Two more taxpayer-funded projects Jason Arday is listed as "co-investigator" on - "Arday is listed as a co-investigator on two more studies funded by taxpayers totalling £4,412,501 - in addition to Arday being a co-investigator on an EDI caucus that received £3,676,371 from taxpayers"
Jason Arday says he was an illiterate, mute child. His schoolmates remember it differently - "Several people who grew up with Arday allege he was never, in fact, non-verbal. “I lived next door [to him] for 24 years from when he was born… he spoke all the time,” says a childhood neighbour. She did not wish to be named but is of a similar age to Arday, who became Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor in 2023. “He was quiet but he still spoke and he played with us,” the former neighbour says. “I used to have conversations with him every day.” Fellow pupils at Heathbrook Primary School in Nine Elms, south-west London, which Arday attended from the age of four to 11 between 1989 and 1996, also contest this claim. Nadia Elawahabi, 42, was in the year above Arday and in the same class as Joseph, one of his brothers. “We had children who couldn’t speak English in our class at that time,” she says, and everybody knew who they were. “There was nothing like [a mute pupil]. It would have stood out.” Another student from Arday’s year, who did not wish to be named, recalls speaking to him directly. “I know he definitely wasn’t mute,” he says. However “he was quiet, quiet in himself… [in fact] the whole family kept to themselves”. Yet far from being a silent, struggling child who was considered an academic lost cause, this schoolfriend remembers him as “well-mannered… intelligent and polite”. In his memoir, which is due to be published in the UK later this month, Arday also claims that he was “always put in bottom set” as he was illiterate. The schoolfriend counters this. “I don’t think that’s true at all,” he says. “I know full well because I was in the [bottom] class.” Elawahabi says there were only two classes in each year group... YouTuber Jonathan Stewart, 40, was in the year below Arday at primary school and said that he “knew it was fraud” as soon as he heard that he had claimed he was mute. In fact, Stewart claimed Arday, who resigned from his Cambridge post last week, was something of a “class clown”. He told The Guardian newspaper that Arday would put on voices to make his classmates laugh and sing on the minibus to Sunday school. Arday, for his part, arranged for The Guardian to be sent a statement from two school friends who said his memoir was accurate... But under Stewart’s video, multiple commenters corroborated his version of events. “I can verify this claim… I was there too,” wrote one. Another comment reads: “The funniest thing I still remember is how he used to talk… And yeah he was a bit quiet at times but around us lot he was very vocal.” With adults, he appears to have been quieter. Samuel Ojoye, 71, has lived on the Heath Road estate in Clapham, where Arday grew up, since 1986. “I have known Jason from when he was very little, practically [since] birth,” he says. “The whole family was quiet and reserved. Jason didn’t talk much but I wouldn’t say he was non-verbal, just very quiet… Although he would always wave and greet you, he was very polite.”... These claims about Arday’s school days are perhaps among the last in his house of cards to collapse... His childhood neighbour describes the school-age Arday as “just normal”. Not extraordinary, just normal: for Arday, that is surely the most damning claim of all."
