Andy Ngo on X - ".@Cambridge_Uni’s over-promoted celebrity DEI professor Jason Arday appears to admit to being an academic fraud in his first interview since the scandal broke. He blames his autism and says it’s racist to want him punished for the plagiarism in his published academic work. He also admits that reports that he himself helped raised millions for charity were false. Leftists and DEI supporters say he shouldn’t be punished because white academics get away with plagiarism all the time, they claim."
Malachi32 on X - "In basketball, you try to get credit for a score you didn't make, you're out. In academia, you fake something and you're gone. Period. Remember Ward Churchill at the U of Colorado? Faked his research. Fired."
Jonathan Kay on X - "This article about arday is bizarre… the first chunk of it is the standard effort to smear critics as racists. But then there’s a bunch of great new reporting about all his other lies, including a particularly insane and obvious fabrication about a nonexistent pig head… Arday is obviously a completely pathological liar. He claims there was a guy with a mask and a knife roaming around his school threatening to kill him, but he didn’t bother telling his colleagues and just stayed in his office and kept working"
Jesse Singal on X - "Jason Arday was accosted by a masked man with a knife who figured out a way not to show up on CCTV, evading detection. Arday didn't inform his colleagues of the guy wandering around with a knife menacing professors."
Audrey Ludwig MBE on X - "Arday is throwing every excellent black and disabled academic; plus everyone who has experienced unlawful race and disability discrimination under a bus"
ripx4nutmeg on X - "I've now become in awe of him. This is an academic speech he made in 2023. It's 46 minutes of pure rambling in which he uses racial buzzwords like 'decolonisation' several times every minute. At no point is a point made. How did he get away with this?"
Prof Ian Pace on X - "‘Although Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, he defended himself by saying he had received inadequate supervision and support, especially given his autism and “complex learning disabilities”.’ Ok. But that does not sound like a Cambridge Professor."
Meme - Simon Baron-Cohen @sbaroncohen: "In 2014 we published the first large-scale study of suicidality in autism, subsequently widely replicated, revealing that 1 in 4 autistic people have planned or attempted suicide. That’s why I’m very concerned about the impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic. He has been accused of plagiarism and he was cleared of any academic misconduct following a rigorous investigation by Liverpool John Moores University. And yet he continues to be systematically discredited over every detail of his life, daily. We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards. However, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues. This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues. It’s time to stop."
Readers added context they thought people might want to know: "Despite university clearance, Arday's PhD thesis contains dozens of near- verbatim unattributed passages from prior works, and a journal corrected his paper for missing citations to adapted text including participant quotes."
Alex Edmans on X - "It is disappointing to see an academic of Simon Baron-Cohen's stature suggest that academic or media scrutiny should be moderated because of the personal characteristics of the person being scrutinised. Academic standards must apply equally to everyone. Autism may require adjustments to how we communicate criticism, but it cannot determine whether criticism is made in the first place. If we accept the principle that scrutiny should be relaxed because someone might suffer psychologically, where does it end? Should journal editors accept weaker papers because rejection might harm an author's mental health? Should tenure committees lower standards because a negative decision could be devastating? The integrity of academia depends on evaluating work by the same standards, irrespective of the identity or vulnerability of the author. That principle applies equally to academic journals and to the media, which plays an important role in scrutinising research that influences policy and practice. Of course, criticism should be directed at the work rather than the individual, and personal abuse is never acceptable. But that principle applies equally to Professor Arday as to every other academic. Equal treatment means equal standards. Lowering the bar because of someone's neurodiversity or demographic characteristics does a huge disservice to them and to the thousands of other minority academics who want to be judged on merit."
Alex Edmans on X - "This is spot on. In the past, your currency was the quality of your work or critical thinking. Now, it's how victimised you claim to be and how many accommodations you need. This does a disservice to those with legitimate needs for accommodation."
Jonathan Kay on X - "Oh Are we finished playing the racism card and now we’re playing the autism card?"
Richard Hanania on X - "What if Arday’s critics also have autism and don’t like to see a liar and plagiarist be a respected academic? Maybe you are putting them at risk of self-harm."
Jack on X - "“It’s okay to be a serial fabulist if you’re autistic, and if people call you out, they’re putting you at risk of suicide.” Sad to see Baron-Cohen torching his reputation like this."
Crémieux on X - "'You can't enforce the law because what if the criminal feels bad about it?' Compelling."
Prof Ian Pace on X - "If an academic is in such a condition that public scrutiny of his (equally public) work may cause suicidal urges, then as a matter of urgency he should take leave and receive care. Using this threat to try and silence critics is about as low as it gets."
