I thought the media fracas about Jason Arday would settle down soon after he died (likely via suicide), but it hasn’t. Now people are busy affixing blame for his behavior, and death, with blame attaching to his fabulism, his plagiarism and obvious lies, the press, and the lack of proper oversight by Arday’s Ph.D. committee and by Cambridge University who hired him.
Because Arday was a black man and the youngest professor of color at Cambridge, and because his story is at once outrageous and tragic, the accusations are flying fast, and coming from the Right, the Left, and the middle. What caused the whole mess? The media? Arday’s own tendency to make up stories? The University of Cambridge? Racists determined to bring him down?
Well, all of these are surely factors in the series of events that led to Arday’s resignation and death, but I won’t even attempt to make a mental pie diagram apportioning the blame. I will say that some motivations surely involved racism, but those are not the same thing as condemning Arday’s hire because it was likely based on his ethnicity and his claimed hardships. Those are objections to DEI, which need not be racist.
And I won’t psychologize here, as it’s not productive. Yes, Arday made up stories, but did he initially or later come to believe that they were true? Who knows? Was philosophger Nathan Cofnas, who initially reported the plagiarism in Arday’s Ph.D thesis, motivated by racism? Cofnas is self-described as a “race realist,” but he was cleared of charges of racism by a disciplinary committee of his own University (Cambridge again, though he subsequently left). I can’t and won’t point the finger of racism at him. And what about all the media firestorms? Did those arise from racism? They involved Arday’s race, but remember that he kept emphasizing race himself, both before and after his plagiarism fabulism were discovered. One could argue that he was hired in part because of his constant invocation of racism as a hurdle he overcame.
All I’m willing to say is that there was plagiarism, that Arday’s stories are unbelievable (though it’s not clear whether he believed them), and that his rise to prominence surely involved prioritizing race and claimed disability over merit.
And while racism surely played some role in the tragedy, given who is writing about it—people who don’t seem to be arrant racists—I can’t believe, as some are claiming, that people went after Arday solely because of his race, nor that the media focus on his stories and tragedy (admit it, it is a eomplelling if sad story) was the equivalent of a “digital lynching”. I’ll highlight some of the more prominent or telling pieces of journalism or commentary. Click on screenshots below to read them; I’ll provide excerpts that are indented, though what’s flush left is mine.
The article from rom Inside Higher Ed below reports that a group of black academics is asking the press to evaluate its “relevant editorial standards”; the implicit message is that the press should regulate itself or be regulated. In other words, it’s attacking the press for what it said about Arday, and demanding that they stop the “ridicule and vilification” of Arday they perceived in coverage.
An excerpt:
A group representing Black academics has called on the U.K. press regulator to examine the media coverage surrounding Jason Arday’s private life before his death, saying some of the reporting on the former University of Cambridge professor amounted to “personal ridicule and vilification.”
Black Leaders in Higher Education UK said in a statement that it would ask the Independent Press Standards Organisation to consider “the nature and extent of reporting concerning Professor Arday’s private life and whether relevant editorial standards were upheld.”
“We have been deeply concerned by the scale and intensely personal nature of some of the public scrutiny directed at Professor Arday, including commentary that moved beyond legitimate questions of academic integrity into personal ridicule and vilification,” the group said.
It added that there was “undoubted public interest” in questions of academic integrity but that scrutiny must be applied equally to all academics.
Well, not necessarily equally, for Arday’s story importantly involves race, both via his repeated claim of the barriers he had to overcome as well as the reason he rose to such a high position despite thin accomplishments and a life story that could not be believed. The group of scholars also asks for university support of students of color who were distressed by the Arday affair:
It also urged universities to provide support and reassurance to Black students and staff affected by the debate surrounding the case.
Finally, money is being collected for Arday’s family, and there was a vigil and a petition supporting him:
An open letter addressed to Prime Minister Andy Burnham and the culture secretary has called for an immediate public inquiry into media coverage of Arday. Published by the Good Law Project, the letter says Arday was subjected to “two weeks of relentless harassment” that continued after his resignation, adding that “there cannot be any doubt that racism lay at the heart of this story.”
It so far has more than 80,000 signatures, including from prominent figures such as Diane Abbott, Zack Polanski and Jameela Jamil.
Stand Up to Racism organized an Aug. 17 vigil for Arday outside the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.
