Introduction by Croakey: Tens of thousands of people have signed an open letter calling on the United Kingdom Government to commission a public inquiry into media regulation following “the relentless harassment” of Dr Jason Arday, leading up to his death last week.
“There cannot be any doubt that Dr Arday’s tragic death was the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment. A significant element in that harassment was the colour of his skin. Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed,” says the letter, hosted by the Good Law Project.
“There cannot be any doubt that racism lay at the heart of this story,” says the letter.
Arday died shortly after resigning from Cambridge University where, according to journalist Alan Rusbridger, just 75 of the university’s 6,180 academics identify as Black. Apart from Arday, there were just five Black professors, or 0.4 per cent of Cambridge’s rank of professors, while only about 4.6 percent of the student population are Black.
Below, Professor Bronwyn Carlson, a Distinguished Professor and Director of The Macquarie University Global Indigenous Futures Research Centre, investigates “the architecture of the hunt” of Arday and others, and outlines its relevance for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics in Australia.
Bronwyn Carlson writes:
Dr Jason Arday was hunted to death. This is not a claim that any one actor directly caused his death. It is a political judgment about an architecture of racism that converted him into a public target, multiplied scrutiny until it became pursuit and continued after he said he had reached his limit. From the assault on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) surrounding Arday to the exceptional scrutiny directed at Indigenous scholars in Australia, the same racial machinery is visible.
“The hunt” is the organised conversion of a racialised person into a public target. It begins when an individual is selected as proof of a wider political claim, such as the idea that DEI lowers standards.
Websites, journalists, commentators and platforms then accumulate allegations, personal details and suspicions until scrutiny becomes pursuit. No participant needs to direct the entire process. The hunt works through accumulation, with each actor contributing one article, post, question or dossier while denying responsibility for the racial harm produced collectively.
The hunt begins from a racial proposition: that Black and Indigenous achievement is evidence of lowered standards rather than intellectual ability. Its underlying principle is the white supremacist belief that Black and Indigenous people are inherently inferior and therefore cannot legitimately occupy positions of academic authority. The language is softened into “merit”, “standards” and “academic integrity”, but the racial hierarchy remains.
Jason Arday became the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. In July 2026, Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge researcher whose college affiliation had been terminated following controversy over his published views on race and DEI, published allegations of plagiarism in Arday’s work under the title ‘DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge’.
The title disclosed the political project. What might have remained a question about attribution in one scholar’s writing was made into evidence that diversity itself was fraudulent.
Cofnas is a self-described “race realist” who has argued that, under a true meritocracy, Black people would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside sport and entertainment, and that the number of Black professors at Harvard would approach zero. His pursuit of Arday cannot be separated from those beliefs. It gave them a prominent Black academic through whom they could be made politically concrete.
Industrial production of a target
Here was a Black professor who, within Cofnas’s racial worldview, should scarcely exist. Discrediting him could therefore be represented as the restoration of standards rather than the political targeting of Black advancement.
The hunt expanded with every new detail. Allegations about plagiarism became questions about Arday’s childhood, disability, literacy, sporting claims, charity work, friendships and family. His entire life became searchable terrain.
He resigned on 5 August, saying that the relentless accusations and public commentary had taken a profound toll and that he had reached the limits of what anyone should endure. The coverage accelerated.
By Newscord’s account, 249 distinct articles about Arday appeared across 15 national outlets in the 22 days from 24 July to the evening of 14 August. The count excluded passing mentions and much broadcast and social media material. It is therefore a minimum rather than a complete measure of the coverage.
This volume was not simply reporting. It was the industrial production of a target. One article raises an allegation. The next converts allegation into character. Another excavates childhood. A columnist turns the person into an argument against DEI. A video condenses that argument into ridicule. Recommendation systems deliver it to audiences already primed to read Black success as evidence of institutional decline.
By the hundredth article, the hunt has become self-justifying where Arday is news because the media has made every part of him news.
Arday was found dead at 41, days after resigning. Police treated his death as unexpected but not suspicious. We should not invent a medical or legal cause.
The political warning lies in what can already be measured. A Black academic became a national spectacle, said he had reached the limit of what anyone should endure, and was met with 188 more articles in nine days.
In a Channel 4 News interview, his friend Dr Kehinde Andrews said Arday “couldn’t see a way out” and described what happened as a “public lynching”. The phrase names the collective violence of the hunt where no single article carries the whole force, but the accumulation can become inescapable.
Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as the “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death”. The significance of this formulation is that racism need not be the immediate cause of a death to be implicated in how lives are shortened.
Racism works by organising unequal exposure to scrutiny, hostility, institutional abandonment, public accusation and sustained media pressure, while distributing protection and care unevenly. These conditions can produce physical, psychological and emotional harms that increase vulnerability to exhaustion, despair, self-destruction and premature death.
The critical question, then, is not whether racism can be isolated as the cause of a particular death, but how racialised structures produce conditions in which some groups are made more vulnerable to harm than others.
The architecture also includes the institutions that manufacture racialised visibility. Dr Paul Tiyambe Zeleza argues that Arday was “eagerly elevated as a symbol, ruthlessly scrutinised as an anomaly, and callously discarded as a liability”.
Cambridge had presented his appointment as evidence of institutional transformation, making his biography publicly valuable before his alleged failures made him institutionally dangerous. The same racialised visibility that allowed Arday to represent progress enabled critics to turn him into evidence that DEI had displaced merit.
