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New media, new rules

On Jason Arday

The School of Athens, Raphael The School of Athens, fresco by Raphael (1509-1511)

I’m usually the last guy to defend journalists. That’s simply born of the understanding that modern journalism is generally quite bad. But when large parts of the political establishment, backed by a number of misguided journalists, want to destroy the last vestiges of — or maybe even the very ability to produce — decent journalism, even I will speak up. The lastest case here is the whole Jason Arday situation.

Who Was Jason Arday?

In case you are blissfully unaware of who Jason Arday was, here’s a quick rundown: The guy was born in 1985 in Clapham, South London. In 2015, he obtained a PhD in Education from Liverpool John Moores University. He took a postdoc job at Leeds Beckett University and later a lectureship at the University of Roehampton. Arday, who is black, specialised in the subject of institutional racism in higher education. He then became an associate professor of Sociology at Durham University. In 2022, he became Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Glasgow. In 2023, he was appointed as Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge. He became the youngest professor ever at Cambridge. He was on TV, and he received awards and honorary doctorates from several UK universities. Arday specialised in a discipline called “autoethnography”. According to Wikipedia, autoethnography is “a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings.” Arday would write papers and books connecting his favourite songs and what he called “lived experiences” to what he claimed was the scientific study of racism in higher education. Around 2025, his work was lauded by colleagues in the fields of Sociology and Educational Studies.

In 2023, David Harris, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University contacted Arday because he found evidence of plagiarism in a scientific article Arday had published in 2018. Arday attacked Harris in a reply and accused him of harassment, not addressing Harris’ legitimate academic concerns and instead reporting him to the police. Harris then contacted his colleague Martyn Hammersley, an emeritus professor of The Open University in Milton Keynes, who brought the concerns to Cambridge’s attention. Following a correction by the journal the article was published in, Jack Grove, a reporter for the magazine Times Higher Education started investigating plagiarism by Arday. When Grove contacted Arday for comment at the end of 2025, Arday replied with a letter from a law firm specialising in libel lawsuits, threatening to sue the magazine, which killed the story. Arday complained about Grove to the police and they investigated the journalist and instructed him to stop contacting Arday.

Also in 2025, Liverpool John Moores University set up a misconduct panel to investigate Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis for plagiarism. Arday excused the fact that he had copied significant parts of his thesis from an earlier PhD thesis with autism and learning disabilities. He said the allegations against him were part of institutional racism, designed to destroy his career and those of other black academics. John Moores University concluded that there were problems with Arday’s supervision at the time and that he had made a “honest and reasonable error” and the panel cleared him of plagiarism charges. Arday then went on the offensive and, in 2026, gave talks alleging that the factually correct allegations against him were part of a “playbook” used by conservative right-wing activists to destroy the careers of black academics.

The legacy media in the UK had, up to this point, largely ignored this story. That changed on 21 July 2026, when Nathan Cofnas, a white American-born Philosophy postdoc at Ghent University in Belgium, published an article on Substack dissecting the obvious plagiarism in Arday’s dissertation and other scientific work over the years. He then alleged Cambridge, which had fired Cofnas in 2024 because the faculty objected to his views on racism, had later covered up Arday’s plagiarism.

There are more than a thousand black people in the UK with IQs over 140 who would be capable of doing serious work in the sociology of education. If Cambridge administrators wanted a black professor to serve as a role model for underrepresented minorities, they could have found someone qualified. Instead, they grabbed a random black person with an unvetted fairytale backstory and almost nothing that even resembles genuine scholarship. When evidence of the black person’s long history of plagiarism is brought to their attention, they excuse it on the basis that he was the victim of “direct and indirect racism.” In their view, he cannot be asked to follow the same rules that we expect schoolchildren to understand. I know it sounds silly to say that “leftists are the real racists.” But by hiring Jason Arday and refusing to investigate credible accusations against him, isn’t Cambridge making a statement that the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards?

Despite Cofnas being a very controversial figure for his theories on racism, the mainstream media in the UK now picked up the Arday plagiarism story. Arday, when contacted by journalists as part of these investigations, continued to deny plagiarism and said he had made errors because of his autism and that he “relied on mimicry to make sense of information”. He also suggested that there was a targeted racist campaign against him and that the work of other academics, when subjected to the same scrutiny as his, would show similar “errors”.

Some relevant legacy media reporting:

Arday resigned a few days into this story being covered in the mainstream press. On Friday, Jason Arday, who was married and had two children, died at home. It seems reasonable to assume that he killed himself. His memoir was released three days before his death.

Things Jason Arday Made Up

There are a large number of allegations of plagiarism, falsification of scientific data and biographical facts about himself that Arday is said to simply have made up or embellished. The man seems to have been a compulsive fabulist. Here is a quick and dirty list of things he is supposed to have made up:

Arday’s memoir, published by Simon & Schuster, for which Arday claimed he had received “1.4 million” (he never said in what currency), apparently has even more fabrications in it. According to a report by The Washington Free Beacon, it lifts supposed events from his life from pop culture TV shows and movies, including Spartacus and Forrest Gump.

The Media Is to Blame?

Why am I even interested in this, you might ask. Well, aside from my love of the UK and my lifelong interest in academia, it is the fact that now, the media is being blamed for what happened to Jason Arday. That it was institutional murder. This is bullshit. The most dangerous kind of bullshit, in fact. It looks like a concerted effort to further threaten the UK’s already precariously endangered freedom of speech. What happened here isn’t a media witch hunt. Being a Cambridge professor is a high-profile job and academia isn’t just a career like any other. As a scientist, you are beholden to the truth. Holding professors, especially at high-profile universities, responsible for knowingly faking research and making up their own biography isn’t evil, it is common sense. It’s the media’s job to do this. In fact, if anything is shameful about this, it is how long it took the legacy media to pick up this story. This stuff had been known about for years, it now seems. One can only conclude that many of these outlets decided it was too hot and only grew a pair once a postdoc on Substack started doing their job for them.

If anyone is at fault here it is universities like Cambridge and John Moores in Liverpool which first decided to put goals of equality and inclusion above qualification and quality of work and which then doubled down and, instead of coming clean and firing the guy, tried to absolve him of his crimes against decency and the scientific method. It was obvious that protecting him in the face of his absurdist claims would not help the guy and that the media would stay on the story. Which would cause the public to get more and more outraged — and with good reason!

This whole story is a disgrace. Not because of a racist witch hunt. The colour of the guy’s skin has nothing to do with it. He was guilty of the biggest crime in academia: consistently making things up to further your own career. And he needed to get called on that. But the disgrace here is the rot it exposes in higher education and in the most prestigious institutions of science and learning.

The role of science is to enable us to understand the world around us. To make sense of reality, in order to improve it. There is no place for equity and equality in this. It is important to give everyone, no matter their background, a chance to become part of this process. But the process itself needs to be a meritocracy. You can’t do useful scientific work if the work isn’t based on merit. The Jason Arday case is the perfect example of this. The guy’s output was bad, if not to say horrible, and with the scientific method, the result is all that counts. Jason Arday had every chance to become a professor and it is good that this was the case. What isn’t good, though, is that he succeeded. He shouldn’t have. Giving everyone a chance to compete is a laudable goal, but if the competition itself is rigged, you get all-around horrible results like this.

Matt Taibbi, who generally has as little respect for our mutual colleagues as myself, puts it well in his own defence of British reporters and the freedom of speech as well as the right to hold public figures accountable for morally repugnant behaviour:

Metropolitan Police admitted in early August it was a mistake to investigate reporter Jack Grove for four months just for reviewing then-Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s record. After Arday was found dead by suicide Friday, that mistake will likely be compounded by an inquiry into what London mayor Sadiq Khan called “pernicious public shaming” by media.

Bollocks. I’m all for beating up media, but in this case? The Arday story will be debated as a race matter, but the story is really about a deeper problem, the institutional rejection of reality itself, which at Cambridge was once celebrated in the form of Isaac Newton’s apple tree.

Arday should have been a one-day story. After allegations of plagiarism surfaced publicly in July, Cambridge should have just done what they did eventually, announcing an investigation into his appointment. Instead, the school denounced the story — which they’d known about for nearly a year at least — as a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” While inviting “accountability,” Arday too threw down a gauntlet, saying, “I think the cruelty that I’ve experienced, and the positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist, is totally unacceptable.”

This was after he gave a mysterious (and prescient) speech in April called “Wanted. Dead or Alive: The Playbook,” blasting media scrutiny of black academics as a “cancer that we need to eradicate from academia,” that is “abhorrent” and “evil.” In that speech he reportedly said, “You get the email and they say you conducted academic misconduct. And you think to yourself, ‘Well this is incredible. I’m on the back foot here. How do I defend myself against this machine?’” If the press wasn’t on the scent of academic misconduct then, they sure would be now.

Even if Cambridge just followed the lead of Liverpool John Moores University (which awarded Arday’s PhD) and announced a “confidential procedure” before saying, “We will not comment further,” the press would have been forced to lope off and twiddle thumbs pending inevitable resignation or dismissal — and it was inevitable, because the academic plagiarism case alone was overwhelming, before you even got to the lunatic backstory fabulism. Instead, one of the world’s most prestigious universities doubled down in a no-doubt factual situation, surely knowing more was about to come out, including news that The Times Education killed a high profile exposé the previous September after a letter from Arday’s lawyer. Still, the development that assured a coverage hurricane was the institutional embrace of Arday’s “playbook” thesis, denouncing true reports as racism.

This was after Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, Borat’s cousin) circulated a letter marked “URGENT PLEASE SIGN ANTI-RACISM LETTER FOR JASON ARDAY,” and after the U.K.’s “women and equalities minister,” the Baroness Jacqui Smith, held a meeting to discuss ‘harassment of black academics’” last September 15th. All this showed a “reporting is racism” institutional wagon-circling effort going back at least a year, with universities, NGOs, publishers, even a government minister sitting on information about Arday’s problems instead of doing anything approximating the right thing. This might have included urging him to take a sabbatical or start therapy pending review — any course but the one they took.

Arday’s supporters are now defending him as a “human being with friends and family,” as Jeremy Corbyn put it, flawed like all of us but underserving of such media scrutiny. Sorry, but the time to tell Jason Arday it was okay to be flawed and ordinary was a long time ago, before selling him on another road to acceptance. There will be more of these stories, and worse things, the more we keep telling people that what goes up, need not come down. You can’t remake reality without casualties.

For once, the media did the right thing. Even if it was a little too late to a story that had to first break on Substack. The universities that caused this unfortunate situation should do some serious soul searching. The people in charge should be ashamed of themselves.

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