Colin Wright on X - "So we can't ever criticize or fire an autistic person, even if they occupy elite positions in society like a prof. at Cambridge, because they're still part of such a vulnerable group that being forced to face the consequences of their actions might cause them to commit suicide."
Crémieux on X - "Man, what a discrediting let-down from Simon.
1. You cannot actually clear someone of a crime by lying and saying they didn't do it.
2. It doesn't matter if you're autistic, retarded, or just a liar like Arday. If you do fraud, you deserve to be punished for it. No exceptions."
Basically Cohen is saying autistic people get a blank cheque to do what they want. Of course we must still treat them equally otherwise if that would benefit them
Allison Pearson on X - "Does anyone know the hospital where Professor Jason Arday had his brain tumour removed just before his PhD viva? The reason Arday dared make up such outlandish falsehoods is because he knew the Cambridge middle-class ninnies revered him for his exciting DEI backstory."
Alice Salisbury on X - "Six months ago a guy gave a talk at my husband’s office about overcoming autism and brain surgery. My husband came home and told me it should give us hope for our son, who actually has had two rounds of brain surgery. Just put two and two together and I’m a bit upset really."
Roger on X - "One of the saddest posts I saw on this whole thing was from the parent of a non-verbal autistic child who kept getting told, by well-meaning friends and colleagues, “don’t worry, he might get over it and go on to be a professor at Cambridge, like this guy I read about..”"
Helen Joyce on X - "Liars do so much harm to so many people they never even know about. No reckoning of the consequences of Jason Arday's false claims will ever be complete."
The Cambridge plagiarism row proves Black academics are held to higher standards | The Independent - "The scrutiny surrounding Arday has moved beyond his academic work into his life story, athletic achievements and charitable activity. When the search spreads across an entire life, it begins to look less like accountability and more like a hunt for the flaw that will explain away every success... Dr Claudine Gay’s ascent to become Harvard’s first Black president should have represented a shattered ceiling. Instead, the scrutiny around her took on the atmosphere of a modern-day witch trial"
Amazing how the left wing line is the exact opposite of reality.
Jason Arday's PhD Turnitin Report - "Below is a linked PDF of what happens if you run Jason Arday’s PhD through Turnitin. Turnitin is a proprietary plagiarism checker that is used by most universities in the UK. Basically, it scans documents and compares them to its own large database of publications and theses as well as work submitted through its system at other universities around the world... Alongside the plagiarism from Zwozdiak-Myers, which has been reported in the press, there is substantial plagiarism from a range of other sources including a PhD thesis by Christina P. Ligadu at the University of Wollongong. There is also a lot of plagiarism from sources by academics in the field, and in particular Arday seems to have borrowed liberally from various handbooks (for non-academics, a handbook is a publication where various thinkers in a field contribute definitive articles on a set topic.) Most people outside of the academy don’t do plagiarism checking. So here are a few pointers for things that are important to note. The highlighted sections are all copied from some other place. They are numbered and those numbers refer to a list that is at the end of the PDF that gives a source. So you can go and look at where the words are from and compare it to the original if you are that way inclined. For plagiarism checks, the standard procedure would be for us to go and look at that original for each case... In general, there is no real problem with including lots of quotations in academic work as long as they are critically contextualised, and it is striking that Arday actually gives very few quotations, instead presenting other people’s words as his own. The large blocks of verbatim copying we see in Arday’s thesis are not normal. Nobody in academia would consider this normal... A Turnitin report that looks like this rings every single alarm bell for people used to looking at them. Arday has argued that “if anyone’s academic work had been subjected to as much scrutiny it would show similar errors.” This is simply untrue. The report linked below is genuinely unusual... the report did turn up a >1% match with a PhD thesis by Shatha Hamdan Alghamdi from Glasgow. It seems that she was plagiarising Arday’s thesis in her own, as she does not cite him and this similarity score for a single source in a PhD thesis is very high. The churn is real. "
Clearly, Turnitin is structurally racist. The developers need to do better and root out its (unconscious) bias. This is an anonymous hit post and needs to be ignored and condemned!
