University suspends US academic leading Jason Arday plagiarism accusations

A Belgian university has suspended an American academic who led accusations of plagiarism against Jason Arday, the Black ex-Cambridge professor who died last week amid scrutiny many have labelled “racist“.

Arday had resigned from his post as professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge in early August over the scandal and the public scrutiny mounting against him.

Researcher Nathan Cofnas – a self-defined “race realist” who was himself sacked from his job at Cambridge in 2024 over his views on race – posted on X on Thursday: “I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.”

Without naming Cofnas, the University of Ghent said in a statement that it had launched a “preliminary disciplinary investigation” against a postdoctoral researcher embroiled in the Arday case.

“Ghent University has suspended the staff member as a precautionary measure,” it said, citing its “respect for human dignity and opposition to discrimination”.

“We attach great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial,” the university’s Rector Petra De Sutter and Vice-Rector Herwig Reynaert said in a statement. “However, that freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.”

Arday, who became Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor when he was appointed in 2023, was found dead on Friday aged 41. He was facing numerous accusations of plagiarising parts of his doctoral thesis and exaggerating some of his personal life achievements.

Diagnosed with autism and other developmental difficulties as a child, Arday had always disputed the allegations against him.

But Arday quit his job on August 5, writing in his resignation letter that he had “reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure”.

Plagiarism concerns surrounding Arday first surfaced several years ago, but went nowhere at the time, with one reporter backing down from investigating further after the professor threatened legal action.

Last month, however, Cofnas came forward to say he had found numerous instances of plagiarism in the professor’s work – and the case snowballed, receiving widespread media coverage in the United Kingdom and the United States.

British media and right-wing commentators seized on the row, claiming Arday had unfairly benefited from diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies.

An outspoken critic of DEI, Cofnas argues intelligence differs between racial groups and wrote that in a true meritocracy, top universities like Harvard or Cambridge would hardly have Black professors.

“Arday’s harassment and death are not idiosyncrasies: they are very much a case of institutional murder by a system infused with anti-Black racism,” Oxford academic Sneha Krishnan wrote for Al Jazeera.

The former Cambridge University professor’s death led to anti-racist rallies in London and other cities, as tens of thousands mourned for Arday and blamed the media scrutiny piled on him.

Ghent University said it was now “assessing” whether there were sufficient grounds to launch full disciplinary proceedings in the case and that it is taking recent statements regarding this matter “very seriously”.