"The Cascade of Dysfunction That Helped Doom Jason Arday"

An excellent piece today by Jesse Singal in The Dispatch; the whole thing is worth reading, but here are some excerpts (by the way, I much enjoy Singal's and Katie Herzog's work on Blocked and Reported; it's one of the few podcasts to which I have a paid subscription):

In the U.K., Labour MP Dawn Butler published a letter to the head of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, an independent regulatory body, arguing that "Jason would still be alive today if not for the relentless and pernicious coverage by the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Spectator, to name a few," and calling for (unspecified) "decisive action" in response to his death. The British journalist and broadcaster Will Self took things even further, posting a lengthy open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham calling for a crackdown that sounds far more Moscow than London. Self argued that the Crown Prosecution Service "should be examining the matter, and the police should be impounding computers" before claiming that "This is not an attack upon a free press—it is a necessarily immediate defence of one." An open letter arguing that "Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed" was signed by a number of British academics and politicians, including Green Party leader Zack Polanski…..

[But] the call for more scrutiny of media, or even outright censorship of it, is astonishing in light of the facts of this case. It was because of the U.K.'s lack of press protections that this story took so long to come out, which, in the end, increased the damage done to Arday. Times Higher Education had a story in the works last year, but Arday sicced an infamous British law firm, Carter-Ruck, on the outlet, killing it. That would not have happened in the United States, because our defamation laws are much more media-friendly (as strange as that might sound during the Trump era).

Arday abused not only the civil system but the criminal one, too. In 2023, mere months after Arday's hiring, the first academic to notice oddities in his work emailed him to ask about those oddities. Arday responded by reporting him to the police. Last year he also reported a member of the Times Higher Education team, Jack Grove, to the police on similar grounds. Here in the United States, cops would likely respond to such a complaint with the American version of "bugger off"—in the U.K., while both criminal complaints were eventually dropped, they were apparently taken seriously by police at first. A cop even told Grove that while he wouldn't be investigated further, he shouldn't email Arday again. That's direct law enforcement interference with the press in what is supposed to be one of the freest countries in the world.

These are all signs that in British society, it's very easy to weaponize the law against good-faith media or academic inquiries. To come out the other side of this horrible story wanting to give more power to those who would crack down on journalistic inquiry beggars belief. To be sure, none of this is to deny that there are elements of British tabloid culture that are a bit bloodthirsty, but as my examples have hopefully made clear, anger at the media has gone well beyond those outlets. (And while it's ill-advised to pin suicide on any one cause, anyway—a point to which I'll return shortly—does anyone actually think the excesses of the right-wing tabloids are more likely contributors to Arday's death than his entire life and career falling apart in a short period?)  …

And, a related but different point:

In a saner, fairer world, Jason Arday would have lived out a happy and healthy life somewhere else, gainfully employed, loved by friends and family. Maybe his chronic tendency toward fabulism would have elicited rolled eyes at the local pub, but it never should have caused more harm than that.

Instead, thanks to a cascade of institutional dysfunction that will go down in history as uniquely bizarre and condescending—even by the considerable standards of higher ed misadministration—Jason Arday found himself in an environment where no one would say no to him, where no one would ask follow-up questions (at least out loud), and where people covered for him rather than holding him accountable. As a result, he did significant harm—to the scholars he plagiarized, the peers he wrongly beat out for a prestigious position, and (everyone keeps forgetting this) to the parents of nonverbal kids with autism, who are frequently victimized by false and suspicious claims of miracle cures like Arday's.

None of this means he deserved to die—of course he didn't deserve to die. But it does mean that, if we want to prevent such scandals from recurring in the future, it is imperative to learn from this rather than to use Arday's death as an excuse to rewrite history.