Grief is a strange thing. You’ll often find yourself in solitude late at night, reading through old text messages, listening to voice notes, and reminiscing about memories you shared with said person. This has been a reality I have faced for the past week.

I had the sincerest pleasure of calling Professor Jason Arday a supervisor, mentor, and most importantly, a friend - a person who brought profound joy and impact to the lives of many through his scholarship, activism, and, more importantly, his clean heart. The media lynching coalesced with the vitriolic racist attacks that sought to undermine him as a “DEI” hire and was a fitting reminder that the “post-racist” utopian world many of us believed in is facile.

As black people, we often hear the intergenerational term lamented by grandparents and parents alike: having to “work twice as hard to get half as far”. I vividly remember Professor Arday telling me of his inbox being flooded with thousands of messages from people across the world celebrating his accomplishments and in awe of his story following his appointment as the youngest black professor in Cambridge history back in 2023.

Ambition led him to secure a chair at the University of Glasgow as a full professor at the age of 35, only two years prior. Alas, ambition can also be a burden. This is said no better than by Professor Arday himself: I always wanted to be a person who flew close to the sun, but sometimes I wonder, did I fly too close? This also serves as a reminder of the virulence of these spaces. The symbolic violence endured by black scholars in the world of academia, where we are subtly reminded of our ceiling, and where the cost of being black and ambitious is a threat.

As a black male in this sector, I recognise that we are gravely underrepresented. It was through meeting people such as Professor Jason Arday, Professor Robert Beckford, and Professor Kehinde Andrews that I envisioned a future version of myself occupying these spaces while staying rooted to where I am from. These professors embodied a commitment to making scholarship accessible beyond the ‘ivory tower’ and to the community.

They attended local events, bridging the gap between these ‘worlds’, and served as beacons of successful black male figures in a realm where we often equate the image of a professor with an old white man with a big grey beard! But beyond the small pun remains some truth.

“Why isn’t my professor black?” - A panel discussion at UCL back in 2014, organised by Dr Nathaniel Tobias Coleman, gathered personal testimonies from students and scholars that demonstrated the dearth of black scholars in the curriculum and in professorships. Highlighted back then, and even following Black Lives Matter to the present, universities have curated more initiatives to bring more black scholars into the sector.

I have benefited from these initiatives, specifically through the University of Glasgow’s James McCune Smith scholarship, which has, so far, supported over 60 black students in undertaking PhDs. This underscores the importance of Professor Arday’s scholarship as someone who took on the onus to raise awareness of structural racism in higher education, the barriers faced by black and minority ethnic scholars, and the hope of belonging in the sector for racialised people.

This is poignantly explored in The Broken Pipeline Report, published in 2019, which Professor Arday co-edited with Paulette Williams, Dr Sukhi Bath, and Dr Chantelle Lewis, and which endeavoured to examine the inequities and racial disparities experienced by black students in the UK academic sector.

At the time of writing, only three per cent of domiciled first-year PhD students were racialised as black. Of the 19,868 funded PhD studentships from 2016-2019, 245, a mere 2.1 per cent, went to black or black-mixed-race students, and only 30 went to black Caribbean students.

It was through reports such as these that the vicissitudes of the structures, cultures, and organisations of universities were called for to help the progression of black students into postgraduate studies.

I want to end by stressing the importance of community. Let the media lynching, the institutional betrayal by the university to provide protection and care that he needed, show how they will pimp us and profit from our stories then treat us like “dash weh” (as my grandmother would say) when we are no longer valuable. Regardless of our institution or subject area, we have a duty of care to black scholars to protect, nourish, and uplift each other.

Now, for those who have read this article with a careful eye, you have seen how I have referred to him as Professor Jason Arday, not Dr Jason Arday or even colloquially as Jason. This is purposeful in honouring the man, his accomplishments, and a fitting way I see his legacy. But I also met him as Professor Jason Arday back in 2022, and that’s how I will remember him. To my bredrin and mentor, sleep well. You fought a good fight.

Montel Gordon is a James McCune Smith PhD scholar at the University of Glasgow researching race and education. He is also a freelance journalist.

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