The bizarre tale of Cambridge University professor Jason Arday

August 4, 2026 • 9:30 am

UPDATE: I just saw this, and I’m not surprised:

 

***************************************

This is the most egregious example I know of someone advancing to a high position in academics while constructing an apparently fraudulent past, as well as having committed multiple instances of plagiarism. The amazing thing is that Cambridge University is apparently not investigating sociology professor Jason Arday despite a complete lack of evidence for his unbelievable claims about his past.

That, perhaps, is because Arday is one of the few black professors at Cambridge, and has argued strenuously that his critics, and those who pointed out his plagiarism, are motivated solely by racism. Besides the accusations of using other peoples’ words (and committing other errors) in both his Ph.D. thesis (granted at Liverpool John Moores University) and in published papers, Arday argues that his achievements come in the face of severe disabilities: he is, he says, autistic, did not speak a word until he was 11, and couldn’t read or write until he was 18.  Despite that, he managed to attain his full (tenured) professorship in 2023, at the age of 37 or 38, and was the youngest black professor in the UK. (He had previously had positions at at the University of Rothampton, Durham University and the University of Glasgow.)

The story or Arday, and how his claims unraveled (or now look unbelievable) has been told widely in the press. The fact that the Guardian has the most comprehensive summary of his apparent behavioral fabulism (e.g., apparent lying) is telling, for the Guardian, being very woke, would be the one “mainstream” paper I would expect to defend Arday, or at least to avoid reporting on the issue. To paraphrase Walter Cronkite, “If you’ve lost the Guardian, you’ve lost the progressives.”

You can read three of UK articles below by clicking on the headlines. The Guardian and Times of London articles are particularly informative.

From the Guardian (photo by Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian)

Interview with the Times of London  (archived here)

From the Spectator:

I just found a NYT article here.

Here, in bold caps are the areas in which Arday has made dubious claims or committed apparently unethical acts:

AUTISM AND LATE DEVELOPMENT: I’ve mentioned these claims above, and, as far as I know,there is no evidence presented for any of them. Surely if he didn’t speak until age 11 and did not become literate until 18, there would be some evidence or testimony to that effect. Wikipedia says he got “his undergraduate degree in education studies with physical education at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree validated by the University of Surrey in 2008.”) In other words, he got his undergraduate degree five years after he became literate, which means that he began university only two years after becoming literate.

PLAGIARISM: Initially the instances of Arday’s accused plagiarism were turned up by two people who have reputations for “race realism” (whatever that is), but since then other people have examined the evidence.  Here’s a small part of it.  This is the report from Grok when I asked it to give examples of Arday’s purported plagiarism. Grok gave references, but I’ve left them out.

PhD Thesis (2015, Liverpool John Moores University) Titled “An exploration of peer-monitoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research,” this is the most prominently cited case. Analyses (including by Cofnas using plagiarism detection software like Copyleaks, and by The Telegraph) identified extensive textual overlap with the 2009 PhD thesis of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers (Brunel University), on a closely related topic of reflective practice and student teachers in action research.

  • Reports cite more than 100 passages (or in later analyses, around 180–188 sentences) that are identical or nearly identical, often with minimal editing (sometimes retaining copy-editing errors from the source). Zwozdiak-Myers is cited about 17 times in Arday’s thesis and appears in the bibliography, but the overlapping passages frequently lack quotation marks or clear in-text attribution for the specific wording.
  • Additional overlaps were noted with other sources, including a 2013 paper by April G. Douglass, Dennie L. Smith, and Lana J. Smith; a 2007 paper by Semiyu Adejare Aderibigbe, Laura Colucci-Gray, and Donald Gray; and works by Muhammad Athar Hussain et al. (2011) and Peter Kahn et al. (2008).

Critics (including Harris and biochemist David Sanders, who reviewed related evidence) described this as a pattern of close paraphrasing or near-verbatim copying beyond isolated passages. LJMU and Cambridge stated investigations cleared him on this point.

2018 Paper in Social Sciences “Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?” (claiming focus groups with 32 minority students). A 2023 correction was issued to add citations and clarify where ideas were adapted from prior research (particularly Memon et al. 2016 in BMJ Open, on mental health services in Black and minority communities).

  • Accusations include substantial unattributed textual and structural overlap with Memon et al., plus interview quotes presented as from Arday’s own subjects that closely matched (or appeared patched from) those in the earlier paper. The correction notice focused on citations, but Retraction Watch reported additional undisclosed post-publication changes: alterations or removal of multiple quotes (e.g., 12 of 31 reworded/trimmed, 6 cut), removal of claims about using NVivo software for iterative coding and independent verification by a second researcher (replaced with simpler “review and reflection”), and participant numbering inconsistencies.
  • Harris and others flagged “puzzling similarities” in 2023, leading to the correction.

