Vigil in Cambridge for Jason Arday, petition for media inquiry

Over 200 people attended a vigil in Cambridge to remember Jason Arday, the professor found dead last Friday at his home in London in a suspected suicide, following a media campaign against him regarding a series of plagiarism allegations concerning his doctoral thesis and the credentials of the academic, who in 2023 became the youngest Black tenured professor in the history of the prestigious English university.

The commemoration was organized by the doctoral students of the professor, who had left his chair in sociology following repeated attacks against him and the launch of an internal investigation by the University of Cambridge. "It was racism that killed him," one of the students of Arday, who had become a symbol of diversity in the British academic world, told the BBC.

And furthermore: "For many of us, Cambridge was once imagined as a destination. We worked to get into places like this, we believed in the university, there was hope that once we got in, we could belong." Meanwhile, doctoral student Shahnaaz Khan called for "justice" for the professor.

Meanwhile, a petition calling on the Labour government to open a public inquiry into the role of the press in Arday's death has reached over 33,000 signatures, including those of several MPs and public figures, with the stated goal of reaching 50,000.

The petition, promoted by the Good Law Project and addressed to Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, argues that the academic's death was "the direct and predictable result" of the media persecution he suffered in recent weeks.