Professor Jason Arday: The Human Cost of the Culture War

“I don’t want this to be a story three, four, five years from now” were Professor Jason Arday’s words when news broke of him becoming Cambridge University’s youngest ever Black professor in 2023. It has become the defining story today in how we see race, difference and DEI around the world. Sadly, it will be the story Professor Arday is defined by forever.

In 2018, I set out to help organisations better understand different communities and, through that work, found myself increasingly part of the diversity, equity and inclusion conversation. Professor Arday’s tragic story has made me reflect deeply on that work, the state of play today, and where we go from here.

I’ve intentionally taken a week before writing this. I’ve spent that time listening to colleagues, peers and friends; reading perspectives across mainstream and independent media; and watching the conversation unfold online. I wanted to resist the pressure to immediately turn tragedy into commentary, and instead give myself the space to process what had happened and what it might tell us. 

Something familiar has happened in the days since. A deeply human story has quickly become part of a much bigger conversation about race, institutions and inclusion. Emma Dabiri, who I interviewed for our Speakeasier podcast in 2021, describes a “Race Industrial Complex” in which race itself can become an industry of content, commentary and consumption. It has made me question whether, in moments like this, our instinct to respond quickly can sometimes get ahead of the reflection, processing and community that should come first.

I am writing this mostly for myself, as a way of processing what is an incredibly complex and nuanced matter. I am also writing it for my team at The Unmistakables, who are personally and professionally affected by what happened last Friday.

I am writing it because on Monday morning, when Simone Harvey asked ‘how was your weekend?’, while I lightly answered that descaling my kettle was the highlight (it really was), what sat beneath that was the need to clean and feel somewhat in control of my environment at a time when everything around me feels like it is swirling.

And when I asked the question back, we both knew that this was a weekend akin to how we felt in 2020. But we both acknowledged that the mood, climate and economy have moved on. We aren’t all fixated on our computers trying to find some good in the world while navigating a pandemic. We’re tackling a weakening economy, inflation, the overwhelm of social media and a very divisive Realpolitik. 

In this piece I’m going to set out:

1. How the pendulum keeps swinging in the DEI discourse

2. How Professor Arday became the fall guy for DEI

3. How the media hounded Professor Arday

4. How we might learn from this and move forward

   
   

I didn’t know Professor Arday, and will start by sharing my deepest condolences to his family and friends. The hardest thing about death is not experienced by the person who leaves us. It is felt by those who are left behind. To know that a life was curtailed and a parent was taken from their children due to powers and forces beyond one’s control leaves me with only one saying: ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un’, which translates as: ‘Indeed, to Allah we belong and to Him we shall return’.

How the pendulum keeps swinging in the DEI discourse

We have an extremely talented Relevance Strategist on our team, Eli Keery. I love talking to Eli because he shares a perspective that is always considered and grounded in insight. Over the last four years he has consistently tracked, and written about, the evolution of ‘DEI’ discussions around the world.

In his most recent client trends tracker he shared that, unsurprisingly, DEI-related conversations are most concentrated in the United States, with over 14m mentions in the media between March and May this year. Compare this to India, with the next highest number of mentions at 1.58m. In 2025, Eli and I collaborated with the rest of our team on a report called The Grow Up. We found that between 2020 and 2025 there had been a 28x growth in mentions of DEI in the media as it became one of many conservative arguments from Trump’s administration.

What sat beneath this was an implicit link between DEI and affirmative action, and the counterargument that affirmative action was contrary to meritocracy. That argument often rests on an assumption that a level playing field already existed, where people are hired, promoted and rewarded largely on merit. Much of DEI was designed in response to evidence that access to opportunity had never been evenly distributed, with structural inequalities shaping who was hired, who progressed and who accumulated wealth. How those interventions have been applied varies significantly between countries, yet US culture-war framings travel quickly, stripping away that context and turning a complicated debate about what works into a much simpler argument about whether DEI itself is fair. When Trump and the US cough about DEI, the rest of the world catches a cold.

Continual coughs have turned DEI into a permanent head cold for anything and everything to do with how humans are treated by one another, fairly or unfairly, without the space, time and understanding to know what is effective and what isn’t. Most importantly, it prevents the ability to have a considered and nuanced conversation about what works and what doesn’t.

This is an argument I wrote about in the Financial Times late last year: DEI isn’t dead, it’s just reincarnating. I argued that inclusivity still matters, but that organisations need to move beyond performative measures and connect inclusion to meaningful outcomes - for people, culture and commercial performance.

I have intentionally challenged ‘diversity’ due to its tick-box measurement of representation and ‘equity’ where it’s not linked to actual shareholding and wealth creation. I made this argument because I was tired of seeing haphazard attempts to improve institutions and organisations in ways that had no material benefit to their bottom lines and, in many ways, actually harmed the people they were seeking to help. I argued that performance metrics trump performative measures, though the latter seem all too prevalent.

