” and has published deeply controversial arguments about race, intelligence and merit. His allegations still had to be examined on their evidence. A man with objectionable political views is perfectly capable of discovering a true fact. We cannot decide whether evidence is true according to whether we like the person presenting it.

But the politics of the person driving the allegations were also plainly relevant to understanding what the allegations subsequently became.

Since Jason’s death, Ghent University has suspended Cofnas while it conducts a preliminary disciplinary investigation concerning allegations of discrimination. That suspension is precautionary and no finding has been made against him. That qualification matters.

It is nevertheless remarkable that Jason’s biography, academic record, former classmates, claims, publications and personal history could become matters of enormous forensic interest, while the networks, politics and ideological purpose of those who transformed his case into a weapon against racial equality attracted comparatively little investigation.

I am not asking newspapers to ignore a fire because the person shouting “fire” happens to be a racist.

I am asking why nobody seemed particularly interested in who brought the petrol.

There is another problem here, and it takes us beyond any one newspaper.

Individually defensible journalism can accumulate into something that none of the individual journalists involved intended.

That is not a particularly radical proposition. We understand it everywhere else.

An individual police officer may sincerely believe that a stop and search was justified. Another officer may honestly believe exactly the same thing about the next stop. Yet when thousands of individually defended decisions produce enormous racial disproportionality, we do not say that examining each officer’s good intentions settles the matter. We ask what the institution is producing.

The same applies in employment. One appointment panel can make what it regards as an objective decision. So can the next. But if the cumulative outcome is an institution whose leadership remains overwhelmingly white, serious people do not respond by saying that because nobody on the interview panels admitted to racism there is nothing further to examine.

That is what institutional racism was supposed to teach us.

It was never a theory about finding secret racists hiding behind every decision. It was a way of understanding how ordinary decisions, sometimes taken by decent people for defensible reasons, can accumulate within unequal structures and produce outcomes that are themselves racially unequal.

Journalism cannot exempt itself from that analysis.

Your original article may be sound. The next article may be accurate. The journalist writing the third may have behaved impeccably. But when the result becomes hundreds of stories, broadcasts, commentaries and social-media interventions concentrated upon one Black academic over a matter of weeks, we are no longer only talking about individual pieces of journalism.

We are talking about a media event.

AP has reported that 289 articles about Jason appeared in just 22 days. Whatever view one takes of the allegations against him, that number ought to stop anybody in their tracks.

At that scale the obvious question becomes proportionality.

Why him?

That question has now moved beyond campaigners and mourners.

More than 50 MPs and peers from across several political parties have written formally to IPSO asking the press regulator to examine the coverage. We should not inflate that into some grand Westminster consensus; it is not. But neither can it be dismissed as the complaint of a small anti-racist fringe. The parliamentarians explicitly argue that the story travelled beyond plagiarism and became a critique of Jason because he was Black. They ask whether his race contributed to the level of scrutiny and whether the coverage was proportionate.

They also point towards something journalists should find irresistible: comparison.

What happened when white academics at Cambridge faced serious findings?

Simon Goldhill faced upheld findings that he had breached university rules concerning sexual and professional conduct. Peter Hutchinson faced upheld complaints involving sexual and sexist behaviour. William O’Reilly is an especially interesting comparator because his case involved plagiarism.

These cases are not identical and we should not pretend they are. Sexual misconduct and plagiarism are different. The personalities differ, the evidence differs, the public profiles differ and the circumstances differ.

But comparison is how you test whether something unusual has occurred.

If a white Cambridge academic can face an upheld plagiarism finding and remain principally an individual academic with an individual problem, while allegations against a Black Cambridge professor become evidence in a national political argument about whether Black advancement has destroyed merit, then the difference itself becomes news.

White academics generally enjoy something Black people in public life have never completely possessed: the right to fail individually.

A white professor can be dishonest, incompetent, vain, bullying, sexually inappropriate or simply useless without anybody seriously asking whether white people as a group should continue to be professors.

Black achievement carries a different burden.

When we succeed, our success is sometimes paraded as proof that the institution has changed.

When we fail, our failure can suddenly become proof that the institution should never have changed at all.

That is the trap Jason entered.

And I think those of us committed to racial equality have to be prepared to examine our own contribution to it.

Jason did not become a symbol only when the right attacked him.

He had already been made a symbol when he succeeded.

His appointment as a young Black autistic professor at Cambridge was celebrated as historic, and understandably so. His extraordinary biography was presented as evidence of barriers overcome and progress achieved. Universities, equality advocates and the media all found something larger than Jason in Jason.

Then the polarity reversed.

The inspirational Black professor became, in the language of his detractors, the fraudulent product of diversity.

