My brother and colleague Sufian Sadiq wrote a piece this week that I would ask you to read before you read mine. His argument, published in Tes and in fuller form in this blog, is that silence from people with power is never neutral, and that private sympathy for colleagues from minoritised communities has to become public conviction. He is right. What I want to do here is take up a question his piece opens but does not have space to answer: why that silence comes so easily in the first place, and why the sympathy so often arrives too late, or not at all.
The answer sits in the ground our charity has worked in for years, where safeguarding meets racism. It has to do with who we allow ourselves to see as vulnerable, and who we can only bring ourselves to see as a threat.
Professor Jason Arday was just forty-one years old. He was found dead at his home in London on the 14 August, nine days after he resigned from the University of Cambridge, where he had been the youngest Black professor in its history. The Metropolitan Police have said his death is being treated as unexpected but not suspicious, and that a file will go to the coroner. His children have lost their father. His partner has lost the person she built a life with.
His death followed days of intense media focus. The central claim that drove the coverage was that he had plagiarised his doctorate. This claim had already been examined by Liverpool John Moores University, where he took his PhD, which had investigated it the year before and had not upheld it. It noted citation problems, which were attributed to honest error and inadequate supervision of a student who was known to be neurodivergent. Cambridge had separately opened a fresh inquiry into his qualifications and honorary appointments when he resigned. None of this made any difference to how he was treated.
There is a particular logic that operated in the Professor Arday story that formed long before we had any newsrooms, and the necessity to name it is the reason I am writing.
Victim-blaming is not incidental to cruelty. It is the labour that cruelty requires, not only to legitimise it but to reframe it as justice. Before a society can harm a person or people, and feel comfortable about it, that person must be moved out of the category of the wronged. They have to be shown to have brought the harm on themselves, to be responsible and worthy of ill treatment. Once that work is done, the harm can be recast as accountability, as fairness, or as simply asking questions.
The sociologist William Ryan gave this its name in Blaming the Victim in 1971. He was describing how the disadvantages produced by racism were explained away, by pointing inside Black communities, at their supposed ‘culture’ and character, so that the structures which produced those disadvantages never had to be acknowledged. When Ida B. Wells documented lynching in the 1890s, she showed the same machinery operating at full brutality. The accusation that supposedly justified the mob, the manufactured myth of the Black rapist, was a pretext. The real functions were to inflict terror and control. The lie was needed first because the violence required a moral face.
The vocabulary is refreshed in every generation while the function remains. The curse of Ham gave way to the measuring of skulls, which gave way to the intelligence curves of ‘The Bell Curve’, which have given way in the current era to the sneering of the “DEI hire.” Each version supplies the same thing: a respectable-sounding reason to withdraw sympathy from a particular person or groups of people, so that whatever happens to them next can be dismissed as deserved.
This is the moral veil, which allows an atrocity, or an act of institutional abandonment, to be cast as the right thing happening to the right person.
The media-monitoring project NewsCord counted 229 substantive articles about Professor Arday across the national press in twenty-two days, 188 of them in the nine days between his resignation and his death, more than twenty a day. As a comparison, it draws attention to a plagiarism case at the same university that was adjudicated and upheld, against another academic. That case drew a single national news story. In other words, one man’s proven misconduct was worth one article. Another man’s contested and unproven accusations were worth a three-figure pile-on.
The scale and pace of what unfolded tell us what kind of exercise this had become. Professor Arday was given nicknames in place of his name. A national paper ran a reader poll on whether his own experiences of racism were valid. On the last morning of his life a newspaper published a psychiatrist’s speculation about his mind, from a doctor who had never met him. Reporters sought to discredit a the account of a neurodiverse man, and memory of his own childhood by seeking out from former schoolmates and from TikTok. A column in the Times, mocking him with the headline “Jason Arday may want to get himself a nice pair of orange trousers,” was published while he lay dead and quietly deleted once the news broke. This was not simply ‘scrutiny’ of a scholar’s work. It was a hunt, or, to borrow from history, a digital lynching. The narrative had moved from his research to the man himself.