The climate around DEI in 2025 had changed markedly since our previous report, Diversity & Confusion, which we released in 2023.

We found that the communities who feel excluded by conversations at work around DEI were actually those that are often deemed to be the beneficiaries of any sort of affirmative action or corrections in policies. Neurodivergent, Black / Black British, LGBTQIA+, Disabled and Asian / Asian British communities all felt excluded from conversations around DEI and each group also had varying levels of agreement as to whether life chances were determined by their background.

This presents one of the central tensions within DEI. The people and communities these conversations are intended to support can themselves feel excluded from them. At the same time, race, neurodivergence, disability, gender, sexuality, class and upbringing have increasingly been folded into a single DEI narrative, flattening very different experiences of difference, disadvantage and discrimination. In doing so, we risk reducing personal, academic or professional achievement to evidence either for or against DEI, rather than allowing for the complexity of individual experience.

What has also changed since 2023 is the growing perception among some historically dominant groups that efforts to address inequality come at the expense of their own opportunity or status. Whether or not that perception reflects material disadvantage, the sense of lost status has contributed to a wider backlash and a pendulum swing away from DEI. The result is an increasingly polarised conversation in which we are asked to choose whether DEI has worked or failed, rather than having the more useful conversation about what works, what doesn’t, for whom, and why.

How Professor Arday became the fall guy for DEI

In my time working in large American PR agencies, I learnt that companies often struggle with their reputation unless and until there is a face behind them. “A statement by Apple” is less personable than “A statement by CEO Tim Cook”. Having a named spokesperson is a communications strategy to personalise a brand. You can see proof of this recently from M&S, who have turned their Director of Product Development, Kathryn Turner, into a TikTok sensation.

In the same year as our last Diversity & Confusion report, Professor Arday was publicly championed as exceptional talent by the University of Cambridge. This made him a visible name and face of what many Black and brown people worry about: the ‘DEI hire’.

I believe that these claims also made him vulnerable to exceptionalism, with the reporting around his appointment forming a lightning rod. He fell victim to the curse of being ‘the first’ and the token.

In 1977, Rosabeth Moss Kanter examined the experiences of women who were underrepresented in their organisations. The theory of tokenism came from that research, and suggested that individuals whose social category is underrepresented in particular contexts will face negative experiences such as increased visibility and social isolation.

This research gave rise to something we advise our clients on all the time: the individual and the system must work in tandem if inclusion and performance are to deliver well.

From 2022 to 2024 we were seeing a lot of ‘organ rejection’ within organisations. This was, in effect, the high rate of churn, most often amongst Black employees and other people of colour, after the Black Lives Matter-fuelled hiring spree attempted to course-correct workplace compositions under the guise of ‘diversity’.

What we found was that the body of businesses, namely the leadership, culture and environment, hadn’t been primed for new organs in the shape and form of different cultures and backgrounds entering them.

From reading Nathan Cofnas’ Substack, my sense is that there was a great deal of organ rejection happening at Cambridge University in 2023. This Substack post further cemented Professor Arday’s place as the name and face of DEI and in further investigation it appears this came through a calculated and well-funded network that is slowly shifting the Overton Window. 

An institution as prestigious as Cambridge would have struggled to backpedal from such a public appointment, and an appointment that was intrinsically linked with Professor Arday’s race. This was likely dealt with through a combination of guilt and lack of confidence, all sparked by a scorned professor in Nathan Cofnas who wanted to go in hard on an ex-employer who had dismissed him for his racist views. The touchpaper was one person: Nathan. His views conflicted with the prevailing views of students, a young population that in and of itself is more diverse and more open-minded in how they view the world.

I’ve seen this a lot within organisations that are wrestling with their leadership and relevance against the backdrop of a changing economy and changing life chances for young people.

Leadership holds one set of views that are often contested by their younger workforces and younger consumers. In quantitative studies we have seen the division in the UK between those, most often aged 45+, who have achieved success and stability in an economic environment of growth and prosperity, compared to those, most often aged 30 and under, who are navigating a much more fractured society and fractious economy.

The millennials between 30 and 45, now in management and leadership positions, are facing their own crisis where the ladder they were given feels like it has been leant on Humpty Dumpty’s wall. Should he have a fall, we are all going with it, too.

How the media hounded Professor Arday

In the sixteen years that I have worked in or around the communications industry, I’ve seen the decimation of interrogative journalism and the pressures newsrooms have faced to adapt to changing media consumption behaviours.

There’s very little money available to do a good job, and there’s an abundance of hot takes flying around our screens. These factors help to explain why Substack has become so popular as a platform where deeper thought and interrogation can happen.