Other Papers: Cofnas and others examined additional publications from Arday’s listed works and reported issues in several:

  • A paper in Educational Philosophy and Theory (around 2020/2021, “Attempting to Break the Chain…”) was corrected for text overlap with the Memon paper and Arday’s own prior work (citations added in methodology).
  • 2018 paper in Whiteness and Education (“Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity…”): Reported overlaps with Nicola Rollock (2012) and Payne Hiraldo (2010).
  • 2022 papers (e.g., in Higher Education and British Journal of Sociology of Education): Minor instances such as sentences matching Wikipedia, reused/altered quotes from prior work, and methodology descriptions closely tracking the Memon-derived approach without full citation.
  • Harris had notified journals of concerns about solo and co-authored articles, resulting in at least two corrections.

Experts like Sanders stated there was “no question that there is extensive plagiarism” based on dossiers of comparisons. Some analyses noted that certain overlaps might not trigger basic software checks focused only on exact matches.

You can see Nathan Cofnas’s initial report with examples here. I’ll reproduce just a few:

From his Ph.D. thesis. Cofnas says:

I ran Arday’s 2015 PhD dissertation through the plagiarism-detection program Copyleaks. It found substantial overlap with previously published work, particularly a dissertation submitted by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers in 2009.

This is clearly not coincidental, nor are there quotation marks to indicate the prose was taken from elsewhere. There are many more examples.  Regardless of Cofnas’s background or motivation, this appears to be plagiarism pure and simple. Cofnas also notes this (I give one example):

Arday appears to borrow from other sources without attribution. I won’t go through all of the examples detected by Copyleaks, but here are two more.

First, he copies and paraphrases from an obscure article by Muhammad Athar Hussain et al. published in the Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education in 2011.

Again, there are others.

Did Arday get punished for this? Apparently not. He attributes the accusations to racism of others determined to destroy him, to not being told what plagiarism consists of, and to ‘inadequate supervision and support” as an undergraduate. From the Times:

Concerns were first raised privately in 2023 (Harris to Arday, Cambridge, and LJMU; also involving Martyn Hammersley). Journals issued corrections; universities said they investigated and found no misconduct (Cambridge noting standard practice of deferring to the PhD-granting institution for thesis issues and describing the public claims as a “vile campaign”). Times Higher Education prepared a story in 2025 but did not publish after legal correspondence from a firm retained by Arday. Cofnas’s 2026 post (prompted in part by internal Cambridge concerns) brought wider attention.

Arday has said errors occurred due to insufficient support given his autism and disabilities, that he supports proper investigations, and that panels concluded the issues were honest/reasonable errors within standards of the time for some overlaps. Supporters have framed the scrutiny as racially or ideologically motivated. Critics argue the scale of unattributed near-verbatim material, quote issues, and pattern across works indicate serious problems with academic integrity, independent of the accusers’ views.

Arday’s defense, taken from a BBC article:

He told the newspaper: “There has been, since I arrived at Cambridge, a very well orchestrated and co-ordinated campaign to unseat me from my position.”

He argued this was “racially motivated” and that he had become a “lightning rod” for criticism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy.

Arday said some errors in his early academic work was because of his autism, as he relied on using mimicry to make sense of information, and that similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academics.

“We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody. I think the cruelty that I’ve experienced and the positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable,” he told the newspaper.

Mimicry? That’s also bizarre. Did nobody ever impart to Arday the problem with copying? Was he completely unaware that this is a no-no in academics?

The Times notes that the Liverpool John Moores panel cleared Arday of plagiarism:

The panel concluded in March that the citation issues were a result of “honest and reasonable error” and also detailed that the text overlap with Zwozdiak-Myers was “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time”.

That’s absurd.

You can find more about the plagiarism at Aymenn’s Monstrous Publications and at Bathetic Fallacy. Even Retraction Watch, while bending over backwards to give Arday a big break, winds up concluding that the investigation should go further, also implying that Arday  should be punished if he committed plagiarism.

There’s no doubt that these allegations were made because of political and ideological reasons. There’s no coincidence that they initially were made public by a long-time critic of both the school and DEI broadly. There’s also no coincidence that the story has been largely carried by publications that share those ideologies.

But the coverage in Retraction Watch, the increasing number of academics expressing concerns and the evidence itself indicate, to me, that this shouldn’t just be dismissed. It needs a public, transparent investigation.

While I understand Cambridge’s reluctance to investigate a dissertation that was submitted elsewhere, Arday was hired on the basis of those credentials. If they are dubious, the school should want to know. Similarly, Liverpool John Moores University should want to know if their PhD was granted on false pretenses. If they have performed a thorough investigation and it does clear Arday, then releasing details would only help both him and the school.