The institution and the anti-DEI campaign occupied opposing political positions, but both converted a Black academic into a symbol larger than himself. Once the symbol became a liability, institutional celebration did not become protection.
Arday’s death reveals the stakes of the architecture where a racialised academic is selected as evidence against DEI, made nationally searchable and subjected to an accumulating media pursuit that no single participant accepts responsibility.
Australian situation
The warning for Indigenous people is that Australia already possesses this machinery.
In April 2024, a non-Indigenous academic published a report comparing 118 senior Aboriginal academics with 118 non-Indigenous academics. The report argued that diversity and inclusion targets may influence appointment and promotion decisions, producing what it called a culture of “low expectations” and a “two-tier system” of academic standards. By treating Indigenous academics as a racial cohort whose qualifications and productivity require special audit, the report made their collective competence available for public suspicion.
The media then converted the audit into anti-DEI politics. The Australian’s headline, “Diversity targets ‘cut uni expertise’”, condensed a contested comparison of academic careers into a public verdict about Indigenous academic worth. A press release and social-media circulation extended the frame.
Here the architecture becomes visible: Indigenous academics are selected as evidence that inclusion has displaced merit, and repetition turns that allegation into political common sense. Anti-DEI does not remove race from the story. It provides the vocabulary through which racial suspicion circulates as a defence of standards.
Arday’s case shows the possible endpoint of this architecture. It begins by converting a racialised academic into a political exhibit, then gains force through repetition across news, commentary and social media until suspicion attaches to the person’s entire life.
In my own experience, this suspicion returns in student comments claiming that Indigenous academics do not possess “real” qualifications, that their doctorates were awarded without a thesis, or that an Indigenous scholar’s PhD is somehow worth less.
These claims do not emerge in a vacuum. They show how anti-DEI discourse travels from reports and headlines into the everyday life of the university, where Indigenous qualifications become presumptively inferior and Indigenous presence must continually prove itself.
The fear of being hunted is constitutive of the practice itself. A public hunt disciplines beyond its immediate target by making the consequences of visibility and dissent observable to others. Its power lies not only in what is done to the person pursued, but in the anticipatory fear produced among those watching: the calculation that speaking out may invite similar scrutiny, exposure or punishment.
Self-censorship and withdrawal are therefore not merely after-effects of the hunt. They are mechanisms through which its disciplinary power travels, particularly when institutions mobilise racial identity to make individuals represent entire communities.
As Professor Debbie Bargallie, Professor Alana Lentin and Keiron Turner argue, institutions can celebrate Indigenous leadership as evidence of inclusion while leaving racial hierarchies intact and pressuring Indigenous people to conform to dominant white organisational cultures.
The hunt therefore disciplines both individuals and institutions: it warns Indigenous people about the costs of visibility and warns institutions that meaningful inclusion may attract political punishment.
This is the political function of anti-DEI, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous campaigns. They do not merely remove individuals. They make examples. They warn Black and Indigenous people that achievement will not secure belonging because achievement itself will trigger the search for fraud. They warn institutions that inclusion will be punished. And they restore white authority by making it the final judge of merit, identity and truth.
Dismantle the architecture
Australian institutions must dismantle the architecture before another person becomes its target. Universities must treat coordinated racialised scrutiny as a psychosocial and workplace-safety risk, provide immediate legal, cultural and mental-health support, and refuse to abandon scholars when controversy threatens institutional reputation.
Editors must ask whether reporting serves a legitimate public interest or merely converts one racialised person into an inexhaustible source of content, and they must assess the cumulative harm produced across outlets rather than defend each article in isolation.
Professional associations must develop enforceable standards for racial harassment, public dossiers and campaigns directed at identifiable academics. Digital platforms must respond to coordinated exposure, threats and racial dehumanisation before amplification becomes violence.
None of this requires suppressing legitimate criticism or questions of academic integrity. It requires institutions to recognise that criticism becomes a hunt when a person is made to represent the alleged failure of an entire race or of inclusion itself.
Universities, professional associations, editors and platforms must recognise cumulative racial harm, refuse the conversion of individual allegations into claims about entire peoples, and intervene before scrutiny becomes pursuit.
The choice is no longer abstract. Jason Arday was made the object of an accumulating media hunt, said that he had reached the limit of what anyone should endure, and died days later. His death does not license an invented medical conclusion. It demands an institutional and political response.
Indigenous academics are already being positioned within the same story of inclusion as lowered standards. If Australian institutions wait until another scholar has been converted into a national target, they will not be able to claim that the danger was unforeseeable. The racial frame, the media pathways and the permissions are already established. What remains is the decision to interrupt them.
Author details
Bronwyn Carlson is a Distinguished Professor at Macquarie University and an internationally recognised scholar in Critical Indigenous Studies. Her research examines Indigenous digital life, data sovereignty, and the social impacts of emerging technologies, with a strong focus on institutional accountability and gendered violence. She is Deputy Director Indigenous at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, where she leads Indigenous research and training initiatives across Australia and the Indo Pacific.
Carlson’s work shapes national policy, supports community led governance, and advances the next generation of Indigenous researchers through mentorship, collaboration, and globally influential scholarship programmes. She has advised government, industry, and community organisations, and her work continues to influence debates on digital governance, safety, and Indigenous futures. She is also the founding and managing editor of the Journal of Global Indigeneity and the Director of The Macquarie University Global Indigenous Futures Research Centre. In 2020 she was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities for her research focused on Indigenous peoples and digital technologies.
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