LONDON - More than 31,000 people, including several MPs, have signed a petition urging UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham to hold a public inquiry into alleged media harassment of the late academic Jason Arday, the organisers said Aug 16.

The petition was launched by the Good Law Project activist group after Arday, who was appointed three years ago as the youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge University, was found dead on Aug 14.

The project had been supporting Arday since he resigned earlier this month from the university and as a fellow of Jesus College after both institutions launched investigations into allegations of plagiarism and fabricating or exaggerating his life story.

“There cannot be any doubt that Dr Arday’s tragic death was the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” the Good Law Project wrote on its website.

“A significant element in that harassment was the colour of his skin,” it said, adding “there cannot be any doubt that racism lay at the heart of this story”.

The allegations against Arday, 41, had received widespread media coverage from the UK press after another academic – self-defined “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024 – said in July he found numerous instances of plagiarism in the professor’s work.

British media and right-wing commentators seized on the row, claiming Arday, who disputed the allegations, had unfairly benefited from diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) policies.

In a letter published when he resigned on Aug 5, Arday said the move was “the only way” to end a “difficult period”, but should not be “mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me”.

Following the shock news of Arday’s death on Aug 14, which police are not treating as suspicious, his family and friends have denounced “a campaign of sustained abuse” since his 2023 appointment.

Other friends have said he was vulnerable, given Arday has written extensively about being diagnosed as autistic as a child, and not speaking until he was 11.

Simon Woolley, Arday’s former mentor and a leading member of staff at Cambridge University, told the BBC on Aug 16 that he and a group of friends had seen him on Aug 10.

Arday “said he felt hounded to death, his words, that he couldn’t see a way out”, Woolley said.

“On that day, we saw a man half his body weight and desperate beyond belief.”

The Good Law Project said “many of the signatories” to its campaign had “warned multiple media outlets privately that their relentless pursuit of Dr Arday risked his suicide”.

A vigil for the late academic is set to be held in London’s Trafalgar Square on the evening of Aug 17.

And a fund-raising campaign to support his family has already raised almost £89,000 (S$154,000). AFP