Cambridge University's Disgrace

Here, I consider what we can learn from the case of Jason Arday.

1. Who Is That?

Jason Arday was until recently a professor of the sociology of education at Cambridge University.

He has related that he was autistic, did not speak till age 11, and was illiterate until age 18. Despite these challenges, he got a PhD in 2015 at age 31, then worked at three other universities before moving to Cambridge University in 2023, where he became the youngest black professor ever employed there. Getting the PhD was challenging because a brain tumor caused him to forget the content of his dissertation weeks before the defense, and he had brain surgery and a stroke two weeks before his defense.

He apparently has had many other amazing experiences, including running 30 marathons in 35 days, nine of those with a hairline fracture in his leg that made the leg swell to twice its size; running 600 miles in 6 days; and raising over £5 million for charity. He installed water points for charity in South America and Africa. As a child, he was featured on the television documentary Seven Up (which was broadcast before he was born). He used to play soccer semi-professionally and made substantial sums of money playing snooker.

He is also the first astronaut to land on the moon while paralyzed from the neck down, the sole winner of all the Nobel prizes ever given, and the one true King of Narnia. (I have interpolated a bit here.)

The evil racists have tried to hold him back, though. He and his family have received rape and death threats, he has been physically assaulted and spat upon, and he has had bananas and bullets mailed to him. Someone once sent a severed pig’s head to his parents’ home, which the police investigated (though they have no memory or record of this, and nor does the butcher shop that Arday said sold the pig). On two occasions, he was confronted on campus by a masked man who threatened to harm him if he did not resign; the second time, the man had a knife. The man was not captured on the CCTV cameras, nor did Arday mention it to anyone at the time.

Arday has an autobiographical book coming out soon, where you can presumably read more about his exploits.

2. Criticism

2.1. Plagiarism

The demonic blogger and philosopher Nathan Cofnas finally got to our hero. In July 2026, Cofnas published a blog post, “DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge”, accusing Arday of plagiarism and thus perpetrating genocide.

Cofnas lists over 30 examples of verbatim copying and/or paraphrasing by Arday, mostly in Arday’s dissertation, which copied extensively from another student’s dissertation (Paula Zwozdiak-Myers in 2009). I will just paste one example here:

The other examples are similar. As you can see, we aren’t talking about innocuous phrases commonly seen in dissertations, such as “I’d like to thank my advisor for their support” or “Death to America”; or quotations of common definitions; or duplication of famous quotations. Nor is this something that could plausibly be accidental, nor is it just one or two lapses. There are many instances (188 sentences, according to one report), and these are about the clearest, most paradigmatic examples of plagiarism that you could ask for. To check for yourself, see: Arday’s dissertation, Zwozdiak-Myers’ dissertation.

The plagiarism apparently continued in some of his published articles, according to Retraction Watch.

When a journalist and a professor asked Arday questions relating to plagiarism, Arday accused them of harassment and reported them to the police; the police investigated the journalist but ultimately found no crime. The Times Higher Education was planning a story on Arday but killed it after getting a threatening letter from Arday’s lawyer. That’s why it was left to Nathan Cofnas to report the story (his stature in hell gives him special rates on demonic lawyers).

2.2. Writing skills

One Twitter post accuses Arday of literary incompetence, citing the following errors from two randomly chosen publications of his:

“Increasing diagoneses of mental illness”

“will enviably impact attainment outcomes.”

Mental illness “destabilizes individuals’ mental facilities.”

“Racism is unlikely to ever go way, owing to its penetrative, divisive and persistence nature.”

The mental-health paper promises insight into “the barriers to preventing access and uptake.”

“There is a cultural cognizance and sensitivity that is are required.”

“There were no visible interpretation services were available.”

The bibliography links to http://raceeequalityfoundaiton.org.uk (with two errors in the URL).

“a need to reinvest inequitable structures”

“heightens feelings of sensibility and vulnerability”

“services that have a designated remittance to support the mental well-being”

“the impact of cultural pressure and expectation on this phenomena”

“there are few opportunities available for them gain these types of opportunities”

2.3. Other CV items

He claimed to have published a book (Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, with Palgrave) for which it looks like he had a contract, but the book was never published. He claimed to have held visiting positions at Glasgow and Ohio State, but those universities have denied this.

