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

Jason Arday’s planned interview with the New York Times on Monday, ahead of his book launch, has been cancelled.
“Asked if, at any point in the editing process, revisions were made to Arday’s book to adjust or correct claims that have been challenged publicly, a spokeswoman said… pic.twitter.com/E46U8pt18E

— Sidsy (@GrumpyOW) August 4, 2026

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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.

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.

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:

Incredible. https://t.co/xFh3xVJdBR pic.twitter.com/p4HBMlWEBU

— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) August 3, 2026

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

Svetlana (Lana) Jitomirskaya is a mathematics professor at Berkeley (Wikipedia, which puts her at two other schools, is out of date), and is one of 29 authors (I’m in there, too) on a paper in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, “In Defense of Merit in Science“. Lana is also a winner of the American Academy of Science and Letters’s Barry Prize for distinguished intellectual achievement.

I mention this because she is distressed at the very low math performance of entering students in Berkeley (and other schools in the University of California [UC] system), but did some calculations to show, as Governor Gavin Newsom intended with his 2024 California Education Compact, that the chances of a student getting admitted to a University of California branch are higher the worse the student’s high school is! Newsom and some “progressive” educators are against using standardized tests like the SAT for students applying for college, because they believe standardized tests discriminate against minority students.  Grade-point averages (GPAs) are one predictor of college and post-college success, but grade inflation is eliminating the inter-student variation that made GPAs useful, and data show that standardized tests add substantial predictive value to success (especially for highly selective schools like Berkeley), so it’s better that schools have both kinds of information for applicants.  Nevertheless, in an attempt to achieve “equity,” UC schools have completely barred the use of standardized tests, and that was against the recommendations of both a UC faculty task force and members of the Board of Regents.

At my own University, standardized tests are optional, but, weirdly, are used only when they can help a student get admitted, which seems to defeat the purpose of using a standardized benchmark. Here’s what Grok says about the University of Chicago’s standardized testing policy for admissions:

UChicago has maintained a test-optional policy since implementing it in 2018 as part of its UChicago Empower Initiative (initially focused on expanding access for first-generation and low-income students). This policy applies to all applicants, including domestic, international, and transfer students.

No Harm Testing Policy. In addition to being test-optional, UChicago uses a distinctive “No Harm” policy:

• Submitting SAT or ACT scores is entirely your choice.
• If you submit scores, they are only considered if they would positively affect your chance of admission.
• Scores that could negatively impact your application are not used in the review process.
• You can self-report scores on your application (via Common App or Coalition); official scores are only needed if you’re admitted and enroll.

This approach gives applicants flexibility—strong scores can help, but weaker ones (or not submitting) won’t hurt you.

Lana maintains that the omission of test requirements, (and I’d add the use of  “no harm testing policies”) hurts everyone: reducing the chances of really good students getting into even moderately good schools, while harming students from poorer schools by eliminating the pressure for them to study the “right” way: not memorizing but actually learning the material and learning to think, which you need to get good SAT scores. (It also eliminates the pressure for teachers to teach that way.) If you’re poorly qualified for a college you attend, the chances of you either dropping out or going into a “gut” major are higher.

The argument and the crucial graph is included in Lana’s new article in the Free Press, “Bring Back the SAT”.  You can read it if you’re a subscriber by clicking below, but I’ll reproduce some of her arguments plus the graph:

Lana gives several extended anecdotes about great students, once destined for Berkeley or UC San Diego, not getting in and having to go to community colleges, as well as students who got high grades by memorizing but did poorly in schools because they didn’t really learn to think. Many of those students, due to the negative correlation, get into places like UC Berkeley and UC San Diego.  I’ll mostly summarize the assertions about educational policy. (Quotes from Lana’s article are indented.)

What does an A grade in AP Calculus mean when it is paired with a score of 1 on the national exam? Exactly what a recent UC San Diego report revealed: In too many public schools, grades have become completely decoupled from learning.

None of this was Diego’s fault [his name is changed]. But now, he would face the reality of a world-class university. He would be required to retake calculus at Berkeley before moving on to the grueling upper-division requirements of mechanical engineering. With his immense drive and determination, common sense says he would catch up. Right?

“Getting into calculus in 11th grade is impressive,” I told him during the interview. “How and when did you realize you were good at math?”

“Math was always very difficult for me,” Diego replied. “But I worked hard and memorized all the formulas.”

This is the last thing a math professor wants to hear. Mathematics is not about rote memorization—it’s about conceptual understanding and logical reasoning, and Diego was never taught the difference. Like countless students at schools where teachers don’t understand mathematics themselves, he was instead taught what my colleague Hung-Hsi Wu calls anti-mathematics: a confusing, disconnected collection of unexplained procedures to be memorized for a test—and then immediately forgotten.

On the UC system’s abolition of SATs in 2020 and what it means for students like Diego:

To succeed now, Diego will need to unlearn these habits and rebuild his mathematical foundation from scratch, with much of what he has already learned not helping but standing in the way.