A GoFundMe appeal started by Windrush campaigner Patrick Vernon to help Arday’s family with funeral costs has raised more than $200,000.
I disagree strongly with the view that the media has to treat everyone equally, especially when things differ—in this case the role of race—from case to case. And since this is the British press, they can be hectored to tweak their coverage so it doesn’t strike anyone as racist. That is wrong, and it’s too late anyway, for the train has left the station. As for collecting money for Arday’s family, I see that as a gesture of sympathy for him, and the guy apparently did have kids, so I have no objection to that except insofar as it’s motivated by the idea that he was the victim of (as Clarence Thomas called his Supreme Court hearing) a “high-tech lynching.”
Speaking of that, here’s a note from Carole Cadwalladr, whose Substack site is given on the second line; she thinks that, in the truest sense, Jason Arday “was the victim of a digital lynching.” I find that ridiculous.
From Coleman Hughes at the Free Press:
Here’s Hughes’s thesis:
Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world, or he was a liar. It turned out to be the latter.
All this has revealed many unflattering things about academia: DEI invites fraud by lowering standards, the bigotry of low expectations is alive and well, and a disturbing number of “experts”—not just Arday but all the Cambridge professors and BBC journalists who co-signed him—are compromised by ideology, cowardice, or both.
But the Arday scandal has also revealed something else: White liberals in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes on to achieve greatness. In fact, they want to believe in this sort of story so badly that they are willing to turn off every ounce of skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.
The irony, however, is that we already have many examples of up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just that they usually turn out to be conservatives—or if not conservatives, then at least out-of-step with the left-wing religion of racial justice.
Another Free Press article, and one a little less thoughtful. Here Ditum blames academia for elevating someone who lacked merit but had the correct pigmentation:
An excerpt:
And Arday was a perfect silly season story. It was—and I am sorry to say this now that Arday is dead, but it is true—very funny. There was a childish brazenness to his exaggerations and inventions. Running 600 miles in six days, and 30 marathons in 35 days (some with a broken leg): obviously ridiculous. When The Guardian’s Lanre Bakare investigated some of Arday’s more baroque claims of harassment and found they didn’t stand up, Arday’s response was hilarious: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.” This was a misfortune for Arday too. If he had been less amusing, he’d have attracted less attention.
But it was also (another misfortune) a serious story. It fell plum into the narrative of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) run amok: Arday was significantly underqualified for his job at Cambridge. The story also raised questions more broadly about academic standards in the humanities, regarding both Arday’s education (Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his doctorate, confirmed that he had received just one in-person supervision while writing his PhD, which was later found to have substantial signs of plagiarism) and the education he provided to his own students.
There was the issue of police overreach. When Jack Grove of Times Higher Education submitted a routine journalistic query to Arday, Arday reported him to the police—and the police called the journalist, pressuring him not to contact Arday again. There was legal chill. Arday retained the law firm Carter-Ruck, which specializes in defamation cases, and threatened reporters with the possibility of libel action. And yes, there was racism: Cofnas is a “race realist” who considers black people intellectually inferior. But it would not have fallen to Cofnas to break the story of a “DEI cover-up” if there hadn’t been a cover-up.
. . . I do not regret writing about Arday, but I am sorry for him, and for all of us, that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about. If the plagiarism in his PhD had been dealt with at the time; if Cambridge had vetted his work; if his publisher had fact-checked his manuscript and done him the kindness of rejecting it; if the allegations of his academic malpractice had been dealt with openly in the specialist press, rather than hushed up until they became a legitimate scandal—then maybe Arday would have been spared the punishing glare of a public life.
Yes, this much is clear, but it’s been said before. Cambridge didn’t do due diligence, but in the end the person responsible for Arday’s death was Arday. We can draw object lessons about DEI and about suspending disbelief, and those are fine to discuss, but neither DEI, racism, nor the press killed Arday. He killed himself.
I was a bit surprised to see Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times agree with me about the dumb calls for censorship based on the assumption that Arday would be alive if the press had been easier on him. It’s a thoughtful piece and ends with a good quote:
An excerpt:
Those pressing for new controls on the press are making a serious mistake. Some who once championed Arday seem to be trying to deflect from their own embarrassing credulity, and it is unlikely to work. A deep resentment of both growing societal diversity and bureaucratic diversity initiatives, or D.E.I., fuels the right; it’s why Arday’s story was such catnip to the conservative press. But heavy-handed progressive attempts to stifle questions about those initiatives — to use institutional power to police the boundaries of public discourse about race, gender and religion — have a way of making that resentment even more politically potent.
