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???

I think theses state on the title page who supervised them. So it should be easy to look that up online.

This is a modern day retelling of The Emperor's New Clothes, with Cambridge playing the role of the Emperor.

I remember this tale from primary school and thinking that the young boy who spoke the truth would have got a mighty clip round the ear from his father.

The academics - who aren't that bright in spite of their illustrious titles and surroundings, were all terrified - too scared to say what was blindingly obvious.

It looks like this charismatic liar has stolen a living so far - depriving others who were more deserving.

Not on title page but Prof Phil Vickerman is cited and thanked in his acknowledgments as his supervisor. Who I think he now says did a crap job and that’s why his thesis is flawed.

Are other universities different?

Whilst my current uni and the one where I did my MA 4 years ago (but still visit regularly as it’s local), are enthusiastically signed up to DEI, no; nothing like Cambridge. There is no picketing, no cancelling of speakers for having wrong views, no glueing to floors in the auditoriums to prevent a formal debate, no banging at doors and windows to obstruct that debate, no Palestine camp-ins monopolising the lawns and the adjacent harassment of Jewish students trying to get to seminars or exams, no Just Stop Oil vandalism or protests of oil adjacent corporate sponsors.

His origin story is so utterly unbelievable and ridiculous that it’s something only an academic could believe.

That said, I am sure many academics had doubts but weren’t prepared to risk burning down their careers by sticking their heads over the parapet and challenging the fashionable DEI cause of the day.

Nothing about this debacle has changed my view that academia is the most cowardly of all professions,

There is neurodivergence, and then there is lying and plagiarism.

You cannot possibly reach PhD level without understanding plagiarism and claiming, as he does , that he was inadequately supervised. It’s explained and taught in every undergraduate course upwards.

There are simple answers to all your questions; I'm surprised you can't work them out for yourself:

1. It's their top headline because it's important and topical.
2. It's extremely relevant that he's black.
3. The DM would write a feature article about it.
4. It makes sense to talk about the black community because they make up only 4% of the UK population, while whites make up 82% of the population.

His origin story is so utterly unbelievable and ridiculous that it’s something only an academic could believe.

The fact that Sir Thomas was a martyr and a Great Mind did not cut any ice at all with him, Alan Grant. He, Alan Grant, had known Great Minds so uncritical that they would believe a story that would make a con man blush for shame. He had known a great scientist who was convinced that a piece of butter muslin was his great-aunt Sophia because an illiterate medium from the back streets of Plymouth told him so. He had known a great authority on the Human Mind and Its Evolution who had been taken for all he had by an incurable knave because he ‘judged for himself and not on police stories’. As far as he, Alan Grant, was concerned there was nothing so uncritical or so dam-silly as your Great Mind.

Yeah, not sure it's top headline topical. There's also a fairly simple explanation, that the Daily Mail is a racist rag, that will find any excuse to highlight individuals from minority groups "letting their community down".

They don’t. But supervisors are usually mentioned first in the acknowledgements section, which is found right at the front.

As someone who is in the process of applying to embark on a phd this makes wonder whether it’s worth it. If it can be achieved in 2 1/2 years then why isn’t this option available to all

Although I'm uncomfortable with the way that those people with racist views are jumping on the bandwagon with this, it is difficult not to doubt the credibility of his claims.

For one thing, completing his PhD in 2.5 years whilst working full time and having a brain tumour? If there's any truth in that, I would be truly amazed (as someone who knows those who have had a significantly longer doctoral journey with no brain tumours or full time job as well).

I just looked up his publication record.
He has a few. When you publish a scientific paper you have to declare that it is original ie not plagiarised. There's something ironic about lying about not knowing about plagiarism. Lying about lying.
The proportion of researchers that don't care about the integrity of their work is absolutely tiny.

I don't think it's about that.
It's about the fact that a globally eminent university has made itself look extremely stupid , and this is reinforced every time the DM mentions the topic. As a pp commented, it's going to stop people applying to the university, stop the rich sponsoring research, etcetera. Cambridge has made itself a laughing stock.
That's news worthy to me.

Yes, it is. These days there are a lot of people going along with a lot of things, simply because they don’t want to be the one to point out that actually the emperor is naked. They’ve seen what can happen to those who have been brave enough to speak the truth before, and it’s worryingly sinister, imo.

I think it's third page news, or at least was that originally. Which is why I am suspicious of the prominence given to it repeatedly.

White academic staff get appointed for spurious reasons all the time! I know Professors without PhDs!

Even in the Guardian? By Lanre Bakare?

https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/aug/01/playbooks-plagiarism-pigs-head-new-claims-surrounding-cambridge-professor-jason-arday

That’s the in-depth article I read last night and finally knew that the game was up. It’s much more than an opinion column - it’s an investigation.

The Telegraph is now reporting that former Blair advisor, Chair of Ofsted and Labour peer Sally Morgan (‘Baroness Morgan of Huyton’) was involved in the Cambridge professorial appointment as Master of Fitzwilliam College Cambridge. These are big reputations going down the toilet, so yes it’s very newsworthy. And people like Baroness Morgan should catch as much flak from this as JA, if not more.