Cambridge took advice from pro-BLM group before hiring Arday - "An “equality and inclusion” working group was tasked with “updating hiring practices” within the university’s faculty of education to improve its recruitment of black and ethnic minority staff. The group, which supported the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and attacked “racial inequalities” within the faculty, was still advising the department on hiring policies shortly before Mr Arday was appointed in 2022. The revelation will raise further questions for the department, which has been accused of lowering its standards to hire Mr Arday as a professor to improve its diversity, equality and inclusion credentials... Prof Deborah Prentice, the university’s vice-chancellor, called Mr Arday’s appointment an “aberration” and appeared to shift blame on to the faculty for its decision to appoint him. The faculty launched the Equality and Inclusion Working Group (EIWG) in 2018 in response to concerns from graduate students about racism and cultural insensitivity within the faculty. An account of the working group’s creation is detailed on the website of the Faculty of Education Research Student Association (FERSA), a student-run organisation for graduate research students within the faculty. According to FERSA, graduate students had been raising concerns about racism and cultural insensitivity within the faculty for years by 2018. This included claims that the texts that made up its curricula for graduate courses were “overwhelmingly white and Western”. In response, the faculty agreed to hold an open meeting with students and staff in November 2018 to discuss how it could take action on issues such as inclusion, diversity, gender and decolonising the curriculum, the student association claimed. The “main and possibly only result of this meeting”, according to FERSA, was the establishment of the EIWG. Its purpose was to work on various initiatives to improve inclusion across the faculty. One of the group’s primary objectives was staff training. In February 2020, it set up “race awareness training” for the faculty’s staff, according to FERSA, although no further information was given about what this involved. Another of its priorities was reforming recruitment within the faculty. By 2021, the group was actively “updating hiring practices” within the faculty, according to a departmental review by the UK’s Research Excellence Framework at the time. The group said the university’s race equality charter – a university-wide framework partly focused on improving the recruitment of black and ethnic minority staff – was “central to our agenda”. Particular scrutiny will be placed on the group’s influence on the hiring process, given its strong public support for the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. In June 2020, as protesters in the UK were marching and defacing statues following the death of George Floyd in the US, it released a statement saying: “We... stand in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and other global communities calling attention to systemic racism.” The group added that “we support and are inspired by protests in the US and around the world” and hoped they would “make people, particularly white communities, think about the human impact of discrimination”. It said there were “racial inequalities” within the faculty and acknowledged the “disproportionate labour of BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of colour] colleagues and students in educating white colleagues and students”. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with marginalised groups across our faculty and university community and pledge to drive for change,” the statement added. The faculty will face questions about whether the working group was advising on its recruitment policies in November 2022 when Mr Arday was hired, despite his relative lack of qualifications and published academic work."
Professors who hired Arday attacked ‘whiteness’ in education - "Michalinos Zembylas, professor of educational theory at the Open University of Cyprus, and Prof Anoop Nayak, of Newcastle University, were among four external academics chosen to sit on the nine-member panel that unanimously selected Mr Arday in 2022. Academic articles reviewed by The Telegraph show that one professor called for the “re-education of Whites”, while another condemned “neo-liberal whiteness” in UK and US universities... In a 2023 paper, Prof Zembylas and his co-author, Prof Cheryl Matias, a race consultant and academic coach, argued that “whiteness” – which they distinguished from white people and described as an oppressive ideology – persisted “perniciously” in teacher education and should be held “accountable and culpable”. The critical race theorists argued that teacher education must stop “emotionally deflecting anti-racist critiques” by merely appearing to say the right things about anti-racism, because this “only ignores, and diverts attention away from the hegemonic presence of whiteness”. In an earlier paper with a UC Berkeley academic, Prof Zembylas argued that white people should become critical of “whiteness” to create a more equal society, insisting this would not cause white people to hate themselves. The authors wrote: “Contrary to the impression that this move promotes self-loathing, a politics of anti-whiteness is precisely the re-education of Whites for a world shared with the other.” The second external elector, Prof Nayak, published a paper last year outlining how to remove colonialism from the field of geography, in which he suggested that charging international students higher tuition fees could be racist. He wrote: “The neo-liberal whiteness of Anglo-American universities is exemplified in the practice [of] charging international students often over double the degree fees of domicile students and doing little to mitigate punitive visa restrictions.” Prof Nayak added that, in other sectors, the practice “could appear a discriminatory act, tantamount to institutional racism”. The paper also praised Black Lives Matter and pro-Gaza student encampments for giving momentum to calls to “decolonise the curriculum from the ground up”, and described a scheme to ring-fence funded PhD places for black and minority ethnic candidates as “necessary”... academics turned their fire on the appointments committee, accusing it of allowing “political correctness” to supersede academic standards. Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, a Cambridge economist, told The Telegraph: “If, as is now clear even to outsiders like me, Arday’s appointment short-circuited academic standards, it was not because the university procedures are deficient, it is because members of the appointments committee permitted ‘political correctness’ to override all else. “And they permitted that to happen either because they themselves are second-rate or because they represent the university administration and want an easy life.” Ritwick Sawarkar, a biologist and Cambridge fellow, said it would be “a big scandal” if standards were found to have been lowered so the university could win “brownie points on the EDI scale”. He said it was possible that the education faculty had chosen certain academics to interview candidates for the professorship “because they had an agenda and they knew these people would help them”. But Mr Sawarkar said that it was impossible to know what was in the minds of those who appointed the committee, and suggested that the problem could have started with wording of the job advert which could have “already pre-selected or pre-deselected people”. When the professorship was advertised, Cambridge told candidates: “The following groups are currently under-represented in our community: women, those with a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic background and those with disabilities.” The advert also listed “a demonstrated ability to support equality, diversity and inclusion in education within the faculty and university” as an “essential” criterion... The concerns of these academics were echoed on Saturday by Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, who accused Cambridge of an “obsession” with diversity targets which she said had left the university “failing students”. Ms Trott told The Telegraph: “I am concerned that by obsessing with DEI quotas, Cambridge has ended up failing students. We need to put an end to this nonsense.” She said that Prof Deborah Prentice, Cambridge’s vice-chancellor, had “serious questions to answer”. “The response so far has been woefully inadequate. It’s right that they are reviewing their appointments process, but that is nowhere near enough,” Ms Trott said. She added: “The university must establish how alleged fabrications of this scale were not identified, whether concerns were raised and ignored, and who was responsible for those failures. If warning signs were missed or dismissed, those responsible should be held accountable.”"
