It’s easy to see how Jason Arday held on to his University of Cambridge professorship until Wednesday, despite facing significant accusations of plagiarism and dishonesty for years. After all, his story fit quite neatly into certain culture war grooves.
On one side was a scholar born to working-class immigrant parents in South London public housing who rose to become the youngest Black professor in the university’s 800-plus-year history. On the other were the forces of reaction, seeming to target him as part of a wide-ranging attack on tolerance and progress. In many academic circles, he was clearly the good guy.
Then, soon after Cambridge volte-faced from its longstanding insistence that there was nothing to see here, and announced its own investigation into Mr. Arday, he swiftly responded with an announcement of his own: He would resign.
If interest in this story peters out, that would be unfortunate, because what’s needed now is genuine accountability. This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny. Their decisions were both wrong and further damaged the reputation of higher education at a time when it has come under withering and sometimes unfair attack.
Mr. Arday was appointed in 2023, just 37 at the time. He tells a remarkable life story. Mr. Arday says he has autism, that he was nonverbal until he was 11 years old, and that he couldn’t read or write until 18. Nonetheless he claimed impressive achievements, including raising millions of dollars for charity via feats such as running 30 marathons in 35 days. At one point, he claimed that he ran 600 miles in six days.
Mr. Arday’s ascent began to stall just months into his tenure at Cambridge when, according to a detailed timeline published by the website Retraction Watch, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University named David Harris emailed Mr. Arday to ask about certain potential problems he had noticed with Mr. Arday’s research, including a 2018 paper he had published in the journal Social Sciences. (Mr. Harris has written critically about critical race theory, which informs some of Mr. Arday’s work.) Among other issues, Mr. Harris noted, Mr. Arday appeared to have lifted language from another scholar’s work. Mr. Arday, after receiving a follow-up inquiry from Mr. Harris, responded by questioning Mr. Harris’s motives and wrote that further emails from him would “be considered bullying and harassment.” (Per The Guardian, Mr. Arday later reported Mr. Harris to the police, which didn’t pursue charges.)
Mr. Harris then enlisted the aid of the sociologist Martyn Hammersley, who, according to Retraction Watch, which monitors retractions of scientific papers, emailed the plagiarism concern to Hilary Cremin, head of the faculty of education, and Rhys Morgan, the university’s head of policy, governance and integrity. According to Retraction Watch, Mr. Morgan replied that since the paper was published before Mr. Arday’s tenure, “we do not consider it within our remit to investigate.” Ms. Cremin replied that while Mr. Arday had the university’s “full support,” he had agreed “to take the article down from the journal online platform” and revise it to address concerns.
This makes little sense. Professors are hired on the basis of their prior work and an assumption of academic integrity; if that work was plagiarized it’s fair game for an investigation. Moreover, a credible allegation of plagiarism isn’t resolved by an author agreeing to take down a paper for revision; it demands a thorough independent investigation.
Instead, Social Sciences, posted a correction informing readers that the article had “been amended to increase the clarity of citation sources within the text.”
Mr. Arday appears to have passed off quotes from interviews another researcher conducted as coming from his own interviews. The new version of the paper, according to Retraction Watch, edited some quotes, deleted others, and removed Mr. Arday’s mention of a second researcher.
There was also apparently plagiarized material in a 2020 paper Mr. Arday helped write in Educational Philosophy and Theory, according to Retraction Watch. The journal had responded similarly in 2024 with generously framed corrections.
The British publication Times Higher Education was preparing a lengthy investigation of Mr. Arday in 2025, Retraction Watch reported, which was to include both the aforementioned accusations and a new one: evidence of extensive plagiarism in his 2015 Ph.D thesis from Liverpool John Moores University. Mr. Arday then hired the prominent British defamation firm Carter-Ruck, which sent the outlet a threatening letter that appears to have killed the story. The scandal broke out only when the philosopher of biology Nathan Cofnas published a lengthy Substack post last month dragging all of the plagiarism accusations into full public view.
