The Late Jason Arday: Just Another Dead Body For The Left To Use

Did anyone ever stop to think he might need a doctor?

S Atcheson | August 23, 2026

Former Cambridge professor of education Jason Arday has now been dead for more than a week, and police do not suspect foul play. Yet the news and editorial stories are multiplying. Arday left a voice message for a fellow Cambridge professor the morning his body was discovered, who said Arday “...felt he couldn’t go on.”

I can’t recall hearing Arday’s name until early August, when stories accusing him of plagiarism made the big London dailies and crossed the pond. About 10 days ago I saw a brief Facebook clip featuring him and Cambridge Professor Hilary Cremin. It was from 2023, when Arday had just been named the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history. Cremin is Dean of the Faculty of Education.

The 39-second video shows Professor Cremin just fawning over the young man, saying his research was “the best in the world.” Hilary was so proud! She had finally bagged a black and was showing him off like a Boone and Crockett trophy.

It should go without saying that Dean Cremin is a world-class ninny, but I will say it anyway. I was more focused on the newly minted Professor Arday. He seemed very pleasant, even somewhat sweet. I remember feeling sad for him and didn’t know why. Michael Polanyi, who once delivered the Eddington Lecture at Cambridge, famously said that we can know more than we can tell, and maybe this was another instance.

Did my tacit dimension (a term coined by Polanyi), that mysterious place where we store our perceptions, thoughts, and intentions, sense depression on that 2023 video? I will never know, and now he is just dead folks, as a former colleague used to say. His bones may now be picked over without mercy by journalists, essayists, and worst of all—fellow academics.

As Henry Kissinger said, summing up Sayre’s law, the fights in academia are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low. I can relate, having spent mercifully few years in........

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