Whiteness is about having standards and not plagiarising, apparently
A PhD is no longer a sign of brilliance – take it from Dr Arday - "I met an old school friend who is a professor at a prestigious UK university. When I told him about my work on PhD appeals, he said that he occasionally examines PhDs but never fails them, no matter how awful. When I asked him why, he said that failed students inevitably appeal and that life was too short to waste time responding to complaints... Then there are those candidates who cheat in their PhDs, whether through plagiarism or, in more extreme cases, having others write it for them. Again, investigating suspected misconduct can take months of academic and administrative time, with multiple hearings and appeals. There is an institutional incentive to avoid rigorous investigation. In a recent case, I criticised a university for doing precisely that. My client had engaged in academic misconduct in his PhD but the university turned a blind eye and allowed him to continue despite his evident difficulties. The student incurred tens of thousands of pounds in tuition fees when he should have been withdrawn much earlier. Examiners are usually nominated by the PhD candidate’s supervisors, and so personal and professional relationships can play a role in assessment decisions. Supervisors will tend to select examiners favourably disposed to their student’s approach or intellectual outlook. Examiners who fail a colleague’s PhD student, especially if that colleague carries a strong reputation, may worry about the repercussions on their own career and reputation. Academia is a small world, and professional relationships may influence judgment. Universities care about the integrity of their academic qualifications, as they so often tell students, but only up to a point. Having a PhD is no guarantee of academic excellence or intellectual ability. As any academic will tell you, there are plenty of mediocre PhDs. Similarly, there are capable candidates who fail their PhDs due to examiners who, for whatever reason, have taken a dislike to their work"
There’s nothing good about Jolyon Maugham’s Good Law Project - "One of the more curious aspects of the Jason Arday affair is that the allegedly plagiarist professor chose to announce his resignation from Cambridge University on the website of the Good Law Project. The GLP – as most readers will recall – is an organisation (not a charity but a Jersey-based “purpose trust”, enabling it to sidestep English charity law) which seems to exist primarily to promote the pet legal projects of its founder and executive director, Jolyon Maugham KC. Its record of success can politely be described as patchy. Along with others, the GLP was active in the Brexit “lawfare” of the late 2010s, doing nothing to prevent Brexit but arguably helping to establish some important legal principles. But over the years the GLP has gained an unfortunate reputation for claiming victories even when it has lost. For example, in a 2022 case brought against the prime minister and health secretary over Covid appointments, the Administrative Court ruled that the GLP had no standing to bring the case and consequently “the claim brought by Good Law Project fails in its entirety”. This abject defeat – towards which GLP contributors had donated hundreds of thousands of pounds – was initially spun by the GLP as “We won!” Another claimant, The Runnymede Trust, had in fact achieved a minor win in the same case (while losing on both its main points), but their consolation prize owed nothing to the GLP. In February this year, the GLP suffered a further defeat after it tried and failed to persuade the Administrative Court that guidance issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in relation to the provision of single-sex workplace toilets was unlawful. The GLP’s reaction prompted 30 barristers, KCs and legal academics to write to the Equalities Minister, Bridget Phillipson, complaining about its “straightforwardly false” attempt to spin the defeat, adding “we are aware of no other organisation that has ever published such egregiously false material about the judgment in a case that it has lost.” If the GLP were a private individual spending its own money this