The Arday Affair - "The centre of gravity in the Arday Affair has shifted. Public discussion no longer focuses on evidence that Cambridge University’s youngest black holder of a professorial chair plagiarised considerable portions of his PhD, embellished his c.v. with three academic appointments at institutions that now deny it, and claimed to be the author of a book that was never written. The focus has moved on to the question of why he was appointed in the first place, and what that tells us about the state of academe. This is good. For Jason Arday himself I feel somewhat sorry. Yes, he’s been serially dishonest. And yet, from what I’ve observed, he really believes his own lies. In brushing aside critics as “racially motivated”, he sounds as if he sincerely means what he says. He’s trapped in a world of fantasy. Whatever his personal guilt, there’s a tragic quality to his predicament. For, when reality does finally break through, Nemesis will enter, too. A terrible reckoning will cause the self he’s constructed to disintegrate. I fear for his life. And that makes me angry—but not with his critics. It makes me angry at all the adults who failed to call him out. Who indulged him. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of ‘eurocentric’, colonialist, racist bad faith. Who aided and abetted the elaboration of his fantasy, year after year. Latest among them are the eight professors and the vice-chancellor’s deputy on the committee that unanimously recommended his Cambridge appointment. Evidently, they failed to scrutinise him. But why? One leading candidate for the answer is the identity of the applicant: an autistic man of African heritage, possessing double membership of historically marginalised and victimised groups. I find this explanation entirely plausible. I’ve witnessed at first-hand how some professors, even at our most prestigious universities, use their victim-identity as a get-out-of-gaol card. How they deploy it to trump intellectual standards and by-pass accountability before the bar of reason. And how their anti-rational behaviour prevented neither their appointment nor their promotion. Several years ago, I was invited to take part in a panel discussion about empire in Oxford. One of my fellow panellists was a female professor of international relations. At one point in our discussion, I turned to her and said, “A few moments ago, you said X. Now you’ve just said Y. They’re not consistent”. Waving her hand imperiously, she swept my complaint off the table, exclaiming, “Enough of your donnish, tutorial tactics!” I was struck dumb, feeling—and I use the word advisedly—unmanned. But, later, I reflected, “Are there no rules to this game any longer? And if not, what on earth is the point?” Clearly, our discussion had not been a searching out of the truth together by common submission to the disciplines of logic and evidence. It was merely the occasion for the declamation of a preferred narrative and silencing criticism by the insinuation of bad faith. Hence, ‘tactics’. But there was more. For, my tactics had also been described as ‘donnish’, which connotes fusty white males in tweed jackets, reeking of pipe smoke circa 1950. My fellow panellist was also exploiting her political power as a member of a group commonly stereotyped as victims (women) over a member of a group commonly stereotyped as victimisers (men). I was aware that, in response to the dismissal of my criticism, my tongue was tied, partly because the one doing the dismissing was a woman and I was a man. And her choice of words took care to remind me of that. Rather than a forum for finding out the truth, our discussion had been an arena for the exercise of power. This was no isolated incident. In my recent book, The New Dark Age: Why Liberals must Win the Culture Wars, I report one of many similar cases on the far side of the Atlantic. After serving as a professor of political science at Alberta’s Mount Royal University for fourteen years, Frances Widdowson was fired in 2021. Why? Because she challenged the university’s policy of requiring its members to ‘respect’ and ‘value’ indigenous ways of knowing. When she disagreed that traditional native American ‘star knowledge’ should be viewed in the same way as astronomical science, indigenous studies professors accused her of racist harassment, making the campus ‘unsafe’ for them. Widdowson sees her particular experience as an instance of a wider phenomenon in universities, where differential treatment on the basis of one’s identity “is becoming the norm”. The silver lining of the Arday Affair’s dark cloud is that it has lifted the lid on this problem in academe, just as the murder of Henry Nowak exposed it among the police. Now it’s up to us to get the measure of it. A local investigation by the University of Cambridge isn’t enough. We need a national inquiry into the corrupting effect of identity politics on our universities."