2.4. General awfulness

Leaving aside the plagiarism, Arday’s main topics of research seem to be himself, and racism. The following is the abstract of an article called “Dismantling power and privilege through reflexivity: negotiating normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric curriculum and racial micro-aggressions within the Academy”:

The challenging of normative Whiteness is paramount in dismantling the cycle of inequality that permeates society. The persistent and operant nature of Whiteness within the Academy is enduring and depicts faculty of colour as deficient or incapable. The articulation of racialised experiences has become an instrument of empowerment for faculty of colour in an attempt to reclaim power and disrupt the operant tools of Whiteness. This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a [sic] storytelling method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula and conceptualising the racial mirco-aggression [sic]. The narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in [sic] racism unfolds within in [sic] the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness. Deconstructing oppressive, racialised structures is central to the belief that morally we collectively have a responsibility to dismantle inequity in all its suboardinated [sic] forms to ensure that we reside in a more egalitarian society.

Enough said.

3. Reaction

Can you guess what Jason Arday, Cambridge University, and other left-wing intellectuals had to say about the allegations? If you guessed, “They screamed ‘Racism!!’”, you are correct. Congratulations, you have figured out how modern progressivism works.

The Good Law Project published an open letter in support of Arday, which has garnered over 15,000 signatures, including those of some British MP’s and prominent academics such as Simon Baron-Cohen. They say that “investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing” and that Arday was “repeatedly subjected to baseless allegations after being fully exonerated.”

One Black Studies professor admitted that there was “poor scholarship” in Arday’s dissertation, which he blamed on “poor supervision” (yes, it’s his advisor’s fault!), but insisted that it wasn’t plagiarism. Also, you could find inconsistencies if you looked at anyone that closely. Also, it’s a myth that universities are left-wing; they’re actually hotbeds of right-wing racism, where blacks are held to much higher standards than whites. Also, a person’s dissertation doesn’t really matter. (No joke, he said those things.)

There were concerns about Arday among some Cambridge professors as early as 2023, plus a video by freelance journalist Simon Webb in 2023, but Cambridge apparently did nothing till there was sufficient negative publicity. By the way, Arday’s department head once told him that he was “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” If true, this suggests that we should shut down the entire field.

After the story went public, Cambridge University initially defended Arday, saying he was the “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility” and that he had been cleared of plagiarism.

Later, they announced they were starting an investigation, whereupon Arday resigned. His resignation letter attempts to curry sympathy while assuming zero responsibility and admitting nothing. Nor, however, does he attempt to explain the evidence of deception and plagiarism. He did note (no doubt accurately) that his students have given him far more than he could ever have given them. (Which reminds me of the 2014 Onion story, “Teacher Who Learns More From Her Students Than She Teaches Them Fired”.)

4. Harms

What is the problem with hiring people like Jason Arday?

• First, it harms scholars who are displaced by DEI hires. In my own field, I have repeatedly seen excellent students struggle to find jobs. These students are always white males. In one case, a student (a white male) with over 20 published papers couldn’t find permanent employment for multiple years.

• Of course, that’s not sufficient to make academics care; in order to make them even think about caring, I have to point out that affirmative action also harms some minority professors—the ones who earned their positions through talent. They are harmed because people wrongly suspect that they are DEI hires.

• It harms students who get a worse education because of an underqualified professor.

• It harms the field that these professors work in by substituting less qualified scholars for more qualified ones.

• It stokes traditional prejudice. When we lower standards to hire from a particular race, the result is that the least qualified professors in the university are members of that race. Students can notice that. They may then infer that the members of that race are in general less talented. If we cancelled affirmative action, there would be fewer minority professors, but they would be just as good as the white male professors.

• It stokes prejudice on the part of blacks. First, because people like Arday are constantly, obsessively promoting the narrative that “whiteness” and white people are the chief cause of black people’s problems. Second, because when controversies arise over the Jason Ardays of the world, left-wing intellectuals will, in the effort to escape accountability, blame the controversy on white racism, which many black people will believe. (See Kahinde Andrews.) This is bad for both whites and blacks. Black people cannot succeed in life by blaming their problems on whites.

