Academics questioning another academic's work is bullying and harassment. At least when that academic is black. A good reminder that when left wingers complain about "bullying" and/or "harassment", they can't be taken seriously.
DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge
"“Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told, if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he’s 30?”
Those are the words of Jason Arday—the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University. Indeed, the story of his metamorphosis from arguably the most disadvantaged person in the UK to elite scholar-athlete-philanthropist would make even Walt Disney raise an eyebrow.
Born to Ghanaian parents, Arday grew up on a council estate (the British equivalent of Section 8 housing) in south London. At age three he was diagnosed with global development delay and autism. Therapists said he would be confined to an assisted living facility. Miraculously, at 11 years old, he spoke his first word (“hello”). When he was 18, he learned to read and write.
Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.
In his spare time, Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days.
As of 2023, he had worked with “more than 70” charities and raised more than £5 million.
Up until his appointment at Cambridge, Arday continued to face unspecified hardships. As reported by the Guardian in 2023, despite previously being a professor at Durham and Glasgow, “He has barely slept over the past 15 years..., working through most nights—often on his academic and charity work, but sometimes just to make ends meet.”
He has received “hundreds of thousands of letters and emails” from fans “all over the world.” This indicates a level of fame comparable to an upper-middle-tier household name celebrity.
But how much of “the most ridiculous story ever told” is true?
I was recently contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge (whose name I will not reveal) who alleges that Arday is a plagiarist and fabulist. My source claims that many if not most professors at Cambridge have known about this for more than a year. However, Arday and/or Cambridge’s administration are using intimidation and legal threats to squelch the story. As far as I am aware, the only mention of Arday’s alleged plagiarism that exists in the public domain is on the personal website of retired Plymouth Marjon University professor Dave Harris...
Developing normal speaking abilities after being nonverbal until age 11 is medically improbable.
Arday has repeatedly made unequivocal assertions that he could not read, write, or even spell his own name until he was 18. But he left secondary school with General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) qualifications in Physical Education and Textiles. Despite being in vocational subjects, these tests require literacy, and they are normally taken at age 15 or 16. Based on publicly available information, it is possible to recreate a timeline that places Arday’s test date before age 18. It is conceivable that he received “special arrangements” to allow him to take the test with help from a reader and scribe. However, a write-up of his forthcoming memoir says that he “left secondary school with two GCSEs to his name, still barely able to read or write.” So he may be backing away from his original story.
30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days are feats of dubious believability. Wikipedia lists running 50 marathons in 50 days as one of the highlights of professional ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes’s career. 30 in 35 days is possible for an amateur, but only with intensive training and planning. 300 miles in three days is an even bigger stretch. For comparison, Yiannis Kouros, who has been described as “the greatest ultrarunner of all time,” set a world record in 1984 when he ran 359 miles in three days. Arday asserts that he was able to do all this because “If you have the will, it will always supersede skill”—a proposition that anyone with experience in athletics knows to be false...
Arday routinely passes off the words and ideas of others as his own. If one removes the apparently plagiarized material from his record, there is little or no real scholarship...
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. (Zwozdiak-Myers received her degree from Brunel University London, where she is currently a Reader in Education.) The chart below compares passages from Arday (2015) and Zwozdiak-Myers (2009). From literally the first page of the Introduction to his dissertation (which starts on page 17 of the manuscript), Arday relies heavily on Zwozdiak-Myers for key ideas and arguments. Many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source...
Dave Harris is a retired Professor of Leisure and Education at Plymouth Marjon University. He hosts a website that provides free teaching materials.
Harris writes that he first read Arday’s work with the intention of summarizing the arguments to make them accessible. However, what he euphemistically refers to as “oddities” were “so frequent that they dominated [his] reading.” Harris emailed Arday, pointing out examples and asking if he could provide clarification.
Arday replied to Harris as follows: “Please do not email me again. Should you have the time to spare, I invite you to direct your resources elsewhere. Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”
After Harris and his colleague prodded several journal editors and administrators at Cambridge, two journals issued corrections to Arday’s publications...
The note appears to acknowledge that Arday’s entire paper is a work of plagiarism...
The editorial note appears to treat plagiarism as an issue of missing references.