. . .Many of the people who didn’t bother questioning Arday’s backstory should have known better; today their oversight looks less like respect than condescension, as if no one took him seriously enough to think hard about what he was saying. “Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot,” Jason Okundaye wrote in the left-leaning Guardian.
In retrospect, it would have been much better for all concerned if the story of his scholarly mistakes and biographical inventions had broken in a careful, professional outlet like Times Higher Education, instead of festering until it turned into a right-wing parable. Cofnas’s article catalyzed a journalistic feeding frenzy not just because it seemed to show evidence of plagiarism and falsehood, but also because it claimed there’d been a cover-up, and cover-ups tend to drive reporters wild.
Well, the Guardian played a big role in promoting the Arday story, and the last I heard the Guardian was not a right-wing source! And the “journalistic feeding frenzy” was due not just to a cover-up (actually, not so much of a cover-up as institutions ignoring their standards in the interest of equity), but to the bizarre nature of Arday’s claims. But here’s the pull quote from Goldberg’s article, which is great:
For people on the left, it’s sure easier to talk about the feral excesses of the right-wing press than the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives. But both contributed to the Arday disaster. Denying that won’t protect the left. It will just leave leftists out on a limb that grows ever more shaky.
From The Atlantic (archived here):
Harper’s piece is thoughtful but I think suffers from “both-sideism”, as he appears to argue without evidence that there is disproportionate scrutiny of of black scholars. Given the unique features of this case, I’m not so sure. Quotes:
The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.
. , .To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.
Around the same time yesterday afternoon that I learned of Arday’s fate, I came across another piece of news: an announcement that Ross Barkan, a white novelist and journalist, had just been dropped by New York magazine after the publication—having investigated allegations regarding dozens of instances of plagiarism in Barkan’s writing—concluded that his work “did not live up to our editorial standards.” Swiftly afterward, Barkan announced that he would now focus on writing a new column at The Nation, another venerable outlet. (After the publication of this article, The Nation told me that Barkan had been “in conversations with his editor about a possible column but nothing had been formalized” and that he was “not under contract” with them.)
‘There are huge differences betweenthe Barkan case and the Arday case; one is not a control for theother.
I hope this will be the last time I write about the Arday affair unless further investigation turns up something remarkable. But I have concluded two things from reading about it.
First, “wokeness” (which I define as “performative virtue signaling”) is still with us, as evidenced by those who try hard to exculpate Arday and blame his resignation and death on a racist witch hunt. For sure there is racism involved, but that is a long way from being the sole reason for Arday’s downfall, and it is not a reason for his suicide. The controversy that exists is evidence that identity politics and the oppressor/oppressed myth is stil la strong strain in liberalism, despite the fact that Arday’s rise demonstrates that he was elevated, not oppressed.
Second, it has now become okay for the press to raise the issue that merit can be dangerously ignored in some considerations of equity. It used to be taboo to say that a “minoritized” person gained privilege because of their minority status. The term “DEI hire” was always whispered and never discussed openly. Now, in the Arday case, such matters can be and have been discussed. When they can be discussed without nuances of racism, but simply as mastication of how we want to structure society and enact “social justice,” that freedom of discussion is a good thing.
Finally, some tweets:
The Good Law Project, which created an open letter stating that the plagiarism charges against Arday were false and baseless has now collected nearly 100,000 signatures to demand an inquiry into further limiting the uk press.https://t.co/YsFHc3fZw5 pic.twitter.com/BBPk1CAvuW
— Diana S. Fleischman (@sentientist) August 18, 2026
The death of Jason Arday hit so close to home that I had no words yesterday. But I woke up with words.
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… pic.twitter.com/XetSepzJrx
— Ibram X. Kendi (@ibramxk) August 15, 2026
Unbelievable… the man who drove Jason Arday to his death is suggesting his life is in danger because of a peaceful vigil in Jason’s memory. Straight out of the Zionist/far-right playbook – they similarly describe pro-Palestine marches as hate rallies and purport to be victims https://t.co/mjsk329eYF
— Amara Sophia Elahi (@AmaraSophia) August 17, 2026
This event has to be the most post-truth thing I’ve ever seen. One speaker said Arday had been assassinated, and here they’re chanting his name with cult-like reverence.