It is undisputed that the first person to brand Professor Arday a fraud was a man who had already concluded, on racial grounds, that a Black man could not become a professor, because of his Blackness. In the Byline Times, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, alongside others, has documented that the allegations began with Nathan Cofnas, a self-described “race realist” whom a Cambridge college had already removed in 2024 after he argued that Black people are innately less intelligent and would all but vanish from elite positions in a fair system. In public, he described Professor Arday in the language of mental deficiency, folding the man’s race, his autism and his scholarship into a single claim of innate incapacity. Last week Ghent University, where Cofnas now holds a post, suspended him pending a disciplinary investigation. Consequences, it seems, can move quickly for some and arrive too late for others.
In safeguarding terms, adultification is used to describe the process by which a Black child is stripped of the presumption of innocence and protection – a presumption that is taken for granted for other children. Black children are read instead as older, more knowing, more culpable and more dangerous than they are. We saw it named this way in the review into Child Q, the fifteen-year-old strip-searched by police at her school while she was menstruating. This review found that she had been treated as a threat rather than as a child in need of care.
The Arday case demonstrates that the logic of adultification is not confined to childhood, nor to the school setting in which it was first named. It is one expression of a broader process through which the recognition of vulnerability is distributed unequally, and along racialised lines. Certain groups are readily extended the presumption of innocence, and the protection that follows from it; while others are positioned primarily as objects of suspicion. This categorisation tends to operate in advance of the evidence, and is then used to shape how that evidence is read.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality describes how the different parts of a person’s identity overlap to create experiences that no single category can capture. She argued that a Black woman can face harms produced by virtue of the fact that she is Black and female. A system that is singular in its focus is unable to capture these experiences. Professor Arday stood at the intersection of several identities. He was Black, he was male, he was neurodiverse, he was from a working-class background and he was, for a period, prominent and high-status. Any one of these might have been legible to the institutions around him. In combination, they produced someone that few of those institutions could hold as vulnerable, because our prevailing conceptions of vulnerability are not designed for a person in his position.
Professor Arday was autistic. He has said he did not speak until he was eleven. Autistic people can be verbal in some settings and effectively silent in others; autistic memory can make the recall of specific events partial and non-linear. These are recognised features of neurodiversity, the kind of features that ought to summon patience and care. In media coverage, they were turned into the proof of his dishonesty. In other words, the very characteristics that marked him out as vulnerable were used to convict him of fabrication – and this should trouble us all. A national press was able to use a man’s neurodiversity to indict him because no one with a duty of care and protection – neither his employers at the university nor the bodies that regulate the press – treated the public bullying of a Black, neurodiverse man as a safeguarding concern. The vulnerability was there to be seen but the willingness to recognise it and to act was completely absent.
I write this as a brown, Muslim woman, and I recognise the machinery intimately. The positions available to us are narrow: we are cast as oppressed and awaiting rescue, or as a risk to be contained. To be seen simply as a person owed protection on our own terms is the rarest thing of all. I have felt the same moral veil come down on me, with the support and protection I needed withdrawn at the very moment they mattered most.
None of what I have described is a problem of individual behaviour, but I do believe, as Sufian does, that each of us should begin by examining our own reflexes, our own quickness to doubt one colleague and extend grace to another. But this is where we start, the beginning of the process, rather than the end.
The veil is embedded into institutions. It is in newsrooms that will run twenty pieces a day about a racially minoritised man on a charge that has not been proven, and one piece about the same offence proven against someone else. It is in universities and employers that broadcast their commitment to staff from minoritised communities in calm seasons and fall silent the moment defending one of them carries a cost. It is in safeguarding frameworks that can recognise the vulnerability of some children but can only understand others through the frame of risk and threat.
So the asks and the change must be institutional. Regulators and editors should be made to answer, in public and by name, for coverage that abandons proportion the moment its subject is Black, neurodiverse, or otherwise outside the imagined ‘norm’. Universities and other employers need a duty of care that activates when a member of staff comes under sustained public attack, rather than a communications strategy that waits to see which way the wind blows. And those of us in safeguarding have our own homework: to extend our understanding of vulnerability beyond the young and the obviously frail, to the adult who is being dismantled in front of us while we tell ourselves it is justified.
Professor Jason Arday told everyone, in his resignation letter, that he had reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure. His family have described a campaign of sustained abuse. Those were warnings, spoken aloud, by people asking to be believed. The least we can do now is reject the moral veil that prevented so many onlookers from seeing a vulnerable man who needed our support and protection.