This is exactly right, and I think the same point applies to Kathleen Stock’s argument. I don’t think she’s saying that neurodivergent academics have no place in universities. She’s saying something quite different: that academia has increasingly become a profession people aspire to regardless of whether they possess the intellectual ability or scholarly discipline it demands. One way around that, in some cases, has been to present oneself primarily through the lens of disability, as though the implication is: “Were it not for this, I’d be Stephen Hawking.” (The irony should be obvious.) Race has, at times, functioned similarly. We don’t do the same in music: “Were it not for this, I’d be Margot Fonteyn/Yo Yo Ma/Ian McKellen, so give me a place at White Lodge/the Royal Academy of Music/RADA” any more than we say “Were it not for my bad eyesight, I’d be a great pilot, so let me fly this passenger plane.”

I’ve written here before about my own experience over more than a decade supervising Cambridge undergraduates and the gradual slippage in academic standards, all under the banner of “access” (and I don’t mean race alone). Last year I supervised a student from a well known
London sixth-form college that has been widely celebrated for sending large numbers of pupils – many from BAME backgrounds – to Oxbridge. The student’s college also happens to have a Master who has made this a particular cause and has publicly associated himself with Jason Arday on numerous occasions.

The student was, at best, mediocre; at worst, producing barely coherent work. I scarcely knew where to begin with the essays. Like much of Arday’s work in education studies, they consisted of sweeping claims which, once you actually read them carefully, left you thinking either, “Well, yes… obviously,” or, “This simply doesn’t make sense.” The writing was either so banal that it wasn’t worth saying, or so muddled that it communicated almost nothing. I find much of Arday’s published work similar: unoriginal, confused, and now, we know, containing substantial plagiarism.

Yet people like this are admitted when stronger candidates are rejected. They are appointed to prestigious chairs while other academics are passed over. Cambridge has become increasingly hostile to genuine intellectual disagreement – look at the treatment of Nathan Cofnas, or the girls who set up a society for biological women – and the media enthusiastically celebrates the number of students from precisely these programmes reaching Oxbridge each year (“more than Eton”, “more than Westminster”, and so on), as though numbers alone settle the question.

So this is not really about Jason Arday. Nor is it about race, neurodivergence, or any of his many personal difficulties. It’s about a university that increasingly appears willing to place academic standards second while elevating other priorities. Some of those priorities are admirable – widening access, for example. Others are peripheral to the university’s purpose (not sure why student fees are going to support various non-academic related causes). Still others have actively undermined intellectual freedom.

A university exists to pursue truth through rigorous scholarship. Once academic excellence ceases to be the overriding criterion, the institution begins to lose the very thing that gives it its legitimacy.

That is the scandal. Not one narcissistic, delusional fantasist (and, believe me, plenty of people in Cambridge have privately described Arday in precisely those terms for years, while being too afraid to say so publicly). It’s that it has 1) exposed again the lowering of standards and the emperor’s new clothes particularly of some hitherto very serious, worthwhile subjects (I include my own in this bucket) and 2) highlighted the cancel culture that is attached to this lowering of standards but which has an added invidious impact on both those who speak out and the wider,
deluded academic community.

That is exactly what I was wondering about. There are so many other examples too. Why is it that really clever, astute people don’t challenge claims that sound completely fabricated? Is it because people really want to believe in these “greatness against all odds” stories? Or do people worry that if they challenge something they themselves will look bad?

His brain tumour claims remind me of Australia’s faker Belle Gibson. The literati fell head over heels for her and her outlandish claims of becoming brain cancer free after eating healthy foods. I mean, come on. This fellow claims to have survived brain tumours while completing a PHD in record time. Along with running ultra marathons with a fractured leg.

If you watch the Channel 4 interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy in which Arday answers a question by wishing he could spin the Earth on an axis of love (complete with descriptive hand movements) you’ll wonder how the hell he ended up with any university position at all. The guy talks shit. Also it’s very un-autistic shit - none of the children with ASD I’ve taught would ever have come out with such metaphor-based garbage.

I think that there are certain types of neurodivergence that suit academia and other similar professions. However, there are others which are obviously not likely to lead to someone being a good fit.

For example, the specific role I am in (not academia) requires huge amounts of concentration, and I have had a couple of people with ADHD diagnoses in the past in my team and neither of them performed well or lasted long. I know that some people with ADHD say that they can have periods of hyperfocus, but neither had that kind of profile. I would be very nervous about taking on another person with ADHD in my team because of this unless I knew that they fully understood the role and had a realistic plan for managing it.

However, the expectation at work from senior leaders would be that someone with ADHD who has great difficulty concentrating should be just as capable of the role as anyone else, and that if our numbers of employees with ADHD are not in line with the general population that will inevitably be the result of bias in our hiring practices, which must be tackled. It's completely ridiculous and out of touch with the reality of the work.

Academia seems to have very high numbers of people with what would be have been previously labelled Asperger's, but I would imagine very few with the more severe type of autism that Arday might have (unless he made that up too).

It would be fascinating to hear from people who knew Arday as a child.