It doesn’t matter to them what Cambridge did, or left wing outlets like the Guardian, or Arday himself.
All…
— Nick Dixon (@NickDixon) August 17, 2026
h/t: Greg Mayer for references
“White liberals in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes on to achieve greatness.”
Let’s be even more frank about this…Jason Arday was the pet of white liberal women. It was overwhelmingly liberal women that facilitated his rise within Cambridge, who defended him when he was under fire, and who continue to defend him now. Within white liberal circles, DEI is primarily a female initiative…the vast majority of your white “DEI specialists” and HR professionals are women.
This is further evidence of something I was formerly skeptical of, which is the “feminization” of academia. It is hard to see someone like Jason Arday rising to where he did without this phenomenon.
And I’ll add this….the knowledge that this man had children but still chose to take his own life significantly decreases my sympathy for him. There is a strong whiff of cowardice here…unless we have completely rejected concepts like “cowardice” and “bravery” and even “duty”, and replaced them with therapeutic language, in which case I am therefore considered old-fashioned and insensitive.
It is a sad and tragic situation to be sure, but Arday’s suicide humanizes him to some extent. I would think worse of him if he had just doubled down and lied even more, issuing rants about befriending his detractors and bombing his supporters.
He was already human to me…egoism, greediness, manipulation, lying..all very human behavior.
And unless he left a note that was some sort of mea culpa, he effectively has doubled down on the lies…as his suicide has predictably galvanized his supporters who continue to lie on his behalf.
It is not evident that it was specifically women who defended him when he was under fire. A major organizational defense was provided by The Good Law Project, run by Jolyon Maugham.
Not “specifically”…read what I wrote. There are always some white males lurking around (usually at the top) grifts like DEI. My point is that in order for the Jason Ardays of the world to exist, you need something like Hilary Cremin, taking him by the hands and bizarrely gazing into his eyes while proclaiming him to be the “best in the world”. This particular type of academic seems to be much more female than male in its representation.
last comment from me…
Please adhere to the commenting-frequency rules; you’re at 30%.
Just a couple of issues. Those who say that the charges of plagiarism are false, or don’t refer to them at all (like Kendi) simply refuse to see any variable in human society outside of race. After all, whether Arday plagiarized or not is an empirical question, and easily answered-in the affirmative.
As far as assigning blame goes, while I do believe in individual responsibility for one’s actions, Arday was enabled for at least all of his professional career. Like many of us who participate on this blog, I am an academic. And I took all parts of my job quite seriously, and resented those of my colleagues who didn’t pull their weight. One of the most important things that we do is teach—in my case, science. I believe the the purpose of graduate education is not teaching the specifics of the field—but the process of doing science well, and rigorously. Which is best, perhaps only, done by example. So when a student submits a Ph.D. Thesis, the advisor reads every word. He or she checks every reference —including the ones not there. Methodology, statistics, design, writing—all of it. It usually takes a few iterations—and it is hard work. Clearly, this was not done in Arday’s case, and clearly the university system did not require it to be done. And so I am angry at the systems, the departments, the universities that allow this, and yes, I do blame them.
During my part-time academic career I saw and sometimes helped enable some seriously dysfunctional aspects of ‘the system’. Variable ‘standards’, special pleading, favouritism, “pets”, etc. were endemic, and not necessarily related to race or sex or sob stories or other personal identity attributes. I do not know why it was like this, or how it might be significantly improved. For Arday it seems clear that ‘the system’ enabled him and so carries a large part of the responsibility for the outcomes.
There is an elephant in the room, and yet no one seems to have mentioned it: how vastly disproportionate support for Arday and attacks on his critics has come from black academics in Britain, and of course also politicians of the Diane Abbott variety. Unsurprisingly, the crowd that protested at Trafalgar Square also included many blacks.
It is clear that as in the trial of O J Simpson or various BLM thugs, guilt or innocence is irrelevant. Their race is all that matters to them.
Conservatives are now blaming liberals for the black man behaving badly, and naturally they must single out those that are white (a word used in an insulting manner). EDI, they insist, is praiseworthy, but could you just get rid of the white people a little bit more slowly? Otherwise it might make some black people look bad.
If I might be a bit critical of black culture, too many of them have a bad habit of rallying behind undeserving miscreants (George Floyd, Michael Brown, Jason Arday, Anthony Karmelo, Jacob Blake, OJ Simpson, etc).
