Eleven days ago, Professor Jason Arday was found dead following an extraordinary international press storm triggered after a self-styled “race realist” academic (now suspended) claimed that Arday’s PhD thesis contained plagiarism. Arday had been cleared of those charges by Liverpool John Moores University last year.
There are many people and organisations that let Professor Arday down, including – and maybe especially – Cambridge University. But, as journalists, the Nerve team has naturally spent a great lot of time thinking about and discussing how the media reported the story.
While some stories were responsible and in the public interest, many were not. Social media posts became “news”, and much of the commentary was abjectly cruel and dehumanising. The most striking thing, as the dust settles and we get a chance to reflect, is how speculation over what may or may not have been true evolved into “fact”. Thus some speculation that was never (and still has not been) proved – that Jason didn’t run 30 marathons in 35 days as claimed, that he had plagiarised, that he wasn’t non-verbal as a child – somehow became accepted as real. In this digital age of misinformation, this is a case study in how truth can become a malleable or vaporous thing.
What also became lost in the melee was that Jason was autistic, and vulnerable.
Who was the real Jason Arday? The people we heard from in the media preceding Jason’s death were almost entirely not people who actually knew him. And now that much of the media has scuttled away from the story in shame, we are still not hearing from those who did.
That’s why, last Friday, we published tributes from former students of Professor Arday. And it’s why today we are publishing a moving and fascinating interview with his friend Sam Clark. Sam and his brother played football with Jason in their team, BPR (Battersea Park Rangers), and his brother was in the same class as Jason at Heathbrook primary school in south London, where Sam’s mother, a teacher, sometimes gave Jason one-on-one assistance with reading.
Here we have, finally, an in-depth account of the real Jason Arday. And it’s so clear that he was an extraordinary and loving human being who had a hugely positive effect on many people’s lives. Our thanks to Sam for sharing his memories with our co-founder Carole Cadwalladr. You can watch the interview here on YouTube, or read below.
Sam Clark My name is Sam Clark and I was born and brought up in Clapham. I went to Heathbrook school, where Jason also went. I’m roughly seven, eight years older than him, and my younger brother was in school with him, in the same class with him, growing up.
Carole Cadwalladr And why do you want to talk today, Sam?
Sam The reason I want to talk today is because, in the last three or four weeks, I feel that the person that I knew – the person that we knew as part of the community, as part of the football team that we shared, as part of everyone who knew him – that person just got lost completely. And the person we knew him as has just become completely irrelevant in the general discussion.
‘I just remember this boy with this afro and this huge grin. He was sort of silent, but really endearing’
Carole So how was he? How would you describe him?
Sam He was a really, really unique person. He was not like anyone else I’ve ever met, to be honest. He was incredibly warm. I think that’s the first thing – he really felt kind and warm, and you were drawn to that. And that was from very, very early on.
I remember him and his brothers, but particularly him, turning up … as I’d go to school, or something like that. And I just remember this boy with this afro and this huge grin. He was sort of silent, but really endearing. And I had quite a strong memory of that back when I came across him very regularly when he was 16. I’d have been in my 20s when he was playing for a football team with my brother. In fact, he started a football team with my brother – he’s one of the founder members of the club. And he was remarkable then. He was just so engaging and so warm. And I very much had that same feeling as I saw him regularly over the 20 years or so subsequent to that.
I think he remembers the smile – everyone remembers Jason’s smile. I don’t think anyone who met him at any time wouldn’t remember it. He just had the most wonderful smile. And he remembered him very fondly from that age. He remembered him as not speaking – that’s how my brother says he remembers it – and he remembers that he used to go out, to be taken out with the special needs kids.
Carole And it was your mother who actually helped him at school with special needs, is that correct?
Sam My mother is a teacher, but she also helped out in classes. So she helped in nursery school in that class, and she also helped when they were in reception. And she was asked by the teacher to read to Jason, because he had special needs and was struggling within the class. So yes, that’s what she remembers specifically.
I’m no expert, but it just seems to me to be obviously and self-evidently not a binary thing; it’s not that language comes one day and arrives. And the press just seem to be absolutely obsessed with proving what he’d written in the book wrong. We obviously didn’t know what he’d written in the book, but they just seemed obsessed with proving it, and by doing that, therefore disprove everything he’d ever said, based on this magical moment when he had or hadn’t started talking.
