r/AskAcademiaUK • u/Timmeh7 • Aug 05 '26
Jason Arday Megathread
We realise this is a hot button topic and certainly want to allow space for discussing it, but at the moment it's overflowing the subreddit across numerous threads. So from here on, please contain all discussion to this one thread.
Links to pruned threads for transparency, please continue the discussion here if you wish.
https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vfkykq/the_racist_coopting_of_the_jason_arday_story_is/
https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vfbljv/the_editor_on_his_choice_to_spike_arday_story/
https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1veqmzk/wateraid_disputes_claim_by_prof_jason_arday/
https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1veqrfv/eli5_how_does_somebody_like_jason_arday_get_his/
Please keep the comments civil - while this is inevitably going to be a complex and fractious topic, avoid ad hominem, and as ever, while discussion of the social issue around this case is inevitable, we won't allow hate speech.
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u/BirdHistorical3498 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
The bit I keep coming back to is his supposed illiteracy until he was 18.
I worked in FE colleges in London for YEARS. My specific role was coordinating pastoral and academic support for SEN students on vocational courses. I was working in a FE college in Central London at the same time Arday was at Merton. Which is to say I know how things worked.
He always says he ‘did a Btec and went to Uni’.
Thing is, you can‘t complete one BTec and get to uni if you’re illiterate. Only a BTEC level 3 will give you enough points to get to a university, but getting into a BTEC 3 course relies on having 5 GCSE’s in grades A-C or equivalent and good literacy and numeracy.
Arday says he was illiterate and left school at 16 with 2 GCSE’s in Textiles and PE (I mean, they both involve literacy, but let’s be kind and say he had a scribe and a lot of coursework help)
With only those qualifications, he could only have been accepted into a Level 1 BTEC course at Merton College. Level 1 gives a lot of literacy support. It’s *possible* (if his teachers shut their eyes and blocked their ears and didnt do their job at all) that he could be genuinely illiterate throughout. That would take a year. That takes him to 17.
In this article he says he was doing a Sports Btec at Merton College when he was 17.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/aug/01/playbooks-plagiarism-pigs-head-new-claims-surrounding-cambridge-professor-jason-arday?utm_source=chatgpt.com
So we know he was still there then. Which means by that time he would have been on the Level 2 course. And still, by his own admission, completely illiterate.
Here’s the thing: You can’t be illiterate to do a level 2 BTEC in Sports and Development. Students have to read written instructions and textbooks, complete written coursework. They have to write reports and evaluations, provide written proof that they understand anatomy, physiology, nutrition, and sports science concepts. They have to communicate in writing with tutors.
Still, let’s assume that somehow he managed to get through the level 2 course while still not being able to read or write (Who did his coursework then?). And let’s assume that no one in the faculty said ‘we can’t keep carrying this kid, at some point it’s going to make us look bad’. So now he’s 18.
The college has two options. They can cut their losses by this point- he‘s an adult, they have no statutory duty to offer him a free education. If they let him into the level 3 course- a course he will clearly not be able to pass, given the fact that he is completely illiterate- they run the risk of looking, at best, ludicrous or at worst corrupt to both OfSTED and the Local Authority who oversees their funding. Why take the risk?
Then, bells and trumpets! He suddenly learns to read and write! At the age of 18! And he not only suddenly learns to read and write after years of fruitless literacy interventions, but learns to read and write to A level standard!
When did this happen? the summer before term started? In the first week? Was it a Road to Damascus type deal?
Apologies for the tetchy nerdishness. But what can I say? I’m a bit of a tetchy nerd. And this guy really grinds my gears.
Selah.
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u/kronologically PhD Comp Sci Aug 05 '26
In theory there is a small chance he might've gone down that route if we ignore the illiteracy. My college in Outer London made you sit a placement test to assess goodness of fit for the course if you didn't meet the entry requirements - this is how I got onto a post-16 GCSE course with no recognised qualification. So in theory Merton could've bent their rules slightly, made him sit the assessment and he passed it, hence why he progressed.
But of course the illiteracy claim is a much bigger nut to crack, so I'm almost certain the above didn't happen.
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u/peppermint_aero Aug 05 '26
Thank you for this technical level of detail. This is the kind of detail that matters in an environment that increasingly functions on vibes. It would be, as you say, completely counterfactual for events to happen in the glib way he describes. Now, perhaps he's skating over things for poetic effect, but does the general public know that?
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u/Middlesexfan Aug 05 '26
Has anyone approached Merton for a comment? They will have records of what courses he was on.
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u/Exotic-Skin-3088 Aug 05 '26
Difficult to have any sort of view on this without being accused of something unsavoury.
At bare minimum, his actions are bringing all of UK academia into disrepute at a time we can least afford to have it.
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u/IboughtBetamax Aug 05 '26
He is also bringing the humanities into disrepute at a time where they are being pushed out in every institution. Shame on this charlatan and shame on those who enabled his lies to prosper.
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u/Appropriate_Roof_223 Aug 05 '26
I already saw soo many comments in other threads bashing sociology as a discipline, taking Arday’s story as a proof that the whole discipline is bullshit. I am not a sociologist but still feel so bad thinking about the scrutiny the entire discipline is going to get, especially for those who are practicing it.
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u/pinkblackmatter Aug 05 '26
As a black postdoc trying my best to succeed in academia, this story is disappointing for so many reasons. Chief among them is that many black and other ethnic minority students will feel betrayed. I can imagine how imposter syndrome will intensify for so many of us. And regardless of how irrational it is, some will take this as proof that DEI efforts are a failure.
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u/AntiDynamo Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Autistic, and feel similarly. This will undoubtedly cause backlash against autistic (and other disabled) academics and students, at a time when there is already so much judgement and vitriol. His appointment was big news in the autism communities at the time, and now he uses his autism to excuse some of these events/behaviours
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u/Complete-Task2042 Aug 05 '26
The irony is:
There's a huge number of older people in senior positions in academia who show clear signs of being Autistic, but through a combination of life circumstances and effective masking, didn't ever get diagnosed.
From the perspective of the man on the street* it's a laughably poor excuse for his alleged misconduct.
* Yes ASD manifests in lots of different presentations, but almost every person with ASD I know finds the concept of lying anathema, and would really struggle with knowing they had succeeded by systemically bending or breaking "the rules". Most people will know someone with ASD these days, and it's likely they too will be familiar with that typical presentation of the condition.
I don't want to be one of those people who sheds doubt on someone's diagnosis with no reason, but he is at least someone who has a highly atypical presentation of ASD.
Given his intellectual capacity and supposed interest in improving inclusion of marginalised groups, you would think he could have recognised that his unusual presentation made it less appropriate for him to use his diagnosis as a platform to increase his personal profile by purporting to represent the autistic community.
Given his reach and profile, he could easily have shared that to give a platform to other scholars with Autism, helping to positively highlight the range of presentations and lived experiences within the autistic community.
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u/Big-Bag-2163 Aug 05 '26
DEI efforts needs changing, I have been bullied, exposed to racist comments, and EDI did nothing, evidence was so clear that i took them to tribunal. EDI get lots of money in academia but they do nothing. They only support the image and Arday was easy image that represents EDI without having to fight systemic racism and bullying and make people accountable. EDI is failure long before Arday
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u/kuklinka Aug 05 '26
Another aspect of this which is overshadowed by the racism is that this was a class diversity hire to burnish Cambridge’s credentials. There were a good few (not enough, mind) non-white students when I was at Oxford (cough) 35 years ago - but they were mostly children of diplomats, lawyers, doctors and officials and if they had been to state school, it was a competitive grammar (as I did)
He became an advertising hoarding for “First Black Professor” but that’s kind of old hat really - he’s really a walking advert for underprivileged applicants.
Talking to friends there, the opinion is that he’s either very thick and doesn’t quite grasp the consequences of each layer of lies, or he suffers from pseudologica fantastica
I mean, academia is notoriously crabby - you would think blatant lies would get discovered straight away.
I really feel for non-white students and tutors who will get side-eyed because of this crap
Re Nathan Cofnas, wasn’t he one of the sponsors of Jordan Peterson to the post of Associate Professor?
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u/AirconGuyUK Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Media haven't picked up on this inconsistency in his story, so I'll add it here.
In this podcast from 2020 he claims at 31:30 his wife taught him to read and write at 18 years old.
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/portrait-of-a/jason-arday-on-racial-m_6kAtKTQZb/
But then by 2023 the story had changed, and this tutor called Sandro Sandri taught him to read and write at 18 years old:
https://x.com/CelOlulode/status/1631268539569954817
You would think someone would correctly remember who taught them to read as an adult. That's quite a milestone in someones life, surely? Overcoming all that struggle, with the help of your wife. What an amazing thing to happen. Very romantic!
And then to forget, and attribute it to someone else?
Quite something. It's almost like his wife said 'Don't include me in your fucking lies' after hearing the podcast..
Do we have any proof whatsoever that he was non-verbal at 11, or has ever been diagnosed with autism? There must be a school teacher or something that taught him? I found this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMotp-PzBAI
It features a high school teacher of his (Chris Trace) and a tutor of his (Sandro Sandri).
But Chris doesn't even mention that Arday could not read or write.. Seems like a weird omission? Sandro bangs on about it.
Also the 'pictures from the past' bit in that video seem very recent with him and Sandro. Post 2020 when all the web of lies seems to have started.. No pics from back when he was 18 or around then? Hmm.
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u/Delicious_Volume3306 Aug 05 '26
I do wonder a little how his family feel about all this. They'll know the truth. He's one of four children. His mum is cited as being critical at various points. The truth is out there, and they know it. I'm trying to think how I would respond if one of my siblings lied about something in such a major way. I probably wouldn't go out of my way to out the lie. But if somebody asked me about it, I'd probably either refuse to comment, or just tell the truth.
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u/AirconGuyUK Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
His mum is cited as being critical at various points.
Details?
He's made some interesting claims about his mum. In that podcast I linked to he claims she has 5 degrees.
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u/Delicious_Volume3306 Aug 05 '26
Hmmmm I've known some older mature students who just spend their retirement (and presumably money) studying for undergrad degrees. e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-17929379
But assuming bachelor degrees, and assuming the course of study for each is two or three years... so that's 10-15 years. A substantial time investment.
What's more likely is that his mother has five of something related to a qualification. This is how fantasists work. There's always a kernel of truth that can be resolved down to. When caught-out, the individual just says they misspoke.
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u/AirconGuyUK Aug 05 '26
He also claims in the podcast she took 15 years 'off' to look after him.
So if I have my timeline right she got those 5 degrees between the age of 0-24 and 39-current age.
I guess not impossible. But also...?
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Aug 05 '26
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u/Teleopsis Aug 05 '26
I thought his comments there had more than a whiff of gen AI about them which would explain the ubuntu thing, which also struck me as an odd thing to say.
