The racist witch-hunt of Jason Arday - "The right are celebrating the fall of Cambridge professor Jason Arday with the glee of a colonial hunting party that has just blasted a lone creature into oblivion. Guns had been out for him as soon as the elite university made Arday one of the youngest black professors in Britain... For the hunters from the Times and Telegraph newspapers though, taking Arday’s head alone was never going to be enough. Their real aim was to insinuate that most black people appointed to prestigious positions are there for cosmetic reasons alone. It is, they suggest, because employers value their skin colour, rather than their abilities... if all university professors—the vast majority of whom are white—were subject to the same spotlight, many would emerge as liars and plagiarists. And, as to Arday’s other no doubt exaggerated achievements, there is little new here either. There is a small industry of people who, for money, will help you lie convincingly. They say you must embellish your CV because all your competitors are doing it—and it’s the only way to get a job. Here Arday’s failing was not that he lied, but that he didn’t lie convincingly enough... The real danger of Arday’s snaring is that the hunters will move on to their real prize. That’s the gutting of all the higher education policies designed to improve representation. And they want the end of teaching the truth of the blood-soaked British Empire. They want to banish discussion of trans people’s rights and gender equality. And they want universities reduced to an echo chamber of the right, where students are only offered courses that will help them aid the wealthy. The bagging of Arday is only the first step to a new, right wing utopia."
Left wingers are so intelligent. They know what people are really thinking even if there's no evidence for that.
Left wingers think merit and achievement are all arbitrary. This explains their worldview - if success is a fraud and just a convincing lie then the successful don't really deserve their positions (what happens when it's a successful "minority" though?)
Jonathan Kay on X - "not sure who does the plagiarism checks at @simonschuster, but it sounds like this whole dumpster fire could have been avoided if he or she had watched the 2010 TV melodrama "Spartacus: Blood & Sand," from which the most dramatic parts of Jason Arday's book were plagiarized"
Saul Sadka on X - "The Humanities PhD plagiarism apocalypse is coming. As the Jason Arday case shows, few expect anyone to read their thesis (in his case, even his doctoral advisors clearly didn’t). Somebody soon is going to set AI on the millions of them; some will be read for the first time, and a list of all the plagiarists going back a century will be spat out. It will be a massacre of reputations."
Master Alpaca on X - "Unless they redefine plagiarism as really not that big of a deal, which they're basically trying with Arday. They say he communicates through mimicry due to autism! So all the plagiarists will bravely and stunningly come out as actually being neurodivergent. Not believing them will be a sign of how much of an ignorant bigot you are and still need to do a lot of work to educate yourself."
Thread by @akarlin on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "For Wokes, a @nathancofnas who allows selection pressures on humans didn't stop acting above the neck 50,000 years ago is more objectionable than serial fraud, plagiarism, and intentional frivolous misuse of police resources to harass journalists (in theory a criminal offense?!).
Object lesson why you really shouldn't don't care about the populist backlash against universities. Populism is dumb but these people made their own bed. This is why I keep saying that AGI seems to have come at just the right moment. Just need to make sure it isn't derailed.
PS. Why does Cofnas actively provoke more outrage than a taxpayer-funded fraudster?
Couple of papers: In 2024, Kirkegaard with Bryan Pesta and Joseph Bronski found that the average American considers the question of whether “European Whites are smarter than African Blacks for genetic reasons” is more taboo than whether “pedophilia is harmful or not”. Just a month later Cory Clark et al. found that the topic of race differences in intelligence was more “discouraged” amongst US psychology professors than sex differences, transgender identity, or even the evolutionary roots of rape. Like for many Wokes being a pedophile is less bad than being a racist as they define it."
The ultimate sin in Western society is to be racist. That's why some of Henry Nowak's last words were pushing back on the slander he was subject to.
