Donna-Louise on X - "Believe Me - The Extraordinary Story Of Jason Arday... On 22 August and 31 August 2025 formal complaints were made to the Advertising Standards Authority about claims in his biographies. On 11 September 2025 the regulator told the agency Amfo to remove or amend claims that lacked adequate substantiation. A British regulator acted on this a year before the story broke publicly... Arday said he had obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck, University of London, and had become a “qualified counsellor.” That claim does not appear on his Cambridge Faculty of Education page. It does not appear on his Wikipedia entry. It does not appear on any of his standard institutional biographies. Birkbeck does not offer a master’s degree called “psychodynamic practice.” What it does offer is an MSc in Psychodynamic Counselling and Psychotherapy — a three-year part-time course that requires prior relevant experience and cannot be taken full-time. No entry for Jason Arday appears on the public registers of either the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) or the UK Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). He claimed the degree and the status of qualified counsellor. The specific degree title he used does not currently exist at Birkbeck. The qualification is absent from his official academic listings. No independent confirmation of either the degree or the professional registration has been produced... In a 2023 podcast he said he had been awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down. The 2017 London Gazette contains no such award. Declined honours are never gazetted, so the absence cannot disprove an offer. What it sits against is the word he used: “awarded.” An award is a completed act. A completed award would appear. Cambridge announced he would donate a £20,000 book advance to charity. Princeton University Press later declined to name the recipients... A former student at the University of Roehampton wrote that Arday “arrived at 4 hour lectures over an hour late and usually left after an hour,” sat on a desk talking generally about racism and celebrities, and that “we learned absolutely nothing.” The student said Arday relied on claims of autism and minority status to attack anyone who questioned his work. After several complaints a lead academic sat in on one of the lectures; the faculty were said to be reluctant to act for fear of being called racist. Arday left of his own accord. A follow-up comment in the same thread claimed the course head had said they would not employ him again... That is the story. Not simply a man who told tall stories. A machine that turns “we are not going to tell you what we found” into “he has been cleared,” and treats everyone who asks to see the working as a bigot... Jason Arday says he is not a liar. He says his errors stem from autism and inadequate supervision. He says he is the victim of a racially motivated campaign. He is entitled to say so. He is also entitled to the one thing nobody has given him: a proper, independent, published investigation by people with no stake in the answer, whose findings anyone can read. Robert Dingwall has called for exactly that. John Preston says there is a case to answer and the evidence triangulates. Colin Mills at Oxford has said he does not want his discipline smeared by association with academic fraud and low standards. The Office for Students says it cannot comment on individual cases. These are not campaigners. They are senior academics in the field asking for the one thing that would settle it. The institutions that elevated the legend have spent the last year quietly walking pieces of it back while insisting that the scrutiny, not the claims, is the real issue. The record is now long enough that the pattern itself is the evidence... The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence. Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough. It was not enough. And it never should have been."
