José Tiago de Sousa is an economist, a PhD candidate in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies at NOVA FCT—in partnership with the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences—and an ESG strategist. Hailing from Mindelo (Vila do Conde), he holds a Bachelor’s in Economics and a Master’s in Finance from the University of Porto’s Faculty of Economics (FEP). He has twice received the U.Porto Volunteer Award (2017/2018 and 2018/2019) and was honoured with the Active Citizenship Award in its humanitarian category, presented by the then-President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. He founded the association Solidarity Soul, took part in European Solidarity Corps humanitarian missions in Italy, Poland, and Turkey, and contributed to European projects on sustainability and gender equality. He has worked as a Senior Specialist in Social Responsibility and Sustainability at FEP and, among others, as ESG Officer at TLG Global.
Box-Ticking Diversity, Zero Compassion – The ESG Failure That Killed Jason Arday (Opinion by José Tiago Sousa)
I said it before. I wrote it clearly, back when Jason Arday was still alive. I said we needed more compassion and less hatred. I said our ESG frameworks were hollow if they could not protect the very people they claimed to include. I said the “S” in ESG had to mean safety, not just statistics. I said it, and nobody listened.
I wrote the first part of this reflection while Jason was still breathing—battered, resigned, but alive. I hoped, perhaps naively, that the collective shock of his downfall would trigger a reckoning. That was August 2026. Then came the news that stopped me cold. Jason Arday was found dead at his home in Battersea, south London, on the afternoon of Friday, 14 August. He was 41. Police called it unexpected but not suspicious. I call it a systemic murder carried out by a thousand small cuts—each one dressed in the respectable language of academic rigour and institutional neutrality. I said compassion was needed. Nobody listened. And now a gentle man is dead.
Let us talk about Cambridge’s ESG. Because the university prides itself on its social responsibility, its commitment to diversity, its governance frameworks. But let us be honest: the ESG that Cambridge actually practised was a performative illusion, a box-ticking exercise that failed Jason Arday at every single level. The Social pillar? It counted him as a statistic, celebrated his appointment, and then abandoned him when he became inconvenient. The Governance pillar? It hid behind procedures, treating a campaign of racist abuse as a neutral academic dispute. And the Environmental pillar? That was never relevant to him anyway. The university failed not because it lacked policies, but because it lacked heart.
Let me start with the Social pillar. Cambridge was quick to celebrate Jason Arday’s appointment in 2023—the youngest Black professor in its history, a man who had overcome extraordinary odds. The press releases wrote themselves. The photographs were taken. The diversity metrics were updated. But when the attacks began, where was the social support? Where was the pastoral care that should have surrounded him the moment the campaign intensified? His family said he was subjected to a “campaign of sustained abuse” over three years—a bullet in the post, a severed pig’s head delivered to his home, endless investigative articles in national newspapers. Cambridge knew this. And what did they do? They issued a few statements of support, then retreated behind the shield of procedural neutrality. They did not offer him psychological protection. They did not assign him a dedicated welfare officer. They did not monitor his mental health as he visibly crumbled—losing weight, unable to leave the house, telling friends his life had been destroyed. The Social pillar of ESG demands that we care for our human capital. Cambridge treated Jason as a liability rather than a person.
Then there is Governance. This is where the failure is most damning. When Nathan Cofnas—a researcher who openly identifies as a race realist and had already been dismissed from Cambridge—launched his campaign, the university had a duty to assess not just the allegations, but the source. Cofnas had previously stated that in a true meritocracy, Black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”. This is not an academic critic; this is an ideologue on a mission. Good governance requires discernment. It requires asking: who is making these accusations, and what is their intent? Cambridge failed to do this. Instead, it treated the complaints as a neutral technical matter, allowing its own processes to be weaponised for an ideological takedown.