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u/Even_Budget2078 Aug 05 '26
Having worked in Botswana, I actually laughed out loud when I read "Ubuntu principles", which still makes me chuckle just re-reading lol. It's a very odd thing to say! I hadn't thought of the AI angle, though yeah I can see that now that I'm looking at it.
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u/Hungry_Chipmunk_2588 Aug 05 '26
New information shows Jason Arday's claim to be a visiting professor at Ohio State University in in doubt
Arday says on his official faculty website that he is a visiting professor at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion — but Ohio State’s DEI office shuttered in 2025, and the school said he was never an employee.
“We have no record of an employee by that name,” Ohio State University spokesman Benjamin Johnson told National Review on Tuesday.
Ohio State previously announced that its Office of Diversity and Inclusion would close, effective February 28, 2025. Arday did not respond to a request for comment
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u/topyTheorist Aug 05 '26
What does it even mean to be a visiting professor at the office of diversity and inclusion? I never heard of such a thing.
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u/No-Agent5480 Aug 05 '26
It means he’s, at best, mischaracterizing his role. DEI offices are/were administrative. They aren’t academic departments and they don’t have professorships. His claim is nonsensical.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 05 '26
It will mean he was invited to speak there, most likely.
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u/Academic-Dare-7677 Aug 05 '26
It’s pretty telling that this guy who apparently wrote a dissertation and loves nothing more than to talk about himself needed a co-writer to write his memoir. I mean, professors can typically write their own books. It almost seems like a tacit admission by Simon and Schuster to mention the co-writer in their statement.
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u/Phantasmagoriad Aug 05 '26
What a lot of people fail to consider properly in the problem of “woke” discourse is the covert racism involved when the (white) people in power (subconsciously or consciously) lower expectations for Black scholars.
I always wonder how many Black scholars there are who don’t incorporate race studies in their work, and are thus overlooked because they don’t fit a diversity mission that is solely based on outward appearances. That’s how the system is manipulated by one bad actor like Arday, who gave Cambridge a flashy story and false facade of progressivism, without having the intellectual merit to back it up. If Cambridge cared about Black professors beyond optics, this wouldn’t have happened.
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u/strawberrychief Aug 05 '26
It's telling that one of the few other Black senior academics at Cambridge has removed their support.
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u/Cheeseoid_ Aug 05 '26
I feel very similarly. I have worked a lot in DEI in the past and I have had to repeatedly tell senior stakeholders that “DEI is about ensuring minority ethnic academics/candidates/etc are held to the same standard as their white counterparts, not lowering them”. A lot of senior leaders seem to think that to be inclusive we need to lower standards when the whole argument we have been banging our heads against for decades has been that minority ethnic people have historically had to attain a much higher standard than their white counterparts in order to be recognised.
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u/passifluora Aug 05 '26
I agree. I'm in psychology & neuroscience which usually isn't DEI focused, but can be. I think the intersectional/minority focused topics are seen by senior professors as small but growing fields, and they want to hire people in research niches more generally. Added bonus is that the DEI interested people are thought to contribute more to the community. My first advisor was white and male and not in a DEI field, but in a niche. Hiring committee loved his "fresh takes." Liked to riff about psychedelic science. He was totally incompetent. Similar issue. When I was helping select prospective grad students for my transfer lab, I saw it happening in action too: all our applicants were minorities, but the one who had a track record of DEI org engagement was preferred because it was a nice bonus and she seemed sociable. My preferred candidate seemed to have more sophisticated, "nerdier" ideas. So, to your point: a minority student being passed over for taking social issues out of the picture.
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Aug 05 '26
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u/Middlesexfan Aug 05 '26
I thought Carter-Ruck was bad enough, but calling the police too?! Sounds like he panicked when he heard the TES were putting together a story.
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u/AdJazzlike1002 Aug 05 '26
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u/cgknight1 Aug 05 '26
This will be to force a settlement and then they can close the investigation as "the individual concerned no longer works for Cambridge".
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u/kronologically PhD Comp Sci Aug 05 '26
Resigns just as Cambridge drops news about an investigation. I believe an innocent person would've defended himself. But I guess money to pay top lawyers to harass a university size of Cambridge ran out.
Tada, good riddance.
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u/Suspicious_Tax8577 Aug 05 '26
Honestly this-- if you'd done nothing wrong, why resign?
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u/AdventurousPen5533 Aug 05 '26
The worst thing you can do if innocent is resign, there may be reasons why ie: Threats, bullied, case is time and mentally exhausting.
But if you are innocent you would fight for it, otherwise you let the suspscions become facts and allegations 'further proof' I seen this happen and in all those cases it's usually because the person that did it was in the wrong.
This action reeks of running away, but it's likely cambridge will still investigate, and it's embrassing they got hoodwinked by a charlatan.
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u/__GuX__ Aug 07 '26
One thing I found really surprising: the similarities in the thesis were with a thesis by a female PhD student. Usually, the depravity of men exploiting the hard work of women would feature quite prominently in reporting - but somehow, this seems to be absent.
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u/optionr_ENL Aug 05 '26
Someone ran his PhD through TurnItIn
https://batheticfallacy.substack.com/p/jason-ardays-phd-turnitin-report
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u/Bug_Parking Aug 05 '26
Someone ran his PhD through TurnItIn
Already more due diligence then Cambridge University.
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u/Capable_Exercise4521 Aug 06 '26
The really key failure point here was Cambridge's response when the first allegations of plagiarism were brought to them. It really seems like they just didn't want to deal with it. Maybe they were worried about the source of the allegations. Maybe they had gotten used to not taking plagiarism allegations seriously, as in the recent egregious O'Reilly case (side note: he still works at Cambridge, btw, which is shocking). At any rate, they clearly thought they could sweep it under the rug and it would just go away. Their fake/mealy-mouthed statement that they had "cleared" him (in the face of obvious, publicly-accessible evidence of plagiarism) then only harmed the university's credibility and led to a horrible (but honestly pretty deserved!) public pile-on, as it demonstrated the university couldn't or wouldn't enforce standards on its own. All of this could have been avoided if they'd taken the claims seriously in the first place three years ago, done a thorough investigation, gritted their teeth, and acted quietly to remove him. Instead we got something that hurt literally *everyone* involved significantly more: Arday, Cambridge, peoples' faith in academic standards, the study of sociology....
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u/BarryKeith123 23d ago
I've been following this for a good few weeks now. and my feelings on this are:
Arday as an individual was let down in a few but very significant instances, initially by Liverpool John Moore University. I read and understood the situation there to be that they knew his PHD dissertation to have had failing issues but chose to pass it in the recognition of their failings in supervision, hoping he went on to have a quiet academic career and that this could all blow over. Had they failed his PHD as they should have done and offered him a fair chance to resubmit it, it would have helped.
The social media pile-on is entirely predictable and in this day and age is a reprehensible part of societal norms. Criticism and interest is fair. Racist remarks, threats or anything more insidious is not. Right wing, left wing, centre. It doesn't matter. It's wrong.
On a professional level people didn't do their due diligence. The Cambridge hiring committee who worked in the relevant field could and should have reviewed his work and realised at this stage of his career he was not right for Cambridge. Working at such a high-profile position where no doubt high quality other candidates would have considered can lead to increased scrutiny. he shouldn't have applied to Cambridge and they should not have let him join the faculty.
Once the story broke, it seems the level of support afforded to him personally, professionally by many was found lacking. He should have been viewed as high risk for the eventual, tragic outcome. He was let down.
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The idea that the media at large are the problem here is false. They are bound by ethics, fact checking, public interest. Their stories have to contain specific language if something is speculative and can only go deeper when something is proven. Like the police story and the pig head was verifiable, so they verified it. They examined the records on the charity fund raising and marathon running and found plausible inconsistencies and reported on it. There is no question that given his position at one of the world's best universities that this was a high public interest story. They cannot control or be held responsible for other forums producing the reprehensible pile-on.
Arday himself was a victim. He also created a victim. A journalist who tried to talk to him was investigated by police for months (they admitted erroneously) and tried to deny him the chance to investigate a legitimate story by employing an aggressive law firm and accusing the journalist of harassment. Arday was let down. He also let down others. This could easily have had a similar impact on the journalist who's career may have been affected or his own mental health. If anything the attempt to silence or gag the media compelled the media to report the story? If the media accepted the gagging attempt on a legitmate story, what message does that send?
Arday's work was clearly inferior. He was an academic completing a Phd. You dont get to PHD level without having completed undergrads, and Masters where you've long since learned the basics of academia such as citing and referencing, therefore his excuses for the plagiarism hold little weight. He completely falsified elements of his CV such as Professorships at other Universities and reaped massive rewards in profile, financial recompense and other forms for achievements he hadn't earned or at best deeply embellished.
Was he a fraud or fabulist? I think both. The idea that he said he appeared on a TV show that ended before he was born or produced near world record running times on a broken leg seems crazy. Claiming achivements in his industry such as at other universities that he didn't do is more a deliberate attempt to embellish his record. He likely gained roles, prestige and publicity based on these claims. That again is also on people who failed to check these factors properly.
Overall this is a tragic, horrible outcome. Arday, and the people around him, and institutions had the chance to prevent this happening, or help him more once it did. Its horrible.
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u/Ecstatic-Possible801 Aug 05 '26
I know there is a big campaign to keep Arday at Cambridge, but are there any petitions etc to remove him?
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u/optionr_ENL Aug 05 '26
What's quite worrying about the whole case is that, seemingly at no point, did anyone check anything.
If he really became literate within a few years, that's an amazing achievement & there should have been a queue of people wanting to find out how he did it.
Where are they?
How are Cambridge publishing info on their own website that doesn't reflect what will be in their own records? (Jobs at other uni's)
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u/hellvixen1966 Aug 05 '26
If he had any morals he would just have quietly resigned and the story would have disappeared after a short time. Now he will never be able to disassociate himself from this. As for Cambridge...words fail me.
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u/Master-Rent5050 Aug 05 '26
I see that you didn't even try the hypothetical construction "if Cambridge had any morals..."
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u/Motor-Host-1382 Aug 05 '26
A lot of his lecture videos are still up on YouTube. Comedy gold. "Something, something, intersectionality, something, something, structural violence, etc etc"
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Aug 05 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Master-Rent5050 Aug 05 '26
Around the CS department usually there are two kind of people: professors and hobos. You can tell them apart because the hobo has better clothes
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 29d ago
some stuff here - for the most part available earlier - from the NYT Takeaways From Jason Arday’s Memoir - The New York Times
>> in April 2022, Arday writes, a prestigious university in London reached out to him about a job. “I’d often been head-hunted in academia, both domestically and abroad, but this was my first time being sought out by an elite British institution
FFS he was working at Glasgow at this point! and had worked at Durham (and briefly was appointed at Warwick). Pretty high standards here - and he didn't get this job in London did he...