Arday in Wonderland | Jacob Phillips | The Critic Magazine - "One reason why Arday’s defenders seem to have sidestepped actually disproving the allegations, is that they share a set of commitments which amount to a different worldview, rather than a difference of opinion. A commitment to to race “equity” rather than “equality” — to achieving balanced outcomes even if it requires differing standards — is formally embedded in 101 universities that have signed the Race Equality Charter (REC) orchestrated by Advance HE, a charitable professional membership scheme which is ubiquitous (and unchallengedly so) in the HE sector. There are 86 REC award holders, including most universities in Britain, who are awarded bronze, silver or gold on the basis of demonstrating their commitment to racial equity. The unassailable presupposition for such a scheme is that old chestnut that everything is racist, racism is everywhere, and it no longer means evidenced examples of discrimination or hatred but is rather a systemic and pervasive atmosphere from which no-one can escape. The REC is “underpinned by 5 Principles”, the first of which is that “Racism is an everyday facet of UK society and racial inequalities manifest themselves in everyday situations, processes and behaviours”. In light of this, you might ask, how could concerns be raised about Arday without those concerns manifesting racism? Advance HE tells us that the “work to drive out racism in all its forms from our sector is imperative and incumbent on all of us”, whether it is “deliberate or unconscious”. This is interesting, given that a key element of any submission for a REC award will involve training in an ideological spaghetti plate of dubious notions like “unconscious bias” which would seem to forestall the awkwardly legal fact, pointed out by the Committee for Academic Freedom, that “latest OfS guidance on freedom of speech states that it is illegal for universities” to (as put by the OfS) “require training or induction that imposes a requirement to endorse any controversial viewpoint or value judgement”. The main reasons why the Arday case will not lead to any change — whatever the truth behind the allegations — is that it is a primary commitment for the REC to promote “inclusive practices that improve the recruitment, retention, progression and success” of staff “from racially minoritised (sic) ethnic groups”. Now, you hardly need an (unplagiarised) PhD in rocket science to deduce that this incentive scheme is likely to clash with a racially neutral approach to academic standards. Remember, there is no such thing as racial neutrality anyway, and the end goal is equity, not equality, meaning that the standards have to be altered in supposed proportion to the case at hand. The absurdity doesn’t end here. The commitment to recruiting and promoting more staff on racial grounds is enveloped within an entirely uninterrogated assumption of the REC about the applicability to the academic world of “representation”. Somewhere along the line, someone decided that academic roles are not about high quality teaching and research, but rather representing racial demographics... The result of all this is a strange world where the illusory notions of ubiquitous systemic racism, unconscious bias, equity, and representation, conspire to make universities like a strange Alice in Wonderland dimension so deeply enmeshed that it can no longer find its way out. Even to suggest that returning to level ground might be a good thing is to admit you’re on the wrong side of history, and perpetuate the sense for denizens of that otherworld that behind every corner lurks a demented Nazi intent on the oppressed victims of staffing disparities. In the meantime, those of us who still hold firm that properly functioning universities are more necessary than ever for a fracturing public square find ourselves with less and less sympathy from people off campus. Removing the REC from all higher education institutions would surely be a fine first step to recovering public confidence again, if it isn’t already too late."
Only uneducated and ignorant right wing conservatives criticise universities
A comedy at Cambridge | James Martin Charlton | The Critic Magazine - "In what style might a script based on the Cambridge plagiarism scandal surrounding Jason Arday, Cambridge’s youngest ever black professor, best be written? The story certainly has a packed plot: an almost miraculous backstory, astonishing claims of sporting achievement, a spectacular rise to the top of his profession, and allegations of serial plagiarism. It also features a gushing crew of admirers, expressions of outrage at Arday’s accusers, attacks on their motives, and a few plain dealers who insist upon saying what they see. Put that way, despite its lack of ruffs and garters, it could readily be imagined as a lost comedy by the great Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson... Modern social justice activism has much in common with the Puritanism Jonson delighted in mocking. Both encourage their adherents to regard themselves as morally elevated by the righteousness of the cause they serve... Jonson portrays his Puritans not as holy people, but as aggressive social climbers who use religious moral superiority to control others while secretly indulging in the very vices they preach against. The question any Jonsonian comedy drawing from the Arday affair would ask is not simply, “who has behaved dishonourably” but “who has really harboured the more degrading view of black scholars?” Is it those who insist identical standards should apply to every candidate, or those prepared to suspend ordinary academic judgement because a candidate is black, working-class or neurodiverse? A great deal of scabrous comic mileage might be found in exposing a culture of low expectations presided over by white, well-heeled, expensively educated liberal academics... There is a rich seam of comedy to be mined not simply from the case in hand. Academia and the wider managerial and HR-led world are full of confidence men and their rubes. This class of people defines our age. Yet it would be a struggle to name a single play, television series or film which satirises this particular strain of institutional idiocy. Could it be that media and arts commissioners themselves belong to the same managerial culture? Like Jonson’s fools, they have become incapable of laughing at themselves. Even when the only appropriate response to a scandal as outlandish and revealing as the current one is to guffaw."