Surely no black academic who merits the post and was appointed after a solid body of research would identify with Arday? Can I presume that all those doing so don’t meet that “merits the post” qualification, but were also diversity hires?
I’m sure lots of them are, and that contributes to their racial activism (there is a letter from 1969 that offers a good explanation, quoted below). But racial tribalism is also strongly encouraged for blacks (and with less fervour among non-whites generally) while being considered the most unforgivable sin among whites. Thus in Britain the greatest advocates for the black community or the Muslim community tend to be the most powerful and influential people in society who belong to these groups, while natives get the EDL or figures like Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage. Arday himself spent much of his career to demonising whites, and received no pushback for that after the scandal broke. The atheist will recognise the helplessness of pagans against the onslaught of Christianity.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/11/the-prophet-of-affirmative-action.php
Re Dean Poor: who wrote this, Dickens? (Cf. Superintendent Gradgrind — academic hard times indeed; some of the fictional parallels are painfully apt.)
And speaking of apt literature, maybe someone should write an updated version of The Crucible.
The fact that he has made it harder for other people of color to achieve academic positions is not even considered, but now they will all unjustly be overscrutinized for every academic position they apply for, as it will be assumed that all applicants are like him and have inflated their CVs.
Yes this will be one of the most toxic effects of the Arday affair. My university (like most other Canadian universities) is in the middle of a years-long process of hiring new faculty members in which the search committees will interview only black applicants (or for other jobs only indigenous applicants). [aside: here on Turtle Island such race-based hiring is perfectly legal and indeed for many of my colleagues is greatly desired] We all hope those new hires will be good scholars and colleagues, but stories like Arday’s in which similar race-based search processes lead to these terrible outcomes will leave lots of people wondering who’s been telling tall tales about themselves.
Hard to see how checking an applicant’s CV for (dis)honesty is “over”scrutiny or unjust. Seems like due diligence to me. Even if black candidates are vetted more closely than others (and I’m skeptical that they will be), if they survive the scrutiny all the better for them.
Agree with the following from Richard Dawkins (copied and pasted from X):
I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday. If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence. The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin” but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?” Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism.
As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope. In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.
Dawkins summarizes it well!
There is an analogy with the books of our host and those of Richard Dawkins such as “Faith vs. Fact”, which show facts disproving the claims and delusions of various (mostly all) religions.
Where they are speaking against Islamic nonsense, they may be called Islamophobes, where they are pointing obvious fallacies in Judeo-Christian dogma, in earlier years they would risk the same kind of blow-back.
As noted in more than one article cited by our host, some Arday supporters follow the same flawed ad hominem style, defending Paul Bunyan or Chuck Norris-type “claims” by claiming anti-racism.
The (misnamed) Good Law Project has been fundraising off the back of Arday’s tragic death although it’s founder (and sole owner) Jolyon Maugham furiously denied that to a BBC reporter. Unfortunately for Maugham, people had the receipts: https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/2089577248168747128
I saw a story with the headline, “Blame DEI for Jason Arday’s Death.”
“It so far has more than 80,000 signatures, including from prominent figures such as Diane Abbott, Zack Polanski and Jameela Jamil”.
Whenever I see Jamil’s name mentioned I can’t help remembering her bizarre tall tales about the multiple (!) times that she has been attacked by killer bees: https://archive.ph/DaxH1
Her various claims about her life make her an appropriate supporter of Arday.
The selection process that advanced Arday worked exactly as intended. The education system and broader elite culture that primed the faculty to obey worked exactly as intended. Whether we speak of Jason Arday or Claudine Gay; of a thousand flavors of gender and a rainbowed spectrum of sexes; of sophistry, stupidity, and gibberish in the humanities and social sciences, the elite institutions are working exactly as intended.
Of course, one needn’t have the consent of every member of such institutions. But they simply need to acquiesce or stay busy in their specialized corners and not substantively get in the way. The few vocal rogues can be written off as “right wing,” especially when few on the left will grant them platforms.
Until sufficient numbers from within those institutions—and the donors and other high-profile figures they produce—insist that “this is not what we intended,” then we will see more Ardays. As long as pedigree-conscious people keep buying their credentials (no matter the declining substance), as long as they keep hiring and voting for the politicized clones these institutions so reliably mass produce, then the system will keep working as intended.
Trust the experts. Trust the credentials. It has become our new medievalism.