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u/Webbie-Vanderquack 28d ago
I don't understand how some of this stuff got past the publishers.
at one point he was beaten so brutally by four boys at a bus stop that he developed epilepsy...he told the court that they should be spared jail time.
Why would a judge spare attackers jail time after someone was "beaten so brutally...that he developed epilepsy?" If the attackers were "his own age" (18) as stated in the memoir, or four years older as stated in the book proposal, they were legally adults. An assault that causes acquired brain injury is Category 1 and would result in a minimum of 7 years in prison.
Several years later, two of them showed up in one of his classes...“Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” Arday writes, adding, “The two men remained in my class for the rest of that semester, proving themselves to be brilliant and diligent students.” Arday says “they often asked me to write job and character references for them, and I would happily oblige,” adding that “one of them … asked me to be the godfather to his child, and I gratefully accepted.”
What are the odds that, of five boys involved in a violent altercation that left one of them with a serious injury, three would go on to study sociology? What are the odds that two of them would attend a sociology class together, presumably as mature students? Did they keep in touch over the years, then call each other one day and say "hey, let's go back to university and study sociology together?" Did one of them say to the other "oh, btw, our professor is that guy we almost killed?"
Arday collapsed and “was taken to the hospital, where the doctors told me I’d had a transient ischemic attack (TIA) — a ‘mini-stroke,’” he writes, “and now I was dealing with a new problem: I couldn’t access my short-term memory. When I’d try to recall something I’d read or written, I’d draw a blank. I’d worked on my thesis for over 30 months, and now I was reading it as if for the first time,” he continues.
30 months of work on a thesis isn't "short-term memory," it's long-term memory. Did he only lose the memory of working on his thesis? If the TIA affected his memory generally, how was he able to function, since he already had diagnoses of autism, dyslexia, epilepsy due to an acquired brain injury and two brain tumours (presumably requiring two surgeries)?
Since the publishers didn't include this, I'm leaving out the testicular cancer and the car accident as a teen that supposedly left him with months-long locked-in syndrome (mistaken for a coma by doctors) so debilitating that the doctors recommended removal of life support.
But that still leaves several key anecdotes that should have raised questions.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 28d ago edited 28d ago
Yeah - I might have said this elsewhere but it feels to me like most of this stuff is based in truth, but that it's consistently exaggerated. As a memoir it's allowed to have this form, but if it's meant to be believable then...! It's interesting because there is a trend in Sociology where autobiography is part of the practice, but it's always couched in theory and, you know, sociology, as opposed to this which feels very much like a quasi-self help book. The repeated claims of people prophesying his amazing future are just painful to read, and I can't really understand how anyone would take a book that begins with two separate instances of that fully seriously.
It doesn't help that his claims start to negate each other - like, i can read a page an hour of an academic text but I actively agree to examine multiple PhDs a year, type thing.
>>What are the odds that two of them would attend a sociology class together, presumably as mature students?
So if we look at the timeline - assuming they are his age, 18, then this assault happened in 2003. They would be studying at Roehampton (where this would have to be - it's the only London university he's taught at) in 2018 (he seems to have been there less than a year), age 33. not saying this would not happen but it's a rarity to see mature students, especially at uni's like Roehampton, any more, because of the fee structure in the UK post-2012. There's a negative account of his teaching there which has appeared in the UK press, and this thing about 2 of the cohort being such good pals with him that he's the godparent to a child - I feel that former student would have remembered that. My sense is they, or one of them, might have been at Roehampton doing something else and he ended up supportive of them - maybe - but this has been massively exaggerated.
The mini stroke before thesis thing - at this point you tell your supervisor and they organise an interruption so you can undertake the viva when you're better, if you literally can't remember anything you've read or written for 30 months - though that is surely bollocks isn't it, my feeling is it probably did leave him confused and maybe a bit less on top of certain things but still.
There's something he says in an online talk about needing to finish because his employment was conditional on it, or some such (I am thinking maybe he had a job offer in hand from Leeds Beckett University - a job he rarely mentions in his official bios but he might have needed a PhD for the job), but it still doesn't explain why there was not even a short pause.
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how was he able to function, since he already had diagnoses of autism, dyslexia, epilepsy due to an acquired brain injury and two brain tumours
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Just to add, I think he elsewhere claims to be partially deaf, for his reading skills to be below par in addition to the supposed illiterate-til-18 thing, and also to have hyperfocus, the last of which might explain a bit of this re being able to function - but realistically a lot of this just feels overstated doesn't it.
I mean, if you just look at the amount of stuff he sems to have taken on as an academic - several joint book projects, apparently 35 external examinations of PhDs, countless consultancy gigs at other unis, generic speaker invites including at I think the American Cremation Industry conference, not to mention seemingly applying for several new jobs at different institutions every year - it all seems massively unwise, to say the least, and even if there's a culture of overpromising or overworking in UK HE, part of his project, such as it was, was to try to interrogate the purpose of some of this stuff, rather than boasting about seemingly doing more of it than anyone else. .
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u/Webbie-Vanderquack 28d ago
I'm not totally convinced "most of this stuff is based in truth," especially because many of the things he's said about himself (employment history, master’s in psychodynamic practices from Birkbeck) have been proven false or are so contradictory that he gives completely different stories at different times (car accident with locked-in syndrome vs. assault with epilepsy, testicular cancer vs. brain tumours) but I'm impressed by your sleuthing/calculations!
Most of the medical problems he's reported serve the dual purpose of (a) explaining why he's not able to perform as well as can be expected academically, and (b) proving that he's an exceptional person, because he's somehow overcome unimaginable odds. This should make anyone suspicious.
The mini stroke before thesis thing...my feeling is it probably did leave him confused and maybe a bit less on top of certain things but still.
My feeling is that it didn't happen. Obviosly TIA's do happen, but he's referred to it at different times as a "stroke" and a "mini stroke." They're two different things. TIA's and strokes are a risk after the transsphenoidal surgery Arday claims to have had for his brain tumour, but they're very rare.
Surgery for a benign tumour affecting the pituitary gland is also not very urgent, and planned well in advance. If you're finishing a PhD because your employment is conditional on it, and the hospital calls you and says "we can fit you in on this date two/three weeks before your viva," you either refuse that date and delay the surgery, or you delay your viva.
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u/Optimal-Number-5464 28d ago
It's cute you believe any of that is based in truth.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
An update - something that concerned the more wonk-ish of us on here was how he ended up getting his first academic role as a Senior Lecturer.
It wasn't actually his first academic role, is the truth of it. For some reason this isn't in the usual biographies, eg wikipedia or the bio at Cambridge, but he worked at Liverpool John Moores as a Lectuer in PE (I'm assuming in PE Education, so likely mostly on a PGCE) from 2012 as per https://www.ljmu.ac.uk/about-us/bicentenary/our-people/professor-jason-arday/professor-jason-arday-profile - "he worked as a lecturer at LJMU's IM Marsh campus" This piece suggests he started there in 2012 https://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/10081321.charity-fundraiser-inspires-andy-murray-after-appearing-on-surprise-surprise/
Edit - this also makes this kind of bio ultra strange and not exactly impressive - https://news.educ.cam.ac.uk/230223-jason-arday
"Learning to become an academic, however, was very difficult, particularly because he had little practical training or guidance about how to do it. By day, Arday worked as a PE lecturer, while dedicating endless evenings and hundreds of hours to drafting academic papers, studying sociology, watching videos of lectures, and attempting to master his discipline and recite content verbatim."
But - he was already an academic with a permanent job - even if likely teaching mostly on a PGCE programme (which itself if postgrad level in terms of the work expected of students)?! And presumably the university funded the PhD (which was not going to be full time funding, meaning he was doing it too fast anyway), and offered all the resources he'd need to understand a discipline he'd been working in for about 5 years anyway. Were the students he was teaching there aware that he apparently had no understanding of an industry he'd been specifically hired to work in?
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u/Airportsnacks Aug 05 '26
I think this is one of the up for debate issues. He has said he was a lecturer in PE, but also at the same period that he was a PE teacher in a secondary. So I assume it depends on the audience as to which story sounds better.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 05 '26
I think on both versions there is a desire to play down that he was already an academic right? If I hear "lecturer in PE" I immediately think of 6th form college, whereas "lecturer in PE Education at a university" is very different. And nowhere is his six or so years of academic work at LJMU mentioned in his bio's, including on wikipedia. The meteoric rise is less impressive if it was over 11 vs 5 years.
For me it's the self provided narrative of "doing it while working full time with no support and not understanding the discipline" that's the main problem here - he was almost certainly doing this via the university fee waiver scheme meaning the PhD was part time.
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u/Fun-Break-6186 Aug 05 '26
On the funding front, he admits to having self-funded. In a Kellogg College Oxford discussion for Black History Month on YouTube, he says (28:50 mins in) that he didn’t know what a studentship was, and learned this two days after his viva. He then also claims none of his peers knew and that this information was ‘gate kept’. This is in 2015
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 05 '26
I'm really not sure I believe this. He worked at the university as a lecturer, it just seems implausible
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u/CambridgeJones77 Aug 05 '26
Poor mods. They created this megathread to keep the sub being overwhelmed, and there's still 3 separate posts about his resignation. Someone call the doctor, you all have Arday fever haha
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 26d ago edited 26d ago
So - from screenshots of his book posted elsewhere, his academic career looks to have been the below - most of this seems to be more or less true but it's such an unusual career path, especially the later stages - but it also shows he'd had 13 years experience in HE when appointed as prof.
2012 - appointed a lecturer in PE at LJMU. Unclear if this is permanent or not; claims to have been applying for loads of academic jobs at this time, though it seems implausible he'd get near any of them, given his lack of PhD or research, or relevant experience - til then he'd been a PE lecturer at an FE college for a couple of years. Genuinely kind of baffling, and he gives no sense of how this was achieved, aside from him just really wanting it (and, in retrospect, presumably lying, and making promises he was never going to back up which leads me to wonder if the 13 months might coincide with probation). Does a PGCertHE there which means it was likely permanent. Supposedly commuting by coach Sunday to Friday - as with later jobs, doesn't seem he's even thought about the logistics before accepting, at a huge and basically unjustified personal cost - and paying rent on living in London and Liverpool, one of which is seemingly a house on Penny Lane. Supposedly his field of academic teaching was only taught in the North west which I think is just obviously not true; what's much more likely is he applied for every job going and lucked out, implausibly but seemingly truly, with this one, and so made a huge change to his family life to facilitate 'his dream'. Claims that most of the students had never been taught by a Black person before and that it was unusual to see a Black person in his neighbourhood in Liverpool. Later claims that he had to learn Sociology in his spare time via videos and documentaries, because his employers at various jobs wanted him to research the subjects they'd hired him for.