Jason Arday: a question of academic standards - "Amid much attention to Jason Arday’s plagiarism and advanced Walter Mittyfication, the gobbledygook of his writing style has been largely overlooked, not least by the professorial electors at Cambridge and the PhD examiners at Liverpool John Moores University. Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects travelling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language?... I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination... I wouldn’t normally use a public forum to lampoon a style that should have been corrected by a PhD candidate’s supervisor. I wouldn’t normally do it but — for heaven’s sake — it’s a Cambridge professor we are talking about, appointed to a presumably much-coveted chair at one of the world’s great universities, possessor of three honorary doctorates. Mightn’t you be forgiven for wondering whether, just possibly, normal standards were relaxed?... Fortunately, there are signs that other faculties at Cambridge are as aghast as the rest of us at what has been done to their university’s good name. May I arm them with a lovely quotation from one of science’s great stylists, Peter Medawar: “…no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”"
The Highly Credentialed Are All Jason Ardays - "Despite Arday's story completely collapsing along with the reputation of Cambridge University among people in the know, the media are still trying to cover for both by basically ignoring the facts of the case. Basically, it's the same thing they have done with Fauci, focusing on Rand Paul as Inspector Javert rather than on the fact that Fauci ruined lives because he is a malignant little man with a God complex. This is now the standard practice with all cases of experts lying and destroying lives. We still get the same insane coverage of climate change despite the fact that the research has been shown to be, a nearly infinite number of times, complete crap. Every prediction is wrong. Every "climate-fueled" wildfire is arson. Every "the polar bears are going extinct" claim is complete bullpuckey. None of it matters, because of The Narrative™. No place is this pattern clearer than in the area of gender medicine, where the research is of such low quality that most can be called fraudulent, and yet the consequences are so damaging that thousands of lives will be ruined and suicides will be caused. We are going through a totally unnecessary culture war over whether men ogling teenage girls and masturbating in locker rooms is kindness and compassion to an oppressed class, or aiding sexual predators. For God's sake, they are all Jason Ardays... The credentialed class is fatally compromised. Their loyalty is not to truth, rigor, or any vision of the good you and I can recognize. It is to their ideological commitments, which include a complete disdain for the hoi polloi and whatever we consider to be important values. These days, the tweed coat, the white coat, or any other symbol of high-status credentials should be viewed with special suspicion. "
Steven Pinker on X - ""A Lot of the Attacks on Higher Ed Are Unfair. Not This One....This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics." Cambridge U appoints a flaming charlatan then denies what everyone can plainly see. This fiasco should accelerate universities' self-examination. An obvious failure point was a lack of viewpoint diversity, with no non-woke profs or admins to call out the delusion. The more serious one is threats of punishment of critics: anyone who point out the obvious is smeared as a racist, ableist, and abettor of suicide (in this case, also police visits & barracuda libel lawyers). We know is a powerful generator of the madness of crowds."