PHYSICAL FEATS:

Arday claims that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, falling on the 20th marathon and sustaining a hairline fracture in his fibula. The Guardian asking doctors, deems this nearly impossible, but Arday says his finished with “his right leg swelling to twice its normal size.”  This may include his claim that he ran 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in six days.

CHARITY WORK:

Arday says that he raised 5 -5.5 million pounds for charity over 20 years.  Challenged on this, he explained that this was not personal fundraising, but as part of a larger group,whose identity he cannot divulge because of nondisclosure agreements.  There is thus no evidence about this, either.

PERSONAL THREATS:

Arday claims a history of threats, and though I don’t doubt that some of them are real, he makes wild claims that have not been substantiated. From the Guardian:

In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.

The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.

The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.

He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.

Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.

In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.

When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.

When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.

Again, there is no evidence to substantiate Arday’s claims. We see a pattern of apparent fabulism.

APPEARANCE ON “SEVEN UP!”:

Arday claims that he was in the well-known BBC documentary series Seven Up!, which tracked a group of children born around 1957 over many years. This could not be true because Arday was born in 1985.  The Daily Fail of August 3 (here and see reference below) notes that Arday has since backtracked:

Last night Professor Arday said that when he talked of ‘Seven Up’, he didn’t mean ‘Seven Up’ the famous TV series, which followed children at seven-year intervals in the format he described. He says that in fact he was referring to ‘a local community and parent-led initiative developed around the Ubuntu principle that “it takes a village to raise a child”.

A tweet about it:

Two things struck me about all this. First is the eagerness of both Cambridge and his Liverpool unis to exculpate Arday despite what seems to be arrant plagiarism. This surely has to have something to do with Arday’s ethnicity as well as his claimed learning disability, which would appear to make him a double victim.  And he leans heavily on the victim trope, arguing that the accusations are motivated by his blackness and a desire to bring him down.  Perhaps some of that inheres in this fracas, but as the size of this scandal became apparent, as well as the failure of universities to do anything about it, lots of reputable people have become involved. Some black people have claimed that if Arday’s missteps are excused, it will diminish the real accomplishment of black British scholars.

Second, as far as I can see, there’s a complete absence of evidence for any of Arday’s claims, whether they be about his disabilities, his marathons, his charity donations, the threats he claims he received, and his appearance on television. And there’s simply no credible accusation for his plagiarism. We’ll have to hang on and see if Cambridge does anything about this.

Here’s a lecture by Arday: “I know what I know: The story of Graceland”. I’ve just found it and have listened only to the beginning. I can see that Arday’s genial demeanor could make people less willing to come down hard on his missteps and misstatements. In the short bit of the lecture I heard he’s very critical of Paul Simon, accusing him of racism and taking credit for other people’s music. As far as I know, none of that is true, either.

h/t: Luana

74 thoughts on “The bizarre tale of Cambridge University professor Jason Arday”

  1. Wheel of Power and Privilege
    By Sylvia Duckworth (This might or might not click right to right away):

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364109273/figure/fig1/AS:11431281096429080@1668150707915/Wheel-of-Power-Privilege-and-Marginalization-by-Sylvia-Duckworth-Used-by-permission.png

    Alternative :

    https://ccrweb.ca/en/anti-oppression

    It’s all so simple.

    (Apparently this was published on Social Media in 2020 – I’m currently tracking down a bona fide paper, but it seems they all – and there are a lot – simply cite Duckworth’s social media – e.g. “@sylviaduckworth”)

    Reply

  2. “Two things struck me about all this. First is the eagerness of both Cambridge and his Liverpool unis to exculpate Arday despite what seems to be arrant plagiarism.”

    It may be possible that many departments and perhaps entire disciplines in academia have little interest in doing rigorous and original research. This explains the lack of action on the plagiarism charges…all of this paper writing and research and what-not is ancillary to the real reasons why Jason is there. Why bother the nice bloke? He is there to be a) a person of color and b) to espouse the correct political doctrines. And he seems to be doing these two things extremely well.

    As such, many of these universities now function more like exclusive social clubs who will protect their favored members.

    Reply

    1. Your comment about the ‘exclusive social clubs’ hit home with me.
      For decades I worked at what I called a ‘country club’ where Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education exhibited an outright disdain for scholarship. People like Arday made up a slight majority of these colleagues. The scientists occupied a different world and kept a safe distance until the ‘country club’ set got control and immediately wiped the scientists out.