Left wingers are still insisting that there's no proof that he plagiarised, or that he was innocent because Cambridge cleared him. They really can't deviate from their programming
Love the UK - Bring back common sense on X - "BREAKING: Jason Arday has been found dead. The police say the circumstances are not suspicious. He spent years building a life on claims that did not hold up. Students who questioned him were shut down, labelled, and left carrying the cost. When the evidence started piling up he did not step forward and own it. He could have said the simplest thing: that a small lie grew, that the rewards made it hard to stop, and that proper checks earlier might have forced him to face it and get help. Instead he kept going, gathered public letters of support, and waited for the next wave to pass. The book coming out this week was the final weight he could not carry. Blaming the media for this is a form of gaslighting. Journalists did what they are supposed to do. They looked, they checked, they reported what they found. The people who should be sitting with this are the ones who never looked. The universities that waved him through. The broadcasters and presenters who put him on air without scrutiny. The institutions that treated his race as a substitute for due diligence and turned him into a symbol instead of a person who needed honest challenge. If those same people had pushed back years ago instead of elevating him, giving him the Cambridge post, the book deal and the platforms, he might still be here. Intervention and accountability would have been harder in the short term and kinder in the long one. He never had to practise either. The DEI shield closed down every criticism before it could land, and the people holding that shield now want to point the finger anywhere but at themselves. It is always a tragedy when a young man dies, especially if the choice was his. Standing up and taking responsibility would have been the harder and better path. He was never required to walk it. RIP Jason - the system failed you."
Billy Bragg chan on X - "He died doing what he loved: emotionally manipulating people into thinking he was a victim"
A lot of left wing cope involves blaming Cofnas. Apparently Cofnas tricked Arday into plagiarising as well as lying about his life
Eli Steele on X - "This is tragic. No one wished this for Jason Arday. The tragedy is that he went down the wrong road, and the people he met on that road enabled him. They looked the other way to avoid the lie and to profit off what his presence gave them. But a house of cards can only stand for so long before reality comes along. The deeper tragedy is that no one ever told Jason Arday he did not have to do this, that he did not have to fly like Icarus. Had someone stopped him earlier on that fateful road, who knows what he might have become. That is the tragedy here."
Given that he sent the police and a law firm after those who tried to expose his lies, he was not innocent
Enguerrand VII de Coucy on X - "The story that will be spun about Jason Arday will be that his death lies at the feet of the people who called out his serial fabulations for being what they so transparently were, but the real story is of an elite academic world that was so excited by a compelling narrative that they rushed a clearly mentally unbalanced man with no real qualifications to the heights of academia because he ticked so many useful boxes. If anybody had stopped to drill into his story BEFORE we got to the point that he was a notable enough figure for others to begin to drill into it none of this would have happened"
Left wing logic - if you expose black people's plagiarism and lies and they kill themselves, you're a murderer. Of course, if someone the left disapproves of kills himself or is killed because of left wing incitement of violence, they celebrate (eg Charlie Kirk).
Jay Beecher on X - "Very sad and tragic news re Jason Arday. As with Virginia Giuffre, who also took her own life after her false allegations began to be exposed and she was due to finally take the stand and be cross-examined, those who blindly believed Arday's clearly questionable lies, who attacked his critics and elevated him into the public eye, are partly to blame for his death. If common sense had prevailed, perhaps both he and Giuffre would have been given the help they needed and they'd still be alive today. Giuffre was blindly believed because she was a woman - anyone questioning her claims with facts and logic or saying she needed help was branded a 'victim-shamer'. Arday was blindly believed because he was black - anyone questioning his claims with facts and logic or saying he needed help was branded a racist. But the truth is that it is never inappropriate to question the veracity of what someone claims, for neither gender nor race play any form of role in the ability for a person to tell a lie. And political correctness/wokeness - often fanatically promoted/enforced by journalists/activists - intentionally suppresses common sense, often with dire consequences...
She definitely committed suicide. She'd written to her ghostwriter on how she intended to take her life, and the method. She'd also lost custody of her children and was battling to have a judge throw out Rina Oh's lawsuit against her. Around a week before she sent her suicide email and wrote a (strange) will, the judge rejected her petition and said she'd have to take the stand and be cross-examined (for the first time). Her lie about only having four days left to live and being involved in a serious car crash being exposed in the press also pushed her over the edge. Re Arday, you're spot on. Cambridge Uni needs to hold an inquiry into why he was hired in the first place and no checks were made."
