Orville Taylor | Jason Arday was you and we

Dead at age 41, a phenomenon, an enigma, a story of defying odds, breaking moulds and making history, Jason Arday had done, in his four decades of life, far more than the majority of academics have ever done.

Born of Ghanaian parents, that very fact makes him genetically related to around 60 per cent of Jamaicans. Then, obtaining his PhD at age 30, he was just slightly older than the average British age of around 28 years for candidates who head straight from high school uninterrupted. American doctoral students typically complete their programme around age 31.5 years.

That he had autism is a big deal. It is a condition in which the individual is, to varying degrees, on a spectrum and is socially detached, hence the ‘auto’ in autism.

Ranging from mild indicators, such as social clumsiness or not being able to understand what is inappropriate, to an incapacity to control emotions, autism generally has a significant impact on children’s developmental prospects.

People with autism live in a world that generally does not understand them and, oftentimes, they do not understand it either. Sometimes nature compensates by gifting these individuals with exceptional abilities.

For example, Briton Stephen Wiltshire, a non-verbal child for much of his early years, has the uncanny ability to draw entire panoramic scenes, including whole cities, from a single viewing.

Generally, people with autism may have fewer filters. Thus, a ‘normally functioning’ PhD holder could, in the middle of a speech or conversation by a politician or university administrator, say, “you know that you are lying”, with little concern that some vindictive people will keep it up longer than they can hold their urine, and eventually write epistles against them, even if they are based on lies.

Arday, appointed full professor at the prestigious University of Cambridge and becoming the youngest black professor in the history of the university, personally resonates with me because he was a sociologist. Moreover, unlike most of his senior peers, whose fame expires at the university’s front gate, his renown was not the product of university cartels or men pushing behind him to make him a star. True, he validated his professorship and won it fair and square, by the very rules and procedures that the university established to prevent victimisation and nepotism.

Imagine, Arday was appointed Professor of the Sociology of Education in 2023, only eight years after his doctorate. That is not just history; it is historic, ground-shaking, and achieved by a black man, an outsider, with a body of work linked to advocacy and doing things that actually count. Teaching is great, and research is wonderful. After all, creating new knowledge is what professors should do. Academics should produce a body of work that translates into worthwhile fields of study. More important, if the work not only stimulates students’ intellectual growth but is substantively useful to policymakers and even the average citizen, it is an enviable apotheosis.

You see, Jason Arday was becoming a poster boy for people with and affected by autism. Practical coping strategies, he had lots of them, and his name and facial recognition extended independently of what his university or the entire academic ecosystem felt about him.

His work, but most importantly his ‘livity’, was what instructed two people closely connected to me to try to bring him here for a summit later this year. Moreover, having visited three East African countries with best practices in human development last year, I was totally on board with this major task initiated by these two insightful ladies. Arday was very excited and ready.

His ‘martyrdom’ has robbed the world, but specifically Jamaica, of a major contribution to the understanding of the fastest-growing neurodivergent disorder among black males.

He was whole soul, not half soul, and many in the latter category, whose egos cannot bear the success of someone other than one of their peers, will not just ‘carry belly’. Rather, their grudge and envy encompass the entire alimentary canal, but especially its eponymous end.

Outshining those in the marked category can literally be fatal. Someone decided to try to ‘give him foot’ and started a witch hunt, better described by the substitution of an earlier consonant.

We do not know if Arday died by his own hand, whatever the investigations officially reveal. However, it is well known that people with autism struggle with suicidal thoughts. Depression is a major driver of suicide among average persons, and there is a correlation between persecutory delusions and the taking of one’s life.

Where the persecution and occupational detriment are real and not figments of the victim’s imagination, it is even worse.

Studies, including one published in 2023, the year of his professorship, indicate that adults with autism are up to 25 times more likely to attempt suicide.

Thus, assuming that his death was indeed a suicide, then a reasonable bystander could conclude that those who started the relentless pursuit, digging up the past and revisiting his already accepted success by all the university criteria, must have had some idea that their conduct could have precipitated this terminal result.

For the record, the causal relationship between indecent work, including unfair employment practices and victimisation, on the one hand, and social pathologies, on the other hand, has been my life’s work as an academic, activist, and practitioner.

When the persecution started, with his detractors conspiring to rewrite facts and change his history, my gut feeling was that this could happen.

If this is not bad mind or legally mens rea, then my Akan name is not Kwesi.

And yet, as we express our collective outrage and write platitudes, we should ask in our own lives and workplaces: Can we cast the first stone or pick the log out?

There are many Jason Ardays here. Look into yourselves.

Orville Taylor is senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology at The University of the West Indies, a radio talk-show host, and author of ‘Broken Promises, Hearts and Pockets’. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and tayloronblackline@hotmail.com.