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???

In degree examinations: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/70295d74-c1bc-427d-8ed7-75072594706f/download

I don't have comparable figures for ethnicity, but an FOI in 2025 shows that 31% of students from independent schools were awarded firsts vs 21.6% from comprehensives and 23.9% from grammar schools.

While I completely agree that Cambridge needs to review very closely how Jason Arday came to be appointed, I haven’t seen much before today about how he was already a professor at the University of Glasgow when he applied.

According to this posted by the BBC an hour ago, Glasgow is going to review how he was appointed there.

It may be, perhaps going back to his PhD or earlier, that once he achieved something that qualification or job role was relied on at subsequent stages without it being carefully questioned how he achieved it or how well he was doing in it. (Apologies for clumsy wording. I hope it makes sense.)

Professor Andrews has been v vocal in supporting Jason Arday in the media in past days and I noticed that HIS undergrad and post grad courses have been axed at Birmingham City University. The reason given is that the Black Studies School courses did not attract enough students. The HE sector is in financial crisis and several programmes are being axed UK wide. I cant help but wonder if more DEI adjacent programmes are likely to be withdrawn.
Esp if career opportunities are seen to be dwindling or are now unfashionable?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy2d6eg050o?app-referrer=deep-link www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy2d6eg050o?app-referrer=deep-link

PS Virtually no reference to Prof Andrews on the Birmingham City University website. Which is. Unusual.

Oh that makes sense. I was more than a decade earlier. 🙂

I’m interested in where you found that data and analysis @marchesman. Back in the day Cambridge quite openly published % degree by school type and found that independent school pupils relatively underperformed in terms of % of 1sts but more than caught up in % of 2.1s. This was used as “evidence” that too many independent pupils were being admitted who didn’t merit it. However, once they started explicitly discriminating against independent schools only the very best of the best from independent schools were offered places and some mediocre state school pupils were admitted instead. Thereafter the proportion of indie students getting 1sts outperformed their % of the intake. Cambridge then stopped openly publishing the figures.

Cambridge has also found that their policies of explicitly favouring state school pupils has meant that alert parents are favouring selective state schools (at least for 6th form) and so while their headline figures show they are recruiting more state school pupils the “privilege” of their intake is unchanged. In other words, school type is a poor metric for privilege. (Who knew?!)

In their most recent plan Cambridge has said they will be using poverty/deprivation metrics rather than school type.

It is still very odd why our 2 most elite/globally recognised/academic(+) universities are so obsessed with social engineering at the expense of academic scholarship. While figures are published for other universities, none of them base their admissions on social engineering metrics. It was refreshing to go to an Open Day at Imperial for engineering and the admissions tutor said: “we don’t care what school you go to, we want to see your passion for this subject and your aptitude”. Hurrah!

Oxbridge needs to do some personal reflection.

(+) however you classify Oxbridge, the media/politicians are obsessed with them

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...

Imagine sitting through a lecture on that. How would you begin to take notes?

I think people who use language like this must think it makes them sound really really clever.
It doesn't.
As I said before, I believe that the more long words and long sentences there are in an academic text, the less likely it is that the writer has anything worthwhile to say.
If it's worth saying at all, it can be said in plain English!

The oddity of the mono focus on race, is that a black boy from Eton/Harrow/St Paul’s/Winchester will be favoured over a white grammar school boy from the Home Counties.

Because for an admissions tutor being able to show ethnic diversity is most highly prized.

How mad is that?

And the increasing proportion of non white pupils at these schools explains why these schools still feature highly in admissions league tables even when discrimination against indie pupils in general exists.

Oh, that reminds me of the arty bollocks web generator - is there a similar for sociology?

create your own arty bollocks

That is possibly the biggest, deepest and most elaborately dressed bowl of word salad that I have ever seen.

And having done a PhD that required that me to read some absolute bollocks, that is saying something.

Yes Hilary Cremin and Jason Arday are in the Faculty of Education. He was Professor of Sociology of Education

There is a Department of Sociology - Sociology is taught as part of a unique interdisciplinary degree. This three-year undergraduate course in Human, Social and Political Sciences

are you ok?

I had to get Co Pilot to give me the plain English version of what the thesis was about:

Algorithms shove people into “male” or “female,” and anyone who doesn’t fit gets treated badly.