The Arday debacle is a great opportunity for the Left - "the BBC Today programme interviewed his fellow Cambridge professor Priyamvada Gopal. She said what a disgrace the Arday affair had been and called for an independent inquiry into Cambridge’s behaviour. An internal inquiry, she said, would mean Cambridge “marking its own homework”. Her words brought expressions of approval from Today’s well-educated, mainly white audience. Despite her “ethnic” name – Prof Gopal is Indian – she seemed not to be jumping on the diversity bandwagon. Perhaps the wheels are at last coming off that particular wagon, many thought. My own reaction is more cautious. Prof Gopal, though much cleverer than Dr Arday, who even needed a co-author to write his own forthcoming memoirs, is one of the most virulent culture warriors in the university. One of woke’s specialities is biting the hand that feeds you. Prof Gopal, a fellow of Churchill College, has firmly sunk her teeth into the statesman after whom her college is named. Without the prestige of the Churchill name, which attracts generous donations, her fellowship would not exist. Chairing a “working group” into Winston Churchill’s imperial attitudes and actions a few years back, Prof Gopal held college events which were platforms for denigrating him as a racist. She was outraged when the college authorities belatedly recognised that the events were turning into hate-fests. In 2020, when she was attacked online and in the press for tweeting: “White lives don’t matter. As white lives,” and saying, “Abolish whiteness”, the university promoted her from a doctorate to a professorial chair. When she was “persecuted”, she rose, whereas poor, fantastical Dr Arday collapsed in a heap. Why does this unrepentant militant move so quickly to condemn her Cambridge colleagues who promoted Dr Arday? My tentative explanation would be that the Left is now seriously alarmed that the whole project “Diversity, Equity [sometimes, Equality] and Inclusion” (DEI) might be derailed. It wants to take charge of a rescue operation which purports to be a moderating force. Prof Gopal’s call for an external inquiry, for example, might sound good, but really it is the duty of a self-governing university to investigate its own failures. You can be confident that any exterior inquiry constructed to the satisfaction of Prof Gopal will come up with the idea that DEI, in order to prevent “abuses”, should be put on a clearer statutory footing with an “independent” (ie. government-appointed) regulator across the whole university sector. Those who appointed Dr Arday would be exposed (justifiably) as ignorant and lazy. More ruthless commissars would replace them. In particular, Prof Gopal surely does not want DEI embarrassments to spoil her related, much greater project, which is the “decolonisation” of the whole university. Decolonisation, she has written, is “a meaningless piety without an extensive enactment of material reparations – indeed restitution” to the victims of colonial oppression; “no academic engagement with it should be soothing”. I would not be surprised if government ministers are not already thinking Prof Gopal’s way. It would fit with Andy Burnham’s style if he could “triangulate” over the Arday issue – seeming to sympathise with conservatives who found the Arday appointment utterly preposterous, while assisting those, like Prof Gopal, who think all universities should banish “whiteness”. The new Education Secretary, Lucy Powell, has a slightly embarrassing link, through a special adviser, with the cult of Jason Arday. She would be a zealous social engineer if Cambridge-educated Andy asked her. A quarter of a century ago, Gordon Brown, then chancellor of the exchequer with no role whatever in education, tried a similar trick, intervening in the decision of an Oxford college not to admit a pupil from a northern comprehensive school called Laura Spence. He used poor Ms Spence as a battering ram with which to assail the commanding heights of academe. Less clumsily, Mr Burnham could achieve similar effects over the Arday case. If he handled the rhetoric right, he could nationalise DEI and force all would-be professors to submit to a government-dictated form of investigation and interview."
Arday ‘accused student of white privilege’ after she questioned mark - "The claim was made by a former student who described Mr Arday’s teaching during his 2018 tenure at the University of Roehampton as “terrible”. The former student described his reaction to being asked for feedback, saying: “I now saw a side of him I’d never seen before – angry, but also scared. Arday implied that I was racist, and said that the only reason I wasn’t happy with 70 per cent was due to my ‘white privilege’.”... Writing for the news website UnHerd, the former student, who was given the pseudonym Fiona Brown, said Mr Arday gave her a mark of 70 per cent for the essay – below her average for the year – and she subsequently asked him for a meeting to provide feedback. When she explained her dissatisfaction, she claimed that “suddenly, his friendly, confident demeanour changed” and he made the accusation of white privilege. “He was clearly upset at being questioned, and I ended the meeting as quickly as possible,” she said. The student, who said Mr Arday had left shortly after the interaction, questioned why none of his universities had “been prepared to point out that the emperor had no clothes” before he joined Cambridge. “Some serious soul-searching must surely follow from all the academics who enabled him to climb the academic ladder,” she said. Describing Mr Arday’s teaching after he arrived at Roehampton as a senior lecturer in the autumn of 2018, she said “the first red flag” was his discussions about song lyrics, including “the way he’d ramble about Tinie Tempah or Eminem, or how black artists like Beyoncé were sexualised by white men, without offering any evidence to substantiate his claims”. Mr Arday would also tell his class to discuss clips from the films Fish Tank and Kidulthood “without offering guidance on how to do so”, she said. She added: “And this was if he was even in the classroom at all. He often arrived late and left early, once teaching for a single hour when four were scheduled. “I can honestly describe Arday’s teaching as terrible. He rarely used the PowerPoint slides. “Instead, he usually sat casually on a desk, giving his generalised views on racism without ever referring to any academic theories – let alone those relevant to the Youth Participation and Identities module he was supposed to be teaching.” The former student said Mr Arday’s class was initially “charmed” by his teaching and “interested in his claims that white people were guilty of every kind of prejudice”. However, she said “it gradually dawned on us that we were learning nothing of substance, and that much of his talk was nonsense”, as Mr Arday continued to fail to turn up for lectures. When the students took an assessment, he recommended that they answer either of the two essay questions that mentioned ethnicity, despite there being four options, she claimed. “This, after all, was the only thing he’d talked to us about,” she said."