How much of Arday’s work is like this?
On his Cambridge University faculty webpage, Arday lists 10 publications under the heading “Principal and Recent Publications.” Entries range from the year 2018 (the year he published his first paper) to 2023 (the year he moved to Cambridge). These are apparently the publications that he believes represent his best work, in recognition of which he was awarded a chair professorship at Cambridge. I will go through the papers one by one...
Arday highlights 10 papers as representing his most important work. The chart below indicates for each paper whether it (a) contains plagiarism, (b) fails to employ scholarly methods, and/or (c) was not actually written by Arday.
When you take away the work that is plagiarized or not otherwise written by Arday, there is essentially nothing resembling real scholarship. There is no indication that Arday is familiar with even elementary statistics. His research involves reporting his own experiences of alleged racism or having conversations with people and providing subjective commentary.
Jason Arday was hired by Cambridge explicitly to advance the cause of racial diversity. When he joined the university in 2023, the official announcement included the following quote by Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education Bhaskar Vira...
(Readers of this Newsletter may remember Vira as one of the administrators who tried to get me fired from Cambridge in 2024 for writing about race and affirmative action.)
The head of the Faculty of Education, Hilary Cremin, told the Times of London that “hiring Arday was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.”...
Arday stated that he was coming to Cambridge to “open doors” to members of underrepresented groups...
In other words, hiring Arday was an overtly political act. Everyone involved—including Arday himself—understood that he was being recruited to promote the ideology of DEI and increase the representation of certain groups.
You can imagine how Vira, Cremin, and others felt when in June 2023 they received an email from Dave Harris’s colleague alerting them to Arday’s alleged plagiarism. If hiring Arday was “proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities,” what would it prove if the university placed him under investigation, let alone held him accountable if it turns out he engaged in wrongdoing?...
From the perspective of the university (represented by Rhys Morgan), any pre-2023 plagiarism was irrelevant. It is difficult to understand this position. Arday was hired on the basis of his work. Surely the university would wish to know whether or how much of this work was fraudulent.
For the Faculty of Education (represented by Hilary Cremin), it was enough for Arday to state that he experienced “direct and indirect racism” and “health issues” to absolve him of responsibility. I sympathize with Arday for his health problems. However, it is unclear how illness or alleged racism can explain why he stole other people’s work. And if he committed plagiarism in 2018, wouldn’t the Faculty want to know whether or not it was a one-off? Yet, with no real investigation into the facts, Cremin declared that “he has our full support.”
I have heard from multiple sources that Arday and/or the university have sicced the law firm Carter-Ruck on journalists or academics who raised questions about Arday. In any case, there are obvious questions about Arday’s work and life story. The fact that literally no one at Cambridge has spoken about this publicly suggests that, at the very least, the administration has created an atmosphere of intimidation where people are afraid to express controversial ideas...
There are more than a thousand black people in the UK with IQs over 140 who would be capable of doing serious work in the sociology of education. If Cambridge administrators wanted a black professor to serve as a role model for underrepresented minorities, they could have found someone qualified. Instead, they grabbed a random black person with an unvetted fairytale backstory and almost nothing that even resembles genuine scholarship. When evidence of the black person’s long history of plagiarism is brought to their attention, they excuse it on the basis that he was the victim of “direct and indirect racism.” In their view, he cannot be asked to follow the same rules that we expect schoolchildren to understand. I know it sounds silly to say that “leftists are the real racists.” But by hiring Jason Arday and refusing to investigate credible accusations against him, isn’t Cambridge making a statement that the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards?
There is a conflict between what universities such as Cambridge call “DEI” and something else that they claim to value, namely, free speech. DEI demands that we accept the fiction that people like Jason Arday, who are hired because they tick certain identity and ideology boxes, are just as qualified as scholars selected on the basis of academic merit. But if people are allowed to speak freely, they might point out that this is false. The Cambridge administration resolves the dilemma by siding with DEI against free speech. Faculty know what is likely to happen to them if they speak about the Arday situation. That is why the administration has been able to bury the story for three years.
The upshot is that we lose both free speech and equality. Equality means treating people the same without regard to immutable characteristics like race, and that is not what is happening at Cambridge."