      Individuals like Arday get pushed along through these systems because at every stage in the system they are easily fashioned into other people’s Key Performance Indicators. But the Ardays, even while they are having a great time, often live in a state of fear, aware that they don’t measure up, unaware of why they don’t. Because they have never been subjected to objective assessment, never developed any scholarly expertise, and never been allowed to fail, they are usually rudderless and insecure, which pushes them further into identity politics and tribalism, reinforcing the ‘country club’ values. You and I cannot reach them to help, because they cannot be seen to associate with us — that would make them traitors to their people, their supporters, or their cause.

      It needs to be dealt with soon. Possibly, a good bit of the foundational problem can be dealt with by reintroducing such old-fashioned things as foreign language, and (serious) math and science requirements to every BA and education degree. In NZ, there used to be national exams in which a pass was set as the top 50%, which meant that every year, exactly half the nation’s exam takers failed. Higher ed might do well to return to such things in order to redirect the armies of Ardays to other pursuits, and to make human failure normal again.

      Reply

  3. What strikes me most is the way that Arday in his own defence immediately defaults to attacking the motivations of his accusers. No scholar should do this – though regrettably many do. The truth of a proposition does not rest on the motivation of its proposer. It’s possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, as TS Eliot pointed out. Moreover, even if the claim-maker is a hypocrite this makes absolutely no difference to the truth of their claim. ‘Smoking is bad for you’ is still true even when said by somebody puffing on a big fat cigar.

    If Arday wanted to lend substance to accusations that he is not a genuine intellectual he could hardly have done it better than by trying to sling mud at his critics (though, as I say, he’s unfortunately not alone in using this tactic). The way to defeat a claim is by presenting evidence or arguments against it, not by saying those who make it are nasty people.

    Reply

    1. He’s a lightweight who has no business being a scholar. This is his only means of defense.

      Shame on him and on those who put him in this position.

      Reply

  4. Much of the reporting underplays what is perhaps the most important part of the tale, which is that, even if it were not plagiarised but was entirely by him, there is no substantive record of scholarship here.

    All there is is “autoethnography” (musing on his own “lived experience” and writing it up as a academic paper) along with interviewing a handful of other people and then musing on their “lived experience”. There’s nothing one would actually call scholarship; all there is regular repetition of buzzwords such as “decolonialism” and “intersectionality” and (of course) denouncing absolutely everything as “racist”.

    That a person with that (meagre) body of work got promoted to a professorship at Cambridge is an indictment of the entire field and everyone who lauded his work. Of course that only happened owing to the strong need to get black people on to the faculty, somehow, anyhow, and an unspoken taboo about holding diversity hires to any standard of merit.

    PS: Small correction: “He had previously had positions at … and the University of Glasgow.”

    He did indeed claim to have had a visiting professorship at the University of Glasgow, but Glasgow have put out a statement that he has never held any post there.

    PPS: “two people who have reputations for “race realism” (whatever that is), …”

    Race realism is the utterly heretical notion that there is indeed some biological underpinning to the concept of “race” — in terms of fuzzy-edged (clinal) shared-ancestry clustering — and that it is not entirely and purely a social construct, as all right-thinking people maintain.

    Reply

    1. that’s correct, but he’s in a field with low standards of research, which makes it harder to find fault in his published work (for example by peer reviewers). A lot of the published work in this area, not just of Prof. Arday, is lazy and pretty useless. I wish what Coel said was more widely understood unrelated to this particular case, because such low standards and bullshit research hurt the Humanities.

      Reply

    2. Given the discussion below, and for the avoidance of doubt, my last paragraph contains some slightly sarcastic wording (since ”race realism” is obviously true and it’s ridiculous that the media treats it as outré).

      Reply

    1. I wrote about this, mdap.
      People with unpopular opinions – like atheists, TERFs, and Zionists are used to conflict, we often welcome it. heheh – just ask the boss!

      I felt like you did also re: SB-C but then I thought he’s like David Attenborough, a friendly hero doing great work and suddenly … for the first time… he finds himself in a hole and in trouble for a mistake he made. And he can’t say WHY he did what he did b/c forces above him, the uni admin, the anti-racist mob – would have destroyed him.
      So he doubled down, stupidly.

      Call it overly lawyerly if you will but I give him a pass.
      best regards,

      D.A.
      NYC

      Reply

      1. His activism has eclipsed his scholarship. He is now merely a left-wing bigot without regard for moral integrity who revels in his status as the world’s most famous autism expert.

        He had just admitted to canceling a study about the genetics of autism because the “autistic community” objected. He also stated his “extreme male brain theory” had become unhelpful. I suspect he would not propose it today, and neither would he write a book about autism titled “Zero Degrees of Empathy”.