” [..] “Intersectionality” visually displays how social identities intersect with one another and are wrapped in systems of power. [..] (Duckworth, 2020) ”
https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/universaldesign/chapter/positionality-intersectionality/
Wheel of Power and Privilege (Duckworth, 2020) direct link : https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/app/uploads/sites/2238/2021/12/Crenshaw-Spirograph-Supplemental.docx
(Bold added):
“[..] Power is located at the center of the wheel, while a spectrum of Marginalization radiates outward. Each of the twelve spokes on the wheel refers to an area of one’s social identity (these categories are located on the outer perimeter of the wheel). These are aspects of what make up who you are, [..]”
https://libguides.pratt.edu/gcpe-social-justice-resource-guide/deij-primer/understanding-power-privilege-intersectionality
“Rest in Power Jason Arday”
-As read on sign activists
Intersectional Identity is the Spirit (Geist), and Power is the God, of a New Age sociognostic religion.
Restating : “social identities intersect with one another and are wrapped in systems of power” – just as Spirits unify and complete God through transformation.
I feel marginalised and minoritised by the traumatic absence of an identity spoke for ‘not suffering fools gladly’.
I am not so sure racism played much of a role in the downfall of Arday. I could well be wrong, but my impression is that Britain is less racist than America, and that black people there have not been subject to the sort of racism we see in the US. British black culture is not synonymous with American black culture. it seems to me.
Britain never had a civil war over slavery, and had been fighting the Barbary Pirates over their taking of slaves for more than 100 years before the US Civil War. Britain outlawed slavery well before the US.
That the articles which contend that racism played a role always mention Cofnas seems a real stretch to me. I don’t think there is any evidence that Cofnas is a racist, or that his articles about Arday were racially-based, or that his research is any evidence at all about his racial inclinations toward individuals in any way, shape, or form. References to Cofnas to imply a racial angle to this sordid affair are really low sophistry, imho.
(387 words) So, a group of black Academics demands that the press stop the “ridicule and vilification” of Arday.
But Arday was a ridiculous figure! He was the academic version of George Santos because of the quantity & quality of his lies. I don’t recall people protesting the ridiculization of Santos (well, Santos was a Republican – so different standards apply). Arday’s claims of being “neurodiverse”, presumably autism, are probably just another lie. Some people may say that Arday should not have been ridiculized because he was psychologically fragile. Was he though? More so than George Santos? How do you know this?
Which journalist(s) vilified Arday how? These black press critics are equating skeptical news coverage with vilification which, by the Oxford English Dictionary, involves abuse.
The British ex-academic Kehinde Andrews (formerly a professor of Black studies in the School of Social Sciences at Birmingham City University, who is or was co-chair of the UK Black Studies Association) argued on a podcast of the British Telegraph (August 6, 2026, 1 day after Arday had resigned) that the campaign against Arday was baseless and driven by racism, that Arday had “a straight record of academic excellence” (except for his dissertation for which he blamed Arday’s supervisors), that Arday did not engage in plagiarism (because Liverpool John Moores University had said so, and Andrews himself had checked the dissertation), and then this:
Andrews claimed that Arday’s critics were animated by the belief that “Black people are unqualified” and should not be on university faculties. Not even Nathan Cofnas has said this! Cofnas thinks (in part, based on admissions data from Harvard University) that without intellectual double standards the proportion of black people on elite university faculties would be much lower than their population proportion. Has Cofnas ever called into doubt the achievements of black academics like Thomas Sowell, Roland Fryer, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter? No, he hasn’t.
So, Kehinde Andrews is spewing nonsense! I bet he is among the black academics who are now demanding from the press to stop the “ridicule and vilification” of Arday.
How about “Blackademic” as a neoligism?
Before Jason Arday’s death, the subjects under discussion were academic integrity, and the role of the DEI cult in facilitating academic fraud and false claims. This would lead to questions about the gullibility of Cambridge mandarins, and the nature of charades like the one labelled “Sociology of Education”. Arday’s death has simply allowed his partisans and mandarin enablers to try to change the subject—a ploy too obvious to mislead many beside Diane Abbott & Co.
Jon, Arday’s defenders did not wait for Ardays’s death to change the subject away from academic integrity, standards of scholarship and DEI. They already were doing this before his death (see, for instance, my comment # 11 in this thread). The thing that is new is that they now call for muzzling the press. Well, this isn’t really new either – authoritarian control of the discourse (and of publishing) is an integral part of wokeness.