And they wanted to talk to lots of people. I know lots of people in my brother’s class were contacted, and they were 10 years old at the time, nine years old – they were children, and you just don’t remember these things precisely. My brother couldn’t remember precisely the details of when he started talking. He just remembered that at some point he was non-verbal.
Carole And can you talk a bit about when you became aware of this sort of smear campaign which was out to get him?
Sam It’s sort of a long story. Going back into our 20s, even when we were 16, we thought of Jason as this unusual, quite extraordinary character, because he almost seemed to have no fear. He would just do things, and he had this idea that he was going to do something amazing all the time.
And my dad, who’s no longer with us, really loved Jason. And he watched Jason doing snooker, which wasn’t normal for a kid of his background, to say the least. Snooker clubs in those days in south London were very much white-working-class, old-school vibes. And he’s this kid of African immigrant parents, and he went in and really learned how to play snooker, and became really very, very good. And I think it kind of helped with his neurodivergence at the time.
And another thing that we remembered at that age – well, my brother specifically – was how sensitive he was about his reading and his literacy, and they had to be very careful about talking to him. My brother has this story about them saying: “Oh, I remember you were one of the dunces at school.” And he was just distraught by this. And my brother’s like, this appalling thing that you say as children – you think it’s funny and all the rest of it, but it just reflects what an impact that had had on him. And he was so upset. They had to work hard to bring him round.
And then this same boy, in his 20s, he went back – he managed to get to university, which we just thought was the most extraordinary thing – to go and be a PE teacher, I think. And then he started doing these things for fundraising, like the 30 marathons, and just all kinds of things, just because he saw possibilities in life.
Carole Well, stay there, actually, because that’s a really good one. Can you tell me about the 30 marathons? Because there’s still this absolute ridicule over that online, and it’s just not accepted.
Going back into our 20s, we thought of Jason as this unusual, quite extraordinary character, because he almost seemed to have no fear’
Sam That, to me, sort of symbolised it, because it became this idea that it was obviously untrue. And we’re like, well, I remember when he did it. Now, can I say that I was actually with him doing it? No, because it’s an extraordinary thing to do. But why would he have made it up? At the time we were following it on the day. My brother’s friends, two of them, did the final day, the final marathon with him, along with a lot of other people. They did it on a bike, actually, because they couldn’t run it. And it’s in the newspaper, it’s in the local newspaper. It’s there for us.
But I think what happened was there was this idea that he’d supposedly done 600 miles in six days as his next challenge. And I remember that one too. And he had corrected it on the record a while ago, a good while ago, saying actually it was over 12 days and there were rest days in between – someone had pointed out that doing 600 miles in six days would put you among the top elite athletes in the world. And somehow that got moved on to this 30 marathons in 35 days, when that is a challenge – it’s an extreme challenge for a normal person – but it’s not insurmountable. Maybe he walked part of it, I don’t know. Eddie Izzard had done it two years before, I think, 40 or something in 45 days or something like that [Izzard’s exact total was 43 in 51 days]. So this is not beyond a normal person.
And this was someone who wasn’t at that time in any sense a public figure. I don’t think he was an academic. He was just a normal person trying to raise some money. And again, he was doing something interesting, and it’s just got used as another stick to beat him. I’ve even seen columnists in recent days referring to that and sort of almost laughing at it. And it just seems to me extraordinary. No one thought, “well, what can we look at to verify what parts of his story might be verifiable?” And that was part of his story that was clearly verifiable. And in fact, I think the local journalist has been on X putting out what he knows about it recently.
It just felt like people had an agenda to find everything that could be said to be wrong from anything he’d ever said, or anything that other people had said about him. And yet no one was going “well, what is true here? What has happened here? What are the facts about his life?”
Carole What you said before, that it seemed like a miracle – this kid with special needs who barely managed a qualification, that it was a miracle that he got to university. Can you talk about that, and then talk about what he then went on to do?
Sam We watched from afar, really – and I say “we”, that’s particularly myself and my family: my brother, my mother and my father and my sisters. My brother was seeing it close up, because they played football together consistently. But we’d hear: “Jason again – he’s just doing something amazing.”