Cambridge initially defended Arday, pointing out that the plagiarism allegations had already been investigated and dismissed by Liverpool John Moores University and the journals in question. Yet as media speculation grew, the university’s support waned. It eventually launched an independent investigation into his appointment and tenure—a move that, whatever its procedural correctness, added to the weight of public suspicion. Arday was left to navigate the storm alone, without institutional shielding. The Governance pillar of ESG is supposed to ensure fairness and protect stakeholders. Cambridge did not protect one of its most vulnerable members. It offered him procedure instead of protection, process instead of pastoral care. That is not governance; that is abandonment dressed in respectability.
And what of the broader failure of institutional imagination? The ESG frameworks we worship are colonial instruments, designed to catalogue and control rather than nurture and include. They demand a purity of performance that historically has served to exclude Black and neurodivergent bodies. Arday’s autism meant he processed information differently—he used mimicry as a tool to understand complex material. Instead of accommodating this difference, the system punished him for it. The standards of precision were applied asymmetrically: when a white academic inflates a biography or commits a citation error, we treat it as a forgivable lapse; when the body is Black and neurodivergent, the same transgression becomes a moral catastrophe. This is not a bug in the system; it is a feature. The university’s gaze is not neutral; it is a mechanism of perpetual surveillance, always anticipating failure, always ready to pounce.
Let me return to compassion, because that is where we have failed most profoundly. I said it before. I said we needed compassion. But compassion cannot be a posthumous sentiment. It must be a living practice, present when people are still breathing, still hoping, still believing that the system will protect them. Jason Arday stopped believing. And he was right. Sir Simon Baron-Cohen spoke to Arday on the morning of his death. Arday told him he felt unable to leave the house. “They’ve destroyed my life,” he said. He was visibly crumbling—losing weight, retreating from the world—and the university offered him nothing. No crisis intervention. No psychological support. No institutional arm wrapping around him and saying: “We have you. You are not alone. You are more than these accusations.” Professor Kehinde Andrews, a friend, described him as “very down” after resigning, “effectively not leaving the house.” This is not institutional failure; it is institutional neglect. And it is enabled by an ESG culture that measures diversity by numbers but refuses to look at the lived experience of the people it includes.
So what must change? We need a governance model that is strict on harm but compassionate on context. We need oversight committees that include neurodiversity experts and minority representatives—people who can assess human context beyond paperwork. We need parallel support mechanisms that do not wait for the final verdict to activate care, because waiting means arriving too late. We need neuro-affirmative protocols that accept mimicry, non-linear thinking, and other autistic ways of processing as valid, not evidence of bad faith. And we need to slow down—to resist the speed of public condemnation that crushes individuals before they can be heard.
But beyond policies, we need a cultural shift. We need to ask ourselves not just “Are we diverse?” but “Are we kind?” Not just “Are we fair?” but “Do we see the human behind the data?” We need to build new benchmarks that value atypical trajectories, that acknowledge the resilience required to simply survive in hostile environments. We need to replace the culture of cancelation and public humiliation with an ethic of restorative dialogue. We need dedicated budgets for the wellbeing of Black and neurodivergent faculty, peer mentorship networks that act as community shields, and statutes that make institutional responsibility legally enforceable in cases of psychological neglect.
Hate kills. It is not a metaphor. The relentless harassment, the absence of institutional protection, and the coldness of bureaucratic procedure created a torment that Jason simply could not bear. His death is not an isolated tragedy; it is a symptom of a system that continues to measure diversity by numbers but refuses to look at the lived experience of the people it includes. Compassion is not a soft cost; it is an impact investment in the sustainability of our collective intellectual future. We need more of it—urgently, desperately, unapologetically. I said compassion was needed. Nobody listened. But maybe now, with Jason Arday gone, we will finally hear. Maybe his death will be the reckoning that his life could not be. Maybe we will recalibrate our hearts, not just our scorecards. Maybe the “S” in ESG will finally mean what it should have always meant: safety, solidarity, and the simple, radical act of seeing the human being in front of us.
Jason dreamed of a world where doors would open for everyone, not just those who fit the mold. The least we can do is honour that dream by becoming the kind of humans he believed we could be. Rest in power, Jason.
