Jason Arday, Cambridge Plagiarist?

[Angeruish]

I’m surprised to be the first to mention this, but what do people think about Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism, and the media row that is brewing around him?

For those that don’t know, three years ago Arday became – at 37 – the youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge. Arday claims to have been diagnosed with autism at an early age, and says he couldn’t speak until he was eleven, and apparently only learnt how to read and write at eighteen.

The appointment, made when BLM issues were very much in the news, was made despite allegations of plagiarism in Arday’s doctorate, which were dismissed by Cambridge as being beyond its purview, and because he had been cleared by the awarding institution, Liverpool John Moores.

Those allegations have resurfaced in the past few days, with examples that certainly seem fairly damning, including a misplaced s apostrophe in the title of part of his doctoral thesis (An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research). This blatant error seems to have originated in a phrase supposedly lifted from the thesis he allegedly plagiarised, although in that original case it formed part of a sentence in which it was grammatically correct.

My experience of dipping at random into the paper, which is available online, immediately showed a number of other very basic spelling and other mistakes, almost as if it had not been proofread at all.

In an abstract (the summary written by the author, which is placed right at the beginning of an academic paper) from a different 2018 Arday paper, the following three grammatical/spelling errors occur within a single paragraph of just 160 words (again, this can easily be found online):
This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling method, which operates…
powerful ways in racism unfolds within in the Academy…
dismantle inequity in all its suboardinated forms…

There are now reports that Cambridge – which insists that Arday is the victim of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility” – is, perhaps not surprisingly, facing a “staff revolt” over the issue. Arday himself complains of “dark arts” being used against him, and says that autism led him to rely heavily on mimicry to make sense of information.

On the web you can find reports of various claims made by Arday (though several universities seem to be scaling them down, now that the spotlight is upon them). And yes, I have copied some of these:

• To have finished his PhD in 2½ years while working full-time and living with a brain tumour.
• To have featured on a television show that ran over a decade before he was born.
• To have run thirty marathons in 35 days, despite having experienced an epileptic fit, a seizure and a leg fracture. He also says he has run 600 miles in six days, just fifty miles short of the world record (no evidence of these extraordinary feats appears to exist, nor have witnesses come forward to testify to them.
• To have raised over five million pounds for charity (when challenged in recent days over this, Arday said this was done in association with others, who he declined to name because, he said, he had signed non-disclosure agreements that stopped him from doing so).
• To have played football and snooker professionally (no indication is given as to how Arday might have communicated on a football pitch when mute, as he says he was until the age of eleven).
• To have had a stroke immediately after graduating, causing him to lose his memory of working on his PhD.
• To have two GCSEs, in PE and Textiles (no timeline is given for when he is supposed to have taken these exams, but both of them would presumably have involved some writing – a skill that he apparently only acquired at age 18).
• To sleep only two hours per night.

Try searching online..... even "The Guardian" has now decided he is not everything he claims to be. So what do people think, and what does it say about higher education nowadays???

Sometimes the easiest way to get rid of someone who is a poor employee is to encourage them to move on. A poor employee can be someone who lack technical competence or who exhibits poor behaviour.

It is also increasingly hard for people to accept that someone is just plain bad. Instead they become products of society that has in some way victimised them. So now everyone defines themselves as a victim to avoid accountability and consequences or to gain advantage.

Compulsive lying is just someone being bad.

Also the fanfare that announced his appointment included reference to his ridiculous backstory. So his employers knew what he was claiming and accepted it without question. It wasn’t a case of now knowing he made wild claims.

@LemonTT but surely he has a lifetime of friends / colleagues / teachers etc who can refute or support his claims? The silence is deafening

But you are right.. moving people on is a nice solution ;-)

JA is not the only fantasist on this thread, and I wonder what percentage of posters are actually familiar with his recent work rather than parroting media? It's a sad and complex case. The schadenfreude here is grim to watch. The comments on his hair and skin reveal an even deeper nastiness. I hope he and his family are doing okay.