The man barely had room to breathe between the two myths.

The Economist has captured that tragedy with brutal economy in the title of its leader: “Jason Arday was treated as a symbol, not a man.”

That should make everybody uncomfortable.

His critics certainly turned him into a symbol.

But so, in a different way and with very different intentions, did some of those who celebrated him.

That does not mean the two are morally equivalent. They are not.

It means that Black people should not have to carry an entire racial argument on their backs every time they walk into an institution where people who look like them have historically been excluded.

We need to get out of this business of producing superstar Black people as proof of institutional virtue and then standing astonished when the same individual becomes the battlefield upon which every enemy of equality chooses to fight.

Institutions should demonstrate their commitment to equality through structures, pipelines, recruitment, promotion, support and accountability, not by loading the entire meaning of progress onto one highly visible human being.

That is one of the lessons Cambridge has to confront.

But the media has one too.

Hugh Muir ends his article by saying there are questions to ask about all the media coverage, including its tone and scale, and about whether Jason’s vulnerability received sufficient recognition.

I welcome that.

Because once we agree that the scale and tone of the whole event require examination, the defence that each individual journalist was simply doing legitimate journalism is no longer enough.

It may be true.

But it is not the whole truth.

That is where I return to the Guardian’s own history.

Windrush was not exposed because Amelia Gentleman decided that every Home Office official involved was personally racist or malicious. It was exposed because she kept following individually terrible cases until the pattern became impossible to deny.

Phone hacking was not exposed because the Guardian accepted the industry’s explanation that each offence could be understood in isolation. It followed the connections until an institutional picture emerged.

That is precisely the journalism this moment now requires.

Jason should be investigated.

Cambridge should be investigated.

The claims made by and about Jason should be investigated.

But so should the campaign that formed around him, the racial ideology that gave his alleged failings such political value, the media pathways through which that argument was amplified, the extraordinary scale and prominence of the coverage, the comparison with white academics, and the institutional decisions that kept the story burning long after the original allegations had been established.

That is not asking for censorship.

It is certainly not asking for racial protection.

And it is not asking the Guardian to apologise for doing journalism.

It is asking the Guardian to do more journalism.

There is a difficult moral symmetry here. Jason cannot be relieved of responsibility for his own conduct simply because he may not have intended the consequences. If claims he made were false, they were false. If academic standards were breached, that matters. Intention cannot erase consequence.

But neither can institutions claim intention as their permanent defence.

Nobody needs to have sat in an editorial conference and said, “Let us destroy this Black man”, for a racially disproportionate outcome to deserve examination. Nobody needs to confess prejudice before we are allowed to ask why this Black professor became a national spectacle while white academic misconduct so often remains exactly that: academic misconduct.

Good people can make defensible decisions and still contribute to something none of them intended.

That is what makes institutional racism difficult.

And that is why the Guardian should be particularly capable of confronting it.

There will be people who read this and say I am trying to blame journalists for Jason Arday’s death.

I am not.

We do not yet know enough to make simplistic causal claims about his death, and grief should not become licence to manufacture certainty where certainty does not exist.

There will be others who say that by raising racism I am trying to excuse Jason.

I am not doing that either.

Jason had agency.

Journalists had agency.

Cambridge had agency.

Those who launched and amplified the campaign had agency.

So did the institutions that watched the whole thing unfold.

A serious account has to hold all of those truths at the same time.

That is harder than choosing heroes and villains, but life usually is.

The Guardian’s great contribution to British public life has often been its refusal to look only where everybody else is looking. It has understood that the victim in front of you may point towards an institution behind them; that an apparently isolated injustice may reveal a pattern; that power is often most visible when you stop staring exclusively at the individual and begin tracing the architecture around them.

That is why I am asking the Guardian this question with respect for its journalism rather than hostility towards it.

You investigated Jason Arday.

You were entitled to.

Some of what you found may prove important.

But while everybody was investigating Jason, something else was happening in full public view. A Black academic was being transformed into a racial symbol. His alleged failings were being recruited into a political assault on equality. An extraordinary quantity of media attention was gathering around one vulnerable human being. And people whose ideological hostility towards Black advancement was hardly concealed were watching the story travel further than they could possibly have achieved alone.

More than 50 parliamentarians now believe that warrants examination. Academics writing in the Guardian itself are asking similar questions. Hugh Muir accepts that the scale and tone of the coverage must be examined.

So perhaps the argument has moved on.

The question is no longer whether the Guardian should have investigated Jason Arday.

It should have.

The question is whether one of Britain’s greatest investigative newspapers is now prepared to turn around and investigate the machinery that gathered around him.

Because Jason Arday was one story.

What happened to Jason Arday is another.

And we still do not know the whole picture.