GB Politics on X - " NEW: MP Zarah Sultana has claimed that if Jason Arday were a "white middle-class academic," he "would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was""
Saskia on X - "Here we go then. Was literally waiting for this boll**ks to begin. The death of Jason Arday is tragic and disturbing. DEI incentives helped elevate and protect a story built on serious exaggerations and lies. Those claims were allowed to grow for years until the public exposure became too much. In his 2012 appearance on Surprise Surprise, even his missus presented his claimed achievements as fact. It’s reasonable to think his kids largely believed that version of his life up until the last few weeks too. He was unlikely to get the mental health support he clearly needed. That sector is full of low expectations and a deep reluctance to apply the usual standards to certain people for fear of being called racist. Few on the progressive side were willing to suggest deeper personal or psychological problems while the story still fitted their preferred narrative. What lessons will actually be learned? Almost certainly none. We’re only likely to see further efforts to hide the problems created by an ideology that rewards identity and narrative over evidence and accountability - as Zarah demonstrates here. My thoughts are with his children."
Vladimir Poutine™ on X - ""If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic, he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was." Sir Tim Hunt was awarded a Nobel prize for his research and was hounded into retirement over inoffensive jokes made in one speech. A distinguished, decades long career torn from him. Over literally nothing but progressive butthurt and hatred of "old white men". Dr Matt Taylor who was part of a team which landed the first probe on a comet was made to publicly apologise for wearing a shirt designed by a female friend of his - once again because you progressive loons lost your minds over cartoons. These two men did nothing wrong whatsoever and you hounded them viciously. Plagiarists and liars, and those within the academies who supported them, having their lies and plagiarism exposed is no crime. Save your breath."
Millennial Woes on X - "It's awful about Jason Arday, and yes the gormless female academics bear the ultimate responsibility (like the dog-owner with their pitbull), but let's not forget that the man was a pathological liar and serial fraudster. Yes, he shouldn't have been facilitated, but he did it willingly and purely for personal gain. They were prepared to be lied to, he was prepared to lie."
Philip Proudfoot on X - "Jason Arday is dead. Right-wing reactionary media did this. Relentless public attacks on what should have been an internal university matter and not the subject of a mass media frenzy. Blood on their hands."
SpongeBOZZ on X - ">man builds entire career on fraud
>Rightfully loses his job and gets clowned
>Commits suicide
>"oMg tHiS PoOr iNnOcEnT MaN, hOw CoUlD ThEy HaTe On HiM tHeY HaVe bLoOd oN tHeir HanDs"
Maybe dont try to lie your way to the top, if you can't handle heat when you get called out."
Of course, without the "relentless public attacks", the establishment would've covered it up - as they tried to for so long
Meme - planefag @planefag: "Look who's lecturing us on "relentless public attacks." *Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann 'smirking'*"
Queen Bee on X - "Here we go. Nobody in the media “did this”. A young man taking his own life is an absolute tragedy, and my heart goes out to everyone who knew and loved him, but turning his death into a weapon against people who questioned him helps nobody. For decades, Jason Arday made claims about his life which were accepted, repeated and celebrated by friends, employers and the media. When serious questions were finally asked, the resulting humiliation must have been utterly crippling. If anything, the tragedy here is that so many people around him enabled something that could never withstand scrutiny. They didn't protect him by doing that. They helped paint him into a corner from which he may have felt there was no escape. That is desperately sad. But blaming journalists and commentators for discovering the truth is neither fair nor helpful."
Eric S. Raymond on X - "Jason Arday has committed suicide. In former times, this would have been considered an honorable exit from a situation in which one has utterly disgraced oneself. Today, I fear, it will only produce a major chorus of "You were all so MEAN to him!". In an ideal world, this would trigger a wave of copycat suicides by DEI hires who can no longer live with the shame of their existence. Alas, we won't get that."
Sangita Myska on X - "The ideological, right wing, racist media that hounded Jason Arday - shame on you and your monstrous witch hunt. The 41 year old was found dead at his home today. He was complicated, vulnerable, and at times reckless but he was a human being . He didn’t deserve to be treated as fodder in a culture war. Cambridge and the other institutions that benefited from his appointment must also be hold themselves to account for their part in his story. RIP Jason Arday. My condolences go to his friends and family."
Accountability for those that the left approves of is harassment. Harassment of people the left disapproves of this accountability that's why they claim cancel culture doesn't exist
If you resist the left's attempt to radically remake and corrupt society, you are starting a culture war and are a bad person
lizzy on X - "He championed himself on fighting rascism racial inequality and how black people should have the same opportunities he was an inspiration to black people only to be found out to be liar . His legacy is how to lie and cheat ur way into a prestigious job ."