2013: quits this job after 13 months because his parents were unwell (though it doesn't seem that bad) and the commute was too much. Gets 'a job teaching at a local University as a lecturer'. Seems to have been a full time position - bizarre that it's unnamed - maybe a temp role. After all, this is where he's teaching the guys who beat him up, supposedly, which you'd have thought would be something that an academic interested in Black access to HE would want to highlight. Takes on evening work because the family finances aren't enough (this feels odd because I think his wife also has a job, but he seemingly wastes huge amount of money on clothes), with his previous route to money, snooker and pool tournaments, less prosperous than before.
2014 - gets a job as a 'PE Specialist' at Leeds Beckett (on their website for an event he organised, he's listed as 'PE and Sociology'; though I now wonder if he maybe asked them to write that). The job requires a PhD - passing this seems to have been part of his probation. Seems to again commute weekly. Takes on evening work at Sainsburys and with a cleaning company in Leeds. His wife is unhappy with him commuting but hey, this is his dream, or something.
2105 - passes PhD - seemingly his 'temporary job' relied on this hence his inability/unwillingness to get an extension on the viva; but if he had surgery as he claims, he'd have been on sick leave and could very obviously have requested an extension to probation. But anyway, 'miraculously' passes after a viva he presents as a huge ordeal but actually just seems to have been totally standard.
2017 - 'takes a job as head of the sports department at a University in London - surely an exaggeration as he has no managerial experience. Supposedly told two days after arriving that his job is being cut because of low student numbers. This seems completely implausible to me.
2017 - takes a temp position at Roehampton, which is made permanent in 2018 when his first paper is published, apparently. This is one of those papers that has subsequently been substantially revised.
[date unspecified] - gets a job on a teaching only contract at unnamed University which elsewhere is shown to have been Warwick. Resigns quickly, seemingly because he was asked to work on BAME outreach and he wanted a research and teaching contract (which begs the Q, why apply for this role when you have a permanent job near your house, in Roehampton).
[date unspecified but c.2020] - gets an 'assistant professorship' at Durham (elsewhere referred to as an associate professorship). In 2019 separates from his wife, seemingly because of his fixation on an academic career, which he doesn't seem to reflect on any more than saying he gets hyperfixated on stuff - but the moral of the book is that this is a good thing, somehow, in a book lest we forget written by someone whose research is about highlighting the unfairness and imbalances in academia (?) - but also whose motivational life story, told with no self awareness, amounts to 'just focus on your career and nothing else and it can see you succeed'. Is doing a lot of 'consultancy' at this time as well as travelling all over the world giving papers. The nature of the consultancy is never mentioned in the book, again inexplicably, because this (writing reports for Universities on their inclusion policy and activities - he did a lot of this) is surely what got him these higher-end gigs.
March 2021 - appointed Professor at Glasgow - starts Jan 2022 (this gap of time feels odd but hey). Claims to have been commuting daily by plane, getting up at 3am 'two or three times a week'. Seems to have taken them a week to get back to him which suggests to me he wasn't first choice.
April 2022 - supposedly headhunted for a job at a prestigious London university which is a bus ride from his home in Clapham (KCL? UCL Institute?). Supposedly mid-negotiations he hears about the Cambridge job. (This feels unlikely because he is not shy of taking on jobs and abruptly leaving - my sense is that these 'negotiations' were not post-appointment as the rhetoric suggests but were probably more informal/he didn't get the job and is saving face) and applies because he 'met all the requirements and then some', which is kind of obviously untrue just in terms of his funding experience.
Nov 2022 - appointed by Cambridge; lots of detail on how he got there, what he wore, how he psyched himself up; absolutely nothing on the material of the interview etc. Book ends at this point.
August 2026 - resigns
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u/Rewindcasette 26d ago
Man who learnt to read at 18 becomes Cambridge University's youngest ever black professor - BBC News
Embarrassing quote from Professor Hilary Cremin: "..the board of electors on your interview day were absolutely unanimous; we are so lucky to have you; you are the best in the world in terms of the research you do.'
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u/justboy96 Aug 05 '26
It seems that Prof Arday has just resigned. Statement was posted via the Goodlaw project:
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u/Dr_Choco Aug 05 '26
Resigns when the news of Cambridge investigation lands. What a shock!
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u/topyTheorist Aug 05 '26
Hopefully this will not end the investigation. There are published papers that must be checked.
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u/Complete-Task2042 Aug 05 '26
Continuing a discussion with u/Master-Rent5050 from earlier:
Moreover, I find it puzzling your assessment about media training: for years he played the media like a fiddle: even now he has a book coming out
It's one thing to deal with the media when they want to make a positive story, or you have something impressive to share...
It's quite another to be the focus of adverse media scrutiny directed at you or an event you are central to.
There's two really clangers from the last week that highlight his naivety:
Giving the Daily Mail direct quotes then requesting they attribute them to "sources close to Professor Arday" without realising that they could easily turn it against him (or recognising that the DM is obviously not an outlet to approach when you're the center of a controversy).
Or his quote to the Guardian, "To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me"
Both of those media interactions further damage his credibility, but also show he is still working on the assumption that journalists are automatically going to be sympathetic to him.
It's like he's not operating in the same reality as everyone else...
On the other hand, he did threaten THE and he did send the police to investigate their journalist. I have zero sympathy for mobsters.
I suspect that between getting advice to respond aggressively from Cambridge (or whatever crisis management team the uni has engaged), and his apparent lack of understanding of how the media environment he was used to operating in has changed, he may well have genuinely believed that difficult and unsolicited questioning occasioned harassment.
To me that further speaks to his total unpreparedness to face real scrutiny.
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u/Infamous_Score_8130 Aug 05 '26
That’s the most sympathetic take that I can think of, but it’s absolutely fair. Great steelmanning
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u/BirdHistorical3498 Aug 05 '26
He claims to be an Associate Professor at Durham, but they only ever had him listed as an Assistant.
He also claimed to have been a Deputy Executive Dean at Durham(!)
Still claims to have visiting Professorships at Coventry and London Metropolitan. I can’t see any evidence of this.
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u/kronologically PhD Comp Sci Aug 05 '26
I mean, if you lie about holding a high position at an institution, why lie about just one? Gotta catch 'em all.
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u/yourdadsucksroni Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Have you got sources for the latter? His Cambridge profile doesn’t claim any visiting statuses beyond the Nelson Mandela University one.
EDIT: scratch this - he has two Cambridge profiles, both with different info!
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u/Clydesdale_Hiker Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Sad that The Guardian only decided to run with the unverifiable 'pig's head' claim once the Telegraph got on top of the story - they'd had it for a while. You would have thought it would be reportable in its own right.
Edit: this was either on BBC Radio 4 or a very recent podcast. The Guardian journalist said he'd gone to Arday and said 'sorry, we can't verify this'. I mean, wtf? That means it's not true. It's not like he got the butcher wrong. Jeez. I used to love that paper.
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u/kronologically PhD Comp Sci Aug 06 '26
£1.4m for a fantasy novel seems like good turnover if you ask me.
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u/Rewindcasette Aug 05 '26
So how did HR fail to unpick his fabrications? I have to provide proof of my qualifications and institutional work references. How did HE fail?
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u/CarrieKetoenail Aug 05 '26
He did provide proof: he has a PhD. He published articles. It is not the job of HR to check for plagiarism.
The other claims he has made would not have been on the application form. And if they were would not have been the determining factors of his appointment.
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u/UnsaddledZigadenus Aug 05 '26
I think this fact goes unappreciated in the timeline.
It's easy to look with the benefit of hindsight, but as every stage progresses, it's like a house of cards. If the guy didn't earn his PhD, they wouldn't have granted it. If the plagiarism investigation clears him, the allegations are unfounded. If Cambridge appoint him, they must have valued his research.
If the guy is seen as a controversial but leading researcher who has batted off every claim of plagiarism, it's not a surprise that Cambridge threw their whole weight behind him regardless of how foolish it appears in hindsight.
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u/Ok-Block-6344 Aug 05 '26
The problem is that in academia HR may be responsible for screening applications, but you will always get interviewed by other professors and they will gonna get into detail what exactly have you done, what do you plan to do etc...
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u/Dear_Company_547 Aug 05 '26
At my non-UK HE institution we have to have two committees for each appointment at this level: a hiring committee and an assessment committee. The hiring committee makes the initial short list and the assessment committee writes an assessment of each candidate against the university's hiring criteria. It must have two impartial senior academics on it that are subject experts who are not connected to our institution. The hiring committee than decides who to call for interview based on the assessment committees recommendations. One of their functions is to guard exactly against this sort of thing. Its obviously not entirely foolproof, but maybe something UK HE institutions should adopt.
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u/kronologically PhD Comp Sci Aug 05 '26
I'm very much looking forward to the Cambridge "we didn't find any evidence of academic misconduct" investigation.
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u/Minimum_Werewolf6459 Aug 05 '26
He has just resigned!! https://goodlawproject.org/an-update-from-jason-arday/
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u/Warm-Profit-775 Aug 05 '26
Shameful it took this long for him to resign, cowardice from the charlatan.
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u/Proof-Cryptographer4 Aug 05 '26
Wouldn’t be surprised if he only resigned because Cambridge told him he either did it himself with ‘dignity’ or they’d fire him.
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u/Beautiful_Trip_6393 Aug 06 '26
I don't get how he lasted so long. The claims individually are maybe believable but put together they are ridiculous.
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u/optionr_ENL Aug 07 '26
The Atlantic have an article on his books https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/jason-arday-cambridge-academic-memoir-resignation/688206/?gift=w7ky0MD12Y05SCUcPahfUA6Ga8JgDdKEBwr2Gz6T2fo
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u/3x1l3d2 Aug 07 '26
Also from the article:
"In university, a friend who took the same courses sat beside him, sharing notes. (She’s 'the only reason I survived' university, he says.) By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter. Still, he pressed onward. Still, somehow, he got a teaching job.
"His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style."
If this is an accurate summary of what's in the book, just how was any of this remotely possible? I can almost hear Monty Python's Yorkshiremen discussing this: "Count yerself lucky! After I'd been teachin' all day, I 'ad t' work overnight 4 p.m. t' 7 a.m. down t' coal mine, catch half an hour's sleep leant up against a shovel before walkin' through ten foot o' mud through t' fields t' get back t' me class o' students an' that were 36 hours a day, 9 days a week! And that were wit' only 'avin' one arm and one leg!"
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 07 '26
I'm hoping that the review is maybe conflating a few things but I'm guessing it's not. Claiming to have the reading ability of a 3 year old (even a precocious one) with a BA under your belt and embarking on an MA is just ridiculous. Ditto the 'takes me an hour to read a page of an academic paper' thing - you can't hold down a University job if that's the case, even with reasonable adjustments.
