When Dr. Jason Arday was appointed at Cambridge in 2023, the University celebrated him. He was thirty-seven, a tenured Professor of the Sociology of Education, the youngest Black person to hold a chair there in the institution’s history. Cambridge, ever eager to promote itself as a bastion of progress in a modern, multicultural world, celebrated Arday’s appointment. Of course, the celebrations also functioned as a sly marketing and recruitment tool. Despite the initial outpouring of excitement, Cambridge students and alumni of color could have predicted what came next.
Within three years, reactionary forces within the University—in coalition with the British media—conspired to hound him out. On August 5, 2026, Arday resigned from his position, despite being found to have not committed the plagiarism of which he was accused. On August 14, he was found unresponsive in his flat in Battersea. He was forty-one. His family said the campaign of sustained abuse had become too much for him to bear.
The instigator of that campaign was Nathan Cofnas, a research fellow in the Faculty of Philosophy. In February 2024, he published a blog post claiming that in a true meritocracy, Black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” He specified that Harvard, if it hired on merit, would have close to zero Black professors. Fifty-eight students filed formal complaints, stating that his work was “the logic of a eugenicist”. The University took no disciplinary action. Prominent academics including Steven Pinker and Peter Singer opposed the investigations on free-speech grounds. And when Emmanuel College terminated Cofnas’s research associate status for rejecting the college’s diversity mission, a narrower charge than the racism itself, fourteen academics, five of them from Cambridge, wrote a letter to The Times calling on Emmanuel to reinstate Cofnas, claiming there was “nothing to investigate.” In an interview with conservative media personality Rob Montz, posted to YouTube on the day Arday died, Cofnas admitted that the campaign against Arday had always been about Arday’s “exalted position”; that plagiarism, which he noted is common in academia, was the pretext “to retaliate” (Montz’s words, encouraging Cofnas). Cofnas went on to say “this is what happens when you don’t give Cofnas a job”, then fantasized about one day heading a department of race science at Harvard “after the [race] revolution”.
According to NewsCord, a UK media watchdog, the British media published 249 articles hounding Arday in just twenty-two days. By comparison, there has been almost no scrutiny of white Cambridge academics found to have actually committed plagiarism. Dr. William O’Reilly, Associate Professor of Early Modern History, had a complaint upheld after copying thousands of words from a student’s essays. He kept his job. Dr. Esther-Miriam Wagner, Executive Director of the Woolf Institute at the University, appropriated a mentee’s original ideas on a Judaeo-Arabic text without acknowledgment. She kept her position. Dr. Nicola Morrison, a senior lecturer, published unattributed material from an undergraduate’s work. Cambridge kept her in post. No newspaper put any of their faces on the front page or smeared their names on social media.
Cambridge may have feted Arday and basked in the praise of appointing the youngest Black professor in its history, but like so many Black professors subjected to unequal standards and scrutiny, he was never safe. When Cofnas weaponized his anti-Black racism and British media’s lack of scruples towards Arday, the University capitulated, abandoning its initial support for Arday. Cambridge reversed its initial defense, opened an investigation into its hiring practices–casting doubt upon Arday’s reputation despite being cleared of plagiarism by his awarding institution–and deleted webpages referencing his work. So, why did abhorrently racist and imperialist scholars like Nathan Cofnas have support within the University, in the first place?
The University likes to present itself as an institution of enlightenment. It produces glossy reports about its abolitionist heritage: Wilberforce, Clarkson, the moral arc. Its facade presents progress and multiculturalism. But its foundations are made of accumulation, built by racial capitalism.
As Destin Jenkins and Justin Leroy write in Histories of Racial Capitalism, capital does not accumulate “without previously existing relations of racial inequality”, relations that mark populations, categorized by race, as eligible for profitable dispossession. Cambridge’s own Legacies of Enslavement inquiry, published in 2022, found that colleges including Corpus Christi, Gonville & Caius, Jesus, King’s, and Pembroke directly purchased shares in the South Sea Company between 1713 and 1740, the years that company held exclusive rights to traffic enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonial Americas. The University received bequests from donors invested in the Royal African Company, which from the 1660s through 1731 played a central role in the Atlantic slave trade, as well as the East India Company, which transported enslaved people from Mozambique and Madagascar. The inquiry’s own language is precise: this financial involvement “both helped to facilitate the slave trade and brought very significant financial benefits to Cambridge.”
The Fitzwilliam Museum, among the University’s most prestigious institutions, was founded on money inherited from a governor of the South Sea Company. Viscount Fitzwilliam’s grandfather, Matthew Decker, was a director of both the Royal African Company and the East India Company. The galleries, the paintings inside them, all of it was purchased with the profits of trafficking human beings. Jesus College, where Dr. Arday was a fellow, returned a looted Benin bronze to the Court of Benin in 2021. The memorial to Tobias Rustat, a major investor in the Royal African Company, still hangs on the chapel wall.