@cantabsupervisor thank you for your view point and @jacks11 my thoughts on this are as follows.
For those individuals that are aspiring academics cases such as this frustrate and even angers me in these cases when reasonably proven there is misconduct. That as a disabled female who has and continues to try and break down those glass walls. They experience the negative public opinion and suspicion; that if one has complex disabilities and a disadvantaged background you are awarded a place as a tick box not on your own merit. My autistic, dyslexic brain obsesses over every reference and structures of language to ensure it could not be construed as plagiarism or not my own original ideas that is contributing to knowledge with academic rigour. My own mentor used Arday as someone who achieved despite the challenges and someone who should be an inspiration to others when I struggled with the internal self doubt (grifters must not feel this) to find it is fantasy and merely a public relations stunt. Especially as my research underpinned by the Sociology of Education.

Lord Sir Michael Hastings - is presumably Dr not Sir

And normally it would be Dr Lord Michael Hastings; your professional title or rank comes first. But it appears to be an honorary doctorate, so maybe the rules are different.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/aug/06/jason-arday-claim-memoir-publisher-simon-and-schuster-cambridge

1.4 million pence, Jason, presumably? (£14k)

If that were true, S&S would have had to have been expecting mega sales - to make that much in royalties (it’s an advance on anticipated sales, isn’t it?) and to cover their costs and still make a profit they’d need to be sure of selling around 750,000 world wide [if google AI has guestimated this correctly].

Apparently Kamala Harris sold 350-500k copies. Not sure he has the same readership pull? I mean, until this story broke I have to confess I hadn’t heard of him but I might live under a specific white middle class arts orientated rock, so that means nothing!

My hunch is that nobody can support his claims but he’s a likeable chap that people care about so nobody is queuing up to put the boot in.

If the plagarism claims turn out to be true (which is looking increasingly likely) this guy has been deeply damaging to both the Black academic community and the autistic community.

Here is some more "parroting" - from Lara Brown in the Spectator:

"Maybe, perversely, we should be quite grateful to Professor Arday. He has exposed that journalists are better peer reviewers than Cambridge academics. He’s drawn attention to the vacuous nature of an entire field of research. He’s also granted us a wonderful sanity test. Moving forward, we can safely assume that anyone who has defended Arday’s academic practice has themselves never produced anything of value in the field. Which provokes the question: why are they still in their jobs? At least Jason Arday is creative. What excuse do they have?" (My bold)

Maybe this whole story is a publicity stunt for the book that has got out of control. It's got to be good for sales, though perhaps it wasn't foreseen that so many allegations would seem to stick.

It's a sad and complex case
@Boeufsurletoit

I would feel a bit sorry for him as no one wants to be turned into a laughing stock, and those responsible for hiring him bear some responsibility.
However I was shocked that either he or someone at Cambridge tried to silence a journalist via lawyers. That isn’t acceptable.

I take your point, in general, but if you look at Liverpool John Moore's University website it looks as though PhDs there are posted before the ink is dry (and Arday's thesis contained no data - he has said that data is overrated).

His PhD was submitted in 2015, when they may have been handled differently, and we don't know when it became available online. However, even if it was still not accessible at the time of his appointment in 2023, there had been ample time for a monograph or papers to emerge. When you are appointing to a senior academic post you need to look at something.

A question please about the PhD, please. Jason says that another barrier to minorities doing research is not knowing how to pay for it and he had to find work to support himself throughout his. But, I always thought you don't pay for doing a PhD and so there wouldn't be a way of processing his payments?

I totally agree, there are loads of people who go around embellishing their lives to make themselves sound more exciting/important than they are, and the nature and volume of his lies are such that anyone with an ounce of common sense would have at least challenged him to provide some evidence, he’s been let down by the systems that should have been in place to prevent him getting this far. I’m pretty sure if I went to a job interview for an office job and told them I’d raised £5 million for charity and run 6 marathons in 6 days, even though it’s nothing to do with the job I’d be applying for there would be some raised eyebrows in the room and some Google searches going on once I’d left.

You do pay for doing a PhD. Student fees as with any other degree. However, there are some funded PhD places available, usually on a specific subject, and various awards and scholarships, and some people’s employers pay for it.