        Unconcerned about the obvious over-diagnosis of autism, he never questioned whether Arday is actually autistic despite his expertise and colluded with him on at least one charity project. His view is that people who get diagnosed with autism (potentially almost everybody) should not only be entitled to special accommodations and legal protections but own a get-out-of-jail card, entitled to lie and cheat as much as they like (if he ignores Arday’s race, otherwise it’s even worse of course). He had rushed to sign the GoodLaw petition in Arday’s support, and then went so far as to suggest that critics would put him at risk of suicide after the plagiarism accusations became irrefutable. This is inexcusable.

        Reply

  6. “Bizarre” is the right word. Such a mess. Cambridge can’t fire him, as doing so would be deemed racist. So they either need to live with their hiring decision or figure out some other way to deal with him.

    Reply

  7. The list of supposed “achievements” in his biography would have made Walter Mitty blush with embarrassment, while the sea of yellow text tells its own story. But for me, as someone who’s had a career in science, the most depressing aspect is that even if he’d written every word of it himself, it’s still just a vacuous mush of word salad, in no way deserving of the terms “scholarship” or “research”. The quoted passages just seem to be a very long-winded endorsement of endless navel-gazing. “People think about things in different ways, and the way we think about things can affect the way we do things”. Wow, what an amazing insight. I wonder what pearls of wisdom we can expect from him in the future?

    Reply

  8. Whether plagerizered or not, the quotes from his research appear to be a bunch of gobbledegook that say nothing of use or importance to actual teachers in real classrooms. And in that regard, his academic publications fit comfortably with many academically produced educational research results I read over many years.

    Reply

    1. While I don’t doubt that that is true, it is undeniable that he did plagiarize. The posts cited by our host are ample evidence of that fact.

      Reply

  9. Many instances of plagiarism in Education, a discipline with much recycling of material and very weak students, from undergrad to PhD. I’ve made comments how I write without looking at the source words and Education types think I am a witch or genie. They can’t comprehend reading material, thinking about it, synthesizing and then writing using your own words. I mention that copying text and changing every fifth word is plagiarism, stealing the author’s grammar, and Education types (probably Sociology and Anthropology, too) are completely baffled. They simply are not taught paraphrasing vs paraphrasing from Day One and their teachers and supervisors don’t care or also are habitual plagiarists.

    Reply

    1. Precisely. And when Santos’ fabulations reached complete absurdity, Congress rejected him. The Cambridge (and John Moores U.) mandarins do not help the repute of higher education by showing much less concern for their institutions’ integrity than US members of Congress (including many Republicans) did for theirs.

      Reply

    2. More like the Walter Mitty! It rather makes me cross as he is giving autism a bad name. To be this inventive is not typical of autism and I doubt his diagnosis. Simon Baron-Cohen has made himself look silly by sticking up for him, and if thinking Arday a fraud makes me a racist, as SB-C suggests, I shall have to bear the label with no regrets.

      I see he has also claimed to have installed wells for clean drinking water in S. America and Africa as a volunteer for WaterAid. The charity has declared it does not allow volunteers to go abroad on its projects.

      Reply

    3. Yes, I thought of George Santos too. These seem to be individual cases of mental illness in combination with a group “emperor’s new clothes” response.

      I used to ask my students to buy Marc Hauser’s Evolution of Communication tome. But then, after his scandal, I just shared my pdf version with them (it was a lower level GE class with a fairly fixed syllabus so it really didn’t matter much). These guys should be sweeping streets. As for their enablers, jeez, pathetic.

      Reply

  11. Guys, calm down, please. Nothing to see here: Arday did not murder anybody (his own defense). And as to the claim that he raised 5 million pounds for charity (over 20 years), well, he did it together with 100 other people and he signed a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) about it, as we all do all the time (I mean the NDA part).

    One thing I don’t get is how can a guy of his age, 41 years, have received four honorary doctorates? (He completed his Ph.d. thesis in 2015, 11 years ago.)

    Reply

    1. You clearly believe what Arday said, but, unfortunately, it isn’t true. I got this from Grok with references (you can start with this one):

      Yes. Jason Arday repeatedly claimed that he had raised just over £5 million (and later £5.5 million) for charity, primarily through ultramarathon and endurance challenges and related fundraising.

      In a September 2021 TEDxDurhamUniversity talk, he stated: “My lifelong ambition was to raise £1 million for charity before I turned 40. And at 36, I’ve raised just over £5 million to charity.”

      In an October 2024 speech to the National Funeral Directors Association, he said a series of ultramarathons over five years “earned just over £5m for charity,” that he had raised over £3m by age 30 against a £1m-by-40 target, and that “at the moment it’s £5.5m and counting.”

      You don’t know whether there was an NDA, and the group donation wasn’t admitted by Arday until he was called on it.

      As for not being “calm,” I’m not sure what you mean but I do know one thing. There is something to see here: we have a lesson about how mediocrity and unethicality are given a pass if seen in an oppressed academic. Further, I’m sure that you do not get to come over here and tell me that there is nothing to see in something I spent several hours reading about and posting on.