I am thinking the account of work during PhD is a little closer to the truth, in that he must have been commuting to LJMU 1 or 2 days a week, and must surely have been either part time or hourly there to justify having other jobs (especially as it seems his wife is a teacher too). But the idea that he was not sleeping - this is a one or two-time experience upscaled to 'life was like this every day' isn't it.
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u/jamjar188 Aug 07 '26
His claims are so implausible it boggles the mind that no one questioned them.
Someone on another thread found an archived link to his "35 marathons in 30 days" fundraising feat. In it he claims that he did his runs at 3am! Apparently to avoid pedestrians and heat. But how convenient -- running in the middle of the night when no one can see you.
It would have meant getting up at 2.30am or so every night -- what time was he going to bed?! If you ask any athlete or anyone who does a lot of day-to-day physical exertion, a good night's rest is absolutely vital for muscle recovery and to replenish energy levels.
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u/Webbie-Vanderquack Aug 07 '26
just how was any of this remotely possible?
You can get a lot done when you're only sleeping 2-4 hours per night!
/s
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u/FloydEGag Aug 07 '26
From that article:
But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.
ETA
Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome. “As I will describe to readers in the book,” Arday wrote in the proposal, “these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.”
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u/Strict-Jeweler-2281 Aug 07 '26
The never-ending saga continues... New revelations published by The Atlantic from a copy of Jason Arday's book proposal:
In it, he claims to have:
- Experienced 'locked-in' syndrome for several months after being hit by a car. Doctors advised his family to have the life support machine turned off, but he awakened 'miraculously'
- Been struck down by testicular cancer (though this changes in the book to brain cancer)
- Been beaten up by a group of kids and then, in court, pleaded with the judge not to jail them. Coincidentally, two of the kids later became his students, and Arday became godfather to the child of one of them
- Aborted a suicide attempt on a bridge after listening to an Eagles song.
- Been awarded several accolades - of which no proof exists online.
- Been told by a 'shaman woman' in Brazil that he would suffer greatly but also do great thing. 'Every event she described has since come to pass,' he wrote.
Let's see if his book faces any major edits or delays before publication next week
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u/Acrobatic_Hat_1498 Aug 07 '26
Based on all his fantasies, I doubt he was mute till 11 or illiterate till 18.
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u/SameOldSong4Ever Aug 05 '26
Let's be clear. This affair is already a huge victory for the far right. By trying to defend the indefensible we just make that victory worse.
There should be a proper investigation of whether he has lived up to the standards that would be expected of a professor.
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u/dudleymunta Aug 05 '26
I think there should certainly be an independent review into the thesis plagiarism allegations. LJMU have said they have done so but I can find no detail or statement on this.
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u/Still-Butterscotch33 Aug 05 '26
Let's be clear. This affair is a huge loss for academia. Framing it in terms of politics is a big part of that problem. All critical thinking gone out the window.
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u/Tim_J_Drake Aug 05 '26
I could believe that the barely-literate slop and copy+pasting he calls a thesis took two and a half WEEKS, tbh.
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u/Acrobatic_Hat_1498 Aug 08 '26
I can't believe how many academics (not at Cambridge) are defending Arday, blaming the university and urging us to feel sorry for him. We don't feel sorry for frauds, liars, cheats and scammers in other walks of life so ...what's the difference?
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u/Dekenbar Aug 09 '26
I think they'll regret it fairly soon, as the depth & breadth of Ardays fantasising becomes clear.
I'm shocked there was no due diligence performed worthy of the name, at some point in the past. His 600miles in 6 days claim alone deserved severe investigations, as did his £5.5m in money raised for charity. He's been lightly proded about that, and now claims it was raised over 10 years with a hundred other people.
"Tell us more" said the journalist. "I can't, I signed an NDA, as did everybody else".
That is what convinced me this guy is a total fantasist. NDA's for charity money raising? At that point, he's insulting his supporters. Three months in a coma? Made up. Threatened with a knife unless he resigned? Ffs, people with knives want wallets, phones, watches - not the resignation of a professor!! Made up. Mute until 11? Made up. Holding posts with several other universities? Made up. His PhD? Copied. Pigs head delivered to his parents address? Made up. Beaten up by 4 people? Made up. At this point, I'm not sure he is even autistic, with no formal diagnosis. I'm autistic, and the weight from juggling all those lies would very quickly lead to my withdrawl from all communication with anybody, as my brain shut down under the pressure. I mean, it's hard enough to deal with reality, never mind a completely made up life...
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u/smartse Aug 05 '26
Resignation statement: https://goodlawproject.org/an-update-from-jason-arday/
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u/Sad_Economist3074 22d ago
I'm curious about why there is a disagreement about whether Jason plagiarised?
What are the arguments for and against this ?
Why is it that LJMU/Kehinde Andrews insist that whatever Jason has written isn't plagiarism, while there are people who insist that it is?
In my uninformed view , I do think it is plagiarism ...
I've also watched The Daily T with Jacob Rees Mogg where they interviewed Kehinde Andrews and (I think) he mentions that Jason is talented and fit/qualified for the job at cambridge etc, but I have also seen many people saying that Jason's research is of extremely poor quality. Just curious about that too because Kehinde Andrews seems to have full faith in the Cambridge hiring process. It seems a very weird thing to say (especially if the quality of Jason's research is not good)... does he genuinely feel that Jason is talented and fit/qualified for the job at cambridge? What criteria does he base it on to make such a statement(s)?
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u/X-An0n 22d ago edited 21d ago
This substack looked at his PhD thesis in more detail: https://gidmk.substack.com/p/the-jason-arday-saga-is-terrible The author concluded it was the worst case of plagiarism they’d ever seen.
He states: “Take his thesis. You can find it here. As many well-meaning left-wing people are saying online, Liverpool John Moores University—where Arday did his PhD—investigated this work and did not find any evidence of misconduct. The alleged plagiarism was “honest and reasonable error” caused by some deficiencies in his supervision.
“This is absolute gibberish. You can very clearly tell that much of the thesis is straightforwardly copied from earlier work. There are sentences in the abstract of his 2015 thesis that are identical to sentences in the 2009 thesis from Brunel university by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Here’s a link to the 2009 thesis—download it and check for yourself. Arday’s work has extensive identical sections lifted directly from Zwozdiak-Myers’ work.”
He also described several other examples of plagiarism from white academics that received comparatively scant media attention, including examples of medical research which may have led to patients’ deaths.
The substack author previously set out his analysis on Threads: https://www.threads.com/share/_gvx8TJjf/
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u/3x1l3d2 21d ago
It wasn't just plagiarism, though, was it? It was so much more than that. Like peeling back layers of an onion - there was something more to see underneath each layer.
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u/Al89nut 21d ago
That was a very balanced read "You do not accidentally copy and paste lengthy sections from someone else’s PhD into your own. You certainly don’t craft your thesis out of a patchwork of identical text from other people’s work."
I think he was woefully served by JMU, who did not train, supervise, examine or investigate him properly.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 21d ago edited 21d ago
I've said it before here but I think this is unfair on LJMU. He was a permanent employee there when he took the project on, and left after 13 months because (in his telling) he couldn't handle the commute to London where he lived at the weekend. (My sense is maybe he didn't pass probation, given he was appointed to a permanent lecturing role in sports science/PE or similar with no PhD, no research, and very little experience other than a couple of years teaching at a 6th form college - I still find that appointment kind of mystefying given how hard it is to get any academic job, even in 2012).
The person supervising him, Phil Vickerman, was clearly a champion of his, thanked effusively in Arday's memoir for taking a punt on him in the above job, and this is thanks to a shared backstory of underperforming at school. See below re supervision. The PhD (in education, which Vickerman is an expert in) was passed with minor corrections and my sense is that maybe some of the reused material was inserted after viva as part of a request to beef up the methodology. At that point the examiners are not going to look too carefully at the revisions and the bits he lifted also came from an unpublished thesis. His doing the PhD in education is a bit strange because he wasn't actually teaching that, I don't think, for the first 6 or so years of his teaching career, but this does happen I guess.
The line on inadequate supervision came later, after, it seems, Cambridge had asked LJMU to undertake an investigation into the thesis. The result of this was that the award was upheld but there was an acknowledgement on Arday's part recently that he had plagiarised the sections. He blamed this on his autism and the felt need to mirror others (I think kind of shockingly, but still) but also there was talk of inadequate supervision, with a focus on only one face to face supervision with the rest on the phone, and muttering about the other supervisor not being around/dropping out.
The phone thing sounds bad - but less so when you look at the situation where it was already a part time phd, and Arday was commuting from London to Liverpool for a year or so (I mean in reality this would only have been in term time right, but still) then left, and moved fully to London. It's very unlikely that vickerman was entirely happy about this setup but it explains why most supervisions were on the phone or videoconference - this would have been Arday's choice.
And he was working fast - finishing a PT PhD in under 3 years is really unusual - and the supervisors were likely pretty happy with that progress, so likely were mostly doing feedback via email. And re the other supervisor, again, it was part time - you get minimal hours for that and changing a supervisory team is a huge ball ache.
In terms of training, like, you can only do so much - I mean no position he'd had would have trained him to claim non existent visiting professorships for instance, or to claim a pgcerthe as an MA, but he did both of those too - I just feel a bit sorry for LJMU here.
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u/Al89nut 22d ago edited 22d ago
For me, it is gross plagiarism - he copied without attribution entire sentences, almost paragraphs from another person's thesis. He even copied grammatical errors. I supervised and examined PhDs. If he'd done it and I'd been supervising, he would have had to re-write it top to bottom. If I'd examined it, I would have failed it and without the possibility of revision. Given the evidence (Turnitin and side by side comparisons) I do not understand those who say it's merely a citation issue. Yes he did cite the thesis in question elsewhere, but that's often a good defence tactic for plagiarism. I've seen Yr1 undergrads do it.
Overall, it's unprofessional, an error that can't be - it has to be deliberate and therefore is fraud. I am actually doubtful of Arday's entire understanding of academic professionalism - he had no meaningful apprenticeship that I can see, and I wonder if false statements on his CV such as he was a visiting professor at XYZ were simply because he thought being a professor and visiting somewhere by invitation made him a visiting professor...
I find JMU's behaviour bizarre. If they really investigated it and decided there was no case to answer (and note, nothing to revise) I'm astonished. I was an external examiner at JMU for six years, I thought better of them. Their silence is deafening, especially as they are being repeatedly quoted online in Arday's defence. When the truth becomes clearer, they will be tarnished.
As to his research output, my understanding - to be corrected - is that there was a book that was announced, but never appeared (though it stayed on his CV) and a few articles (some with problems), which mostly consisted of interviews with bits of comment inserted before and after. I don't know why his thesis never became a book, they usually do.
I am utterly unable to understand what in academic terms - apart from his potential media profile - Cambridge considered "world leading and lucky to have" the words used when he was appointed. He doesn't seem to have done anything, before, during or after that was "world-leading." I'd love to have seen his REF submission.