Lucas on X - "Shame on you Sangita. You and your leftist ideology put this totally unimpressive lying black man where he did not belong. If he were white this would not have happened as he never would have got a job at Cambridge through their DEI shit!"
Yetomy on X - "I don't think it was a witch hunt though; didn't he resign in disgrace?"
Emily Keeler on X - "He was a liar who got called out. ‘Racist’, really? For saying he didn’t run 600 miles in 6 days, some of it on a broken leg?"
C F on X - "His left wing beliefs killed him, as usual the left refuse to take responsibility."
Gary Younge on X - ""When people talk about the need for Black Excellence I counter with an insistence on Black mediocrity: the right for black people to be as average, flawed, compromised & mistaken as any other group of people. The right, ultimately, to be human." R.I.P. Jason Arday
From Pigeoholed: Creative Resistance as an Act of Freedom"
Eric Christen on X - "You lied about him he lied about himself and your DEI cult caused all of this. Congratulations sociopath."
A perosn on X - "Exactly, they did this, they abandoned him, they've learned nothing and want to blame us."
i/o on X - "Reaction from right: "He was used by the academic establishment to score DEI points; it is to blame."
Reaction from the left: "We told the racists that if they continued their witch hunt, this would happen."
My reaction: Maybe the guy who spent his adulthood lying, used these lies and his race to run a much-too-easy grift, and then threatened and maligned those who dared to call him to account finally felt some guilt about the way he had behaved, and ended his life the way he had lived it: Irresponsibly and with moral cowardice."
Barry Wall on X - "The Haldane Loophole: The Angle on Arday You Don’t Know About
Arday and the cronies of Cambridge do not exist in a vacuum. To think so is to fail to see the key changes that occurred in the university sector since the creation of something called UK Research and innovation, UKRI as it is known, in 2017. Something important happened at that time that most people missed. Why wouldn't they, after all it seemed like a dry exercise in funding allocation for the HE sector even if you were aware. In reality it was anything but, and it's a story worth telling.UKRI is the main public body that funds research and innovation across the United Kingdom. Its creation dissolved the previous research councils covering science, medicine, social science, arts and humanities, along with Innovate UK and Research England, bringing it under one organisation, UKRI. It controls billions of pounds (8.8 billion in 25/26) of taxpayer money each year and decides which projects, universities and researchers get funded. But there is a problem, an overarching one that many still fail to recognise flows directly from the Equality Act 2010 and the subsequent Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). UKRI, like so many of these out of control Quangos, has institutionalised and embedded EDI as a core part of its mission and operations with a dedicated Equality, Diversity and Inclusion strategy titled “research and innovation by everyone, for everyone.” Downstream individual research councils (EPSRC, Research England, BBSRC and others) publish their own multi-year EDI action plans. These treat EDI as fundamental to high-quality research, diversity intrudes at every stage of the funding cycle, they monitor award rates by protected characteristics, push for more diverse panels, and encourage or require EDI-related statements and inclusive practices in applications and project design... This dumbing down, the abandonment of excellence and meritocratic rigour, and the ascendancy of EDI in all its destructive force from implementation to infection of the funding pipeline did not occur by chance, but does illustrate a perfect Chesterton's Fence example. This demolition of a fence that has allowed Cambridge, with its Jason Arday and his boss Hilary Cremin, to behave in such a way was built into the creation of UKRI within The Higher Education and Research Act 2017 from the beginning, it is not a bug it is a feature.The Haldane principle is the long-standing UK convention that decisions about which individual research projects should be funded are best made by researchers themselves through peer review, rather than by politicians or civil servants. It is named after Richard Burdon Haldane, who chaired the committee that produced the 1918 Machinery of Government report. The core idea is that ministers set the overall science budget and high-level priorities, but the detailed allocation of grants to specific projects and researchers should be left to independent experts judging quality and excellence... The old formulation, set out clearly by David Willetts in 2010, involved evaluating “quality, excellence and likely impact.” The new legal definition dropped those two crucial elements: “researchers themselves” and “excellence.” It now reads that decisions are best taken “following an evaluation of the quality and likely impact of the proposals (such as a peer review process).” This was a deliberate softening, and it opened the flood gates for the modern day snake oil sellers, the likes of Arday and his cronies; along with, I suspect, thousands of others across academia and by default the public and private sector, hamstrung by a funding chain predicated on EDI compliance. The 2017 statute opened the door to the infection of EDI. Once the legal text no longer