Cambridge professor's death after resignation sparking dangerous calls for media censorship, scholar warns

A civil liberties group that advocates for free speech is cautioning against letting concerns over former Cambridge professor Jason Arday's death turn into media censorship.

In an interview with Fox News Digital Thursday, Senior Scholar for Global Expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Sarah McLaughlin detailed how there has been a major push for censorship in the United Kingdom in the wake of Arday's death. 

"And there's a few different avenues this is coming from," she said. "There are some activist groups and nonprofits who are pushing for a government inquiry into the press and into what kind of process media outlets engaged in that led them to producing all this coverage about him and about the allegations, about plagiarism and other things about his life. 

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"But it's also been picked up by a number of politicians who have signed on to petitions about media inquiries."

Last week, the former university professor was found dead at a south London address. Though his death was treated as "unexpected," Metropolitan Police informed BBC News that it was "not believed to be suspicious," leading some to suspect Arday died by his own hand.

This came just days after Arday announced that he would be resigning from the University of Cambridge after the school announced an investigation into his academic qualifications and honorary appointments amid plagiarism accusations. In a statement, he suggested "public scrutiny" of him was a factor in his resignation.

"Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack. While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love," Arday wrote.

After his reported death, some have suggested that the press was partially to blame for Arday's death, and members of the U.K.'s Green Party have pushed for measures to reform "media power" in response.

Arday's resignation was covered extensively in the media, in the U.K., the U.S. and other countries. There were also open questions about his biography, which included claims that critics and media reports alleged ranged from exaggerated to fabricated.

Now, more than 133,000 people as of Friday afternoon have signed a petition from the U.K. nonprofit the Good Law Project, which demands a public inquiry to "ensure a responsible press" after Arday's death. It cited the coverage it felt happened after his resignation "when the reasonable public interest in the story had diminished or evaporated."

"His tragic death did not result from the allegations of plagiarism but from the press coverage," the petition states. "There cannot be any doubt that racism lay at the heart of this story."

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McLaughlin, who covered the topic in an essay for FIRE Thursday, emphasized that while it was "reasonable" to criticize and push back on media for inaccurate reporting, censorship was not the solution.

"The U.K. already does censor quite a lot of speech. So, you know, there's a certain point where people might say, ‘OK, well, we already censor this. What more could we be censoring to stop this from happening again?’ And I think that's really the wrong lesson to learn from this," McLaughlin told Fox News Digital.

"I don't see how that would work at all, if I'm being honest. But also imagine what kind of tool that could be for bad actors who want to silence their critics, who want to silence people talking about bad conduct or even crimes. 

"And, so, I think people just need to remember that there are ways that we can approach this. There are ways we can challenge coverage that we think is wrong, but giving the government power to censor speech, to censure the press, it won't fix this. But it will just create more problems."

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Media critics after Arday's death included controversial author and anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi, who wrote in an essay for The Emancipator last week that the "White-owned, mainstream media" had "lynched" Arday.

"To be a prominent antiracist Black scholar is to know you are a target, almost totally surrounded by resentments. You know that at any point, the attacks can come like a lynch mob. And if you die from all the attacks, the media still calls the attacks on you ‘accusations’ to wash their hands of the blood. Your lynchers announce your death as if they had no role in your lynching," Kendi wrote.

McLaughlin said people are still free to criticize and challenge media with their own freedom of speech.

"The press has rights, and so do their critics. And, so, people who don't like what these outlets have been writing, they can unsubscribe," she said. 

"They can challenge them. If they don't like what media commentators have been saying or writing about Arday, I think they can point it out and say, 'You're wrong, you're being cruel.' That's their right. 

"But I do not think people have thought through what it would look [like] to get the kind of censorship they're asking for."