19 August 2026

The shaming of Jason Arday

A young man has died. Where was the possibility of absolution?

A young man who has lived with different kinds of disadvantage all his life is elevated to a position of influence and privilege. In this position he is exposed to consistent, merciless attack, until there is no way back. It ends in death. Summarised like this, it has an almost archetypal quality. The proverbial Martian observer would very likely catalogue it with the rituals of sacrificial scapegoating chronicled in many pre-modern societies – the outsider selected for both sacred dignity and ritual humiliation so that some existing order can be consolidated by an act of collective violence.

One of the many things we ought to be reflecting on in the wake of the shocking and tragic events leading to the death of Jason Arday is the nature of the shaming rituals of modern culture, the careful gradation of verbal violence from judicious headshaking through to unbridled, annihilating, joyous venom. The philosopher Bruno Latour wrote that “we have never been modern”; it is sometimes alarmingly clear that we have never been “secular”. We still repeat the ceremonies of public humiliation and cathartic sacrificial violence. A debased media culture and the fever-ridden jungle of online comment are just another iteration of habits deeply rooted in human society-building. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that we have outgrown any of this.

On the contrary. The mechanisms of scapegoating are all around us – and are not confined to the political right. Well-meaning efforts to offset the myth of the scapegoat can easily end up colluding with the process. As has so often been pointed out, tokenism sets people up to fail. Unless change is systemic, thought through, and unless it is intelligent about risk, emotional cost and the specific vulnerabilities of individuals, it is simply sucked into the magnetic field of the sacrificial drama: exalt or highlight the victim, then punish and expel.

Every person from a background defined as racially, culturally or neurologically “non-standard” who is admitted to an existing elite will know that their success or failure is not just the routine luck of the individual draw that it is for the “insider”. Expectations are higher, pressure is vastly increased. So long as they are marked out as exceptional – as being not like either their original community or the culture into which they are being adopted – they are marked out for painful isolation. So long as any group is so hugely under-represented that major success is a major news story, the risk remains of reinforcing the ritual story.

Several of Arday’s students – including many from comparable backgrounds to his – have said in response to the tragedy of his death that they have been forcefully reminded of their status as “non-standard” participants in the elite academic world. The brief illusion of a “new normal” in which they do not have to over-perform in order to survive, let alone succeed, has been shaken. What they see is a dominant culture that has still not changed – and that will exact a price for any briefly shared privilege.

All this is abstract enough, but the practical issues are not hard to identify. One of the more disgraceful elements in the storm of hostile comment around Arday was the near-total refusal to attend to the complexities of a neurodiverse condition. Any exposure to abusive, violently unsettling hostility is likely to compound the vulnerability and anxiety of individuals living with such conditions. If we witnessed the systematic bullying of a neurodiverse child in school, we should rightly be appalled and insist on protective strategies being in place. Have we arrived at a point where journalistic ethics expects less than an average primary school would?

Two things to clarify here. First, this is not an issue about freedom of speech and comment. Any culture that routinely ignores or belittles concerns about the mental health of any of its citizens is barbarous. Some people genuinely are more at risk than others in respect of their mental stability. They need a certain generosity of attention if they are to manage in an environment that is already felt as dangerously insecure.

So there is a broad question here about the climate of public debate. At what point does proper public criticism and the call for accountability mutate into a sustained programme of simply destructive comment, in which any residual respect for someone’s three-dimensional humanity has vanished? What is said in newsrooms and editorial discussions about the mental health of actual persons under scrutiny? If this is a general concern about our news culture, how much more in the case of a person living with a condition that exposes them to greater risk?

“Proper public criticism and the call for accountability”: this opens up a second and even more sensitive question. Arday has been portrayed as a fabulist – not only guilty of plagiarism, but someone who had offered exaggerated or fantasised versions of his own life outside academia. I have no privileged insight to judge the accuracy of his narrative.

