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???

Is this part of an elaborate staged Hoax to bring down the academic system? Sokal style?

It gets more bonkers by the day.

You don’t have to be an academic to recognise rampant plagiarism.

There is a long Oxbridge tradition of very low offers to candidates that a college or department really wants. If they're think you're brilliant in some way, they don't really care if you screw up your A Levels.

I'm not sure how often this happens now.

I agree, Jane379; it was no surprise to see a PP say that he's been discussed around Cambridge for ages, but given the university's approach it's all too obvious how any complaints would have been received

He doesn't even appear to be a skilled con artist, though admittedly the "couldn't speak until 11/ illiterate until 18" was clever in that it enabled excuses for any poor performance, but Cambridge have done themselves no favours here by trumpeting his initial appointment so widely and therefore inviting even more comment when it all came crashing down

Think the point being made is that whilst journalists etc are crowing about JAs down fall, revelling in the readership their stories are getting, they were part of the reason he was there in the first place. They are as much a part of the system that elevated him to this role. Without their buy-in and promotion over the years, and without their use of their investigative skills and faculties at the very outset [because of the risk of racism accusations, as Grove experienced], he might never have been considered a ripe candidate in the first place. It’s a scandal of multiple agencies making, including the media.

In law, those coming to court to seek redress must do so with ‘clean hands’. The media needs to acknowledge its own dirty finger prints all over this fiasco.

So, this is a man who, by his own admission, has very poor literacy and comprehension skills
Yet as a Cambridge professor he presumably would be charged with leading and facilitating academic discussion at a high intellectual level (or so one would hope!), and reading and marking students' work, as well as analysing others' research and producing his own original work

See my last post, @Mauvish1; in light of the Uni's attitude, how do you suppose any adverse comments on his academic performance would have been received?

When you tell a story, the first person you must convince is yourself; if you can make yourself believe it’s true, then everyone else will follow.*

I have found that, if you listen carefully, those that deceive will tell you themselves. In the Guru-Murthy interview, Jason states that he has no skill what he has is "indomitable will".

*Sally Walker (alias Raynor Winn), The Salt Path

@Boeufsurletoit I am extremely familiar with the field, his work, and the complete word salad he produces. Imagine saying something that is either wrong, or more often, just completely obvious and not worth saying, and then sticking the word 'Foucault' or 'Critical theory' in. That's what we're talking about. I'm making this example up, but stuff like 'Placing the boxes on the desk in that way forces them to be upright, because otherwise they would fall down. Likewise, we all need to stand on our feet so that we can walk along, stand up for ourselves, reflect each other, face in to each other, redolent of Levi-Strauss's bricolage'. A crass example because I don't want to quote my students' work, but honestly so so accurate.

This has been allowed to rot - not just Arday's but that in lots of the 'education of' humanities subjects. The sadness is that sociology and the other humanities are profoundly important to academia and society - slapping the 'education of' on and allowing people like Arday to produce not just nonsense but plagiarised nonsense does the humanities and society at large a huge disservice.

So yes, this is indeed a sad and complex case, but not for the reasons I imagine you are imagining. The University indeed has a duty of care to this fantasist, but also to the others who applied for that job (women, passed over in a female-dominated field for this man). He used things like his race and disability to game the system, and the system allowed him to game it. He deserves to be exposed, and the system needs to change.

This is not, as you suggest, Schadenfreude. In a climate where funding and support is constantly being removed, and a British culture of anti-intellectualism, those of us working hard to produce quality output and teach good students are angry at what he and the University have done to our institution and higher education generally.

I fear my personal Peace (Inner) was negatively affected by just reading her profile of piffle 😂

In France I understand there's more of a 2-tier system where there are top tier places like Sciences Po and then more general unis where large numbers go..I think uni education for large numbers is a good thing but there need to be some top tier unis and it's questionable if Cambridge etc are still that.

It is sadly appropriate that it is now Arday who is being portrayed, not least by himself, as the innocent victim of this debacle.

Let’s face it, our education system now sees self-declared victimisation and disadvantage – whether it be social, ethnic or physical – as a superpower to be wielded. The ultimate get-out-of jail card.

Given that we now insist on giving prizes to everybody, no matter how undeserving, we should not be so very surprised when somebody plays the system and ends up with the biggest prize of all.

It’s a scandal of multiple agencies making, including the media.

Cambridge did it. All. The media exposed it.

I have a PhD from Cambridge and have studied or worked in academia in five different countries. I left a permanent job at Cambridge for many reasons, one of them being the fraudulence of my faculty's claims (a large humanities faculty) about how they're all about pure intelligence and brilliance. They're not; they're about finding well-prepared candidates.

My inside knowledge of the institution is by now ten years old, but this is a place in which structural change is difficult, slow and produces contradictory results (for which Arday is an example), so I think what I've seen is probably still of some value.

The important point is that Arday is NOT evidence of 'political correctness' having run away with the humanities in CB. The university of Cambridge is intrinsically a deeply conservative institution, and degrees that require 'soft', learnable skills (s.a. presenting information and opinion according to what previous generations of CB humanities profs have come to think of as 'clever') are particularly liable to reproduce pre-existing social types and styles of reasoning.