Benjamin Ryan on X - "Jason Arday told The Times: “I am not a liar.” And yet over at least five years, he repeatedly claimed to have—or allowed others to assert he had— raised millions of pounds for charity, which he now acknowledges is not true. Today The Times reports that Arday "said that he did not raise all the money [£5M] for charity but was part of a syndicate of about 100 people. Asked why he did not correct the narrative, he said: 'Could I have ever guessed that somebody would literally comb through every single word I’ve ever said on that? There’s no way because I never, ever guessed I’d ever be in this position.'” This suggests the figure was the result of a single moment of misunderstanding that might have been lost to time had people not started digging. And yet: Here is what Arday said in a TedxDurhamUniversity speech in 2021: “My lifelong ambition was to raise a million pounds for charity before I turned 40, and at 36, I've raised just over 5 million pounds to charity.” The Guardian wrote about him in 2023: “The University of Cambridge’s youngest Black professor, he joined its faculty of education in March 2023, at 37. Before then, he had been a professor at Glasgow and Durham universities; published three books of academic work, mainly focusing on race and education; and, most importantly to him, raised more than £5m by doing charity work.” In the announcement page for the honorary degree he received from Southampton Solent University in 2023: “A prolific fundraiser, Professor Arday has raised over £5 million as part of several fundraising collectives for a host of charities over an 18-year period.” In a 2023 interview with the Cambridge Student, the paper wrote: “The ‘accent of charity is the centre of my identity and belies something greater than yourself’– this sense of selflessness was drilled into him upon visiting a ‘homeless shelter for Christmas’ aged 18, raising over £5 million to date.” In 2024, the National Autistic Society conference peaches announcement stated: “In his spare time, Jason has been a prolific fundraiser; having raised over £5 million pounds as a part of several fundraising collectives for a host charities over an 18-year period, winning numerous prodigious fundraising awards.” In 2024, the Daily Mail reports, he gave a speech in New Orleans to America's National Funeral Directors Association in which he said: “My target was to raise £1million for charity before I turned 40, but by the time I'd got to 30 I'd raised over £3million and at the moment it's £5.5million and counting.” His current Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau bio page: “In his spare time, Jason Arday is a prolific fundraiser; he has been part of several fundraising teams that have raised millions of pounds for charity, winning numerous prodigious fundraising awards.” My question is why all these publications and other entities did not ask for evidence that he was such a prolific fundraiser. That is on The Guardian, most notably, for not doing their own fact checking."
Jonathan Kay on X - "for more on jason arday's hallucinatory megalomania, check out this excerpt from his forthcoming @simonschustermemoir memoir: claims that a woman who gazed upon him received a "prophecy" that he was destined for "great things" & "sad and difficult things," like a hero of myth"
Pete North on X - ""How did allegedly intelligent professors fall for his bs?" Simples. They aren't intelligent. They are people who progress the same way Arday did - looking and sounding the part while having socially convenient opinions. Social sciences departments are basically institutional version of Bluesky. There's a reason academics have deserted X and its not on any moral grounds. It's because the more they say, the more they out themselves as morons, which is reputationally damaging for them. On that basis, academia has very little public engagement and talks mostly to itself - which is what makes it parasitic. You could close every single politics and sociology departament in the land overnight and no work of value would be lost. The people therein would struggle to find even a minimum wage job. They have no useful skills. Most are computer and data illiterate who have meltdowns if faced even with an Excel pivot table."
memetic_sisyphus on X - "Yeah they’re the professors that are telling you white men are evil."
Ecgwine Icling on X - "I find it hilarious that this is really the best they have. If there was even a tiny pool of competent blacks, they'd draw from that and showcase them everywhere. But they can't, because clearly there isn't."
Julie Bindel on X - "I know, personally, two women, both from disadvantaged backgrounds, who lost out to jobs because of Arday. He was promoted over one, and got the job over the other. Both are great in their field, and WAY better than him. In my view, he is not the innocent victim in this."
Adrian Hilton on X - "“We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody,” Jason Arday told the Times. It's a very revealing statement: you'd expect someone who holds a prestigious chair to respect the academy, not traduce and then trivialise it. I feel most sorry for his students, who go up to Cambridge for a world class education and expert supervision. The Faculty of Education there is perpetrating an educational fraud."
Timur Kuran on X - "Arday joins Kendi and Gay as a symbol of DEI’s obsession with race over merit. He’s been lionized despite clear intellectual mediocrity. That’s why the backlash is so fierce. Cases this blatant embolden people who stay silent on smaller DEI abuses and inefficiencies."
Cambridge didn't learn from Harvard, and did an even more epic fail
Yuan Yi Zhu on X - "Yesterday Arday said something like 'I haven't murdered anybody. It's just academia' to The Times and I just can't stop thinking about it. There is somebody out there whose career ended because Arday got their job."