Opinion | A Top Scholar’s Fall Shows That Universities Don’t Get It - The New York Times - "It’s easy to see how Jason Arday held on to his University of Cambridge professorship until Wednesday, despite facing significant accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty for years. After all, his story fit quite neatly into certain culture war grooves. On one side was a scholar born to working-class immigrant parents in South London public housing who rose to become the youngest Black professor in the university’s 800-plus-year history. On the other were the forces of reaction, seeming to target him as part of a wide-ranging attack on tolerance and progress. In many academic circles, he was clearly the good guy... If interest in this story peters out, that would be unfortunate, because what’s needed now is genuine accountability. This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny. Their decisions were both wrong and further damaged the reputation of higher education at a time when it has come under withering and sometimes unfair attack... Professors are hired on the basis of their prior work and an assumption of academic integrity; if that work was plagiarized it’s fair game for an investigation. Moreover, a credible allegation of plagiarism isn’t resolved by an author agreeing to take down a paper for revision; it demands a thorough independent investigation. Instead, Social Sciences posted a correction informing readers that the article had “been amended to increase the clarity of citation sources within the text.”... Mr. Cofnas arrived on the scene because of Cambridge’s complacency — he wrote the post after an anonymous Cambridge tipster reached out to him — which soon hardened into stridency. “Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop,” Cambridge said in a written statement it sent me last month, insisting the allegations against him “have been thoroughly investigated by the relevant institution and the journals in question.” That phrasing pointedly excluded Cambridge itself. Instead, the university gestured at the aforementioned investigations, none of which appear to have been thorough, as evidence it needn’t burden itself with further action. Liverpool John Moores even kept Mr. Arday’s Ph.D. thesis online, with the apparently plagiarized sections intact... If this had all come out earlier, it might have jeopardized Simon & Schuster’s publication of Mr. Arday’s memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” which is next week. Simon & Schuster told The New York Times that it stands by Mr. Arday’s memoir and plans to press forward with its publication, naturally. When Cambridge reversed course Wednesday, it cited new information about Mr. Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” — an apparent reference to recent reporting showing that Mr. Arday claimed affiliations at universities that denied any connection to him. In light of Cambridge’s years of complacency, I think the more likely explanation is that it could no longer ignore the growing PR problem represented by Mr. Arday’s continuing employment... Sometimes, though, academics use Mr. Trump and the populist forces he represents as a convenient excuse to avoid the quality control that was so obviously absent here. Their more cleareyed peers acknowledge that higher ed’s own hands aren’t spotless. A Yale University report published in April said “declining trust” in higher education “must be addressed,” and acknowledged that “those of us in higher education have too often resisted calls to critically examine our own institutions, professions, and modes of thought.” In this case, perhaps what should be critically examined is how academia treats its stars — especially those who come to symbolize important new ideas or social-justice movements that bolster the reputations of their home universities. In 2023, The Times of London paraphrased comments from the head of Mr. Arday’s academic department, writing that his hiring “was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.” “To any students or prospective colleagues who are wondering if Cambridge is a place where they can belong, the answer is, emphatically, yes,” she told the paper. If Mr. Arday isn’t just a scholar, but a symbol of his university’s commitment to social justice, perhaps that made it more difficult for Cambridge to examine its own role in his ascent — and to delay, by several damaging years, the full investigation Mr. Arday’s case so obviously warranted."
Jonathan Kay on X - "absolutely wild: in the book proposal he sent to @simonschuster, arday claimed a magic "shaman woman" (correctly!) predicted he'd be a modern spartacus leading the world's (metaphorical) slaves in an epic freedom rebellion And Simon & Schuster was like "sounds good. green light""
Nick Dixon on X - "All this talk about Jason Arday, but people still don’t realise what DEI has done. One, it has destroyed millions of lives (they’re all white men, so no one cares). Two, it has destroyed entire industries and even art forms, potentially forever. There’s no sign that literature, for example, is coming back from the assault of DEI, and the related ideological impositions upon content, sensitivity readers, and general idiocy. Older authors like Ian McEwan or Don DeLillo still publish, but they are like the last Elvish kings whose ilk will never be seen again. Obviously it’s similar across all the arts, not to mention the many fields where DEI puts people in actual danger, like policing. You may think Jason Arday is a joke, and it is funny to a degree (no pun intended), but DEI is synonymous with the collapse of the West."
Luke Rosiak on X - "The only lesson from Jason Arday can be recognition that this is going on everywhere. This is the dissertation of a University of Maryland campus president. She stole someone else's dissertation and changed the name of the field. Maryland has known this for a year."