In consequence, the British men who I thought of as 'empire-ologists' or 'Churchill-ologists' or 'Chaucer-ologists', the ones whose job it is to continue celebrating a conventional, safe, sanitized notion of British culture and history, are still in charge. They've recruited the occasional brown, 'continental' or American colleague (the vast majority male) to go with the times and 'diversify' a bit.

Arday's presence, then, is indicative of the attempt to deal with the narrowness of the social base of student body and faculty in the humanities, and the largely conventional nature of the topics they address, by window-dressing. The '-ologists' thought that in Arday they'd bought themselves a multiple-minority colleague who could tick a lot of boxes at once. How very convenient. That's why they couldn't be bothered to check into his wild claims.
Also note that the humanities are overall taken less seriously than the natural sciences in CB, and therefore so is quality control in them. Cambridge is dominated by the natural sciences to a greater extent than Oxford, and many scientists can't be bothered to hide their contempt for humanities people (I remember a college master who had a sideline in jokes about how science students could do a history degree in their spare time). I doubt that the particle physicists see much difference b/w an honest and a plagiarising education scientist, it's all bunk to them.

I haven't the time right now to RTFT so apologies if I repeat points made at nauseam.

PS. Of course racism is rampant in CB, especially against people of African descent. There was a student society ball in the 2010s at which white students dressed up as 'natives' with frizzy hair and necklaces made of teeth, and another one whose theme was 'the Old South' (as in, the American slave-owning south). That's just the tip of the iceberg.

Amazingly, many of Arday’s defenders, of whom there are still surprisingly many, are downplaying the plagiarism issue, saying – like Kehinde Andrews – that it’s all ok, nothing to see here since he was cleared by Liverpool John Moores.

Given that the evidence absolutely leaps off the page, this feels incredibly patronising, as if they are telling us not to believe the evidence of our own eyes, since they know better than we do.

To many, it must feel like proof that higher education really has been hijacked by Orwellian self-delusion.

What’s more, for the first time many ordinary people (ie, those not inhaling the university bubble laughing gas) will have read a sociology paper, and seen the ‘discipline’ for the absolutely pointless, self-serving, BS it generally is (and one in which - many will suspect - posts, categories and even entire courses are invented simply so more DEI hires can be made, and consciences eased).

The word about this nonsense will spread fast, and frankly should do.

Which leads me to wonder... how many parents out there would now be happy seeing their children go massively into debt to get a sociology degree?

having run away with the humanities in CB.

Sorry, what does CB stand for?
I googled it and got Citizen’s Band Radio and Covertible Bonds

"Completely Bonkers"

aka, Cambridge (it's the postcode)

I agree with everyone arguing this isn't all JA 's fault. From everything that he's said and that said about him, the incredible and contradictory claims, I'm not sure he's bright or well and doesn't seem to know the difference between truth or fiction. Difficult to know to what extent he's knowingly misled. Nobody has caught his behaviour and given him feedback or counsel about academic standards. Or at least it's not clear that anyone has? His apparently delusions have been allowed to proliferate.

Also to add in the case of any doubt, sociology is not a soft intellectual subject when approached with proper rigour. Though not sociology my own phd involved the study of behaviour (without being too specific) and I spent 2 years just on data collection, cleansing, analysis, quant and qual methods.

But, wait- there's more! The Atlantic got a copy of his book proposal https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/jason-arday-cambridge-academic-memoir-resignation/688206/?utm_source=apple_news

Archive link https://archive.ph/SA5Gc

That was posted at 9.02 and discussed, but agree it's an interesting update.

I feel very sorry for the students who were under this man. They were really sold a pup. The majority were probably brighter and better read than JA. Someone up thread quoted a Reddit poster who claimed to have been told to "check his white privilege" when he queried a mark (of course we don't know if that's true) - but I wonder if JA was actually able to read, analyse and understand the work submitted.

You should do an AMA I’d love to know more about the inner workings of Oxbridge

I also wanted to make a point that I've been making since the introduction of the 50% of school leavers to uni target was introduced:

We'll work on the idea that intelligence has a Gaussian distribution, with 50% of the population above average and 50% below (I know that's not exact but it's close enough). Not all eligible school leavers will want to go to uni. So if some of those of above average intelligence don't go, those places will be filled by those from the below-average 50% to meet the 50% target.

The idea that people of below average intelligence should go to university makes a mockery of the system.

It's no wonder that some of those people struggle academically; it's no wonder that some courses become less rigorous.

I find it very uncomfortable that two or three days in or whatever to this story it’s still so focused on the individual.

There’s a racist system failure here across multiple institutions. A racism crisis of multiple white institutions thinking that either black and autistic people are lesser and shouldn’t be let in at all … or thinking black and autistic people are lesser and so should be given a madly implausible free pass even when they are easily disprovably not telling the truth.

All of which breaks down trust in institutions and tarnishes reputations and costs a lot of money and leads to great individual damage. Cambridge will be fine of course, I do worry about this young professor though.