News of his death comes the same week as the release of his memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” a highly anticipated work that Simon & Schuster had decided to release despite the doubts about his credibility. In a statement issued through his publisher, Arday’s family said that they were “in shock to have lost this amazing father, partner, brother, uncle and son.”

“The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone,” the family said

  • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
    9·
    13 days ago

    He was exonerated by the vaguest of “investigations”

    In other words, he was exonerated, but you don’t like the conclusion.

    Arday then hired the elite law firm Carter-Ruck

    UK’s defanation laws are unjust, but the greatest injustices are from extremely rich and powerful companies and people bullying journalists and political activists into insanely costly court cases. Arday was neither rich nor politically well-connected, so it’s hard to claim that what he was doing was SLAPP. As for Carter-Ruck, fuck them, but they exist due to flaws in the system. To get rid of termites, fix the dry rot.

    At the time of his death, he was being investigated

    Which is not evidence of guilt until the investigations are concluded, and even then, only if the investigations were conducted properly, in a transparent and accountable manner, and they actually find wrongdoing.

    This time they were considering the copious evidence

    No, they were considering the copious allegations. Allegations are not evidence unless they are substantiated.

    So for argument’s sake, let’s assume the worst case, based on what is known now: Cambridge hired Arday without exercising due diligence, and got a professor who wasn’t as qualified as Cambridge professors are expected to be. But the right-wing media then went into full witch-hunt mode, and it’s entirely plausible that as a consequence, he was receiving death threats and constant harassment. That’s disproportionate to any grift that Arday may have done, and it’s not the way that similar situations have been resolved in other academic bad hires. As can be seen with the pile-on against Arday’s successor, the most credible explanation of the difference is to do with his ethnicity (and his successor’s) than any wrong that might have been done.

    And until a credible, impartial investigation takes place, I have no more reason to believe that any of the allegations are true than to believe that the whole sordid business was cooked up by the right to keep the racist outrage machine well-stoked.