Ohio State Professor Judson L. Jeffries is a regular contributor to The Columbus Dispatch.
Jason Arday's story is a tragic and painful one.
Weeks after being accused of plagiarism, the youngest-ever Black professor to teach at the University of Cambridge in England wasfound dead at his homeon Friday.
From what I have read, trouble for Arday began when Nathan Cofnas, a white professor, seemingly green with envy, resigned from the same university in 2024because of the backlash he received for pejorative comments he made about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
According to Cofnas, in a meritocracy Black people“would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”
This coming from someone who, from the
looks of his vita, has spent the bulk of his brief academic life in the ivory tower, which means he has little real-world experience to speak of.
Admittedly, he is a prolific writer, yet much of his work, influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, lacks any real import and garners little interest outside the circle of academics who are convinced of the correlation between race and cognitive ability.
At any rate, Cofnas, an American with an apparent axe to grind, felt compelled to comb through Arday’s dissertation, where he discovered sentences and perhaps passages that, under the letter of the law, are considered plagiarism.
Suspicions growing at Ohio State
Whether Arday’s work, which I have not read, is a blatant appropriation of other people’s work without attribution is a matter on which I cannot comment. However, what I have noticed over the past few years at my own institution is a preoccupation with plagiarism and academic misconduct, broadly defined. This preoccupation has heightened with the advent of AI.
As a professor who has been in this industry for nearly 30 years, I have never spent my time conducting a witch hunt for students who may or may not have plagiarized or engaged in some form of academic misconduct.
The one occasion on which I encountered misconduct was in the early 2000s at Purdue University, when a student turned in a paper that he did not author. The original paper was so good that I retained a copy of it; that was my proof that academic misconduct had occurred, and it was dealt with accordingly, but not publicly. Back then, a professor had to furnish hard evidence that a student engaged in academic misconduct.
That hasn’t necessarily been my experience here at Ohio State University.
It is not uncommon for students here to be charged with academic misconduct based on a professor’s suspicions. No proof is needed, just a “suspicion,” at which point a student is notified of the charges by letter, no matter how baseless, circumstantial or flimsy, and summoned before a committee to disprove said charges.
Recently, a student was curiously charged with academic misconduct after final grades had already been posted. Weeks after the semester ended, the professor insisted on a meeting with the student.
During the meeting, the professor peppered the student with questions and was convinced that the student cheated because his answers weren’t to the professor’s satisfaction.
Months ago, two students in the same course were summoned before the Committee on Academic Misconduct because, yes, you guessed it, the professor “suspected” they cheated on an exam.
Student A was exonerated after the professor admitted he suspected Student A of cheating largely because he is friends with Student B, whom he was sure had cheated.
In a third case, a student was charged with academic misconduct because that student spent too much time in the restroom. That student was also wearing a hoodie that day and was thought to have a cheat sheet hidden therein.
In sum, students’ lives and those of their parents are being adversely impacted based on professors’ “suspicions.”
Sadly, for Professor Arday, the criticism may have been too much to bear.
That students are being suspended for a semester or a year for academic misconduct in the absence of credible and verifiable evidence that meets the burden of proof is a travesty of justice and something that should be of concern to all of us.
Judson L. Jeffries is a professor of African American and African studies at Ohio State University and is a regular contributor to The Columbus Dispatch.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Same kind of witch hunt that ensnarled Jason Arday tracking Ohio St ate students | Opinion
