Was Jason Arday just the perfect victim?

[KellyK2026]

Surely I can’t be the only one that feels like Jason Arday was a victim, right? Yesterday he was found dead and I feel bad for him. Here’s the reasons why I think he was a victim:

1. It is absolutely insane to me that Cambridge University would appoint him as a Professor when he was in the early stages of his career. It’s practically unheard of. At any university you typically have to earn your dues (which means working as an academic for many years) OR do something truly special, like a Nobel Prize nomination, to be promoted to Professor. I cannot imagine the amount of pressure he had been under to prove himself and likely had a tremendous amount of imposter syndrome. Cambridge let him down.
2. I’ve worked in academia for many years, and let me tell you, academics are under a tremendous amount of pressure to publish. This pressure can compromise quality. Arday isn’t the first nor will he be the last to publish questionable papers.
3. As I’ve worked in academia for years, I’ve experienced academics make racist and sexist remarks first hand. One white academic I worked with got drunk at a work get together and started a rant about how Black people shouldn't be president (this was when Obama was in power), that Obama was a Muslim and interracial relationships were ‘disgusting’. What made this somewhat even worse was that this particular academic wrote about racism in the public sphere, so he profited from writing about Black struggles while harbouring these personal views. There was no repercussions for him, despite presenting himself as something other than what he was.
4. I’ve also been sexually assaulted at a conference by a male academic. No repercussions for him either and he no doubt pretends to be a feminist in his work.
5. I don’t think it’s in doubt that Arday had autism. Now I don’t know how it affected him personally, but, again, that must’ve been extremely difficult and perhaps even blurred what is and isn’t acceptable in higher education.
6. He was also cleared of plagiarism but, again, so many academics have plagiarised ideas and papers, but they haven’t been strung up like Arday has been.

So, long story short, I feel like Cambridge let him down. And I feel like he was targeted because there’s plenty of other examples but they never get called out and nobody cares. It was a witch hunt. But I’d be interested to hear what others have to say on this matter.

The phrase 'hoisted on your own petard' springs to mind.

Does anyone know what is in the biography that is due to be published at the end of the month? Maybe he knew 'the jig was up.' We don't know what is coming - although the decent thing would be for Simon & Schuster to shelve the book. But if they've already paid out a 1.4million advance (as Arday claimed)... not so easy.

Good grief for people that keep saying why were people talking about him so much or he was hounded everyone is definitely out to wave his dead body around like a victory flag with all these threads.

I think these threads actually provide the point that people on both the left and right are willing to use anything or anyone to claim the upper hand. The guy was a not shy of telling a porky but in death he is supposed be untouchable, sorry the world just doesn't work like that anymore so if you want to give him any respect just don't start posts about him.

Did he have no proper supervision of his PhD work then?

I don't know how it works in the UK but when I did my PhD thesis at a major European University there was regular oversight into my work:

• 8-10 formal meetings annually with my 2 supervisors per year - approx once a month between September and June plus additional meetings as required.
• I had to present my findings at various stages on completion at 2 hour departmental research seminars attended by the department's academics and where an opponent was appointed to grill me (3 times). Plus I had to present my research methods paper at a national doctoral research methods conference.
• A manuscript conference with my supervisors and 4 invited expert guests
• A public PhD viva in front of the panel of examiners (in total around 80-90 people present) plus an expert opponent flown in from the US

So I'm not sure how issues with the PhD thesis weren't caught

This is a good point. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I do think JA had an issue with exaggeration so I don’t know how far this is correct or not but JA himself claimed that he had very limited contact with his supervisor only meeting them a handful of times. Again, don’t know if that’s true. I guess the university would have to publish the notes from his supervisory meetings.

He didn’t help his own cause, but if there hadn’t been fawning people in the Cambridge hierarchy so desperate to prove their own credentials by over promoting him so quickly rather than letting him build his body of work in time or even appointing other more experienced and deserving minority academics in the meantime, he would not have been set up to fail so publicly. It’s deeply sad as (as various autism researchers and academics pointed out before the tragedy) as an autistic man he was always overwhelmingly more at risk to depression and suicide.