On "Fiona Brown's" testimony
Jason Arday taught me. Here’s what I learned - "Given that he could neither teach nor support his students, it’s little wonder that he appeared psychologically incapable of coping with criticism. The University of Roehampton was seemingly aware of his failings yet did nothing, avoiding controversy by allowing him to move on to another set of students. Indeed, if any one of the universities Arday had taught at before being appointed to Cambridge had been prepared to point out that the emperor had no clothes, he might never have faced the humiliations of the past two weeks. Some serious soul-searching must surely follow from all the academics who enabled him to climb the academic ladder. Did they really help this young man, or were they only thinking of their own reputations? They might also spare a thought for all his students. I’m reminded here of the tale of the Post Turtle, where a farmer finds a turtle stuck on a fencepost. “That Post Turtle didn’t get up there by himself,” the farmer says. “He doesn’t belong there, and you wonder who put him there. He has no idea what to do while he’s up there, and having been elevated beyond his ability to function, he’s never going to get anything done while he is there.” He adds: “You just want to help the poor bugger get down, and you can’t help but wonder what kind of idiot put him up there in the first place.” It’s a question Arday’s many backers may now wish to ask."
Left-wing lawyer behind Jason Arday open letter defends support - "A lawyer who led a campaign backing Jason Arday has reiterated his support for the former professor. Jolyon Maugham, the founder of the Good Law Project, headed an open letter calling plagiarism allegations against Mr Arday a “smear”... Mr Maugham defended the former academic again despite his resignation, claiming that the former professor’s alleged dishonesty could be attributed to neurodivergence."
The Arday scandal exposes the creeping decay of Britain's great universities - "With his professorship, Dr Arday got a fellowship at Jesus College. I have followed activities at Jesus since I discovered that its China Centre was funded by money sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party, and pumped out Xi Jinping propaganda, refusing a platform to Xi’s critics. Its Master, Sonita Alleyne, also someone without an academic background, defended this arrangement. Zealous about Black Lives Matter, she led her college into the ecclesiastical courts to remove from its chapel a beautiful 17th-century memorial of a benefactor because, she said, he had made money out of the slave trade (actually, he hadn’t). She lost, costing the college a six-figure sum... Dr Arday told The Guardian that he was paid £1.4m for this book. If, for once, he were accurate, you would think his fall this week would cause the publisher to lose the lot. But then again, perhaps not. The people using this bewildered and bewildering man to advance their ideology may yet succeed in persuading the gullible that he is a saint and martyr. If they do, they will succeed in destroying the concepts of research, improving the sum of universal knowledge and properly educating the young. Then the academic freedom upon which a university’s reputation depends will wither away."