sort of thing would be of rather less concern. But although it is not a charity, the GLP constantly wraps itself in the clothing of sanctimonious moral rectitude to solicit, and to receive, millions of pounds – well over £4m in 2024-2025 – from the public every year. If well-meaning and credulous people are persuaded to donate on the basis of false or puffed-up claims, that is difficult to reconcile with its claim that “everything we do in connection with our work at Good Law Project will be, and should be, measured against the highest possible standards of ethical conduct”. Exactly what the GLP’s involvement with Prof Arday was before he announced his resignation is a little unclear. When did that involvement begin? Did he choose the GLP because of its reputation for demanding “the highest possible standards of ethical conduct”? Or did the GLP reach out to Prof Arday, choosing to stake its reputation, such as it was, on his integrity? Did the GLP have any part in persuading him that one way of dealing with what it still calls “a smear campaign” was to set the police on the journalist who tried to obtain honest answers? Perhaps unsurprisingly given its record of support for dubious causes the GLP continues to promote its petition in support of Arday, although some of the big names who originally signed – notably Prof Baron-Cohen, Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, President of Wolfson College, and Sonita Alleyne, Master of Jesus College, – have quietly had their signatures removed in the last few days. Its description of the allegations as a campaign against a man with a “distinguished record of charitable and community service”, is entirely characteristic of the way in which the GLP tends to distort truth and reality in its campaigns. Despite the overwhelming evidence that Arday’s record is considerably less distinguished than once appeared, the petition continues to gather signatures, over 18,000 to date. Every signatory must supply the GLP with a name, email address and postcode, information which it will use, according to the organisation’s privacy policy, in “offering you ways to fund our work” and “inviting you to campaign with us”. Even if the petition itself has had no effect whatsoever, the personal data gathered will help generate the cash needed to keep the GLP lawfare show on the road... Those who sought to use him for their own purposes deserve at least some of the opprobrium that he has brought on himself. Amongst those still doing so, the Good Law Project is prominent."
James Martin Charlton on X - "An extraordinary paragraph from Afua Hirsch in which she admits that many black sociologists and she herself had doubts about Arday but sat on them because “he would be unlikely to be treated fairly and we would all be damaged in the process.” Did they not consider that students were doubtlessly being damaged and - when it eventually came out - so would sociology and the reputation of black academics? It seems second and third order consequences weren’t their strong points."
Jason Arday is now the stick the right will use to beat back racial equality. Don’t let that happen - "I have lost count of the number of emails, text messages, DMs and WhatsApps I received asking me to condemn the allegations against Arday. Not one of these messages asked me first if I know him, what my opinion about the allegations is or whether I actually agree with their assertion that they are baseless... I am unequivocal about condemning the media pile-on, which ranges from overt to dog-whistle racism, and which is completely disproportionate... Black academics, and black people in general, have never and – it’s my confident prediction – will never demand the right to plagiarise, lie or fabricate our credentials. What we have been demanding is to be treated equally. To be appointed to the levels commensurate with our actual credentials, to have our work taken seriously by intellectual peers, and to be paid fairly and on equal terms for our labour. To not have opportunities taken away because of our race. To have our work, performance and legacy held to the same standards as everyone else’s. We are very far from anything resembling this"
Damn internalised racism! How dare they doubt him!
