Jason Arday, Claudine Gay, and the line between inclusion and bias in universities

The political scientist Claudine Gay became Harvard University’s dean of social science in 2018 and, five years later, its first Black president and only the second woman in the university’s 387-year history in the post. Later that year, on December 5, 2023, Ms. Gay testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce on antisemitism on university campuses, following Hamas’s infamous October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Ms. Gay’s answers were sensible as she tried to hold the line between students’ speech and conduct. However, her words went viral soon after for all the wrong reasons.

A short time after, conservative activists began alleging that Ms. Gay had plagiarised her PhD thesis in 1997, a finding that a subsequent Harvard University investigation also upheld. Ms. Gay resigned on January 2, 2024, concluding the shortest presidency in the university’s history. In her resignation letter and an op-ed published soon after in The New York Times, Ms. Gay said she stepped down to deny the “demagogues” a chance to weaponise her ‘case’ against other Black scholars.

A very similar narrative is playing out in the University of Cambridge, with the resignation of Jason Arday, who only three years ago became the university’s youngest person to be appointed professor, at 37 years. Until recently, Mr. Arday was known as much for his life as his work as a sociologist. According to reports, he grew up non-verbal and autistic in South London before learning to read in his late teens.

But only months after his appointment in 2023, two academics flagged similarities in text between one of Mr. Arday’s papers and a study by epidemiologist Anjum Memon. Cambridge took the implicated paper offline. Then, last year, Times Higher Education put together a dossier of alleged plagiarism ahead of what was to be a blockbuster investigative report. But when it reached out to Mr. Arday for his comment, it found he had hired a pugnacious law firm, which disputed the allegations and Times shelved the piece.

In July this year, University of Ghent philosopher Nathan Cofnas — infamous for his views on race and intelligence and whose own affiliation with Cambridge ended in 2024 following a different issue — published his independent findings of Mr. Arday’s work, including allegations of plagiarism in the latter’s 2015 PhD thesis and in later papers. The well-regarded science integrity publication Retraction Watch also reported on the spiked Times article on July 27, and quoted an independent expert who had reviewed its dossier.

Cambridge at first stood by Mr. Arday and cast the allegations against him as a motivated campaign to discredit a rising Black scholar. But on August 5, it launched an investigation into his qualifications, and Mr. Arday resigned with immediate effect. In his statement, reminiscent of Ms. Gay’s opinion, he said the process academia uses to verify the work of scholars had been weaponised against Black people.

The real problem

Of late, universities in the Global North have been recruiting people from underrepresented backgrounds in part on the strength of narratives of overcoming disadvantage and embodying the universities’ commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

In both Mr. Arday’s and Ms. Gay’s instances, these narratives seemed to have overtaken closer scrutiny of the scholars’ academic work. (At the time of writing, Mr. Arday maintained he did not plagiarise.) Chunks of the public conversation surrounding their work, including the views of Cofnas and conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who targeted Ms. Gay, have also been explicit about wanting to discredit DEI policies. Which makes it easy, and sometimes also accurate, to dismiss a complaint by pointing to the complainant. Yet plagiarism is plagiarism.

The real problem is that the tools scholars use to police academic integrity are applied unevenly and sometimes opportunistically. Considering every finding of plagiarism against a minority scholar to be proof that DEI policies support poor scholarship is wrong. Treating every plagiarism allegation against a minority scholar to be suspect because of who is alleging it is also wrong. Affirmative action and hiring to improve diversity are necessary policy responses to a history of elite universities excluding non-elite scholars. They don’t become less legitimate due to the actions of some of their beneficiaries.