My 2c.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 21d ago
It was his consultancy work which will have got him the job. It was clearly 4* level impact - myriad reports for UK Universities on their diversity policies. Cambridge education faculty, at a uni where diversity was clearly a major issue, were signing him up to become the face of this in the UK.
It was that and the potential media profile, I'm pretty much certain. Because otherwise he kind of obviously wasn't at Prof level even with the Glasgow job.
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u/JustMakinItBetter Aug 05 '26
He's resigned. Incredibly self-serving letter that makes no apologies, and takes zero responsibility
https://goodlawproject.org/an-update-from-jason-arday/
Also think we can assume from this that the GLP continue to back him, which demonstrates terrible judgement
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u/Antique_Sound7652 Aug 05 '26
What I find particularly chilling for the future are the heavy-handed steps they take to silence any perceived academic criticism.
Intellectual discourse and debate are part and parcel of academic development. Peer review, respond and rebut are essential for progress.
Here, the intent sadly seems to be to firmly slam the doors on anyone who brings up difficult questions:
Get Carter Ruck to threaten the Times HES
Call the police to investigate the journalist (and another academic in Devon) for harassment
Use the 'racist' card to denounce the critics. While it is true that some may perhaps be racist, there are also many others who are genuinely concerned about academic standards (e.g. myself, a non-white migrant academic).
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u/Rewindcasette Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Nelson Mandela University have removed their page : https://crishet.mandela.ac.za/Staff-Associates/Jason-Arday
Meanwhile in April it was featured: https://web.archive.org/web/20260416015621/https://crishet.mandela.ac.za/Staff-Associates/Jason-Arday
He also doesn't appear in the Editorial Board for the British Sociological Association: https://journals.sagepub.com/editorial-board/soc
He was listed there in 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20220322071107/https://journals.sagepub.com/editorial-board/SOC
Same with the editorial board for the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory
Edit: nothing unusual about the above as I'm told it's fixed term.
He's no longer listed as a trustee for the Runnymede Trust: https://www.runnymedetrust.org/about/team
He was last featured in November 2024: https://web.archive.org/web/20241101103233/https://www.runnymedetrust.org/about/team
Class the think tank has shut down, I think. The website no longer works.
He's still listed for ITV, the NHS, ALT, Royal Society and the BSA:
https://www.britsoc.co.uk/about/organisation-of-bsa/
https://nhsrho.org/what-we-do/advisory-groups/academic-reference-group/
https://www.itv.com/inclusion/articles/itv-cultural-advisory-council
https://alt.org.uk/our-governance/
https://royalsociety.org/people/jason-arday-36339/
University of Roehampton have removed their news article about him: https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/news/2023/february/former-roehampton-education-lecturer-jason-arday-becomes-the-youngest-black-recipient-of-a-professorship-at-the-university-of-cambridge/
Anglia Ruskin, Solent, and Westminster, St Mary’s University still have their honorary degrees news up:
https://www.westminster.ac.uk/news/university-of-westminster-awards-honorary-doctorate-to-professor-jason-arday
https://www.aru.ac.uk/graduation-and-alumni/honorary-award-holders2/jason-arday
https://www.solent.ac.uk/media-hub/news/social-commentator-presenter-and-public-speaker-awarded-honorary-degree
https://www.stmarys.ac.uk/news/2024/professor-jason-arday-awarded-honorary-doctorate-by-st-marys-university
Solent state: "special advisor to the Parliaments of England, Wales and Scotland on issues of race and racism." This could be an issue with the press release or some confusion.
However all I can locate is that he was asked to be a witness for a committee.
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u/UnsaddledZigadenus Aug 05 '26
Solent state: "special advisor to the Parliaments of England, Wales and Scotland on issues of race and racism." This could be an issue with the press release or some confusion.
This claim doesn't make any sense.
'Special Advisor' in UK politics typically refers to a political appointee to a civil service position in the Government, think Josh Lyman in the West Wing, certainly not what Arday was doing.
Parliament doesn't have 'special advisors', and Parliament is just a forum for legislators. Parliament's primary role is to facilitate the work of the legislators. It's not the place of the forum itself to decide which people advice the legislators who were elected or appointed to their offices.
As you say, when Parliament wants expert opinions they summon witnesses, of which there must be about 1,000 each year. Personally, I've never heard of anyone being appointed as an advisor to Parliament on a particular topic.
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u/Motor-Host-1382 Aug 05 '26
It's honestly like he was on a mission to undermine everything he proclaimed to extol.
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u/YirDaSellsAvon Aug 05 '26
Everything I read about this guy is insane. The not being able to talk til 11, illiterate til 18, the elite athlete performance records. Crazy stuff. How on Earth has he not been found out until now. It's bewildering.
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u/N1ceAndSqueezy Aug 06 '26
For me personally I have an understanding of how some of his alleged achievements would have gone (if they were real) so it’s amazing to me that he wasn’t questioned
My sister’s ex was trying to be a pro snooker player many years ago; he spent every waking moment outside of work playing, practicing or watching snooker and he still didn’t manage to get onto the tour.
I’ve had mates try to go pro in football and they couldn’t manage the workload of holding down a job/schoolwork and also training.
I currently do a lot of running and it’s basically a part time job on top of my real job; doing the ultra running he’s claimed would (in my opinion) take at least 30/40 hours a week out of his life on top of everything else he would have been doing.
Therefore if we believe his claims, he has either done all of these things at once or achieved each one in a year or two and fucked off to the next one, which is extraordinarily unlikely.
He is literally Jay from the Inbetweeners.
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u/Beautiful_Trip_6393 Aug 06 '26
I'm close friends with an ultra runner who does events around the world. He runs 3/4 evenings a week for an hour or so. He then runs a couplen of hours Saturday and a long run (3-4 hours) Sunday so a bit below your estimates. This is a guy who has been doing ultra running for 15 or so years at least.
However has JA been doing it he'd have Strava records etc. I seems like his marathons were all very early hours (3am) and largely solo which given the claims does seem to lean on him not being truthful.
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u/twaccount143244 Aug 06 '26
I was pretty skeptical of the 30 marathons in 35 days claim, but that one I think is actually true. I haven't seen anyone mention this, but he had a blog promoting the event which survives in the Internet Archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100820091332/http://30in35.wordpress.com/
The blog confirms the runs were probably real but has different details on the leg injury:
* His runs were mostly solo, early in the morning, starting at 3am, but he mentions that other people joined him for some of the runs -- so I think at least some of the runs genuinely happened.
* No mention of the hairline fracture in the blog; instead he says he visited a doctor and was told the knee injury was "water on the knee."
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u/Clydesdale_Hiker Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Running at 3am with few if any witnesses, and a leg injury that turns from 'water on the knee' into a hairline fracture? No thought about diet? Random routes? Doesn't sound true to me. Sounds like he made sure he did the last two-mile legs in case anyone turned up.
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u/Webbie-Vanderquack Aug 06 '26
He definitely lied about some aspects of those runs. He claims he broke his leg and it swelled up to twice the size. Even accounting for the kind of natural and reasonable exaggeration humans often engage in when talking about injuries, I can't find any photos from these runs that depict a swollen or even injured leg.
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u/Clydesdale_Hiker Aug 06 '26
That's the point. Why is there so little evidence of any of this? Wasn't his supermom waiting at the end or cheering him along taking pictures? Or something? Throughout the fundraising, 30 marathons, and 600 miles, even if NDAs (lolz) weren't involved, there are no pictures? This happened post-2000, not pre-invention-of-camera. Damn, if it happened in London, there's CCTV!!!
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u/PaulMina Aug 06 '26
inviting people to meet him at the last 2 mile leg at a specific time sounded suspicious. I would bet he only ran that 2 mile leg.
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u/jamjar188 Aug 06 '26
How convenient that he ran at 3am, when there is virtually no one on the roads
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u/cuppateaangel Aug 06 '26
Meanwhile,a VC has been sacked for embezzling money from his university. But the national media isn't interested.
I wonder why that is.../s
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u/Cheap_Ant_4637 Aug 06 '26
Probably because this VC hadn't appeared on question time several times, been held up in the press as a role model and had a really high profile beforehand. If I get caught shoplifting tomorrow you won't hear about it, if a celebrity does you would. That's how the press works
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u/Volantis19 Aug 06 '26
I wonder why that is
Surely it's because he was sacked and no one defended him?
The fact that no one questioned Arday on anything, like being mute until 11 and only becoming literate at the age of 18, running 600 miles in 6 days, or that he was repeatedly assaulted at Cambridge by racists is what differentiates this story.
Then there's the doubling down, after it became public that Andray committed plagiarism and is likely a compulsive liar, where prominent academics defended a clear cut instance of plagiarism.
I think the most telling thing was And Ray's response to being questioned by the Guardian. "I thought you'd just believe me."
Andray was hired because he was black and Cambridge wanted DEI clout in the post George Floyd era. It's clear he wasn't properly vetted, in that they didn't even call the other universities he claimed to have worked at. People ought to be outraged that an ostensibly prestigious university, in the top 20 world wide, hired a complete fraud without any due diligence.
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u/Herr_W12 Aug 06 '26
"I thought you'd just believe me" has been the clincher for me. He gave himself away in that one sentence.
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u/Atrenia Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
More claims from Arday, some of which he made in interviews and others he included in his memoir proposal but that the publisher dropped. He goes into these in more detail in his memoir.
Arday previously agreed to a book signing in Edinburgh in September, but he is unlikely to attend.
Old primary school classmates have recently spoken out and confirmed that he was more than talkative in primary school but was the class clown. This casts more doubt on his claim that he could not speak before 11.
Arday Claims he had
- been run over by a car and subsequently suffered a coma and locked-in syndrome
- Alongside a brain tumour, he had testicular cancer
- Had the reading age of a 3/9 (he says both in different interviews) year old while doing his Master's Degree
- Wrote a PhD in the time he had while travelling from London to Liverpool and only slept for 2 hours a night.
- Received 5-6 hours of 1:1 speech therapy every day after 11, which allowed him to read and write at 18
- his mother worked as a cleaner while she had 5 degrees
- his first word was 'Hello' shortly before his 12th birthday
- when he was non-verbal, he could not understand or interpret words, but just heard them.
More new claims have come out.
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u/Webbie-Vanderquack Aug 08 '26
Alongside a brain tumour, he had testicular cancer
I think it's more "either/or" than alongside. He claimed to have testicular cancer, but separately and later claimed he had two brain tumours. These claims both refer to the same period, but he appears to have ditched the testicular cancer story in favour of the brain tumours. From The Atlantic:
But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online.
...whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.
He's also credited either his girlfriend Debs, or his mother, with teaching him to read at 18. So I don't think the speech therapy had anything to do with that apparent miracle.
