As a (biracial) black, neurodivergent person, I had to take a few steps back to think about the news of Dr Jason Arday's death before I responded. I'm really trying to be more intentional about how I respond to media online, and I wanted to make sure I'd read enough and had a good think about what all of this meant to me before I tried to add anything of my own to an already huge situation.

However, there are a lot of similarities that I share with Dr Jason Arday. We're both people of colour with black origins. We're both neurodivergent. I strive to become an academic like he did. And from what I could find out about him online, he also taught secondary school-aged students, just like I do. Plus, I often get involved with discussions about EDI/DEI. It's literally my job to talk about it now. So I wanted to just get my own thoughts on the matter out there.

First of all, I want to say that it really is a tragedy. No one – and I mean no one – should be so harassed by the media that they take their own lives. It doesn't matter what they've done. We should be calling people in, giving them space to grow and make mistakes, and holding them accountable. That can't be done when someone is in a state of fight or flight because they literally can't pick up their phones without seeing another article blaming them for making it harder for black people to be seen as legitimate in the academic world.

But at the same time, I want to also acknowledge that Dr Jason Arday clearly lied. I'm not going to stand up for him and say that the backlash against him was only because he was a black man. There are clear inconsistencies in the stories he told about his own life that just don't make sense if he wasn't concocting some tall tales.

Yes, it's quite common for people to have errors in attribution in their theses for PhDs and Master's Degrees. It's not unheard of for people to accidentally misaccredit something or fail to get the right permission for something else. I'm sure we've all been in the place where we heard someone say something, stored it in our brains subconsciously, and then repeated it thinking it was our own idea. So I won't go against the findings of any investigations if they conclude that Dr Jason Arday's referencing and permission issues were accidental. But he did lie about his life, nonetheless.

I do want to say, though, that the media response to him wouldn't have happened if he wasn't a black man. Another Cambridge professor, William O'Reilly, was accused of plagiarism in 2023 and he got nowhere near the same level of press coverage as Dr Jason Arday. In fact, trying to find articles about him now was so difficult! Most of them are paywalled at places like the Financial Times and the Times Higher Education, so it's really difficult to get the full details.

O'Reilly was allowed to stay in post, and no one really spoke about him, save for a few articles. O'Reilly also threatened to sue the student who accused him to make the scandal go away, just like Dr Jason Arday did.

But compare the lukewarm coverage of O'Reilly's plagiarism to the absolute media hounding that Arday got. Why? Because O'Reilly is a white man and Arday was black.

If it turns out that Arday's plagiarism was intentional, then he's pretty much in the same moral boat as William O'Reilly. Yet, Arday is dead while O'Reilly is still a Cambridge professor.

What about the lying in his memoir? Well, I'm not going to try to excuse anything that Arday did. Lying about his upbringing was wrong and he should have been able to have the space to breathe and the mental capacity to answer for why those inconsistencies happened. I wanted to know: why did you lie? What are you going to do to fix that? But now, because the press gleefully picked at the story like greedy vultures, a man is dead and he can't ever make it better. No one can ever make it better.

As a neurodivergent person, I used to lie a lot as a child. In fact, I used to lie a lot all the way until I was about 17 or 18. I'm not sure exactly when I stopped, but it had definitely gotten old for me by the time I was at uni. Why was I a bit of a compulsive liar? Well, I was masking all the time. Masking already felt like lying to me, so I really didn't understand where the line was. To me, I didn't understand the difference between pretending I was coping just fine in the social situations I was in and pretending I'd stood up to myself to people I'd let walk all over me – or pretending I'd got into an argument I hadn't.

This isn't an excuse for Arday. He did something wrong. But he was a vulnerable man who needed our help and support. As a fellow neurodivergent person, I know I need people's help and support. I get in my head so much, and I can spiral.

When it comes to his plagiarism, I do wonder: was he experiencing something similar to me with my childhood lies? Did he also struggle to distinguish between masking and outright lying? Did he get himself caught up in so many lies while being such a high-profile person that he couldn't just reset like I did at uni?

But I'll never know, will I? Because the media harassed him to death.

After watching Brand New Home, my husband and I decided that we wanted to rewatch the whole of the MCU from the very beginning – TV shows and oneshots an all.

To be honest, I remember basically nothing. I think this is about my ADHD (it might not be. I'm not completely sure), but I only really remember plot details well once I've consumed a piece of media four or five times. I can say such interesting things about a text when I first watch or read it, but then it just flies out of my head.

Frankly, it's a good thing that I still love consuming the same content over and over again like I did when I was a kid! Otherwise this would be very tiresome. Although, maybe that's the reason I love rewatching things so much? And it definitely helps with my main job as an English teacher! Reading Hamlet at least once a year really doesn't bother me because I guarantee I will remember something absolutely important that I forgot was even there.

I can promise you I'm going to watch Sinners another six or seven times before you catch me writing anything about it. And I'm on, like, episode 200 of One Piece for the first time right now, and my husband is saying things like 'Do you remember when...'. No Absolutely not. Frankly, I don't even remember the order of when the current straw hats joined the crew! Was Usopp before or after Nami? Who knows?

It's holding me back, to be honest. Mainly because I really want to watch loads of the classic films and TV shows that impact pop culture. But right now, even when I do watch them, it seems like I haven't because I forget so much. I can't connect with people over the content and when I say 'Oh I've seen that' and people try to engage with me, I have this deep paranoia that they'll think I'm lying.

So, being at teacher at a film school, I just can't keep up. Watching The Gladiator another four times before engaging with it means that I don't have the time to rewatch E.T or watch Jurassic Park for the first time. And I really, really want to be able to connect with students on the media they love. Discussions in the staff room would be much easier, too.

When I was young – before I even considered ADHD a possibility, let alone got diagnosed with it – I used to worry about the fact that I didn't have a good memory. The people in the books I read used to be able to give detailed descriptions of people who grabbed their purse or something to the police, enough to get a whole police sketch done! I wonder: if I ever need to do something like that, will people think I'm just lying because I can't even remember what I had for breakfast? I wonder if this is the reason why my memories before age 11 are so hazy...

The funny thing is that I remember random facts very well. Go figure.

But if there's anyone here who's found my ramblings interesting, wish me luck on my MCU marathon! It might take a while! Maybe I'll post about it here. For posterity (except the posterity in this case is just me when I've forgotten I rewatched them in the first place).