Cambridge University is England’s second-best university, but it’s now bottom of the class. As the case of Jason Arday confirms, no one does dumb like the smart people.
In 2023, Cambridge made Arday a professor. He became the professorial chair of sociology and education. These fields produce politicized gibberish and call it scientific research.
Arday allegedly went above and beyond inventing results to fit the ideology. He invented himself.And Cambridge, the place that split the atom, discovered the structure of DNA and formulated the rules of soccer, played along.
The topic for today’s class is that modern classic: “How Our Institutions Destroyed Their Credibility.”
When American universities caught the cold of Black Lives Matter in 2020, Britain’s leftie academics sneezed. Cambridge had fewer than a half dozen black professors. England’s finest minds realized that they had done a “structural racism.”
Enter Jason Arday. The son of Ghanaian immigrants. An autist, epileptic and dyslexic. Arday could not read or write until he was 18. But in 2021 he was already teaching at Glasgow University. His specialty was detecting bat squeaks of racism in education policy.
Cambridge U. touted the 37-year-old as the “youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.” Arday wasn’t just a DEI redeemer and a balm for white liberal guilt. When he wasn’t purging racism from schools, he was a world-class endurance runner.
He claimed that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, nine of them with a fractured leg that had swollen to twice its normal size. He covered 600 of these miles in only six days. Despite his fractured leg, he was within trotting distance of the men’s world record, 650 miles in six days. He also claimed he raised more than £5 million for charities.
These feats beggar belief. His biography is full of similarly absurd accolades.
The media rushed to acclaim Arday. Universities competed to employ him and posted his inspirational biography on their websites. Simon & Schuster purchased his memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” which — at least for now — comes out Tuesday.
In 2025, Arday said, a masked racist threatened him with a knife. He said a severed pig’s head was dumped on his parent’s doorstep.
Arday has struggled to sally forth evidence for any of these great and unfortunate claims, athletic or criminal. Many of his other most impressive achievements seem to be crumbling under similar scrutiny.
As the saying goes, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
Arday was an obvious fantasist, a Walter Mitty on the River Cam.
When a researcher named Nathan Cofnas ran Arday’s 2015 doctoral dissertation through plagiarism detection software, he found that Arday’s thesis appears to have lifted more than 100 passages from Paula Zwodiak-Myers’ 2009 thesis. Some suspect he faked his researchtoo.
His backers took his stories and research at face value. They saw only the color of his skin and his political potential. When the lefty newspaper The Guardian asked him about his claims, Arday said, “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me.”
We know why.
Cambridge initially called criticism of Arday’s scholarship “a vile smear campaign.” Arday called it “racially motivated.” An open letter claimed that “rightwing newspapers” were attempting to “undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.”
Finally, when the stream of evidence became impossible to ignore on Wednesday, Cambridge announced it would open an investigation into their scholar. The same day, he resigned.
Arday supplied the fakery, but the universities and media created the demand for it. Arday is not one bad apple in an otherwise sweet barrel. No, the whole thing is rotten, through and through.
Top academics supervised Arday’s research and his thesis. They wrote his references and hired him. They applauded his talks and published him.
They should be punished too for failing to do even a modicum of due diligence.
And they should be made to admit that they put politics above academics.
It’s bad enough that academics strike radical postures on the ramparts of the ivory tower. It’s worse when they do the same in public — for instance, when the American Association of University Professors endorses a union hack such as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary.
Social-science research drives government policy. The problem is, the research is as true as an Arday anecdote.
The SCORE project, an international study of 3,900 social science papers, recently published its findings.
When SCORE tested the findings in education papers, it was only able to “approximately reproduce” half of their results. The other half could not be reproduced at all. None of the results could be “precisely reproduced.”
Hence, America’s collapsing literacy rates, created by the kind of people who believed Jason Arday.
Only fools and fanatics would believe a con so outlandish. Its collapse exposes the rottenness of a corrupt system. We should thank Arday. I say, now that he’s back on the market, give him tenure at Harvard.
Dominic Green is a historian and columnist @drdominicgreen.
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