The Jason Arday scandal

Oh, Cambridge will definitely survive. But it has damaged its reputation for no gain, and they've made themselves a global laughing stock

Would have thought that was patently obvious. After Cafnas, the Mail and Telegraph led the charge. I haven’t looked but I expect GB News are creaming their drawers too.

It’s hard to know where to start with that poster’s gibberish isn’t it? Or were they being ironic?

One of the most damning articles was in the Guardian.

It is very Tom Wolfe

Thank you so much! I will read this I think. This kind of thing fascinates me. 😊

So you're excusing everything he's done because he's "young and black". Thanks for confirming👍

So you are saying the wrong people reported on this and only the right people like The Guardian should be allowed to and if they do, then it would be a legit 'charge'?

This just shows doesn't it, the ludicrousness of it all. Gotta be on 'the right side of history' even when things are staring you in the face.

Reference to creaming drawers was particularly vomit inducing. One to swerve in future.

"vanishingly small" is not the same as "never" though, is it?

I actually agree that perhaps the americanisation of our history and things like bridgerton and other race blind casting might mean a lot of 'average' people who don't have a great grasp of history might end up assuming that britain's ethnography was a lot more diverse than it really was.

But by saying there were 'never' black slaves etc you're doing exactly the same, just in the other direction.

Is he even neurodivergent? If he's lied about car crashes, brain/testicular cancer, mutism, comas and physical attacks, why should he be telling the truth about his autism? God alone knows what the actual truth is surrounding this individual. He's like Walter Mitty. Personally, I think personality disorder is a better fit.

Never fear, the inevitable slavery argument has been introduced to save the day. Everybody but Arday brought about his downfall.

My thoughts exactly.
I was listening to a bit of his interview with James O'Brien and honestly he sounded like a Ricky Gervais or Peep Show character. Just not serious or believable at all.

We discussed this in one of my university lectures in 2001. I made the point that giving preferential treatment to someone because of their race (or sex, or disability) was patronising and that it I was someone with that characteristic, I wouldn't want anyone to give me preferential treatment because I'd want to be recruited on my merits. The lecturer thought I was absolutely barmy, but I pressed my case. I wasn't saying that there shouldn't be an effort to remove barriers that any protected characteristics might present. Simply that if something is necessary it should be necessary for all, and if it is not necessary for one person it shouldn't be necessary at all.

Unfortunately for him, reality.

It's ridiculous. Regardless of what colour he us, he's a human first and foremost and humans are often disordered, opportunistic pains in the arse. These stupid, sheltered middle class university people fetishising this man because he ticks their boxes. Bunch of fools. Just treat people as people, some are intelligent, some are stupid, usually flawed and often on the make.

I would love to know the truth.

When he said he'd been on the 7 Up documentary series J O'B didn't challenge him at all.

His claims about his past are so unbelievable I think speculating about a possible personality disorder is reasonable. What's not reasonable is the sheer number of supposedly highly intelligent, educated people who fawned over him like he was some kind of savant. It really makes me question how much we can trust the output of elite academic institutions.

So, you think Arday is in Bryan Cox’s league? I attach a screen shot of just the abstract for his PhD thesis. Feel free to compare to Arday’s. There is a very distinct difference between explaining complex concepts in simple language for the lay person - usually a skill only achievable by those who have a profound understanding of the concepts they are explaining - and not being able to use that language at all.

The reason he got to his role as ridiculously quickly as he did is because he was subject to LESS scrutiny than his white middle class peers (and the female ones from disadvantaged and NON-middle class backgrounds who were passed over to give him this role). In fact, when the THE/Grover approached him in 2025 to ask questions in the line of his job - to do the professional scrutiny into Arday’s qualifications as required of his job - Grover was accused of racially motivated harassment and ordered to stop. Less scrutiny, not more.

And ‘AI’ didn’t make a mistake. Plagiarism detection software is what is used, not AI - and it has been in use in universities for years - you are required to run your assignments and essays through it (eg Turnitin) prior to submitting in for marking, address any errors, and then tick a box to say you have done so. That is what was used to screen his work. Erm, and you do know that these people were able to refer to the original thesis that he plagiarised to corroborate the findings of the plagiarism detection software, don’t you? They didn’t draw their conclusions on a ‘hunch’ like you? After all, freedom of speech is a very fragile right and is counter-balanced by laws of defamation and libel in the UK, one which journalists and newspapers are very careful to protect themselves being prosecuted for… usually by double and triple checking their facts before going to press.