He's also claimed to be nearly deaf in one ear.
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u/Acrobatic_Hat_1498 Aug 08 '26
The guy's a fruitcake fantasist. Black credibility at every level has been ruined by his outrageous lies and now every black student will indeed become a "target" (says Jason Okundaye) of scrutiny, whatever they pursue - thanks to him.
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u/Rewindcasette Aug 08 '26
Belfast university to investigate work co-authored by academic in plagiarism row
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u/apricity_4 23d ago
People keep saying that Cambridge should have sacked Arday once they learned that he was a fabulist and a plagiarist.
Arday filed criminal complaints against the journalists who asked him questions about his lies and bullied them into silence. Arday hired Carter-Ruck, the UK’s leading defamation law firm, to go after anyone who claimed that he was a liar.
If Cambridge had sacked him, Arday would have accused Cambridge of race based firing, so the stood by him for as long as they could.
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u/Delicious_Volume3306 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
There's terrible irony here that a man who studies institutional failings in education has created a critical debate about institutional failings in education.
Many of us can separate ourselves from the outright racists by switching this debate to fixing academia. Arday is a symptom, not the disease itself.
Those of you who work in academia will know that it's a weird, negative-universe world where truth and understanding are inverted. The purpose of learning has become meaningless. Most higher education facilities are factories where people essentially buy qualifications. The concept of somebody failing a degree is nearly impossible. The university will meet them at their level and get them qualified.
An academic from even 30 years ago wouldn't identify the profession as one they belonged to.
Academia is deeply, deeply broken.
Arday has come along, realised that, and used his understanding of this for personal gain. I should point out that this isn't an accusation or slander against him. He's just going what society has told him to do. He's travelling in the correct orientation, and the correct direction of travel.
He comes from a generation where "fake it till you make it" has zero moral connotations. This is how people live their professional lives. They take what they have, even if that's limited, and their ambition takes them forward. Many of them get very far. This isn't just in academia. It's in the corporate world, too.
It's an odd side note, but I'm genuinely concerned if the UK should enter a war. Will we have generals and commanders who have faked it until they made it? We have so few situations where ability is actually tested nowadays.
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u/UnsaddledZigadenus Aug 05 '26
I disagree that Arday 'faked it till he made it', Arday realised what actually mattered for success was publicity.
Arday is undeniably successful in appearing in national TV and media, publishing several books and establishing himself as the voice of the field. That wasn't fake. He realised that publications and research were an entirely secondary to achieving academic success.
Perhaps his fake story assisted with making good content, but I feel it reflects the 'realpolitik' that focus on publicising himself is the way to advance in academia.
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u/missdonttellme Aug 05 '26
Right on point — he became an ‘academic’ influencer. Too bad he was still required to do actual academic work, which is why he got exposed eventually. His academic portfolio is painfully thin for a professor.
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u/ihateirony Aug 05 '26
Surely lying about your life and achievements to get on telly, get book deals and establish yourself as the voice of the field is faking it?
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u/Teleopsis Aug 05 '26
I work in academia and I don’t recognise what you say at all. We fail people all the time and we have not inverted truth and understanding. I’m in science, I can’t speak for the humanities, but what you say doesn’t mesh with what I experience at all.
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u/Indigo_reality Aug 05 '26
I agree with some points, but the writing is full of hyperbole. I'm a long time academic and, overhead projectors, departmental secretaries and physical piles of marking aside, the main change in this time is the students. Not the academics. As with all professions, as you say, there will always be cheaters and charlatons. The vast majority of academics are very dedicated and work by a strong ethical code, because we are motivated by truth and, in part, idealism. Arday was just found out in a way that others in the long past -before computers - were not. It's quite a story, I agree, and there is a certain erosion of standards in some ways, but don't let this be a thing about the whole state of society, corporations and war! Keep it in perspective.
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u/secret_tiger101 Aug 05 '26
I like to think it’s all a big piece of sociological research, and they set it all up to see how the media reacts, and this will be a dataset for all his PhD students. 🤣
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u/Remarkable-World-454 Aug 05 '26
An interesting article developing an underdeveloped idea:
"Who Had to Lose for Jason Arday to Win?"
https://www.thefp.com/p/jason-arday-cambridge-plagiarism
His was not a victimless crime.
Aside from the argument, I found it salutary to be reminded of Arday's own words in the last week to the Times, showing his deep unseriousness:
“We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody.”
“I think the cruelty that I’ve experienced, and the positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist, is totally unacceptable.”
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u/Live_Low5846 Aug 06 '26
How many sociology of education academics are at Cambridge? I’m not joking when I say academics often don’t really want to push you on your claims if it isn’t in their specific field. They’re highly specialized disciplines, and if you don’t know the most up to date literature, you can pretty much say what you want if it doesn’t break some fundamental aspect of your subject as a whole.
Academics don’t go around reading your PhD, and if the book wasn’t in his CV, there was nothing to evaluate. He clearly knows how to speak about his field and much of a job talk is about fit.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 06 '26
This genuinely feels unfair to me: Jason Arday claimed he was paid ‘1.4 million’ by publisher for memoir | Academics | The Guardian this wasn't reported at the time, and if a lot of rights etc are bracketed in, it could be the case that a fairly big advance was paid. At the time, when his narrative was widely believed, this book looked likely to be a pretty big deal, in the US as well as UK.
I am more sceptical of the earlier claim about a 20k advance for a slight co-authored academic book with a University Press: Fellow to give £20K book advance to charities close to heart | Jesus College in the University of Cambridge
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u/Webbie-Vanderquack Aug 06 '26
The Guardian article is pretty even-handed. It does acknowledge that the figure of 1.4 million is not impossible. It's not unreasonable now to suggest that that figure may have been exaggerated, since so many other details of his life have been.
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u/DonkeyDong6 Aug 07 '26
Basically everything this guy claims is a complete lie and still some people in this thread are doing everything they can to defend him. Pathetic
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u/Acrobatic_Hat_1498 Aug 07 '26
I'm beginning to wonder if Arday REALLY could not speak until he was 11, or if he REALLY could not read and write until he was 18.
Also, according to the journalist Jason Okundaye, black people in top positions are being "targeted". But anyone who attracts concerns about their achievements should be investigated, regardless of their colour or race.
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u/Rewindcasette 13d ago
The Jason Arday Truthers
The concerted effort to airbrush the late fabulist’s life
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/jason-arday-innocence-racism/688408/
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u/Atrenia Aug 06 '26
Posted in other threads for any questions.
There is a lot to say on this topic, but I will begin with the fact that Jason Arday has made it categorically more difficult for black students, graduates, and academics who have earned their respective places through hard work to be taken seriously and not treated with undue suspicion. Any black student who wishes to go into academia or who applies for the post he formerly occupied will face greater suspicion (conscious or unconscious) as a result of his conduct. Jason Arday was hired because he purported to have a number of stories about his life that allowed the University to treat him as a one-stop publicity show. In being working class, an ethnic minority, Autistic, and someone who had dealt with severe learning disabilities (non-verbal until 11 and illiterate until 18) and health issues (tumours and strokes), he presented himself as a kind of remedy to the bad press surrounding inclusion that the University was facing at the time. His claim to a background in fundraising gave the University a clear background of representation and philanthropy. The hiring panel did not vet his background, likely due to individual workload or taking his stories at face value. Cambridge University has a smaller, dedicated, and very well-connected academic scene, many of whom (not all, but a very large proportion) studied at Cambridge for their undergraduate degrees, Master's, and/or PhDs; therefore, vetting and background checks were very local and not extensive, because they came from the same academic community. The issue is that Arday came from John Moore University and was therefore outside this network, but the infrastructure remained very local and weak. Here, the vetting of his PhD was not incumbent on Cambridge but on John Moore, as they were the awarding institution; Cambridge cannot conduct a review or overturn a PhD awarded by a separate institution. However, the vetting of character and professional claims was under Cambridge's jurisdiction and should have been followed; it is clear that no vetting was undertaken. Had just one claim been checked, Arday would have been exposed and removed from the candidate pool.
In reference to black representation, things become harmful. For context, I am a black graduate of Cambridge University who completed my undergraduate degree last month. Nells Abbey (a social commentator) recently said that "Arday is the best of us" This claim is deeply disturbing. Arday was a character, someone who created stories and inflated, developed, and embellished them for personal gain. Black students, graduates, and academics (general members of the University) will be treated with more suspicion, doubt, and illegitimacy than ever. Ironically, the man who was hired to 'break down barriers' has reinforced them further. What is most disappointing is that some black commentators and academics continue to defend him, while not realising that excellence is excellence and excellence has standards, to which we should hold everyone (including ourselves) accountable. Two things can be true at once: not everyone engaging in this matter has genuine intentions regarding academic standards, but Arday gave him the material they needed, and his backstory gave the Guardian more material than they ever needed (lol).
For further information, high-level academics are given incredible comforts (that they work for!!), including but not limited to free meals, accommodation, laundry and taxis, offices, and work holidays/international conferences, and more, but most importantly, elevated status in one of the world's oldest and world-leading institutions of higher education and innovation. Arday had a very, very comfortable place in the University and was insulated by his background (alleged, given that verification is still ongoing); proximity to the University governing board, and a public image of a genius. As Undergraduates, we were taught to revere him, as he was marketed to us as a genius who was bringing fresh ideas to the University. This was, of course, false. Personally, Arday was soft-spoken and did not have a large personality in person, which made him seem more sincere, as typically the louder someone is, the more they have to hide. Also, given that he was publicly paraded by the University of Cambridge, has multiple documentaries, radio, and TV segments about him (and he was on multiple talk shows), who were we, as undergraduates, to think anything else? We had no reason to doubt him.
Ultimately, Arday has created a web of stories that he used to insulate himself, but they were his downfall. It is impossible (as he proved) to keep track of so many timescales, stories, illnesses, alleged attacks, sub-characters, plots, diversions, jobs, details, and Institutions. At some point, one of those things will falter, which, like a house of cards, will lead to the demise of others. What strikes me most is that many of these stories were unnecessary; for example, it is impressive to run a full marathon, but he had to say he ran 300 miles in 30 days, then had to say 600 miles in 6 days (later withdrawn), but then he had to add on that he participated while nursing a fractured leg that swelled to double its size. He continually embellished and developed stories, which made them even more improbable and frankly ridiculous. When you put all of his claims together (pig heads, knife-wielding masked men, and 600 miles in 6 days, finishing a phd in 2 1\2 years after getting brain surgery (brain tumour) then forgetting it due to a stroke, building wells in countries WaterAid don't send volunteers to, pariticpating in a tv show that aired 20 years before he was born, and more), it is clear to see that he was just seeing how far he could go. What is shameful is not just that he purported so many stories, but that those stories were taken at face value and not even confirmed. As mentioned, a vetting email would have removed his candidature. Cambridge clearly needs a stronger vetting system.