Cambridge hired Jason Arday after ‘listening to black students’ - "Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of the Faculty of Education, said the university had “listened to the voices of our black scholars and our black students” prior to Mr Arday’s appointment as professor of sociology of education. She said the conversations had helped the university to “face up to some of the structural issues that people face” at Cambridge... “The board of electors on your interview day were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”... The job application for Mr Arday’s position specifically welcomed applications from candidates from diverse backgrounds. The application form said: “The Faculty of Education welcomes expressions of interest and applications from candidates from all communities and a diversity of backgrounds. “In particular, the following groups are currently under-represented in our community: women, those with a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background and those with disabilities.”... he falsely claimed to hold a master’s degree in psychodynamic counselling from Birkbeck University and to be an “honorary professor” in Durham University’s sociology department... Mr Arday had repeatedly claimed that he was the author of a book called Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse. The book was listed in his biography description in published essays as well as in promotional material for speaking events, and was attributed to the Palgrave Macmillan publishing house. There is no evidence that any book was written or published. Mr Arday also claimed between 2019 and 2023 that he had published a book titled Considering Racialised Contexts in Education: Using reflective practice and peer-mentoring to support Black and Ethnic Minority educators. The title was listed on his staff profile on Durham University’s website as being published in 2019 by Routledge publishing company. He was still claiming the book was published when he took up the post as Cambridge’s youngest black professor in March 2023. It was not until December 2023 that the Durham website was finally altered to say the book was “in press”, meaning it had passed peer review and been accepted for publication, but had not been published yet."
Jonathan Kay on X - "One interesting detail here is that when it became clear that Arday was an incompetent fraud, the university did nothing except let him move on to some new school so he could do the same grift there. Everyone was terrified of criticizing him publicly because they all thought they’d be accused of racism… which in fact is exactly what happened to the first group of people who did go public with their attacks on Arday in 2026. To it’s everlasting disgrace,@Cambridge_Uni even joined in with those first initial accusations of racism, even though everyone there by this time new full well that Arday was a complete fraud"
Prof Ian Pace on X - "The case of Jason Arday involves at least five universities, as well as external academics on recruitment panels, multiple academic publishers, a range of academic journals, the principal sociological professional association. Not to mention many outside academia."
Dan Neidle on X - "Why was the Jason Arday story broken by a racist blogger and not the mainstream press? Because Times Higher Education was intimidated off the story by a letter from notorious libel firm Carter-Ruck. I'm publishing the letter. Its central claim may be false."
Professor Alice Sullivan on X - "The Carter Ruck letter to @timeshighered has now been published. An interesting footnote - the letter states that Arday was supervising 15 PhD students and had acted as external examiner for 35. 15 would be a huge number of PhD students even in the case of a brilliant and energetic supervisor. I would expect a well-run department to discourage this kind of excessive supervisory load because it is very difficult to provide adequate supervision to this many PhD students. If Arday really had 15 PhD students, I wonder what experience these 15 students received and how they are being supported now. Acting as external examiner for 'over 35' students would be extraordinary given that Arday only received his PhD in 2015. If this is true, then there are over 35 people whose PhDs are tainted. PhDs are examined by two academics, the internal examiner, and the external who comes from another university. Broadly speaking, the internal ensures that the student gets a fair ride, while the external is there to enforce standards. The name of the external examiner will typically appear on the PhD graduate's CV, because it tells you who has attested that this is PhD-level work. We now know that Arday's own PhD was plagiarised. But even if it hadn't been, his work was of such low quality that no university should have elevated him to the position of supervising or examining PhD students. There are many victims here. I hope we will hear from some of them."
Nathan Cofnas on X - "ChatGPT counts 46 organizations that had formal ties with Jason Arday including
- Durham University (associate prof)
- Glasgow (full professor)
- British Sociological Association (director)
- Royal Society of Arts (fellow)
- BBC (guest editor)
In 2023, the Guardian itself (!) published a breathless article titled “Jason Arday: he learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 – then became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor.” More than a dozen academic journals gave the imprimatur of “peer review” to Arday’s plagiarized wokebabble. The prestigious NY publisher Simon & Schuster is still going ahead with his memoirs. Now the Guardian wants us to think this is just about “one academic and his bosses at Cambridge”? There are thousands of Jason Ardays in universities all over the Western world. The only thing special about Arday is that he took the plagiarism and lies about his personal life too far, so there was a hook for a news story. But even that wasn’t enough to get him removed from academia. Until last Wednesday Cambridge was still smearing his critics as waging a “vile campaign.” He crossed the line not by being an incompetent fraud, but by claiming prestigious affiliations that he didn’t have, creating conflict between Cambridge and other universities. “DEI” means achieving representation by doing away with elementary standards for certain people based on race. Just take a look at the content of “peer-reviewed” journals like Whiteness in Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory. The other papers in these journals are just like those written by Arday—someone who is now widely recognized to be mentally disabled. The people trying to write this off as a fluke or an isolated case of “research misconduct” are at best delusional. The ideology of elite institutions is DEI, and DEI is Jason Arday."