5. Lessons

What does this case show?

• It illustrates the correlation between intellectually dishonest ideology and personal dishonesty. Wokism is a dishonest ideology, so it attracts people like Claudine Gay, Jason Arday, and Ward Churchill.

• The problem with universities is probably worse than you realized.

  • Moderate leftists will try to say that this is just one case, and there are always fabulists or liars of any ideological persuasion, so what’s the big deal?

  • But the existence of Jason Arday isn’t the issue. The issue is how the rest of the academic world treated him. Note that the right-wing ideologues didn’t have to scrape the barrel to find these cases—they found the president of Harvard, plus a professor who another sociologist said “probably holds the top position in the world in sociology of education”. I don’t think that 50 years ago, these elite institutions could have been so hoodwinked, nor would academic fraudsters have so easily found high-status intellectuals to defend them. By the way, Claudine Gay resigned her position as university president, yet she continues to work as a professor at Harvard, and continues to draw her >$1,000,000 salary.

  • I have lived in the academic world for most of my life, and I have participated in both admissions and hiring decisions many times. I know that the cases the right-wing media points to are not isolated; they are just the most dramatic cases. People care about Harvard and Cambridge; people won’t look so closely at lower-ranked schools, but there is discrimination going on all the time throughout academia, probably in nearly every school, in nearly every round of hiring or admissions.

• The slippery slope is real. Affirmative action was originally thought of as a tie-breaker or something similar—that race would be taken into account when candidates were otherwise equally or nearly equally qualified. But that didn’t produce the desired results. And when you have vague criteria in the first place (what constitutes “good work”?), once you accept race in principle as a factor, it becomes easy for it to play a larger and larger role—until eventually you get people who shouldn’t even have passed their PhD being awarded top positions in their fields.

• Woke intellectuals are racist, as you already knew. But it’s not just the anti-white racism. It’s also the subtle racism of low expectations. Conservatives are completely unimpressed with Arday because they apply the same standards to him that they apply to white people. But the Cambridge professors who hired Arday probably just implicitly assumed from the start that a black man couldn’t satisfy the standards we apply to white professors; thus, they were impressed with him because his work was so good for a black man. They and Arday were using each other. Him, to gain prestige and money; them, to congratulate themselves on having their token black man.

• University administrators rarely care about truth or justice. The only reason why Cambridge finally agreed to do an investigation was the negative publicity surrounding the case. If it hadn’t been for Nathan Cofnas, Jason Arday would still be teaching at Cambridge, and would probably have continued receiving accolades for the rest of his life.

• Skepticism is justified.

  • The number of Americans expressing high confidence in higher education dropped from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2023. The drop is particularly steep among Republicans. One reason is undoubtedly the extreme and increasingly shameless ideological bias of academics. Cases like that of Jason Arday show that this distrust is justified.

  • Again, the issue isn’t that this one guy was a fabulist. The issue is how the academic world greeted him and how they rallied to his defense when questions were raised. We have people seriously saying now that plagiarizing your dissertation isn’t a big deal—they’re just that averse to granting a point to the hated right-wingers. And that kind of proves the right-wingers’ point.

  • Recall that the Cambridge spokesperson initially characterized the plagiarism allegations as a “vile campaign to undermine [Arday’s] credibility.” Cambridge University, the Good Law Project, and many serious intellectuals assured us that the plagiarism allegations were completely baseless, that Arday had been completely exonerated, and that there was nothing behind the charges but pure racism. They said that, even though anyone could have spent 5 minutes reading the passages reproduced in Cofnas’ blog post and verified with near-100% certainty that there was plagiarism. This is how they behave when non-woke information threatens to intrude into their consciousness.

That is worth remembering the next time someone assures you that experts have established some left-wing point.

Left-wing academics will blame the right for undermining trust in academic experts. But the right couldn’t and wouldn’t be doing that if the academy weren’t so intellectually awful.