I desperately hope he manages to do so. But statistically, the chances are dangerously low. With the foundational deficiencies Diego demonstrated in his interview, the probability that he will survive his first Berkeley calculus course, even with a barely passing grade, is 50-50. He will spend his entire college career in a frantic, exhausting game of catch-up, and it is far more likely that he will be forced to change his major—leaving a hardworking young man’s confidence badly shaken, his engineering dreams derailed, and significant public resources wasted.

None of this would be as likely if the UC system still used a standardized test benchmark. The SAT was completely abolished for UC admissions by a Board of Regents decision in 2020, driven by concerns that standardized tests disadvantage minority and low-income students. This decision went against the unanimous, data-driven recommendation of the UC faculty task force—and against many of the Board of Regents’ own stated convictions. The SAT, imperfect as it is, measures knowledge of the absolute basics and the ability to reason clearly under a time constraint. An SAT score would have told us—and Diego himself—the truth about his preparation before it was too late.

Even more importantly, preparing for the test is itself a powerful intervention. If Diego knew that the SAT stood between him and a Berkeley engineering degree, his drive would have led him to use free, high-quality resources away from rote memorization and toward real mathematical reasoning. The preparation itself would have rewired his foundation. We failed Diego once by not providing him a decent math education. We should not fail students like him again by removing the incentive to build one themselves.

This is why my UC colleagues and I wrote an open letter to the Regents demanding a return to standardized testing. Within days, it garnered over 1,400 signatures, including those of 60 department chairs across the UC system. This unprecedented consensus is significant because STEM faculty aren’t political activists—they are the ones shaping California’s next generation of mathematicians and engineers.

That is indeed a powerful consensus!

According to Lana, the disconnect between grades and merit involves schools infusing courses with ideology:

Many of my colleagues teaching introductory gateway courses are not so lucky. They report a feeling of the bottom falling out of the classroom. “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6,” one professor said. “The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”

The root cause of this bifurcation is California’s broken K-12 education. Teachers are trapped in systems that prioritize ideology over subject mastery, pressured by administrators to inflate grades, lower standards, and pass unprepared students along. The state has spent tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail line that has yielded zero benefit. It has spent far more, and done far worse, inflicting immense generational damage on California’s youth by failing to provide them a quality K-12 math education.

This is the fundamental reason why we cannot honestly satisfy the Newsom Compact’s goals. The onus for a decent math education has fallen entirely on parents. Those who can afford to move to a good school district or send their kids to after-school programs do so. Children of those who cannot are usually left trapped with subpar math instruction. Meanwhile, the schools that provide rigorous education become increasingly competitive. This is the engine behind the bifurcation we are seeing.

And here’s the critical and completely counterintuitive graph, the result of “progressive” thinking. Lana introduces it this way (bolding is mine)

An analysis of official California Department of Education data reveals that this is a systemic pattern. Over the last decade, the UC system has transitioned from a positive correlation between a high school’s math and English proficiency and its admissions success to a statistically significant negative correlation. Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates’ chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.

The graph is due to Hart Hornor-Jones, a UCSD graduate student in sociology.  It’s a bit confusing to the layperson, so let me clarify it.  (Thanks to Jay Tanzman, who put me onto the article and is a statistician, for explaining it to me.)  It is a plot over time in which the Y-axis values represent correlations: the correlation in one year between the assessed quality of a high school itself (not of a student), and the probability of students from that school being accepted to two UC schools: Berkeley and San Diego.  The points not only fall with time, but have gone below zero into negative territory, showing that the worse the school, the higher the chances of a its students getting into Berkeley and, especially, UC San Diego, where there’s a whopping -0.5 correlation between high school quality and probability of its students getting into UCSD. (If you’re statistically minded, you could say “how BAD a high school you went to is 25% of the reason you got admitted to UC San Diego.”) 

If you want to delve deeper into these data, you can go to this post on Hornor-Jones’s website.

This result is in fact what Newsom and other higher-ups had in mind, for high schools rated of lower quality also have a higher proportion of minority students. This negative correlation largely, says Lana, resulted from an ongoing attempt to achieve equity by upgrading the admission chances of students from poorer schools.  I believe Lana’s point is not that this situation is the result of dropping SATs—for the correlation was already falling before 2020 when SATs were abolished—but that we now need the SATs to be able to assess how good students really are. 

I’m told that nearly all high-school students in California get straight As now, so GPAs are a terrible predictor of success, even though I’m also told that “conventional wisdom” says that GPAs and standardized tests are roughly equally important in predicting success in college. That may be wrong, at least for California, but I’ll depend on diligent readers to look it up.

Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that if you go to a worse school, your chances of getting into the two best UC branches improve! Lana winds up for calling for the reinstatement of SATs, and I’m with her:

It is too late to reintroduce the SAT for the 2026 cycle, but we can still help thousands of students like Diego who will apply to the UC system in 2027. That is why a growing coalition of faculty members is rushing to force an emergency course correction. If a car full of your children is hurtling toward a cliff, it is not the time to create yet another subcommittee. You’ve got to slam on the brakes. The University of California must recognize this academic emergency for what it is and act to immediately restore objective standards to the admissions process.

Now if you’re a “progressive”, you’ll object to her characterizing SATs as “objective”, but that’s an argument for another day.

h/t: Jay Tanzman