It is a lot of money and a huge barrier to many good students. When I was a lecturer in a vocational subject I often had potential students contact me with good ideas and relevant skills, but they were unable to make the finances work. Some well off students would self fund, or self fund to begin with and manage to get a grant after the first year once they had done enough research to pin their project down more and make a more persuasive application.

Arday is absolutely right that funding is a barrier.

That's a tricky one. In some fields, mostly in STEM, being a PhD student is a job which gets paid a salary (or 'stipend'.) In these fields, candidates apply to work on a specified project. In others, students are expected to find the funding themselves and come up with an idea. If their research proposal is good enough (and they are lucky too, it must be said!) then one of the taxpayer-funded Research Councils (divided up by research area) will pay the fees and a stipend. Otherwise, the student pays.

(Note that this might have changed recently! It was the case a decade ago though.)

Thanks @TheCountessofFitzdotterel and @MoralOrLegal - he is right on this one then. I remember querying this years ago but it would have been science and things may well have changed.

I would certainly expect the panel to look at something, but if there was nothing but the PhD to look at eight years on that would be pretty much unprecedented, for a professorial appointment!

I'd stand by it that it's unusual to look at the PhD thesis or to have cause to look at it, when selecting a candidate beyond earliest of career stages. But absolutely, once queries were raised, it should have been scrutinised

I quite like the image of a roomful of unworldly Cambridge dons thinking, 600 miles in 6 days? Is that much above average for these sporty types? Nice to hear he does some charity work, must have a couple of wealthy godparents sponsoring all that ...

Sadly they don't seem to have scrutinised what actually lay within their remit either.

Jason says that another barrier to minorities doing research is not knowing how to pay for it and he had to find work to support himself throughout his. But, I always thought you don't pay for doing a PhD and so there wouldn't be a way of processing his payments?

There are grants for postgraduate work, but a lot of people study part time for postgraduate degrees while working and self-funding. A friend did an MA, self-funded, over two years rather than one while working full time as a teacher.

I self-funded my Ph.D. I was registered as a part time student and took time out now and then to earn some money - I was in commuting distance of London and there was a lot of temporary office work around at that time.

I've just looked at my university's website and the part time option is mentioned in the introductory information, so it's not hard to discover.

It's a very interesting case.

There seem to be 3 camps:

1. right wing racists who are gleeful that a black person has been found to be a shyster
2. left wing nutters who absolutely will not admit that he could have done anything wrong because he is beyond reproach
3. bemused normal people who feel that this is an example of a recent social issue, where people who are seen to have minority or oppressed identities (trans people, black people, autistic people etc) actually have a lot of power in left wing or mainstream circles, and there is a sort of witch hunt like hysteria if they are criticised ina ny way. These leads dodgy people (sex offenders, inadequate men) to either adopt (trans) or lean on these identities to try and gain power and prestige, while people without these powerful identifies are at risk of severe backlash and consequences if they even dare to question them legitimately.

It's a scary time, similar to Mcarthyism or The Salem Witch trials, but hopefully will run it's course soon.

And i'm not white myself. I'm certainly not saying all black people are this or that. This is just a shitty man gaming the system.

Post graduate Masters loans via SFE started in 2016 and I believe doctoral loans were 2017. You do pay for the Supervision element of a PhD. It around £3,000 per year. HE fees reduce the higher you go, due to less contact time and the expectation of independent study. However, it is a challenge if you do want to complete full time. A majority of mature e.g., those over 30 complete a PhD part time due to living costs. Although it also depends on your PhD route. Professional Doctorates are ordinarily part time 5-6 years due to the expectation of being in practice.

I am self-funding my PhD research, alongside working part-time and doing quite a few other things. I never applied for funding because I always seemed to find myself at the wrong point in the application cycle and, as a mature student, it wasn’t crucial to me applying. I just applied to the university and got started! I am still held to the same processes and timescales. My friends and peers are a mix of funded/unfunded and there isn’t really much difference between us, except that the funded students worry about coming to the end of their funding and then the self-funded students make sympathetic remarks! 😊