Nathan Cofnas has been mentioned repeatedly.

Why don’t you think it’s in ‘any doubt he had autism’.??
He lied about so many other things I very much doubt this too.
As the wife and mother of autistic people I get sick to death of behaviour like this being linked to autism. It does genuine autistic people zero favours.

He was an utter liar.
He reported God only knows how many people to the police for ‘racism’ when they rightly pointed out inconsistencies in his lies. What damage has been done to them and their careers??
He took the place of somone who will have genuinely worked so hard - and he knew this!!
He written a fucking book ffs full of his dreadful lies! Taken money!
Why hasn’t his family done anything to stop him?
If MY autistic daughter was lying through her teeth to get a job she wasn’t qualified for at the expense of others, lying about every aspect of her life and reporting people to the police/sending them legal letters then I would damn well do somethimg to stop her.
And finally - if your parent kills themself then you are statistically more likely to commit suicide too. Thats the legacy he has put on his children and that to me is unforgivable. I have seen the damage a parent killing themself can do to people.

He has lied, lied and lied again then when he got found out and called out he has taken his own life, left his family to cope with the fall out and the devastating effects of his behaviour.

I write this last night -I am sick of the beatifying of individuals who behave badly then kill themselves. It’s not a pass to forgiveness. His lies are still lies.

Who’s waving his dead body around by saying that Cambridge has a lot to answer for? I think people should be talking about it as things do need to change so this doesn’t happen again.

You're wrong here. PhD theses are indeed put through anti plagiarism software now and are not too big.

I don't know when JA got his PhD but perhaps before this software.

No one is justifying his death. They are justifying scrutiny of a man who lied and lied again, who failed hundreds of students, threw around accusations of racism protect his position, set the police on a a journalist who enquired about his qualifications, used those fake credentials to be a public media spokesperson on ideologies that were only backed up by his opinion and his manufactured data, and who is part of a faculty that pushes that same dangerous ideology into schools.

As for his plagerism - I am surprised you are so ready to dismiss it when you haven’t looked at the evidence - not only his PhD either.

What's it got to do with left or right? That's unnecessary division.

Absolutely it was relentless. 188 articles in the 9 days after he had resigned and after he had said that he had 'reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure'.

The BBC as usual did not do due diligence and totally fawned over him, they too need to take some of the blame for this. So much for BBC Verify. I do think we create Sacred Castes of people that can never be questioned. Look at all the con artists claiming to have cancer and that Salt Path guy. Its all taken as fact because cancer.

I think we need to stick to the facts rather than hyperbole. He was a fraud and a con man and now he’s dead.

Allegedly Lee Andrew's is a conman. Do you think being in the public eye and exposed as a liar is good for business?

Then again... when is a lie a con... is it when it is financially advantageous? Would Arday have got the job at Cambridge without the lies?

There are two separate but possibly interrelated issues here.

One is that the guy was an utter fantasist and a pathological liar. This may or may not indicate some kind of underlying mental health issue: either way it’s dishonesty.

Then there’s the other issue. Plagiarism is theft of intellectual property. It’s the biggest no-no in academia and on its own should be enough to discredit any academic career.

Except that, as an active academic, I know this isn’t the case. I’ve had my work plagiarised. I had no option but to flag this as the reflection on me could have been professionally catastrophic. Yet I was the one made out to be the problem for raising this, rather than the cheat for being a cheat and a thief. My tenure as an external examiner for that university ended the following year and I received not so much as an email in acknowledgment of four years’ goodwill.

I REF reviewed a monograph written by a professor. It was abysmal. It made spurious claims about the research which were demonstrably untrue and I suspect - although I would certainly not make such a claim without evidence - that significant portions of it were written by AI. The writing and research were shocking. I have undergraduates who could have done a better job. I came under pressure from above to improve my REF scoring. I declined.