      BTW, unless you don’t have two neurons to rub together, you already know the answer to the question in your final paragraph.

      Perhaps you would like to retract your claim that Arday never said he’d personally raised all that dosh for charity? The man seems to be a compulsive liar, and, since he’s an academic with honorary degrees, yes, there IS something to see here.

      Reply

          1. I was being sarcastic. The guy is a fraud. The plagiarism is proven. The NDA thing is ridiculous. I would not be surprised to learn that he never had an autism diagnosis, etc.

            Cofnas is right: this is a DEI story. It is reminiscent of the paper that Jerry co-authored with a dozen or so scholars, published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas in 2023 (In Defense of Merit In Science).

        3. My own attempts at sarcasm are so subtle and nuanced (muddled and confusing) that at one point I started adding a carroted SARCASM at the end. Of course, a few people missed even that but I was less likely to pour over my unhappy post while rewriting it in my head in order to make the tone more explicit.

          Reply

          1. Sastra one has to be careful of sarcasm or irony on twitter or its easy to get spanked, shadowed or “reduced”.

            Happened to me lately though not seriously.

            The robots don’t have the sense of nuance or humor, obvious satire that say, PCC(E) or my editors do.

            D.A.
            NYC

          2. Assertions that in the past would be obvious as sarcasm are now not necessarily so, e.g. identifying as a blak indigiqueer three-spirit neurodivergent Palestinian or some other such “intersectional” identity. Apparently one can go quite far in academia with such identities these days.

    2. Like David Hughes, I think Peter’s tongue is firmly in cheek. I myself have signed thousands of NDAs as we all do all the time.

      Arday’s self-defence that he didn’t murder anyone is consistent with his critics: nobody is suggesting he go to jail either. Arday seems to take his own scholarship seriously on its own terms (fighting racism, ableism), his critics are just doing the same (rejecting falsehoods and intellectual dishonesty).

      Reply

  12. Mask-off moment from the Guardian interview: “When Arday was asked about his claims by the Guardian, he stood by them. “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” he said.”

    Reply

    1. Even Arday’s “I thought you’d just believe me” makes it hard to tell whether he is a scammer, as some here say, or whether he’s merely a ridiculous dupe.

      Could Arday really be so stupid? — YES.

      Since at least the 1960s we’ve had ‘academic’ disciplines where we are expected to accept what someone says without any doubt, simply because they said it. It’s very normal now in some areas. Arday might not know any other kind of academic values. If all there is is one’s personal truth, then what’s the basis of falsity? And aren’t truth and falsity part of an evil ‘binary’ anyway! [^sarcasm^]

      Do the sophists know that they’re engaged in sophistry? Do the plagiarists know that they’re plagiarising? Some will, some won’t. Still we need to remove all of them from the universities. They don’t belong there.

      Reply

  13. Well, the problem is not Arday. He is just a scammer, and like all successful scammers, he knew exactly how to take advantage of the gullibility of his victims.

    The problem is the university system. We have recently been treated to the sight of ay least two scammers (Gay and Arday) being elevated to elite positions at elite universities (In Gay’s case, I am referring to her professorship, not her presidency.) Any serious, rigorous vetting, of the type that is the purpose of faculty committees) would have caught them out. But there was clearly no such vetting, or it there was, it was swept under the rug. There are two possible reasons for this: laziness and fear. My experience on faculty committees tells me that laziness is not the reason—people take their jobs measuring qualifications seriously—if not, it degrades the value of their own positions. Fear is a very real motivator. At one time, a proven accusation of plagiarism (which was true in both cases) would have been a firing offense. No longer. But an accusation of racism—just the accusation, can cause even a tenured professor to be fired. So the fear is reasonable.

    Perhaps those of us in the sciences can take comfort in the fact that most of this is happening in the humanities and social sciences, believing that in reality-based disciplines, such things are less likely to happen. That, IMO, is a mistake. Just ask Carole Hooven.

    I like to think that this will eventually self-correct. But I think that it will take quite a bit of time. I must say that I am happy to be recently retired—I love university life, and I hate to see it prostituted by ideology.

    Reply

    1. Hi Starwolf.
      My question – and I’ve never worked in a uni system though my Dad was a professor of Eco History – is HOW can plagiarism be ignored?
      Esp with the tech tools to discover it?
      As I have it – there are two mortal sins for academics:
      Plagiarism and diddling one’s students.