Cambridge did more than profit from the slave trade. It supplied the intellectual infrastructure that sustained it. Thomas Thompson of Christ’s College argued in 1772 that slavery had “rescued” Africans from the deprivations of their homelands. Stephen Fuller, a Fellow of Trinity College, served as Jamaica’s colonial agent in Britain for thirty years, from 1764 to 1794, leading the pro-slavery lobby from within the University. He was supported by a network of Cambridge-educated parliamentarians: Sir Charles Davers of Trinity, Sir William Young of Clare, and Brownlow Cust of Corpus Christi. A statue of William Pitt the Younger, who served as Member of Parliament for the University, stands at Cambridge with no mention of his efforts to stall abolition or to restore slavery in Haiti after the revolution. Cambridge was a pillar of the slave economy, educating enslavers’ sons, investing their capital, producing the scholarship that justified the trade, building its galleries with the returns.
Trinity College also produced Arthur James Balfour, alumnus, Conservative Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, who authored the Balfour Declaration of 1917 while serving as Foreign Secretary. The declaration promised British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” in a territory where the majority of the indigenous population was Palestinian Arab. A sixty-seven-word letter addressed to Lord Rothschild, it initiated the dispossession of an entire people, a process that would culminate, in 1948, in the Nakba.
Balfour’s views on race were explicit. In the House of Commons in 1906, speaking in support of the disenfranchisement of Black South Africans, he said: “We have to face the facts. Men are not born equal, the white and black races are not born with equal capacities: they are born with different capacities which education cannot and will not change.” In 2024, from the same university, Nathan Cofnas wrote that Black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” under a system that selected for merit, that hiring on ability alone would bring the number of Black professors at Harvard to “close to zero per cent.” He called this position “race realism” (a thinly veiled circumvention of “white supremacist”), an echo of Balfour in 1906. A portrait of Balfour hung in Trinity College until March 2024, when a Palestine Action activist slashed it with a knife. One year later, Cambridge’s endowment managers would purchase shares in Palantir, the surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel, which provides AI targeting systems to the Israeli military. Achille Mbembe writes in Necropolitics that sovereignty, in its ultimate expression, resides in the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. He calls the colony and the plantation the foundational sites of this power, spaces where the instrumentalization of human existence becomes the central project, where certain populations are rendered disposable so that wealth can be extracted from their subjugation.
Cambridge has operated at every stage of this industrialized process, investing in the companies that trafficked human beings, producing the academics who argued those human beings were less than human, educating the statesmen who claimed that white and Black people were born with unequal capacities, then authoring the dispossession of Palestine. Today, the University holds shares in the companies whose algorithms generate kill lists and build weapons for the Israeli military, all while still harboring academics whose careers are built on the racialized dehumanization of others. Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice announced the inquiry into Arday’s appointment in early August, three weeks after her institution confirmed in a July 14 trustee meeting that it would maintain £85 million in defense investments, including its newly purchased Palantir shares. Cambridge protected its financial portfolio, but not its star Black academic.
Cambridge has one of the largest endowment funds of any European university: £5 billion as of May 2026. Approximately £85 million is invested in defense companies. According to filings reported by The Sunday Times, endowment managers bought £800,000 in Palantir shares in the last quarter of 2025, along with £900,000 in GE Aerospace, which manufactures engines for fighter jets used by the Israeli military. Palantir entered a “strategic partnership” with Israel’s Ministry of Defense in January 2024, selling the ministry an AI platform that uses classified intelligence reports to generate targeting decisions. An investigation by The Nation linked Palantir’s technology to the Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy systems, AI platforms that make life-and-death determinations about which Palestinians to strike. UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese found reasonable grounds to believe Palantir supplies predictive policing technology and “core defence infrastructure” powering those systems. Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, has said publicly that the company’s “weapons software is in every combat situation I’m aware of.” Peter Thiel, asked in July 2024 about the ethics of the IDF’s use of Lavender AI, replied: “My bias is to defer to Israel.”
Cambridge has not divested. In July 2026, the University’s governing council refused to authorize a formal motion, submitted by 155 academics, demanding full divestment from arms manufacturers supplying the Israeli military. Mark Lewisohn, chairman of the endowment trustee body, said in a transcript published in the Cambridge Reporter that the decision had been taken in part because the conventional arms trade would remain profitable. “As more investment in defence is mandated by governments around the world,” he said, “the proportion of global market capitalisation represented by defence is likely to further increase.”
According to the University’s own Legacies of Enslavement report, Cambridge colleges purchased South Sea Company shares “in the pursuit of capital projects”, King’s College built the Gibbs Building with the returns. Lewisohn’s rationale would have been familiar to any eighteenth-century bursar buying into the slave trade to fund a new building at King’s.