Wesley Yang on X - "It's actually true that Arday is just one ridiculous fraud who took one person's job by spouting a mildly less competent version of the same inane drivel that much of academia specializes in producing. It's not like he was part of a grand conspiracy to defraud the public into believing that chemically castrating children was evidence-based, medically necessary, and lifesaving -- a vastly more consequential enterprise of equivalent fraudulence for which no accountability is even contemplated."
Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor - "A charity has cast doubt on claims about volunteering made by the Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row. Prof Jason Arday has listed among his achievements “installing water points” in South America and West Africa with the charity WaterAid. WaterAid, however, says it never sends volunteers abroad... Thousands of people have signed an open letter supporting him, but the name of one of the most prominent signatories on the list has now been removed. Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, was previously the second named signatory on an open letter accusing newspapers of “trying to smear [Prof Arday] with fake accusations of plagiarism”. Her name has now disappeared from the open letter organised by the left-wing Good Law Project."
Damn racist charity!
Andrew Lawrence on X - "It's clear this guy is absolutely full of shit, and nobody has ever called him out on it, because they were terrified of being called racist."
Jason Arday is merely a symptom of academia’s moral disease - "The controversy engulfing the Cambridge professor Jason Arday should prompt a moment of introspection amongst the Great and the Good who rule our lives. Whatever conclusions are drawn about the allegations of thesis plagiarism, this sorry affair has already exposed how a fixation with moral virtue has downgraded sound judgment. Yet there will be no reckoning for all those who helped create the conditions in which the Arday saga unfolded, no admission that universities have become uncritical purveyors of fashionable orthodoxies. Arday is making a show of contrition: in an interview, he reiterated this weekend that he was the victim of a “racially motivated” and “coordinated” effort to unseat him... Meanwhile, the usual suspects have already mounted their high horses: the ludicrous Zack Polanski has signed an open letter in support of Arday. The equally ludicrous Kehinde Andrews, a Black Studies professor, who once unselfconsciously attacked the work of his peers as “mind-deadening”, has decried the affair as a “smear campaign”. Alas, our opinion-transmitters will learn no lessons, and we can be sure of this because in the same week that the Cambridge farce became big news, Dame Harriet Harman declared that Labour should ban men from running in its next leadership election... Our society is so obsessed with “the first” that excellence or even competence has been subordinated to symbolism. Arday became the “youngest-ever black person” appointed to a professorship at Cambridge. Rachel Reeves was the “first female Chancellor”. Our institutions still behave as though they are in Gilead or 1950s Deep South, forever searching for the next “historic” milestone to congratulate themselves on... The allure of Arday’s branch of Critical Race Theory scholarship to our self-flagellating leaders is another factor. Had the professor (and part-time super-athlete) devoted his career to the economics of pension schemes or the evolution of butterflies, he would probably not have become a celebrated national figure. But he worked in a field which allows universities to bask in the warm glow of their own benevolence by encouraging the spending of public money on this intellectual pap. Economics and a chunk of political science – such as analysis of voting patterns – and some sociology have a quasi-scientific methodology and genuinely attempt to quantify concepts and test conjectures. Most other “Social Science” is opinion dressed up in incomprehensibility. For his 2018 paper on black and minority ethnic students’ mental health, Arday’s empirical basis was 32 self-selected interview participants, yet it made broad claims about the “lived experiences” across higher education... arguments were evaluated less on methodological rigour than by conformity with prevailing political assumptions. That same instinct suffuses virtually every aspect of British life. Broadcasters, higher education institutions, public bodies: they are all addicted to inspirational narratives because those stories flatter whoever is telling them... Harman’s intervention was not the only reminder this week that identity politics remains embedded in Labour’s thinking. The party also lifted Diane Abbott’s suspension, she who once wrote that Jews experience similar prejudice to “redheads”, but not racism. Abbott later apologised for the remarks, before saying she did not regret writing them. Would a pre-Your Party Jeremy Corbyn have been readmitted with such magnanimity? However doubtful Arday’s future, the system in which he was a willing participant is alive and well."
Jonatan Pallesen on X - "Hah! No. This is the perfect story. Jason Arday is the perfect awful DEI candidate: useless as an academic, his work contains a large amount of plagiarism, and he is obviously a liar and a fraud. Jason Arday-gate will hopefully keep going and going. In the very optimum outcome, this story becomes so big that Cambridge University is forever tainted with it. And other universities can see what happens when you go full DEI."
Benjamin Ryan on X - "I found that Cambridge quietly edited Jason Arday's Jesus College bio sometime between Jan 1 and Aug. 2. His title changed from "Professorial Fellow of Education" to "Fellow of Education," and an MA in Education Studies from Liverpool John Moores vanished from his list of degrees."