Konstantin Kisin on X - "A lot of people say Britain is falling behind America but our Claudine Gay is way more advanced than theirs!"
Hans Mahncke on X - "No chance. America remains the global leader in this field. Making Jason Arday a Cambridge professor so everyone involved can congratulate themselves on their virtue is beginner level stuff. America took a serial plagiarist with embarrassingly poor scholarship and made her president of the most prestigious university in the world. That is how you do institutional decline at scale."
Michael Laprarie on X - "And we took domestic terrorist Bill Ayres and gave him an Ivy League professorship (Columbia) and let him earn Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago."
Julie Trimble on X - "It’s not surprising when you realize that America’s political elite took a serial plagiarist, Joe Biden, and elevated him to the highest position of power—President of the United States."
‘Old racist wine in a new bottle’: Black academics respond to Jason Arday affair - "“Jason has to take responsibility for what he did. But when a white person makes mistakes, it’s just a story about them as an individual. When a Black person makes a mistake, it’s treated as collective – and used to undermine the very principle that Black people should be in these spaces,” one Black academic said this week, describing the impact of Jason Arday’s case on his peers... days of reporting describing sociologist Arday as a “diversity poster boy” have had a chilling effect on the UK’s Black academics, already demoralised by the impact of cuts on Black scholarship. Many compared the response to the academic criticism with accusations against white academics that have passed with little fanfare. While views among Arday’s peers vary on the gravity of the accusations about his academic work – no formal investigation to date has found him guilty of plagiarism – opinion is united that Arday’s story has provoked a rightwing backlash against Black progress in academia and public life. “I think there’s a real question about whether these spaces are safe for us and whether we just have to start doing this outside universities,” says Kehinde Andrews, who was the first Black Studies professor in the UK but was recently made redundant from Birmingham City University. Andrews added: “No matter how many cracks have appeared in [Arday’s] CV, it doesn’t change the fact that this is a dedicated, coordinated smear campaign from the right, based on the premise that Black people should not be at Cambridge. There’s so many other things that happen in higher education that are never discussed.” Andrews believes there were “problems with some of [Arday’s] scholarship,” but that they stopped short of plagiarism. For the eminent sociologist Paul Gilroy, responsibility for the row lies with the “culture warriors” who appointed Arday, as well as “racist critics” – and comes at a critical time for the sector. “Reckoning with Jason Arday and his impact-chasing enablers should not be allowed to obscure the vicious, irrational cuts to humanities that are wrecking UK universities,” Gilroy added... Few Black academics are happy to speak about Arday’s case publicly. One academic said: “I can’t say anything on the record or I’ll be the right’s next target. The [right] have set their sights on pushing Black people out from all these institutions... “It’s not just about Black people – any minoritised group, our success is generally seen as not being genuine,” said one academic, speaking anonymously. “[The row] will make the small number of Black people in the field feel much more vulnerable. It will give licence for a while to people who don’t want Black people in the academic space and it may give pause to people who want to redress the massive [racial] imbalance in academia... “There’s a bunch of people out there who think Black people are less intelligent than white people, and that the only way they can get anywhere is by being forced into situations that they are unqualified for. For those people, being Black is the definition of being unqualified. It’s an old racist wine in a new bottle.”"
I wonder what white academics have not just shamelessly plagiarised to such a large extent but lied about marathons, fundraising and being non-verbal till 11, and not been fired.
When "minorities" succeed, they show how good their demographic group is. When they fail, they only represent themselves. When "majorities" succeed, they show how the system is rigged to help them. When they fail, they show how useless and underserving their group is.
Arday was paraded about as a DEI success story, but of course, his fraud and failure are only on him.
If a formal investigation does not find that it is hot in summer, that means you can't say it is hot in summer
Maybe the fact that the humanities are incapable of self-policing shows that they deserve their cuts
I wonder who all these mysterious unnamed people who claim that all black people are unqualified are. Since they are everywhere surely a few examples can be named