insisted on researcher-led excellence as the core standard, it became much easier for other criteria to be layered on top and in the years after UKRI was formed, that is exactly what happened. EDI requirements, diversity statements, inclusive excellence language and identity-focused considerations moved into funding calls, peer-review guidance, panel composition and appointment processes across UKRI and the universities. Officials and administrators could still claim they were evaluating “quality and likely impact” while expanding what those words meant. The formal defence of pure scholarly merit had been wounded, and if we do not address it; that wound could be fatal. The downstream effects are now highly visible. We have seen rapid promotions and high-profile appointments justified by identity narratives rather than by the quality, originality and excellence of the scholarship. The Arday case is one high-profile example, but again it is not isolated. When the formal standard of excellence is diluted at the legislative level, the institutions respond accordingly. Peer review becomes less rigorous, scrutiny of credentials weakens, fabrication and plagiarism are more easily overlooked. If the candidate fits the preferred story or box in need of ticking they are in, driven of course by the incompetent grievance scholars and the Lanyard sporting bureaucrats who now hold sway over everything. A careful change of a few words in legislation and standards collapse, as they have, followed by years of cultural pressure from the expanding EDI industry and its Utopia driven equity zealots. That 2017 change removed a key defence against these snake oil merchants, for what began as a move for strategic flexibility around industrial strategy, became a useful opening for the wider cultural shift being manufactured inside academia itself. The loophole was real, and it was exploited. Excellence is not bigotry. It is the only fair and reliable way to decide who gets scarce public money and prestigious positions. When you attack the word itself in law, you attack the principle. The results are now playing out in plain sight and yet the state shows no intention of restoring the words “excellence” and “researchers themselves” to the statute. Until that happens, every future Arday will have a legal and cultural loophole ready and waiting."
Nigel Jacklin The Good Stats Man on X: "Is the Education Bubble About to Burst?" / X - "The Jason Arday scandal (Cambridge University's youngest black Professor) has generated much interest and criticism of academia. Whilst some link his promotion to DEI, I see a more broader picture:
a sector that is increasingly out of touch.
According to statistics published by the HESA (Higher Education Statistics Agency) the number of academic staff in UK higher education grew from 140,000 in 2000 to around 245,000 in 2025. This 75% increase was associated with a broadening of the university education pool based on the assumption that a better educated population would benefit society and the workplace. As a result, a university degree went from being a desirable qualification for many jobs to being a necessary condition. At the same time children in senior school were persuaded that a degree was a good thing, that they could achieve their dreams and that the lowly jobs their parents had (shop assistant, trades person) were beneath them. Some time ago we analysed the Labour Force Survey, producing a guide to the World of Work. This was designed to help students understand 'what jobs exist,' something schools careers advisers seemed to be not particularly good at. We also ranked jobs by education (the proportion of people working in a given job who had a degree). At the top a significant proportion of those in jobs with degrees were in...education. They were clearly convinced of their own worth. Out in the real world, it now seems people are less convinced... If the reaction to the Jason Arday scandal is anything to go by, many people hold the same level of contempt for academics as academics do for them. Why might this be? Listening to some of those defending Arday it is clear they have a different 'world view.' Whilst Arday is British, he represents the global majority. As such they feel he deserves a place at the heights of academia. In this respect the latest stats from the HESA are informative (see picture). These show that in the latest academic year just over a third of all people employed in Higher Education were non-UK nationals. The biggest growth in the past four years has been in non-EU nationals, up from 33,270 to 46,795, an increase of 41%. Your views on this may depend on whether you have a 'global' outlook (it's good) to a 'national' one (it's bad). You may feel this influx of international talent enriches our universities or just makes them feel less relevant and less 'for Brits like you.' It may be that you are quite happy with life at a local level and see no need to leave your home town and go to university. If you are in the latter group, and see a job as being a means of earning a living more than as a career and part of your identity, these international academics are clearly not going to 'do' it for you. Personally I think we have an over-supply of academics. 'Research' projects highlighted by @CharlotteCGill show just how much cash is being spent on quite ludicrous projects. If I had to choose which part of the bubble should be burst, the projects she lists would be the ones I would start with."