“authoritarian control of the discourse…is an integral part of wokeness.” Dorothy L. Sayers who wrote the Lord Peter Wimsey novels and had earned her degree in mediaeval literature in 1915 at Oxford University, one of the first women to do so. She had been subjected to the belttling of women scholars at the time, as you can imagine. That never stopped her.
In 1938 she was asked to speak at “a woman’s society” about feminism and she felt that it was not a cause she espoused but a way of life that she practiced. She explained “that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man….What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not an individual person.” She ended with “If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it–not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it on the individual…in fact, upon you and me.
She wrote this in 1938.
From “Are Women Human?” Published in 1971 with introduction by Mary M.Shideler
It’s a bit more complicated, since Cambridge is a collection of semi-independent colleges.
At university level a misconduct enquiry found that his writings were within the bounds of academic freedom (they didn’t rule on whether they were “racist”). He was on a fixed-term contract, though, and they let that run out (which is actually fairly normal anyhow).
His college did terminate his (unpaid) association with them saying that he was not in line with their DEI values.
Is Cofnas a “racist”? Well that depends on how one defines “racist”. Personally I don’t think that arriving at a good-faith opinion on any empirical matter after best-efforts evaluation of the evidence makes one a “racist”.
Others might disagree, especially if it concerns the taboo topic of IQ gaps. But surely a scientist should do their best to dispassionately evaluate the evidence, even if that leads to an unwelcome conclusion?
“Racism”, as used today, is mostly about being prejudiced against people and treating them poorly or unfairly on account of their race.
Under that definition, someone like James Watson was not a “racist”, even if he did think that there were clear differences in mean IQ between different ethnic groups, if that was a good-faith evaluation of the evidence, and if he didn’t treat anyone unfairly.
PS Editing to add: “Race realism” means only that there is some biological reality underpinning the concept of “race”, rather than it being entirely a social construct; that is pretty obviously true, since, for example, genetic analysis by 23andMe reveals shared-ancestry clustering that does match (to a great extent) people’s self-description of their “race”. So all scientists who have thought about it are surely “race realists”.
Our host wrote that “Nathan Cofnas…initially reported the plagiarism in Arday’s Ph.D thesis” but that’s not quite right. The retired sociologist David Harris first reported that plagiarism to officials at University of Cambridge in 2023. Cambridge stonewalled him, and Arday reported Harris to police for harassment! Then the reporter Jack Grove at Times Higher Education wrote about the plagiarism in 2025. When Grove contacted Cambridge and Arday for a reply, Arday hired an expensive law firm to threaten THE with a lawsuit for libel, and he reported Grove to the police for harassment (again). It was only after those failed attempts to persuade Cambridge and Arday to do the right thing, away from the limelight and long before the looming publication of Arday’s ridiculous memoir, that someone leaked all of this to Nathan Cofnas and everything went to hell.
I don’t care about any of those things (police, legal threats, coverups) as much as I care about Arday’s data fabrication: he stole “interview” quotes from other researchers and recycled them into his own interview-based research publications. As others have said before, once you recognize that Arday invented his data, there’s no reason to suppose he didn’t event ~everything else.
I think data fabrication by a scientist should be a misdemeanour and it should be subject to charges and punishment. Guys like Arday (and Dan Ariely and Brian Wansink and Jonathan Pruitt and all the other infamous data forgers) should be in court, tried, and fined (but maybe not end up in jail). Short of that, I wish Arday had hung on and taken whatever punishment Cambridge and his funders and his publisher might mete out. It’s terrible for his family and everyone else that he killed himself instead.
The guy was absolutely shameless. Lying, plagiarizing, calling anyone who questioned him a racist and reporting them to the police! And it worked for a while, until it didn’t.
The bigger they are….
It is shocking to me how often, and lazily, the term “lynching” is employed. The people who use it know the images it evokes. My father, born in 1894 the son of Mississippi sharecroppers, knew what it was (and had probably seen it). I never heard the word come out of his mouth.
I am sure it is generous and thoughtful of people to raise money for Arday’s family and funeral. But let’s be clear, he was not indigent. I hope it will not be required he be buried in a gold casket, as was the case with one Mr. G. Floyd.