And the truth? Perhaps you should take a look at the videos of former class mates and Sunday School compatriots who state very clearly that this guy was not mute or learning disabled and was in mainstream school along side them, chatting and singing away on the Sunday school bus. They are furious at the way he has besmirched the reputations of black people and the impact this may have on others aspiring to be university professors. Just as I am livid that he has pretended to have overcome mutism, global developmental delay, had multiple brain tumours so ‘forgot’ his thesis, when I have watched a best friend die from his brain tumour and also watched the year long recovery my step mother went through with hers. And for him to blame his autism - or YOU to conjure up some autistic savant level text-memorising skill as a hypothesis for fuck knows what, as you do in another of your posts - is frankly despicable.

I could absolutely not give a flying fuck about his skin colour. But I do care about the potential damage he has done to the perception and inclusion of autistic people in academia, about the impact this will have on future autistic/ND, black and disadvantaged students gaining access, about the way it may devalue the PhD I have been preparing for submission - and for what it reveals about the erosion of professional standards and lack of robust recruitment processes that have arisen out of DEI driven policies that have created a climate of silence around people like Arday.

So no, it hasn’t been a witch hunt. No, he is not undeserving of every bit of ridicule and derision that comes his way - as loudly from members of his own black community - and no, he was not set up.

I don’t think giving him tenure was racism. It was done by a bunch of ( probably) white academics who were seduced by the tale they were spun because they badly wanted to believe in a story of a black person overcoming all the odds to blossom into a bona fide, lived experience sociologist. This narrative operated so powerfully that they lost their critical faculties. It is also a narrative I have seen other minority heritage persons deploy in other spheres to gain advancement and usually it works like a charm. I can give examples.

It's awful. I thought my trust in institutions was at an all-time low but this has proved to me that it wasn't quite at rock bottom.

Did they all really believe his nonsense or was it a case of not wanting to rock the boat, I wonder?

The issue is I am not entirely convinced that hs appointment was a serious one in the first place which is why they got someone who was a loud mouthpiece rather than a serious academic.

I work with people from Cambridge uni. Arday's academic abilities, or total lack of them, were an open secret. As I said in a much more previous post, most people are just not prepared to risk their livelihood or reputation to take a stand, it's simply not worth it. The self righteous Hilary Cremins of academia can be very aggressive in subduing criticism.

In terms of institiuton's reputation I think this news is much bigger than Arday but I do wonder whether it will actually make it into the mainstream media

Palantir Co-Founder Peter Thiel and Reform UK’s Cambridge University Recruitment Pipeline Project Revealed

The world-renowned academic institution has nothing to say in response to a six-month investigation by Byline Times raising serious concerns about the safeguarding of students and foreign influence at Cambridge University.

bylinetimes.com/2026/07/09/peter-thiel-and-reform-uks-cambridge-university-pipeline-project/

Spaghetti alla word salad

Originally posted on the other thread (where they are having fun using AI to unentangle it) as an example of the kind of sociology our taxes go to fund....
(chosen at random, I promise, from the link to recent Phds awarded by Cambridge):
Through a critical genealogy that traces the colonial classificatory violence of binarity, its implementation into bureaucratic administrative violence of nation states and its automation in contemporary algorithmic violence, this thesis challenges the algorithmic relation to transness, the presumed technooptimist ‘objectivity’ of algorithms and the ways in which the algorithmic organises the necropolitical infrastructures of targeting, surveillance, and cisnormative violence that trans bodies live under. This intervention posits that algorithms—as the computational set of instructions—constitute the channels through which the trans body is classified and translated as information, coded as data, marked-as-different and imbued with necropolitical violence that cannot valorise transness, which position transness against and in tension with the binary valorisation of life itself.

It's totally about class in America. Race can be a class indicator, but that is less and less true.

The black Americans who most benefit from DEI and tend to lead that discourse are professional middle class, which is why it reflects their interests.

The last thing they want is inter racial working class solidarity. Neither do their white counterparts.