      I think you are correct that fear of “racism” witch hunts is the motivating factor for sweeping it under the rug.

      best from hot NY,
      D.A.
      NYC

      Reply

      1. This is nothing new. In the 80s I was a teaching assistant at a major US university (household name). I exposed a student who had plagiarized an entire published paper as his own. According to the rules, he should have received an F for the course and subject to expulsion as well. But he was black, and I was told by higher-ups to pass him because the university had to meet a requirement of passing a specific percentage of black students.

        Reply

      2. The tech tools are relatively new, and academics are slow to adopt changes in academics lifestyle. The cases in point show that it will have to happen.

        I imagine that most of the time it was a matter of assuming that the other guy would catch the plagiarism. If a paper with plagiarized sentences passed journal reviewers and editors, why would a committee be expected to check? Again, with the AI tools now available, this will become another burden on committees, and add another level of bureaucracy.

        The whole plagiarism scandal thing is interesting in that it shows a change in the appeal of academia. These guys are in the system for the prestige that academia offers, and the ease of the lifestyle for those who do not do real work. For the scientists that I know, the appeal is the opposite: curiosity about the subject, the joy of designing experiments to answer specific questions, and one more thing— the “task” of explaining, in one’s own words, new results. Something not formerly known to humanity. Why would one give that up to use someone else’s words? That is the best part of it all, making all the other stuff worthwhile.

        (I am idealizing, of course. But not by much.)

        What new information have Gay and Arday brought into the human knowledge sphere? As far as that goes, what interesting information have they brought us?

        Reply

  15. While I cannot speak to his plagiarism, I’ve worked with students who were awarded doctorates for dissertations that were meaningless. This was done in the mistaken belief that it provided equity.

    Reply

  16. On a tangent, Paul Simon’s song “American Tune” is taken directly from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and Bach copied it from a hymn, which in turn was a copy of a secular song. This music has also been copied by Peter, Paul and Mary, and by Dave Brubeck. Wikipedia tells us “The tune is based on “Mein Gmüth ist mir verwirret” (c. 1564–1612) by German composer Hans Hassler.”

    Reply

    1. And where did the tune “really” come from? Was it originally a Neandertal campfire song stolen by Cro-Magnon man (& woman) which then passed on up the line to Herr Hassler?

      Reply

  17. One of your commenters compares Arday with George Santos, whose life story was mainly invented. A further comparison is Richard Meinertzhagen (1878-1967), who was another serial fabulist. The invented story of his life is even more remarkable than that of Arday.

    Reply

  18. From an article in the New York Times:
    <blockquote[Arday] went on to get his Ph.D. in education, and claims to have had to relearn the contents of his dissertation weeks before defending it after losing his memory following the removal of a benign brain tumor.
    https://archive.ph/X0Emb

    There are just too many unlikely claims in Jason Arday’s story not to conclude that he is a fraud. And the plagiarism has already been proven.

    Reply

    1. Alas, my only claims of note are to have pitched and won all 4 games of the 1994 World Series in 2 days despite having only one arm, to have climbed Mt. Everest backwards, and to have invented Scotch whisky. An embarrassingly paltry resume.

      Reply

      1. A blind man successfully summited Everest using the tactile vision substitution system technology. Perhaps even more amazing than your feat of climbing Everest backwards!

        Reply

  20. The Graceland lecture is hard to watch, though Arday is a decent speaker and seems like a nice guy. He makes a claim that he’s listened to Graceland every single week since he’s been 15 and he’s now 40 (over 1300 times). I’ve probably listened to it at least 100 times, but to listen to it every week for 25 years seems highly unlikely.
    He uses “renumeration” instead of “remuneration” when talking about paying the band (minor point, but he’s supposed to be a scholar).
    He claims that this was the first time that Paul Simon ever worked with black musicians – obviously untrue.
    He comes across like someone who is making up a story to fit a certain cultural appropriation narrative, while leaving enough open-ended so that he doesn’t have to demonstrate any depth of research or make a clear conclusion.

    Could it be that those defending him, especially at the unis where he either works at or credentialed him, are afraid to criticize him because that criticism would (rightly) be pointed right back at them for approving him in the first place?

    Reply

  21. Boy. Lots of comments on this from our high IQ WEIT readership, skewing academic.
    Just want to say: I want to submit an “autoethnography” myself:

    “Australian born Manhattan Loudmouth and – oy veh – the struggles I’ve endured!”

    What a hilarious tale!

    D.A.
    NYC ++

    Reply

  23. As terrible as it is, plagiarism is in academia more common than people think. This guy seems to be a compulsive liar. But there are bigger problems here, some of which have been pointed out already.

    First, This guy is not just a plagiarist, he is a fraud. He made up interviews for his study and didn’t even put the effort to make them up from scratch! He copied from others.

    Also, he is a bully. He (with the help of Cambridge) bullied Time Higher Education into killing their story. Jack Grove, a reporter, was accused of harassment after emailing some questions to Arday.

