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???

A few of the subreddits had a lot to say, I spent yesterday reading some of them. The general view was very dismissive of him and his standards, someone who was at uni with him said he simply wasn’t academic, others had read his papers and were unimpressed.

I assume what she's trying to say is that some people's profiles aren't spiky, they're just flat at a lower level.

Like, if you say that the perfect academic has qualities A, B, C and D. But there are some academics who are amazing at A, B and C, but struggle with D. So you say that D is something you can get accommodations for. And so on for all the letters.

You can get to a point where someone has neither A, B, C nor D but is somehow still around.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_disengagement_syndrome

Like, what is this?! This is just "some kids aren't particularly academic/intellectual", but is the sort of thing people seek out accommodations for (which I've seen under its old name of Sluggish Cognitive Tempo - man, I see why it got the rebrand)

I feel she could have said this clearly, if that's what she meant. Probably it is, because what she wrote is preposterous if you know anything about academia. I have a lot of time for Stock but there is no need to kick out at everyone with such disabilities to make that point.

Not sure about sluggish cognitive tempo. Could you be a slow thinking genius? Doesn't sound impossible but slow responses would make some aspects of academic life very difficult, certainly

Interesting article in Saturday's Times about him. They have uncovered further inconsistencies and discrepancies in his work.

He’s a fantasist who was aided and abetted by numerous higher education establishments for their own benefit. Cambridge comes out looking awful.

Kathleen Stock said it best:
— ultimately, the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves. Irrespective of the truth about his research techniques, it is obvious Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot.

archive.is/20260728230827/unherd.com/2026/07/jason-arday-cambridges-dei-darling/

I think I might buy his autobiography! Which I wouldn't have done without all the publicity. Sounds like it's shaping up to be one of the greatest works of fiction this century. Maybe he'll be able to retire on the royalties instead of being sacked.

This whole saga reflects incredibly badly on Cambridge and highlights how damaging and unfair DEI can be: professors should be appointed on their merits not on their race/disabilities/background.

Yes, I agree with that. There must be endless really talented academics who have given their lives to their studies and unable to secure a proper position. if I were one of that community, I really would be eating my heart out.

My assumption is that Cambridge also wanted him for lucrative impact and engagement measures. He could have co-authored relevant work (and for all I know, he has) to meet scholarship criteria.

I find it hard to deny that the PhD and early research looks problematic. But I wouldn't expect anyone at Cambridge to have read his early work. I wonder if the same problems exist in the years leading up to his appointment. I don't think things are necessarily as black and white as Stock suggests, and that his apparent usefulness was necessarily all about his back story and ethnicity.

That's not to say the university can necessarily defend keeping him in the post at this stage. (If he was a fantasist but his recent work showed no problems with academic integrity, though? Not so sure. They've always had fairly wild personalities on their staff)

@ApplebyArrows
I think I might buy his autobiography! Which I wouldn't have done without all the publicity

I wonder what will happen about the autobiography. Presumably if it’s published as promised later this month, Arbay won’t want to do a publicity tour.

Agree - I think he was enabled/facilitated into this situation by individuals and institution with an agenda that was not about safeguarding an autistic young man. It’s the institutions (LJMU, Cambridge) and all those involved his PhD that should be held up for ridicule. The plagiarism/non adherence to quotation protocols, etc should have been picked up - it would not necessarily had seen his thesis fail - he should have been asked to amend and update. His supervisors/directors of studies should be named and shamed, frankly. It’s the whole pack of cards that was erected to elevate him to the top deck that needs exploring and tearing down.

I wonder if he scraped in just before anti-plagiarism software was routinely used at post-grad level; also whether the work he drew on was in relevant databases at that point? It may have been digitised more recently.

He should certainly have been picked up on sentence construction. I agree with you that this is a sad case. It's in nobody's interests to drop standards, for whatever reason

There is the plagiarism. The athletic claims. There are also very wild allegations about persecution from Jason Arday, as well.

I used to work with his brother, would love to know what he thinks about it but would never dare to ask!

Do you think it’s a problem that you have to declare a diagnosis to be able to discuss autism and adhd in an academic paper? To me this is a big issue and directed connected to why Arday got his post. It had to be held by a person with lived experience, almost regardless of merit it would seem. This a poor way for academia to operate.

Should we ignore this joker just because he is Black? He’s an embarrassment to the Black community frankly.

Well said. Our universities are going to be very short of students, lecturers and researchers if we bar nd people from them.

I think it was problematic because, initially, the other academics that called Arday out for plagiarism were obviously very against DEI. I also didn't agree with The Telegraphs heading calling Jason a poster boy for this. I then looked into it further and saw that The Voice had an eminent list of people calling out the critics, as declared by The Good Law Project.

Further reading of the Plagiarism Today article and The Guardian is more convincing that there is a case to be answered by Cambridge for lack of due diligence.

He is clearly completely round the bend. As are all the academics who have given him degrees and academic positions at universities.

In the case of my project, yes, I think it needs to be stated - it’s a 70-80k novel and a 40k thesis exploring the depiction of mothers in fiction, with a specific focus on mothering autistic children and also the depiction of autistic girls and women within my genre [or lack of]. It features an exploration of the impact of later-life diagnosis and how women look back and reconstruct their understanding of their lives and relationships through the new lens of diagnosis, especially if they are now mothers to autistic children; it references how they come to understand themselves and their childhoods retrospectively through that new knowledge and the experience of their own mothering.

In creative arts PhDs, you have to have a reflective component stating what you were trying to achieve on a personal and artistic level, as well as then supporting that with academic research, so yes because I am writing autistic characters I have to be able to justify that I am not appropriating autistic experience but exploring it through the lens of my own lived experience and that of my autistic children. It lends authenticity to the writing and addresses issues that could arise from the reluctance to allow people to appropriate cultures and identities without becoming empathetic experts and engaging sensitivity readers to screen for literary misdemeanours.

It’s not something I necessarily agree with - as a writer I should be able to write about Black disabled men freely, but the publishing industry does not concur. Academic study is then also framed, or limited by, this expectation of authenticity.

Someone on X posted a clip of him claiming on an interview that he was on the tv program 7Up too, despite the maths of his age not working, and presumably it would’ve been difficult since he didn’t talk until 18. He’s a fantasist for sure.

But why is it their top headline? Why does the headline shout "black" when there's a photo of him? What would the Daily Mail do with a white academic with similar accusations? Do we ever accuse anyone of of being an "embarrassment to the white community" or do we not expect every white person to represent one community?

But aren't you missing the point that it's extremely unlikely that a NT white academic would have had "similar accusations" (ie that he was appointed as a result of DEI and not on academic merit) levelled against him?

I wholeheartedly agree with this.

But aren't you missing the point that it's extremely unlikely that a NT white academic would have had "similar accusations" (ie that he was appointed as a result of DEI and not on academic merit) levelled against him?

Well no he wouldn't have had similar accusations because an NT white academic wouldn't have been appointed as a result of DEI (unless he had some other relevant characteristic such as a physical disability).

And I suppose it's argued that if he was guilty of the same (alleged) plagiarism and falsification as Arday (allegedly) is, he wouldn't have been appointed at all.