Kehinde Andrews is no longer employed by
Birmingham City Univ.
He was made redundant.
Along with several other people.
But he's sure his redundancy was due to racism...

Professor Andrews has been v vocal in supporting Jason Arday in the media in past days and I noticed that HIS undergrad and post grad courses have been axed at Birmingham City University. The reason given is that the Black Studies School courses did not attract enough students

The article says that a course attracted just EIGHT students, @NotInMyyName ... did he really think they'd carry on funding that?

The whole thing's been a bloody disgrace.

This isn't a victimless crime. Students were paying a fortune to get a world class education and what they were getting was some Walter Mitty type talking crap.

But the worst thing is the way he used the machinery of the state, the police and they let themselves be used to try and stop a journalist doing his job of asking reasonable questions.

If all this does is bring academia into total disrepute I guess it might have done a generation a bit of a favor.

But I just cannot understand what the f*ck the met police think they were doing.

Isn’t it about time that we admitted that places like Birmingham City University are not proper universities. It’s an ex poly that grew out of an arts school. And there is NOTHING wrong with an arts school. But if even Cambridge (Cambridge!!!!) can’t quality assure its academics, what are the chance of nowheresville polytechnic being any good academically????? And an “academic” at such an institution being any good?

Don’t forget that the “academic” who supervised Arday’s PHD (who failed all his GCSEs) was at Liverpool John Moore’s Uni, another poly that was the amalgamation of a group of technical colleges that originally educated people in real trades (proper vocational trades like mechanics, engineering, surveying… REAL STUFF, that our govt is supposed to want to bring back). Let’s get rid of all this pseudo intellectual nonsense at these 3rd rate institutions with not even 3rd rate academics. “Professor” Andrews is worried because who will give him a job in the real world? What is his value??

I had to do the same thing in Google AI (it took several attempts because I just wanted a translation into simple language, not an 8 page discussion on it).

It eventually came up with: This text means that modern computer programs are not neutral, and they actively harm trans people by forcing them into strict male-or-female categories.

How could Araday take and pass his finals for his original bachelor's degree if he could barely read and write. ?

This is an interesting article on Arday's thesis from an educational perspective, written by a Reader in Philosophy at the Uni of Hertfordshire who has supervised and examined many education doctorates and co-authored a study on peer support among philosophy students.
https://brendanlarvor.wordpress.com/2026/08/07/an-exploration-of-peer-mentoring-among-student-teachers-to-inform-reflective-practice-within-the-context-of-action-research/

How could he teach if he is more or less functionally illiterate? How could he read his students' work, understand it, assess it, give them useful feedback, help them develop?

Or maybe he didn't do any of that.

If that's the case, those students should get a refund!

I'll admit it took a while to get the one sentence, as even my request to translate it into English a 10 year could understand was still a little too waffly for my liking!

Trinity, which is an ever-present at the top of the Cambridge's Tompkins degree league table, says it only selects on merit, and consistently has one of the largest intakes of independently educated students, at over 50% (I think).

Brilliant. Now there's a use for AI.

I think that sums it up very well. Although my impression is that there was little or no evidence that state educated students outperformed students from independent schools specifically at Cambridge. It was more the case that it had "become the received wisdom", and "widely assumed that this must be the case at all UK universities": https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4ec11595-9a9e-4d72-a32e-8a8e0302940c/download

Parks found that students from state and independent schools performed equally well in 2011, and he later publicly raised objections when the plan was set in motion to discriminate between students based on school type.

It has never been explained why it was necessary to have a target to increase the proportion of low SES students and another quite separate target to decrease the intake of privately educated students. But as you say, a predictable performance gap developed, increasing year by year. Publicly available exam data disappeared after 2017 and discrimination by school type has now been quietly dropped.

I guess the calculation is that explaining why students from independent schools are now 50% more likely to be awarded firsts than students from state schools is probably more embarrassing than explaining why there are so many of them.

From a distance the whole thing looks utterly moronic, and universities like Imperial deserve to prosper from Oxbridge's posturing.

It is interesting to the extent that it exposes that “research” for a PhD is a very - very - low bar.

Frankly it’s all pointless ££ BS. Convince me otherwise.