    He has others who are supporting him. Clearly Cambridge is still supporting him (despite knowing about some of these for 3 years), and they would not do that if didn’t have an incentive. I will leave it at that. The Good Law Project solidarity letter is quite shady with it being edited after people signing it (it has other issues too). Unfortunately, the liberal media is still touting it as evidence of support for Arday.

    This whole saga is a very bad look for academia.

    Reply

  24. From a few hours ago on Tuesday (it’s hard to keep up): “Police investigated journalist who tried to expose Cambridge professor.”

    Four month investigation of the Times Higher Education reporter Jack Grove, whom Arday accused of harassment. No charges but a sobering thought that pointing out plagiarism and bullshit can put critics within arms reach of arrest.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/04/journalist-questioned-by-police-for-investigating-cambridge/
    or
    https://archive.is/hReGR

    Reply

    1. I was just reading a thread on X about that, the police action on it is outrageous, although the incident has triggered several funny memes https://x.com/i/status/2084702455795798493

      It comes at the same time that Stuart Campbell of Wings Over Scotland had police banging on his door at 2.30 am for two funny tweets he shared over 6 months ago. The police didn’t know that the guy making the accusations, Lynsay Watson, has made over 200 police complaints and wasted so much time. He’s the guy who complained about Graham Linehan and had him arrested at Heathrow, which then cost the police £25k and an apology.

      Someone even manipulated the ‘evidence’. The dates on the 2 tweets were past the actionable date, so a later 3rd tweet was added – but that tweet was nothing to do with Stuart, he hadn’t even retweeted it. So you can be accused by the police for something that you didn’t do and that they should have known that you didn’t do.

      You’d think that by now the police would have learned to keep out of this nonsense and concentrate on proper police work. 🙄

      Reply

        1. I missed that. Such lunacy 🤦‍♀️

          I don’t know if you’ve heard of them, but The Good Law Project has set up a petition letter to support Arday. That’s the kiss of death because they rarely win a case 😂. It’s a one man operation by Jolyon Maugham, famous for killing a fox with a bat while wearing his wife’s kimono.

          Investigative journalist Ben Ryan has shown that Maugham edited his letter after 600 people had already signed it. There are several versions in the archive, so it seems he doesn’t know much about the law, or being ethical.

          https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/2084357066144059423

          Reply

  25. A while ago I went to Cambridge to lecture to some potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds but who were considered bright enough to get in – many of them were indeed very impressive. One of the panels had Arday on it who spoke nothing but unintelligible sociological jargon. It was clear that the kids saw through this (and a couple came up to me afterwards to ask what exactly he was talking about) but they were too polite/bashful to call him out in public. On the other hand his comments received lots of enthusiastic nodding from the other academics present!

    Reply

  27. You wrote:

    “And there’s simply no credible accusation for his plagiarism”

    This must have been a mistake, considering the data you presented.

    Reply

  28. The examples of plagiarism brought a strong feeling of déjà vu. In about 2003 I was reading what was then a new book by Vladimir Leskovac called Comprehensive Enzyme Kinetics. My initial reaction to that book was quite favourable, and I thought parts read as if I had written them. After seeing several examples I realized that they read as if I had written them because I had indeed written them. I was quite cross, but after 20 years I wonder if Leskovac’s plagiarism went far beyond the amount of quoting that is acceptable in a textbook. Quite a lot of quoting is OK, of course, if you specify the source, but not if you pretend that it’s your own text, as Leskovac did. Probably a total of less than 2% of the book was plagiarized, and one argue that one should just ignore it. Leskovac’s publisher, Springer, agreed to withdraw the book from sale, but, of course, they didn’t. In the case of Arday, I wonder what proportion of his text was stolen.

    Reply

  29. “[Arday’s] research focuses on race inequalities within the education sector with a specific focus on racial and intersectional inequality in higher education. Areas of his work have also focused on mental health in education, cultural studies, race and politics, education policy and decolonising the curriculum.”

    Source: https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/bicentenary/our-people/professor-jason-arday/professor-jason-arday-profile

    He is officially a professor of sociology of education (now at Cambridge); but, apparently, he is part of the politicized (leftist) cultural-studies movement (the field of “critical theories”), which is known to have a problematic relationship with scientific sociology (to put it diplomatically).

    Reply

  30. Have you noticed that there are no DEI appointees at prestigious universities in the hard sciences, such as mathematics, physics, or biology? They always come from fields such as the sociology of education or critical race and ethnic studies.

    Reply

  32. Indeed, as he said, he has not murdered anyone, so he should be left alone to heal. However, his Ph.D. dissertation should be thoroughly reviewed, and his degree should be revoked if plagiarism is found in it.

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *