Cambridge professor Jason Arday resigns amid plagiarism probe
This is hands down the best opinion piece you will read on the Arday case. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Prof Katherine Schofield 🇬🇧🇦🇺🇪🇺3631. His academic misconduct and fantastical claims are pretty clearcut; he should not have been appointed. 2. The press/public wouldn't have noticed if he wasn't black* 3. They noticed in particular because Cambridge made a huge song and dance about appointing a black person. 4. This is on Cambridge.
Phil Harrison54"The next step will be to make this single case bear the weight of the ideological arguments they pile on it" This line made me wince. Because this is *exactly* what will now happen and it's such a grim prospect.
Dr D11What a dignified piece of writing! Thanks for sharing the link.
Bernd Porr9"If we let only our opponents tell the story, then it becomes a parable about the hazards of striving for progress and equality, rather than about the institutions that reduced equality to a mere PR exercise." to be fair Arday certainly loved telling stories and what's PR is all about...
Mo' Flo' Mojo8"the right has enjoyed a near monopoly on criticism of DEI, leaving it to frame it entirely on its own terms" Sadly you can substitute almost anything for DEI here & the statement is true. The left needs to stop giving hostages to the right like this.
Elsie Yorks6It must be so hard for Black academics (especially humanities/social sciences) this week, to see this stuff.
Stephen Bush103Fantastic piece (and great related thread by Katherine - it and the replies are worth your time also):
James Ball19"Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race…Independent of the merits or pitfalls of his own scholarship, what success looked like for Arday in this role was limited"
Kai Kupferschmidt15“Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race: too few black students […]; single-figure black academics (which is still the case); allegations of institutional racism.“
nancyforde.com8"What concerns me is how little space remains for a genuinely progressive critique of institutional diversity practices–one capable of scrutinising how for many organisations and corporations symbolic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform...vulnerable to just this kind of backlash."
D A V I E M O O7What the right often fail to grasp is that the left don't say "these things never happen"- we just acknowledge how often they do. Of course some people inflate their expertise. Of course some migrants are violent. We acknowledge reality & statistic, where they think one case speaks for all.
Sal 🇵🇸🇺🇦6It’s simultaneously true that Arday is clearly a total grifter and the right have availed themselves of an opportunity to be racist. But the wider problem is online media. Once no one would have known or cared about this other than those involved, and that was for the better.
Brooke Newman5“What concerns me is how little space remains for a progressive critique of institutional diversity practices – one capable of scrutinising how for many organisations & corporations symbolic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform, leaving it vulnerable to just this kind of backlash.”
Marianne O'Doherty 5This and the thread are great. I'd add one more thing: in a context of HE collapse in the UK, with massive redundancies, course closures, and 20+ institutions at imminent risk of going bust, this story is being used both as a distraction, and an implicit justification for defunding HE.
Alison Sampson is working3and, the very, very small numbers of black people, particularly men, at Cambridge University should be seen as a scandalous embarrassment *to the University*. Let's not let this get in the way of that.
Nikki Jayne2Love this. Great take. Ahhh, if only we actually lived in a meritocracy.
Forget everything else about this and just marvel at *Michael Gove and the Spectator* discussing how damaging a serially misleading fantasist can be, whether his bosses feel responsible and how they can claw back respectability.
flyingrodent65Say what you like about some wacky professor, he didn’t e.g. lead a terrifying national panic about a hidden cabal of secret Muslim conspirators plotting to jihadify the schools of Britain, and he didn’t rope every major media outlet into promoting that shit like it wasn’t his own crackpot idea.
BalthazarBlaze12I mean honestly, who in the general public really gives a shit about Jason Arday? I've never heard of him and I read this sort of shit far more than my most liberal-middle-class friends do. No one outside of the club cares who Cambridge employs, or any of this shit, ever. 'National scandal'.
Punished 'Woke' Bane10the fact i've been hearing about about this story every day this week completely against my will through google news alerts etc makes me smell a rat
donjohnsonyeh.bsky.social2Gove is a fucking disgraceful human being.
Sebastian Dobson2Do I detect an attempt by Gove & Co to deflect from another Cambridge academic in the media spotlight? bylinetimes.com/2026/07/09/p...
Jonny Hunt2from the people who brought you such treasures as "we've had enough of experts" and "in praise of the wehrmacht"
There’s been some talk about bringing in OfS to deal with the Jason Arday scandal, but I remember the time (just three months ago) OfS was revealed to be colluding with a right-wing agitator to produce a disproportionate fine against a university on trumped up charges based on ‘culture war’ nonsense
Nate O25Wondering if there’s been any follow-up on Stock’s first statement submitted to OfS that turned out to not be remotely true on all relevant matters of fact, but was the key document in OfS’s investigation into Sussex bsky.app/profile/nate...
Roger Giner-Sorolla4Office Against Students, in that case.
Natacha3Yes, as unbiased as the Daily Mail.
We are asking for accountability at Cambridge. This is an institutional story as much as anything else. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...
Evan Romero13“Whatever the results of any investigation, the university bears no little responsibility for the grotesque racism which this whole business has unleashed, and for the harm done both to the individual in the line of fire, to Black academics as a group, and the broader field of critical race studies”
Natalya D9I wish it didn't always have to be Priya Gopal saying the necessary and painful but sensible things about the impact on People of Colour generally and individually and wider efforts to diversify when prestigious orgs like Cambridge Uni screw up like in the Arday case.
Thread: (Assume the word “allegedly” has been liberally sprinkled over everything that follows.) Jason Arday says Simon & Schuster paid “1.4 million” (unspecified currency, could be lira) for his memoir. The publisher won’t confirm it. Strong start. But in keeping with a pattern of "Ardayism"
Russ Jones22Hard to explain how deranged that figure is unless you've tried to make a living as a writer. Most authors have roughly the same chance of getting a book deal AT ALL as they do of being bitten by a unicorn. Even if you somehow get signed, your advance wouldn't cover a modest trip to IKEA.
lesleyak.bsky.social7Not to mention how he did his Phd with a brain tumour and finished it 2 weeks after being operated on. He's a total fantasist and Cambridge was taken for a ride. www.aol.com/articles/cou...
Black Country Book Girl2I live under a rock and have never heard of him. Rushing to Google at the end of current doom scrolling session.
weecat85.bsky.social2You are so on the 'money' here
Arr David1This has all the hallmarks of a George Santos.
plod1.bsky.social1cambridge uni the beacon of academia never checked any of this!! this had walter Mitty written all over it!!!
Tip for top education journalists: Dr James Orr of Cambridge University's Faculty of Divinity's 'Key publications' list include "Being and Eternity: Phenomenology and Thomism in Edith Stein (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022)." Bloomsbury's online catalogue lists no such item. Time to do some hunting?
Guy Halsall5On a less serious note, has he stolen Pete Hegseth's hair, or is this the new Christofascist coiffure?
Let him who is without sin in being very, very late delivering an academic book to the publisher cast the first stone...
Björn Heile2Hmm, apart from not existing (and 'forthcoming 2022' is a particularly nice one), it looks a bit like plagiarism. See this: philpapers.org/rec/MCNTPO-24
"Arday was treated [by Cambridge] not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race." Really good piece by Jason Okundaye. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Matilda Fitzmaurice30Jason Okundaye has got it here. Much easier for Cambridge to tokenise a Black academic for a quick PR win than to do actual anti-racism work.
Paolo Sandro12This is indeed a good op-ed on the Arday affair, with just a minor observation: plagiarism scandals have attracted a lot of attention in some high-profile cases, and have even led to the resignation of multiple ministers.
Pretty astonishing and fresh evidence of research fraud in the Arday case from @thetimes.com. I wouldn't be surprised if this precipitated his resignation. Free link: www.thetimes.com/article/0d48...
Emma Yeomans39We put this to Arday 24 hours before his resignation. Our findings include: - A false claim of Mind funding his research - His claim that his participant committed suicide, in a study with no ethics approval and unreported in the final paper - evidence of fabricated participants - nonsensical errors
STEAMLORD8This campaign has been a viciously racist, targeted campaign; but that doesn’t mean Arday doesn’t have questions to answer. It’s also incredible to me that no one checked whether he had won various grants, awards, had held actual jobs? Like, that’s pretty basic hiring stuff