Liverpool John Moores University’s subsequent response appears to have been as thorough as the two journals’: “A confidential procedure was conducted in response to those allegations and Professor Arday’s Ph.D. still stands,” a Liverpool John Moores spokeswoman told me in a written statement on Monday, declining to comment further.
Mr. Cofnas was not an ideal messenger, given his interest in the purported correlation between race and intellect. In a meritocracy, he wrote, “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”
But Mr. Cofnas arrived on the scene because of Cambridge’s complacency — he wrote the post after an anonymous Cambridge tipster reached out to him — which soon hardened into stridency. “Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop,” Cambridge said in a written statement it sent me last month, insisting the allegations against him “have been thoroughly investigated by the relevant institution and the journals in question.”
That phrasing pointedly excluded Cambridge itself. Instead, the university gestured at the aforementioned investigations, none of which appear to have been thorough, as evidence it needn’t burden itself with further action. Liverpool John Moores even kept Mr. Arday’s Ph.D. thesis online, with the apparently plagiarized sections intact.
Mr. Arday attributed “some errors in his early academic work to his autism,” as The Times of London paraphrased his response, “saying that his method of making sense of information relied heavily on mimicry,” also blaming “inadequate supervision and support, especially given his autism.” He softened some of his impressive endurance-running and fund-raising claims. He has denied any deliberate wrongdoing.
An Aug. 1 Guardian article by Lanre Bakare represents the absurd climax of this scandal. In it, Mr. Arday said a masked man threatened him with a knife at Cambridge. Mr. Bakare reports that Cambridge security cameras captured no such intruder and that Mr. Arday “did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.”
The journalist Benjamin Ryan, meanwhile, documented the Orwellian efforts some of the institutions affiliated with Mr. Arday made to quietly revise or delete claims they published about him that now seem to be false. They include several universities that granted him honorary degrees, the TEDx speakers program and the Simon & Schuster speakers bureau that represents him.
If this had all come out earlier, it might have jeopardized Simon & Schuster’s publication of Mr. Arday’s memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” which is next week. Simon & Schuster told The New York Times that it stands by Mr. Arday’s memoir and plans to press forward with its publication, naturally.
When Cambridge reversed course Wednesday, it cited new information about Mr. Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” — an apparent reference to recent reporting showing that Mr. Arday claimed affiliations at universities that denied any connection to him. In light of Cambridge’s years of complacency, I think the more likely explanation is that it could no longer ignore the growing PR problem represented by Mr. Arday’s continuing employment.
Of course genuinely unfair right-wing attacks on academia exist. Donald Trump’s campaign against D.E.I. goes beyond concerns about the rigor of certain diversity programs — concerns I share, in part — and well into rocket-launcher-versus-mosquito territory. Sometimes, though, academics use Mr. Trump and the populist forces he represents as a convenient excuse to avoid the quality control that was so obviously absent here.
Their more cleareyed peers acknowledge that higher ed’s own hands aren’t spotless. A Yale University report published in April said “declining trust” in higher education “must be addressed,” and acknowledged that “those of us in higher education have too often resisted calls to critically examine our own institutions, professions, and modes of thought.”
In this case, perhaps what should be critically examined is how academia treats its stars — especially those who come to symbolize important new ideas or social-justice movements that bolster the reputations of their home universities.
In 2023, The Times of London paraphrased comments from the head of Mr. Arday’s academic department, writing that his hiring “was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.” “To any students or prospective colleagues who are wondering if Cambridge is a place where they can belong, the answer is, emphatically, yes,” she told the paper.
If Mr. Arday isn’t just a scholar, but a symbol of his university’s commitment to social justice, perhaps that made it more difficult for Cambridge to examine its own role in his ascent — and to delay, by several damaging years, the full investigation Mr. Arday’s case so obviously warranted.
Jesse Singal is a host of the podcast “Blocked and Reported” and writes the newsletter Singal-Minded. He is working on a book about American youth gender medicine.
Source images by Sean Gladwell and undefined undefined/Getty Images.
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