Emperor Arday’s new clothes - spiked - "To understand the making of the emperor’s new clothes, count the tailors. The University of Cambridge maintains an Office of External Affairs and Communications with nearly 40 named staff. Six of them are press officers in the narrow sense, and there’s a head of media and five communications managers. Another seven sit in research communications. Around them cluster a five-strong directorate, four public-affairs operatives, seven people doing social media and video, four on web and email, three on internal communications, three designers and a three-person brand and trademark team, which exists, presumably, to protect the brand. Then count the moral tailors. The central equality, diversity and inclusion section, nested within human resources at the Old Schools (the university’s central office), has a section head, three EDI consultants, a co-ordinator and an administrator. That is before the separate race-equality team, before the disability service, before the EDI officers salted through every faculty, before the college-level apparatus. None of this comes cheap. These posts sit on the university’s single-salary spine. A communications manager or an EDI consultant occupies roughly the £43,000 to £56,500 band, heads of section run towards £67,000, the deputy directors to £76,000 and the executive director of communications sits somewhere north of £83,000 on a spine that climbs, for the most exalted, past £213,000. Cambridge employs more people and on better salaries to manage its reputation than most national newspapers employ to report the news. And what has all this machinery delivered? In March 2023, it delivered Jason Arday, appointed professor of sociology of education at 37, celebrated everywhere as the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history, a man whose account of himself – nonverbal until 11, barely literate until 18, doctorate by 2015 – was promoted by the press office and the newspapers with the credulity of a parish magazine reviewing the vicar’s marrows. He was made a fellow of Jesus College. He was garlanded with honorary degrees. He was, in the ugly phrase of the trade, a comms asset... what did all those tailors do? In June, Cambridge’s official response to the questions was to denounce a ‘vile campaign’ to undermine his credibility. Not to examine the claims. Not to say nothing, which is what a competent press office says while it checks the facts. It decided instead to smear the questioner. Eight weeks later, Cambridge announced a fresh investigation into Arday’s qualifications and honorary appointments, and within days, on 5 August, he resigned with immediate effect from his chair and from his Jesus College fellowship, citing the toll of relentless accusation. Whatever the investigation eventually finds, the institution managed, in a single summer, to be both attack dog and prosecutor, to vouch and to recant, and to do it in front of every newspaper in the English-speaking world... The Good Law Project’s open letter pronounced the allegations entirely false, the work of a right-wing smear campaign, and gathered some 14,000 signatures. Archived versions show the text was then quietly rewritten under the signatories’ feet. The claim that two universities had conducted thorough investigations disappeared. Cambridge names were trimmed or shorn of their affiliations. No note disclosed the changes. And now, after Arday’s resignation, the Good Law Project’s founder, Jolyon Maugham, explains that it merely chose ‘to carry’ the letter, ‘a deliberately neutral verb’. Fourteen thousand people signed that letter after the Good Law Project urged them to. They are now left holding a courier’s receipt. And what of the master of Jesus College? Sonita Alleyne made her career running a media-production company before she came to preside over Arday’s college, so she of all people knew what an open letter is for and what a signature on one does. She signed anyway, and she signed as master, lending not merely her name but her office to a text declaring the allegations entirely false. The master of a college is not a fan with a lanyard. She holds a position of trust over her college’s fellowship. Had any question of a fellow’s integrity come before the college, its master had already published her verdict. Then the letter started to slough its Cambridge names, affiliations melting from the page. Within the week, Arday had resigned and the Good Law Project’s founder was recasting the whole exercise as neutral carriage. Thirteen press officers, six diversity professionals and not one of them, apparently, empowered to ask the only question that mattered: Is the story true? Pity the fundraisers. Cambridge’s Development and Alumni Relations Office employs more than 140 people, bleeding 310,000 alumni, fresh from a campaign that raised over £2.2 billion for the university and its colleges. Jesus College runs its own small Development and Alumni Relations Office and was lately recruiting a major-gifts officer to persuade donors that Jesus College is, in the words of the advertisement, a place where ‘academic values’ are a ‘core concern’ and ‘freedom of thought and expression is paramount’. Somewhere this week, a development officer is preparing for a call with a hard-headed benefactor in Houston or Hong Kong who has read the coverage and wants to know why his money endowed a pedestal rather than a scholarship"