But step back for a moment. How might we read Arday’s autobiographical claims against a wider background? “Be exceptional! Astonish us!” is the cry that goes up from media and public when someone from a “non-standard” background arrives in the spotlight. This is an age in which celebrity autobiography is not exactly a model of sober truthfulness. What allowance do we make in this light for claims to exceptional behaviour and experience? What are the inner pressures on a person with existing vulnerabilities to produce a narrative that will – for the time being -– silence hostile questioning by extravagant storytelling?

There are considerably more powerful and dangerous fabulists at work in the world at the moment, liberally indulged by parts of the media and the public. If Arday embroidered or invented parts of his autobiography, did this completely invalidate his work as a teacher and what many of his students report as its transformative impact on them?

It would be sentimental and false to let misstatement and misjudgement pass unchallenged. Arday admitted in effect that he may not have been innocent of all that was laid against him. He confessed to making mistakes. Before the story got out of hand, a Times Higher Education journalist was the subject of a police complaint after Arday had reported what, in retrospect, was a legitimate line of questioning. This is not entirely a morally simple story. But by the end, Arday was asking the morally basic question about proportion in the judgement being passed by those disproportionately more powerful than he was. This was not to be granted. The “exceptional” figure, it seems, loses all claim to proportionate response, and any right to be seen or heard in a context of attention and respect. It is the price paid for a high-profile success story.

Back to the high cost of “tokenism”, if that is what was at work in his appointment. We shall see what Cambridge University’s investigation concludes about this. But we can at least remind ourselves that there is a difference between making a statement and making a difference. The latter involves the maddeningly protracted business of shifting the assumptions of a culture. Oxbridge institutions have made limited but real progress recently in opening their doors wider and liaising better with historically disadvantaged groups. But a university can hardly be fairly asked to make up in short order the imbalances and inequities of an entire educational system and all the social and economic mechanisms that lie behind it. The temptation to fast-track results by high-profile gestures is strong. We have now been shown what the risk of a flawed decision might be, not just for an individual but for a whole cohort.

One last issue, cutting still deeper. Think again of what was said in various ways by Arday and his friends in the aftermath of exposure: there is no way back. For at least some victims of the full-blown monstering process, there is nowhere to go once the spotlight of contempt or derision has been directed upon you. Historical misjudgement, long-abandoned views or activities, routine inconsistencies and errors all build up into a charge sheet that can never be cleared – especially for the person who has always been present on sufferance, who has no secure claim to be part of the social or intellectual conversation.

GK Chesterton said that while there was absolution for sin there was no forgiveness for a faux pas. We have rituals of humiliation; we do not have rituals of restoration. This is not about “forgiveness” – a diverse, protracted, many-layered interpersonal process; it is about the possibility of recovering the right to be visible and responsible in society, to be taken seriously again. Precisely because some of the most common grounds for public opprobrium are not legal torts or major moral delinquencies but offences of a more nebulous kind, there is no tariff of punishment and no obvious means of agreeing when adequate reparation might have taken place.

Jason Arday was not guilty of a legal offence. It is not clear that he simply falsified his professional record in a significant way. If he was guilty of plagiarism, it was not a fault unique to him in the academic world. He did not abuse or exploit his students. But he was portrayed as, in effect, a fraud and fantasist, in ways that made it impossible for him to retain any self-respect, any hope to be taken seriously. “Do not fear the one who can kill the body,” says Christ in the Gospels, “but the one who can destroy body and soul.” The assault on Arday was an assault on his soul.

Are we able to see what is being done in our current shaming rituals by this refusal of “absolution”? Is there a “freedom to fail” that we need somehow to rediscover – for all of us, but very specially for those already disadvantaged and at risk? Is there a court of appeal beyond the jungle of compulsive collective destructiveness?

Rowan Williams is a former archbishop of Canterbury and master of Magdalene College, Cambridge

[Further reading: The poets trying to give AI taste]