I love how left wingers always hyperventilate over trivial bullshit, but all the media who criticised Arday are responsible of, at the very least, dog-whistle racism
It's rich how Arday and other DEI hires like Claudine Gay got special treatment, but this somehow doesn't count
The Worst Academic Scandal in 817 Years! - "This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years. If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive. The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world... Watch Professor Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, fawn all over Arday and say to him: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do!!!!!!!” I’ve never seen anything so cringeworthy in my life. It’s just so pathetic... the Jason Arday scandal is one of the best possible things to happen to higher education in my lifetime. But let’s make this clear: the Arday scandal is not primarily about Jason Arday; it’s about the corruption of Cambridge University and indeed of all higher education. Arday is, to be sure, a fraudster and a grifter, but his crime is to have exploited a totally corrupt system. The “system”—the system of DEI welfarism—is the greater crime. The faculty and administrators who hired and promoted him are intellectual and moral malefactors who have stolen something important from us. They deserve to be fired. They do not belong in the hallowed halls of academia. I’m not at all confident that Cambridge will fix the problem. They will appoint a “committee” or a “commission” to investigate and two-years later the committee will bury the report and do nothing. It’s all a charade. Let’s be clear: there is NO systemic racism in higher education, at least not the kind that they want you to think exists. Quite the opposite. There is, instead, a kind of fawning, sycophantic but ultimately demeaning treatment of black scholars that is, as black scholar John McWhorter put it, “a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.” Just so! So yes, there is racism at Cambridge, just not the kind they want you to think exists. It’s the racism of low expectations, the racism of guilt, and the racism of revenge. But the new, systemic racism is more than about the pursuit of some form of perverted virtue as McWhorter suggests. Hilary Cremin, the Chair of the Education School at Cambridge and Arday’s chief promoter (she’s the fawning woman in the BBC documentary above who said Arday “was the best in the world”), was clearly looking for redemption—the kind of redemption that relieves one of an overwhelming sense of guilt. You can see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice when she tells Arday that he is the “best in the world.” Jason Arday was hired and sanctified by racists, who are morally responsible for his rise, decline, and fall. They nailed him to the cross... we should all say “thank you” to Jason Arday. We owe him a debt of gratitude for exposing the intellectual and moral rot not only at Cambridge University, but in all higher education in the English-speaking world."
Eric Hendriks on X - "Now the Guardian is obsessively delving into the backstory of the Arday saga, to reinforce the ‘one bad apple’ theme and quietly obscure the structural problem of which the paper is itself a part: the ideological capture of culture and intellectual life."
Why would 'Professor Plagiarism' make such outlandish claims? DR MAX PEMBERTON has been a psychiatrist for 20 years. Here he examines the questions facing Jason Arday and says there's one condition that could explain everything - "Why lie? I don’t mean the small, social lies that keep things running smoothly, but what appear to be enormous ones – invented academic posts, fabricated childhood, feats of endurance that never happened. And having decided to lie, why choose stories so extravagant that they invite disbelief, and so specific that anybody with a spare afternoon and an internet connection can take them apart?... There is an old descriptive psychiatric term, pseudologia fantastica, coined in the 1890s for people whose lies are elaborate, sustained and built around a fantasised version of themselves rather than for obvious material gain. You may think that hardly fits here, given this story apparently brought Jason Arday a professorial chair, several honorary doctorates and, he claimed, a 1.4million book deal. But the gain is usually a by-product of this pattern of behaviour rather than the object, and you can usually tell this from the type of lies. Someone who, for instance, wants a certain job often embroiders their qualifications. But they stop there, as anything beyond that is pure risk, and tall tales about marathons they’ve run, funds they’ve raised and the desperate childhood they’ve endured do little for a selection panel except draw questions that up the chance of being caught out. The people I’ve met who fit the description of pseudologia fantastica tend not to stop lying. They are seldom cold or calculating. They tend to be charming and, perhaps most importantly, fragile underneath. What strikes me most is how often they appear to half-believe the story they’ve invented. The lie is not really being told to the listener at all, it is being told to the ego of the person telling it. The listener is only there to confirm it... The stories are hardly ever straightforward boasts of success either, because someone who simply claims to be clever or rich invites envy – and envy is not what these people are looking for. Instead the tales are about suffering that has been overcome, odds that were insurmountable, the diagnosis nobody believed, the childhood that should not have been survived, and then the triumph over all this. It is a far more effective structure for any fantasy, because it makes doubting it feel like an act of cruelty. It is also the structure our whole culture of aspiration is built on, the one that fills memoirs and TED talks and the back-stories on TV talent shows. This is why anyone constructing an identity out of borrowed material will reach for the template. It’s the stuff of fairytales and legends, the struggle in the face of adversity, a struggle that demonstrates positive things about an individual’s personality and inner character... Every fantasist I’ve known kept going with their stories long past the point where anybody was still convinced, because the alternative was to confess it was a sham and allow people to destroy the false identity they had built for themselves, so become a nobody. Which is why I don’t feel triumphant about Jason Arday’s downfall. When a world collapses it is a terrible thing to live through, and no less terrible for having been constructed of tissue paper. He built it and must answer for it. But he did not build it on his own, and the institutions – not least Cambridge University and the diversity, equality and inclusion industry – that made him their poster boy and handed him the bricks have gone very quiet. For that they bear considerable responsibility in this sorry saga and should reflect on it in shame."