This is the platform Nathan Cofnas used for his views, and his piece about Professor Arday on July 21st surfaced the extent of plagiarism that took place and detailed how various institutions did or did not respond to it. Similar investigations had been made by mainstream press such as the Guardian, which has since come under fire in liberal circles. 

It was Cofnas’ post, however, that lit a match and was quickly picked up and shared into the mainstream. Once he made it onto Times Radio, the onslaught began. It was perhaps something he hadn’t anticipated, given his continual shares about it going viral on various feeds. All this at a time when newsrooms are naturally quieter due to summer holidays.

188 articles in nine days from the likes of The Times, The Telegraph and The Daily Mail.

Professor Arday was relabelled as a ‘diversity poster body’ and the ‘plagiarism professor’. When a national newspaper runs a paid advert with the headline ‘I was Jason Arday’s student. He was late to class and spouted nonsense’, two things happen.

The first is that it’s hard to ignore it, even as someone not following the story. The second is that if you’re the person in question, it’s impossible to escape it.

The volume and ferociousness explain why he said to Diane Abbott: ‘they’re hounding me to death, and I cannot see a way out’.

In 2024 we launched The Hope Gap, a report exploring the gap between the society we long for and the reality that people are living through today. In our chapter on the media, Eli wrote: ‘Imagine a world where journalists [...] operate with the right checks and balances to tackle stories with the nuance and care they deserve’.

In the media industry we define the hope gap as the widening divide between the public’s desire for trustworthy, balanced and inclusive reporting and the reality of biased, negative and sensationalist coverage.

Many of us live in a place where we don’t want to completely distance ourselves from the news due to fear of falling behind. At the same time, the relentlessness of it makes us question its value and the impact it has on us.

I saw a post this week arguing that this wasn’t the media’s fault. I think what sits at the crux of this is a long-standing distrust of media institutions among communities who have repeatedly seen their identities turned into stories of scandal, threat or controversy. There are commercial incentives within attention-driven media and an outrage economy that reward exactly this kind of coverage. If we look back to how George Michael was treated by The Sun, or how the MailOnline constantly vilifies Muslims, we see firsthand proof of this.

When I think about it, I start to feel sick remembering a time in my career when getting a client on the MailOnline for its reach was seen as a marker of success. It makes me question all of the systems that sit under the media operations. 

How we might learn from this and move forward

When I say ‘how we might learn from this’, there’s a need to define the ‘we’.

If ‘we’ is defined as Black communities and non-white communities, there may be very little new learning. Instead, there is a reminder of invisible but felt powers and structures that have surfaced through this sad affair.

The learning here, as I learnt through David McQueen’s LinkedIn post, is not actually new. Those who have been community building in Black male spaces and Black spaces overall have known the complexity of what Professor Arday felt.

If ‘we’ is defined as institutions and people running organisations, then the answer is markedly different.

With this definition, my suggestion is to actually sit and understand the experiences and fears that individuals face. All too often I see these disregarded in favour of percentages and large sample sizes. The washing machine of research and data gathering goes on a new cycle in the hope that the laundry will smell even better if we’ve run it just one more time. One person’s lived experience is another person’s sample of one. If you’re promoting someone different because you believe in them and they have the skill, understand what toll it will take on them to be the first. 

This is linked to duty of care. When institutions publicly celebrate someone as a trailblazer, particularly when their race, neurodivergence or background becomes part of the story being told about their success, they also need to understand what that visibility can expose them to. In a climate where difference is routinely pulled into culture-war narratives, celebrating a ‘first’ cannot stop at the announcement. Institutions have a responsibility to understand the scrutiny, hostility and dehumanisation that can follow, then consider what support the person behind the symbol may need.

How we move forward is less clear.

As I read Ndu’s post and his mantra to ‘make life better for your children than the life you had’, I think about two things.

The first is how my late father and mother lived by that, and what their legacy has afforded me today. I know that I’ve had to work twice as hard in some arenas to be perceived as just as good. I also know my parents gave me a form of privilege, not just in the thirst for education they ensured I inherited, but also in the upbringing and opportunities I have been afforded.

The second is about what I can do as a leader. While having children is not on the horizon, I have birthed a firm and, with it, taken on a responsibility for the people who choose to be part of it and to work with us. If I am asking institutions to understand the experiences of the people behind the data, the same has to be true at The Unmistakables. It means creating the conditions for people to grow and succeed, while recognising that the experience of doing so will not be the same for everyone. That’s why we decided writing something was important. 

We have proof that inclusion, done well, drives performance - both in employee growth and consumer growth. Performance is a multi-faceted measure, and leadership requires us to pay attention to the human experience behind it and how the individuals and systems work together. Getting wound up in ‘DEI’ is a political distraction and risks losing sight of what matters most today - humans. 

What I hope for under all of this, however, is that Professor Arday’s legacy is remembered not by the headlines that were whipped up around him, but instead by the lives he touched along the way.

May he rest in peace.