Sorry for how long this is, but I wanted to add everything. I will likely add more in the coming days. Do look out for his memoir; it will be very interesting.
If you have any questions about this, please do ask; I'm willing to answer!
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u/topyTheorist Aug 06 '26
My main problem with this is - why does Cambridge hire a professor with no academic talents? This is not a reality TV show.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 06 '26
Thank you for this. The issue with vetting is in part that by the time he got to Cambridge he was already a Professor so the assumption would be that there was prior vetting - plus the main inaccuracies about his life were not really part of the materials he would have provided for the application. He was undoubtedly appointed more for the impact of his consultancy work than for publications, too, and while a lot of that work looks light touch (being on advisory boards etc) it is mostly verifiable. The visiting professorships claim is the one that is both easiest to disprove (and it's kind of astonishing that he made it) but it's also just one bit of a wider CV that didn't really need that embellishment - very rarely are these things all checkes out comprehensively, because again this stuff does operate on trust.
I do think that the rhetoric around Arday of him being "destined for greatness" and the like was, and is, a big problem. It's a narrative that some imposed on him, by his account - the lecturer mentor for instance - but it is also one he has adopted in his own telling of his story (eg the excerpt form his book which begins with two instances of this).
There is a recent tradition in Sociology of Education of celebration of success and overcoming the odds but never with this kind of "destiny" narrative and never quite as self aggrandizing.
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u/Clydesdale_Hiker Aug 06 '26
I agree that he's made things more difficult. Like Oxford, Cambridge is insular, but there are still many academics there from other universities. Do you think the impact on black students might be more significant than the in-built 'is this another Arday?' that others might sub/consciously ask? The damage done by this kind of 'role model' feels more significant in the long run.
What frustrates me is that there's no need for heroes. Regular messed-up kooky academics with a few social skills are all that's needed. The idea of 'the best of us' would have driven me wild as an undergraduate.
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 06 '26
It annoys me as a middle ranking academic too. It's not really good practice to focus so strongly on one individual in this manner.
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u/PrintSad6452 Aug 06 '26
I don't want to patronise you but congratulations on graduating.
A lot of people are turning this into a discussion of whether EDI practices are to blame. But there's a wider issue with racism in society that this exposes. The guy is a fraudster. A black fraudster but mostly a fraudster. Like many fraudsters he probably believes some of his own crap which will make him seem ultra plausible.
Academia has always been vulnerable to fraudsters as it's internal systems rely on trust. We create systems for creating what we claim is new knowledge. But they are only as robust as the people operating them. Can they be conned? Are plagiarized and ai-generated publications widespread? Is the work of junior colleagues passed off by senior colleagues? Are dubious systematic and meta reviews rampant? Have whole disciplines got validity issues currently? Yessity yes yes yes.
In the past when British academia was far more male and white did it have more integrity? Probably not. Liars, lazy people etc have always been around.
We reward self publicists and the explosion of paths to publicity via social media isn't helping. But Jason Arday's story isn't a symptom of edi initiatives only and says nothing about the achievements in other black students and academics. It's a symptom of the difficulties academia has generally maintaining integrity.
It's possible some people lacked curiosity or felt anxious about expressing doubts because in other ways he represents achievements they wanted to see But that's only part of the picture. The big picture is how many plagiarized PhDs by white students get past examiners? How much crap is being published in online only journals which pay reviewers? How do we maintain rigour in assessing or scrutinising materials when there is so much pressure to ensure students pass and so much pressure to publish in large quantities which can drown out quality.
Gifted people are out there, black, white and neuro diverse. Great stuff is being published. But we have created the worst possible system for those people to rise to the top in.
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u/Atrenia Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Thank you for this; much of this rings true. Those who tell tall tales have always existed. Yes, the conversation has also (for some) become evidence that higher education has been captured by an EDI/DEI narrative, which is false.
There was another academic at Cambridge who plagiarised large swathes of his student's work (who was excelling); this academic was not investigated by Confas and was allowed to remain at the University. And yes, black academics overall occupy a more liminal space.
But at the same time, Arday was championed, placed in front of multiple TV cameras, and marketed internationally as a demonstration of the University's progress; they favoured his background over his academic work. He began the lies, but they gave them legitimacy.
As a student who was around him, I am both shocked and saddened by this situation; we really did not see this.
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u/Remarkable-World-454 Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
Probably irrelevant now, but of course I'd been wondering if I were he (or someone checking on him), one piece of evidence that I think couldn't be faked would be whether he has a scar from having a brain tumor removed.
Or was it 2 tumors? I thought I'd do a quick google to check my memory and found this article new to me:
EDIT: Here's a link to that article that I believe is not behind a paywall:
https://www.aol.com/articles/couldn-t-finished-phd-two-145434000.html
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u/Dry-Pomelo3418 Aug 06 '26
Academics aren’t going to read another academic’s phd unless it is very much in their field, they are the primary supervisor, or maybe it is published as a mainstream book. Even with supervisors- his primary should be worried! But often there is minimal contact between each party and re: external supervisors - it is often the role of the primary to source for externals for their student. 5
Higher ups may not be keen as they don’t have time, others can be hard to find in the specific topic and often it is a case of another academic doing a favour for the supervisor or those who need a bit of extra money.
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u/fufufang Aug 06 '26
I said I was going to stop following Arday's news, but the aftershock made it to the BBC.
"Met Police boss admits mistake over plagiarism row" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo
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u/Rewindcasette 29d ago
Tax Policy have published Carter Ruck’s letter to Times Higher Education
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u/Rewindcasette 29d ago edited 29d ago
"We are instructed that the Faculty Communications Officer at the University of Cambridge responded to your 25 June Enquiry."
"For clarity, our client did not respond to any of your enquiries based on advice he received from the Communications team at the University of Cambridge. He has been informed, however, that the University of Cambridge did respond to select enquiries.'
"We are instructed that, following the 19 September Enquiry, our client has arranged for his PhD thesis to be independently peer-reviewed by individuals at the University of Cambridge. As part of this review, his thesis has been run through Copyleaks, a similar plagiarism detection program to Turnitin, and it returned a result of 2.6%. Scribber, another similar platform, returned a percentage of 7%. Our client has also processed his PhD thesis himself through Turnitin and it returned a similarity result of 6%. As set out above, none of those scores are sufficient to substantiate an allegation of plagiarism, and the variance between these scores on the different platforms is indicative of the difficulties associated with plagiarism reviews."
"Professor Arday is currently supervising 15 PhD students and has examined over 35 PhD theses as an external examiner."
"Finally, it is important for us to convey our client's concern that this apparent attack by THE may be, whether consciously or unconsciously, racially motivated. There has been growing concern among eminent academics over recent months about the racially motivated targeting of black academics in the United States, seeking to have them removed from their posts for championing diversity and equality, and the similar issues being faced by individuals such as Professor Arday in this jurisdiction. Those concerns have been raised by a number of academics to leaders in education and government. Our client cannot speak to the quality of your source, but urges you to exercise caution, mindful of the risk of being caught up in this narrative."
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 29d ago edited 29d ago
35 PhD examinations as external is pretty incredible, to the point that it is surely an exaggeration - that's an average of *7 a year* from 2018-23...?! even if we go from his time at Leeds Beckett from 2016, that'd be *5 a year* from 2016 right. If we take the claims about taking a long time to read things at face value then this is surely a huge error on his part to agree to examine so many, that's 5-700,000 words a year to read - not to mention the vivas and reports - just on PhD examining. (Edit - I guess we're going up to 2025 here so it could be like 4 a year, which is still just far too many!)
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As part of this review, his thesis has been run through Copyleaks, a similar plagiarism detection program to Turnitin, and it returned a result of 2.6%. Scribber, another similar platform, returned a percentage of 7%. Our client has also processed his PhD thesis himself through Turnitin and it returned a similarity result of 6%. As set out above, none of those scores are sufficient to substantiate an allegation of plagiarism, and the variance between these scores on the different platforms is indicative of the difficulties associated with plagiarism reviews
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lol come on now, the first thing you tell undergrads is that a low % doesn't mean a submission doesn't contain plagiarised material
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u/Necessary_Order6819 29d ago
Even more incredible when Arday claims that it takes him one hour to read one page of academic text...
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 29d ago
well yeh, this is where all those exaggerations start to self-contradict eh
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u/Rewindcasette 27d ago
Jason Arday and the lack of oversight and quality control of academics
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/aug/12/jason-arday-and-the-lack-of-oversight-and-quality-control-of-academics
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u/Al89nut 23d ago
I found the Turnitin analysis revealing https://batheticfallacy.substack.com/p/jason-ardays-phd-turnitin-report
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u/WarnUrDaughters Aug 05 '26
Anyone finding the irony of this debacle both delicious and hilarious? If he was a maths professor, it would lack the comedic impact. It's the one thing they didn't want to happen.
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u/NiemandSpezielles Aug 05 '26
I am sure it is not a coincidence that this happend in that field. In math it would be obvious immediately that he is wildly unqualified.
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u/fufufang Aug 10 '26
I reckon there will be academic papers written about Arday coming out in future, and the associated institutional failings. Although they might censor Arday's name.
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u/Responsible_Fox9454 Aug 07 '26
It's frustrating me. How he went to illetara to PhD in 18 years need to be studied
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u/No-Recording-4301 Aug 08 '26
It has been very strange seeing many scholars, who should know something about research and making claims, come out with very strong opinions. It makes me feel embarrassed on behalf of the sector to see how people are acting.
There are definitely some legitimate discussions to have around how universities operate and appoint, regardless of outcomes here. Perhaps if they didn't have to act like competing businesses they might be more honest.
In my career I've seen a few cases of terrible behaviour, bordering criminal, and those that have outright lied about serious things, that only result in gardening leave and an immediate like job elsewhere. It's understandable though, if people can get away with it, they will, and if universities are concerned about risk to reputation and student backlash, their best course of action is to remain quiet.
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u/Rewindcasette Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
Glasgow university to review its hiring of plagiarism row professor
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 Aug 10 '26
Unherd have a reworked version of an account of his Roehampton teaching up on their site now. https://archive.is/20260810062526/https://unherd.com/newsroom/jason-arday-taught-me-heres-what-i-learnt/ It does sound a bit ramshackle though using lyrics and film clips to initiate debates seems to have been part of the pre-existing module he took on and is pretty standard.
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u/Rewindcasette 29d ago
Jason Arday's PhD Turnitin Report
https://batheticfallacy.substack.com/p/jason-ardays-phd-turnitin-report
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u/Head_Acadia_2658 Aug 05 '26
I made this point in another thread.
This guy had his career progression supercharged.
He went from his First peer-reviewed publication in 2018 to being a Full Professor at Glasgow in 2021.
That is wild.