My point is that morally corrupt, incompetent, even cheating academics are far from a rarity and are often protected, not infrequently at other academics’ expense. But this should come as absolutely no surprise in a sector in which management consistently fail upwards.

Cambridge clearly promoted this guy well over his level of capability. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen this and people can and will put their own interpretive gloss on it. But it happens all the time and any adverse consequences are frequently rugswept.

Given the above do I believe that the right wing media went after him specifically because he was black? He’s a cheat; this is not letting him off the hook. But yes, I do.

I said it because he himself attributed his mistakes to his autism/additional needs. That isn’t just my opinion. And I say there isn’t any doubt because his story has been corroborated by external parties, including a teacher who helped him read and write at 18. I’m not JA so I don’t know how his autism affected him, so I have to take that at face value.

The fact of the matter is he was 1. Cleared of plagiarism (whether you agree with that or not, doesn’t matter). 2. If I interview for a doctor’s job but I don’t have a medical degree and I end up killing someone, who is at fault for hiring me? Is it me for lying or is it the hospital for not actually checking. I argue it was Cambridge’s fault and I’ve no idea why they didn’t check his credentials. 3, there’s been other Cambridge Professors who have plagiarised and did not receive an ounce of the same media attention that JA did.

You’re missing the point. Although the press and social media were relentless, much of it was nothing to do with plagiarism, it was the sheer improbability of his claims ie having a brain tumour removed followed by a stroke two weeks before his viva. He claims to have been in a coma following a car accident as a teenager and having locked in syndrome and hearing the doctors advising his mother to agree to his life support being switched off! Then miraculously one day he just woke up. The timelines just didn’t add up either.

However, none of this justifies him being hounded but I saw it more as Cambridge and the liberal elite at the helm were at the forefront of this and they were the ones being held to account (quite rightly) and Jason took the brunt. It’s a tragic end to a cautionary tale but I doubt anything will change.

I feel very sad for his family.

There's plenty of academic misconduct that goes on - check out Leonid Schneider's blog, for instance - but the media doesn't really give a shit unless it's a black guy with cornrows.

His public claIms were also very different eg exceptionally late development, extreme charity fundraising and sporting accomplishments.

Probably because that other professor didn’t tell a litany of other Hollywood movie level lies about their life to the extent a whole memoir was written?

Everyone knows you can lie a little bit of the time, but you don’t lie ALL the time and think you can survive flights that close to the sun.

Thanks for your take. I absolutely agree. I’ve had my work plagiarised by a more senior academic and nothing came of it. My horrid experience in academia made me walk away years ago. I hated how I was treated as a young female academic and I can imagine it’s pretty bloody hard for an academic from an ethnic minority background too, possibly more so.

According to his classmates he was chatty at primary age and he got two GCSEs at 16. It is entirely possible he struggled with reading but he wasn’t illiterate.

Realistically I think the journalists targeted him because he was already a minor celebrity (not many academics have their biographies ghost written at 41), he’s black, he’s good looking and the fantasies around the plagiarism make a good story. It is also silly season.

It is devastatingly sad that he has died so young and I feel very sorry for his family and friends, and yes Cambridge bears responsibility for making an inappropriate appointment because they wanted a poster boy and for not following up on the many, many early accusations. Some from an academic who is openly racist but others from much more credible sources.

I don’t think it’s helpful to suggest that Cambridge was solely to blame. I’m an academic and I’ve sat on plagiarism panels. Jason Arday clearly plagiarised sections of his PhD and his publications. He invented much of his back story and threatened anyone who questioned it.

Desperately sad but I don’t think anyone comes out of this with clean hands.

Being black was not the issue, being appointed because he was black and being protected from scrutiny because he was black is. That and the fact that he was symbolic of the widespread corruption of much of academia.

Comparisons to Caroline Flack are nonsensical too. As if she’s not a HUGELY problematic character.

If a man accused and on trial for domestic violence killed himself, it would be a far different story.