Mr. Arday could have admitted his wrongdoings, disappeared for a time, then used his many resources, connections, and networks to rehabilitate himself, and found ways to contribute to society. Instead, his last act put the stamp on the fact he was a fraud.
Please don’t trust anything from The Good Law Project. It’s a one-man-band run by Jolyon Maugham. He loses most of his cases.
The Arday letter that he organised has been subject to many complaints because he changed the letter after it already had 600 signatures. I don’t think the original signatories were told about the change. I understand that further changes were made to the letter and several versions of it have been archived.
The suggestion by Kendi et al. that Arday was singled out because of his race only demonstrates profound ignorance (I decline to declare his ignorance willful due to an unfortunate mind reading deficiency).
To declare racism as the sole motive of the news media one would have to have no knowledge of, explain away, or ignore that Prince Harry has not been treated kindly, Harvey Weinstein was no golden boy, Gwyneth Paltrow got hammered for her goop nonsense, Lance Armstrong excoriated for PED cheating, J.K. Rowling for transgender views, and the authors of “The Salt Path” for fabulism akin to Arday’s. (Those are just the ones off the top of my head, I am sure there are others)
Arday’s problem was the attempted cover up/dismissal of his plagiarism. Compare this to Harvard’s former president who just ignored the accusations, later resigned, and disappeared from anyone’s attention. To be fair, if I got to keep a multimillion dollar salary on condition of becoming a ghost, I would happily vanish as well.
(“You are gonna pay me how much to do nothing? What door and how soon do you want me out of it?”)
ISTM your unfortunate mind reading deficiency is beneficial, since clear reading of unfortunate minds would be quite distressing.
🙂
One wonders about the strenuous defense of Arday by certain Black academics. By “certain”, I refer to the fields in which they work. None of them are the Black professors and other academics in the hard sciences, all of whom work just as hard as their white colleagues. (I don’t recall any journals asking if the submitting author is Black, White, etc…). None of the accusations of persecution come from them, and I imagine that they are at least as offended by Arday’s coddling as any other scientist. I have not seen a single defense of Arday by Black endocrinologists, economists, psycholinguists, biochemists, etc.
And by the way, there is no problem finding Black academics, including full professors (at least in my field). Their percentage in the academy is probably less than that of Black percentage in society—such calculations are, in my opinion, meaningless. And Cofnas (of whose existence I was unaware prior to the Arday brouhaha) did himself no favors by bringing up such nonsense.
No, it seems that the Black academics and individuals complaining about racism in this case do so because this is their field: everything is about race and racism. And there are plenty of White academics who are doing the same thing for the same reason. Kendi is the best example. If he were to cease speaking and writing about racism, he would not be able to speak or write at all.
Jesse Singal has published a astute article as for the downright hysterical and agressive reactions of Arday’s supporters.
The Cascade of Dysfunction That Helped Doom Jason Arday
In a better world, the late scholar wouldn’t have been elevated to—and fallen from—such dizzying heights.
https://thedispatch.com/article/jason-arday-cambridge-journalism-media/
Now Nathan Cofnas has been suspended from his post at Ghent University “for discriminating against Arday”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cevmrjd9lj1o
Does Ghent University want to kill the messenger? It sure looks that way.
An eye for an eye. No doubt some would like to see him atone with his life.
No doubt after many months he will be entirely cleared of any wrongdoing (since he has patently done nothing wrong), a result that the university will studiously avoid publicizing. It will then make his life so intolerable that he resigns.
Mike Hart (#15) is correct. The charges against J. Arday preceed Cofnas by years.
I decided to read Jason Arday’s (thin) book Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova (Routledge, 2020) before reading any reviews, and so I did. I then looked for reviews and found this one titled “Impoverished Sociology”, with which I agree. Its author is Ian Pace (Professor of Music, Culture and Society at City, University of London): https://thecritic.co.uk/impoverished-sociology/
Thanks — Ian Pace’s piece is remarkably thorough and carefully worded, without polemic. The examples he gives of the book’s instances of “earlier scholarship insufficiently distinguished from Arday’s own”, as he delicately words it, show repeated uses of the same strategy, presumably to avoid detection of plagiarism: Arday cites works that describe ideas generally but does not cite the ones (usually by the same authors) that he has actually copied from, so that if anyone checks the sources cited in the references, the direct lifting of quotations will not be apparent. Very clever, and incidentally — as a repeated pattern — showing that there was a deliberate intention to deceive.