‘Almost to a person, [journalists have] said, “oh, isn’t this tragic”, and then continued to make the point that they were making all along’
We were so proud, because we knew this was someone who’d been barely literate, who got one or two GCSEs at E or whatever it was – and then this was someone who then managed to go to university. And this, we just thought, was just the most amazing achievement. And then he wasn’t interested in stopping there. He wanted to see how far he could go, how far he could develop as a scholar, as an academic, and how he could help other people who might have been in his situation. And whenever you spoke to him, that sense of mission came through incredibly strongly. And it was just such an amazing thing. Every time it was just, “my God, I can’t believe that’s happened, and this has happened, and the other’s happened”. The fact that he was this normal person – he was a normal person, but doing extraordinary things.
And then this idea [grew up] that somehow, from his 20s, he’s been generating this cunning plan to fool the whole liberal establishment into giving him a job. He was just someone doing extraordinary things. It was incredible to watch.
I remember when he got the Cambridge professorship. In fact, that week I was in the changing room with him playing football, and he came in, and we all hugged him and congratulated him, and you kind of didn’t know what to say. This is way out of our life experience, doing something like that. And we’re just, well, this is just fantastic, well done, that’s amazing. And he was obviously pleased, but he was telling us about the reaction that he’d seen on social media, and how there was a lot of hatred out there. And someone looked, as we were in the changing room, and it was like “oh God, you didn’t want to look at that”, and shut it. And then he actually made a joke. He said: “There’s someone who keeps consistently saying I look like Milli Vanilli – which I find quite funny, though he’s actually being very racist, as well as saying I look like Milli Vanilli.”
Carole In terms of the way that Jason was treated, do you feel that there was any concern which was shown or expressed towards the fact that he had autism?
Sam Every take that I seemed to read – and it was just coming at us from all sides – seemed to be taking one side or other in the culture war, DEI, etc. And this was someone who’s autistic, who’s complex, neurodivergent, and it just never seemed to come up. It didn’t even come up when people were talking about his appointment. Now, I know nothing about his appointment in academia, but I do know that at the time they were talking about the perspective that his neurodivergence brought to the role. And that’s what he felt that he had brought, and that was what he felt was important – not his race or background.
Carole You told me that thing about the Will Self piece, about the question about identity – this idea that that’s something that people with autism struggle with.
Sam I hadn’t thought about his reaction to his personal details being challenged. But it all made sense to me when I read a piece by Will Self, where Will Self talks about how threatening it is for autistic people to have their construction of their story, how they’ve constructed their identity, challenged. And reading that was like a jolt of recognition. And I was [like]: that was it – that was it. I saw the response; that was it. It was very, very, very difficult for him from that point. And I believe Will Self knows what he’s talking about when it comes to autism.
Carole One of many things which just shocks me has been the defensiveness of the press in the days since we’ve learned of Jason’s death, and that it seems that there’s been a sort of battening down of the hatches against any form of criticism. And we haven’t heard from any of the senior editors of these newspapers. What do you observe from the reaction in the days since?
Sam I’ve definitely observed a kind of defensiveness, insofar as almost to a person they’ve said, “oh, isn’t this tragic”, and then continued to make the point that they were making all along. Just no sense of reflection of how there was a person there.
Carole One of the things that I think you said before is that you were angry.
Sam My initial reaction was just anger. I was so angry. And I just couldn’t believe it. I was just so cross, and I was so cross with the people who were glibly passing things on. That was just what came back to me, of the people that I had read, making fun of it and making light of this person, and just making as if it was their entertainment. And I just remembered all these people glibly laughing at this person, who was a wonderful person, and a person who touched so many people in an individual way – and the fact they laughed, and he was no longer with us, it just made me so angry.
Carole If there’s anything that you could bring about a change from this, a sort of lesson for the media, or an active change that would help somebody in Jason’s position, [what would it be?]
Sam I don’t know, from a legal perspective, what would help from Jason’s position, because I’m not an expert in that. But there has to be some way of pulling back on the personal attack in a situation like this. There has to be a way of institutions stopping monetising an individual’s pain – even, almost, whatever they’ve done. But in this situation, he was accused of plagiarism, and then he’d resigned, and yet still it went on and on, attacking the very core of him and his story and his personal details. It just doesn’t seem right. And it seems to me that it’s been done because it was selling clicks in a time of year when there’s not a lot of news.
When life is difficult, Samaritans are here to listen – day or night, 365 days a year. No judgement, no pressure. You can call them for free on 116 123 or visit www.samaritans.org