The far right, fueled by tech oligarchs, has been deepening its reach into Cambridge, further tainting an already racialized atmosphere. A six-month investigation by Byline Times, published in August 2026, revealed that Peter Thiel made an anonymous donation to Cambridge University through James Orr, an Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion in the Faculty of Divinity, in late 2018, just as Orr was being considered for his academic position. University documents confirmed that the Palantir co-founder’s five-figure donation was routed through Cambridge in America, a US tax-exempt fundraising body. An internal audit by Deloitte found “weaknesses” in “internal control” that were putting university objectives “at risk.” Orr has since been appointed head of policy at Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s party. He told the Telegraph that his Cambridge position is central to his political project: he has met “hundreds” of Cambridge students he considers suitable allies, and his job at Reform is to work out how they can be “recruited into the party at scale.” His sprawling Cambridge compound, which he has described as a “right-wing Mecca” and a “Conservative Kibbutz,” regularly houses postgraduate students, a practice fellow academics have called “deeply unusual and unacceptable,” and which appears to breach the university’s own safeguarding policies, adopted in July 2024. The guest list at Orr’s compound is a registry of the international hard right. Thiel has visited, along with JD Vance, who has described Orr as his “British Sherpa.” Jordan Peterson finished his 2024 book there. Douglas Murray is a regular guest. Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, was invited by Orr to address Cambridge staff and students. Rod Dreher, funded by a Budapest think tank sponsored by Viktor Orbán’s government, has been a repeat resident. Thiel, who spent $10 million on JD Vance’s Senate campaign, has bankrolled key thinkers in the so-called Dark Enlightenment, a movement that dallies with eugenic pseudoscience, calls for the replacement of democratic governance with autocratic rule, and questions whether “democracy is compatible with freedom.” His Palantir Technologies is named after the all-seeing stones in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. At a dinner following his January 2026 “Antichrist Lectures” at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, hosted by Orr, Thiel reportedly told guests that Saruman and Sauron, the dark lords who use the seeing stones to dominate Middle-earth, are “deeply misunderstood.” The university, when contacted by Byline Times about safeguarding failures, conflicts of interest, and foreign influence, forwarded the journalists’ confidential questions directly to Orr’s lawyers. It is this broader, capitalized indifference towards the harm that may be caused to Black and brown students that ultimately led to Dr. Arday’s death.
Since the 1660s, when its benefactors first invested in the Royal African Company, Cambridge has funded itself through industries that profit from the subjugation of Black and brown life. Cambridge invested in the South Sea Company, which held the Asiento, the exclusive right to supply enslaved Africans to the Spanish colonies. The returns built the Fitzwilliam Museum, endowed professorships, funded the galleries where generations of students were taught to see themselves as inheritors of civilization. Pro-slavery academics like Stephen Fuller of Trinity College ran the colonial lobby from within the University’s walls. A century later, Arthur Balfour, also of Trinity, authored the dispossession of Palestine while declaring that the white and Black races were born with unequal capacities that education could never change.
Today the University invests £85 million in defense companies, holds Palantir shares bought with endowment money, welcomes Peter Thiel to deliver private lectures, allows its campus to be used as a recruitment pipeline for the far right, harbors a self-described “race realist” who argued for the elimination of Black professors from elite universities, dismisses fifty-eight complaints against him, then subjects the youngest Black professor in eight centuries to a level of public destruction it has never directed at a white colleague. Mbembe describes sovereignty as the power to determine who may live and who must die, certain populations reduced to disposability so that wealth can be extracted from their subjugation. Cambridge’s relationship to this framework is structural. For centuries, the University has generated wealth from systems that require the subjugation of Black and brown life: the slave trade, colonial extraction, the defense industry, the surveillance apparatus that produces Palestinian kill lists. Cambridge has simultaneously produced the intellectual architecture, race science, imperial apologia, civilizational hierarchy, that makes this subjugation seem rational. This racism, which manifests as racial capitalism and in the everyday as microaggressions (or outright aggressions), is Cambridge’s animating logic. It is how the University has operated, what it has invested in and profited from, and who it has chosen to protect at the expense of whom, for eight hundred years. Mbembe observes that necropolitical systems do not require individual malice to function. They require institutions. Cambridge has exercised its institutional power within empire for eight centuries: through the slave trade, through colonial dispossession, and through the defense contracts funding its endowment today. In all of its years of existence, the institution has never had to truly answer for what it is or what it has done.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham, himself a Cambridge graduate, has called what happened to Dr. Arday a tragedy. A tragedy implies a flaw, or an error in judgment. What happened to Jason Arday–institutional, capitalized racism’s full weight bearing down upon one man–was not a flaw, but the primary function of the University, a place that elevated him, used him, then surrendered him to the forces it has cultivated for centuries.