If ever a story seemed tailor-made to pour fuel on the culture war fires, it was the tragic story of Jason Arday.

The Cambridge professor recently resigned under scrutiny, and was found dead last week in a South London home. His story touches on deeply divisive topics, from race to higher education to D.E.I. to autism. There’s so much to unpack. To make sense of it all, I spoke to my colleague Mara Hvistendahl, who’s been reporting on Arday’s life, his death and the fallout at Cambridge.

Three years ago, Jason Arday, then 37, was hired as a professor at Cambridge University. Cambridge made a big deal of its new star, touting him as its youngest Black professor and promoting his incredible personal story of growing up in public housing and overcoming severe developmental delays to go on to academia.

Then, last month, a blog post — written by a former Cambridge researcher once disciplined after arguing Black people couldn’t succeed in a meritocracy — accused Arday of plagiarism and embellishing his life story. A firestorm ensued. British media, especially British conservative media, found the story irresistible.

Eventually, Arday resigned, saying he no longer wished to feel as if he was “living under a constant spotlight.” Last week, he was found dead in a London apartment; in a statement, his family referenced the “campaign of sustained abuse” he’d endured.

You can read my conversation with Mara below.

So, Mara. How did Jason Arday end up at Cambridge?

He was hired for an enormously prestigious position — an established chair of education — in 2023. At the time, Cambridge was under a lot of pressure to increase its representation of people of color both among faculty members and students. And you really cannot overstate how far they had to go; Cambridge was, and is, a very white place.

Arday had a Ph.D. in education, but only a modest publication record, and he’d been bouncing from one university to another. We know that among the people competing with Arday for the position were two more experienced women of color. But Arday was the only Black applicant. He also had this remarkable back story of being diagnosed early with autism, not speaking until very late, and overcoming that to make a name for himself. And Cambridge was promoting that too.

Part of the issue here is that universities increasingly want to hire stars who have amazing personal stories and big followings that can gain the institution positive media coverage.

But that back story wasn’t true?

Parts of it were true, and parts of it really stretched belief and turned out to be lies and exaggerations. He said he didn’t speak before he was 11 and he didn’t read before he was 18. In our reporting, we found people who knew him as a child, including a speech professional who worked with him, who contradicted this.

Could the hiring committee have realized this?

The short answer is yes. We don’t have full insight into how those deliberations went, but the nine people on the hiring committee were experts on things like how people learn and develop.

At least one key member of the committee was a child psychiatrist who had himself done research on autism. He was arguably in a position to understand that Arday’s claims really had no precedent in medical literature.

Why did they seemingly turn a blind eye?

Cambridge is one of the world’s most elite universities. But it also has a reputation for being very white, privileged and a little stuffy.

So critics say Arday’s backers thought his hire could potentially help change Cambridge’s image. Not only had they hired a Black scholar but also a young scholar who had this remarkable life. It provided a counterpoint to how many people thought about Cambridge at the time.

When did Cambridge first find out about potential problems in Arday’s work?

Almost immediately. Cambridge was first alerted to possible plagiarism three months after he was hired. They didn’t deal with these allegations swiftly, which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is how actively they defended Arday. They said he was facing several issues at the time he wrote those papers that had influenced his work, including direct and indirect racism.

Cambridge then got alerted by a very respected academic industry publication to issues in Arday’s doctoral thesis. But the university continued to defend him, saying at one point that he was the victim of a vile campaign.

So these latest allegations didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been circulating inside Cambridge for three years. Cambridge could have easily done its own investigation, but it didn’t.

So Cambridge wasn’t just defending Jason Arday. It was also defending itself, and its initial decision to hire him.

Another concern of other professors my colleagues and I spoke to was that this was a position that typically goes to people who are very senior. By thrusting Arday into that position pretty early in his career, and by heavily promoting his personal story with all its flaws, they argue, the university set him up for intense scrutiny — and ultimately for failure.

That’s not to say that he wasn’t pushing these things himself. But without the Cambridge brand and without that extensive media coverage, his story might have looked very different. And arguably had Cambridge dealt with it earlier, this would not have all blown up in this very public and tragic way.

Do you think the scale of the media attention on Arday was disproportionate for what he did?

Well, I haven’t done an analysis that can speak to that. Arday’s defenders would say that Black academics are subjected to disproportionate scrutiny; they’d cite former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who was accused of plagiarism for much more minor infractions.

But the media is also fascinated by fabulists. Remember George Santos, Jayson Blair or — to give another U.K. example — “The Salt Path”? And this story came with an extra layer of culture war issues around neurodiversity, D.E.I., higher education. It was always going to make for an explosive mix.

What will the long-term fallout of this be, Mara?

At Cambridge, scholars say they’re worried it’s done immense damage to diversity efforts, to the reputation of the university, to their own reputations, and to the recruitment of faculty and students in the future.

Experts on developmental delays worry that the story of Arday’s remarkable trajectory has given families false hope and false expectations of what’s possible with a relatively extreme diagnosis.

And now that he’s died, people are calling for an examination of the media’s role in his death. This story is not over.

Read Mara’s story.

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