Hard Days for Arday

Last week, I followed the saga of Jason Arday's misfortunes. He is a professor (now former professor) of sociology at the University of Cambridge and a former fellow of Jesus College. I was particularly interested because I studied at Jesus College, and this incident showed me, once again, how much things have changed at Cambridge.

To understand the current atmosphere at this college, we must go back to 2019, the year of the election of the current Master, "the first female and first Black leader of an Oxbridge college." It had undoubtedly begun a little before, but from that moment on began the implementation of what is called, on the positive side, the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) programme, and, on the negative side, "wokeism". Phrases like "person with wombs" started to be used:

 

A multi-faith centre was built. There was already a chapel for Anglican worship. But requests from other religious groups were to be met, though I wonder if Roman Catholics and Jews had any demand. The new centre has separate entrances for men and women and a curtain to separate them. In another era, when I studied at this college, this would have been called apartheid, and the students would have mobilised against it.

 

Note in the previous quote the presence of a shoe rack, a very useful device indeed for Jews and Roman Catholics.

In 2022, the Master wanted to have the Rustat Memorial removed from the chapel on the grounds that Tobias Rustat got rich through the slave trade. The chapel is a listed building (part of it dates back to 1220), and any changes made must be approved by the Church of England authorities. An ecclesiastical trial took place (text of the judgment available by clicking here). Rustat is the largest benefactor in the college's history. A group of historians, who had initially supported the removal, changed their minds when they discovered that Rustat had sold his shares in the slave-trading business only shortly before his death, well before his donation. Excerpt from the written testimony of a former student quoted at the trial: “The college is using deliberately inflammatory language to students to consistently refer to the Memorial as ‘the slavery-celebrating memorial’, when in fact it does not celebrate slavery at all, it simply marks the life of the man who is buried there in the Chapel.” The Consistory Court of the Diocese of Ely refused Jesus College's petition to remove the 17th-century memorial.

 

In this context, which is not unique to Jesus College, Cambridge University set about hiring a new professor of sociology; he would later on also be elected a fellow of Jesus College. And they found the ideal candidate, what the British media called a "poster boy," with his dreadlocks down to his buttocks, the very embodiment of the DEI programme.

Let's take a quick look at his CV. Twenty years before he was born, he took part in the BBC's "Seven Up" programme. He didn't learn to speak until he was eleven, and he learned to read and write at eighteen. He has run 30 marathons in 35 days, two or three of them with a leg injury. In 2015, he received his Ph.D. from Liverpool John Moores University. He has written on critical race theory. He has also written "autoethnographic" reflections as a neurodivergent Black man. In 2023, he got a professorship of sociology of education at Cambridge. He also claims to have taught at a Scottish university and an American one, but both have denied. In July 2026, he was accused of plagiarism (of having taken large passages from Paula Zwozdiak-Myers's dissertation):

  

The two PhD theses have considerable overlap. “The signal is in the tail, and it survives controls. Against two independent education doctorates matched on discipline and partially on topic, the focal pair shows: 9 near-identical sentence pairs (cosine ≥ 0.999) in 11.09M comparisons, against 1 in 34.29M control comparisons – and that single control match is the standard thesis declaration (“This work has not previously been presented for an award at this, or any other, university”). 179 sentence pairs sharing 12 or more consecutive identical words (107 spatially independent blocks), against an expected 0.32 under the null – an exact count over all 11.09M pairs, no embedding model involved. Longest shared run: 63 words. Conditional on high semantic similarity, cross-document pairs share a median run of 11.5 identical consecutive words, versus 4.0 and 7.5 for sentences within each thesis – that is, among semantically matched sentences, the two documents phrase shared ideas alike more often than either thesis does when restating itself. Under the most conservative assumptions available, the probability of observing this pattern under independent composition is 5.7 × 10⁻⁴; on the central estimate of the null rate, 8 × 10⁻¹¹. [From Titorekno’s GitHub page] It is very unlikely this happened independently (specifically one in a one-in-100-billion chance of happening). Source: https://21percent.org/?p=4036.

The newspapers seized upon the story (first the Daily Telegraph, then the Guardian and the Times), and social media were quick to react. A petition of support was put on line (text available by clicking here). But this did not end the pressure, and Professor Arday eventually resigned from his positions at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College (where his page was immediately taken off the college website without explanation). In the aftermath, some of the petitioners (including the Master of Jesus) withdrew their signatures.

 

The young prodigy was particularly criticised for his command of English. The following table provides examples of his errors:

  

By Chris Brunet Jason Arday has published 34 academic publications. I'm too lazy to check them all. I picked 2 at random: 1. Understanding Race and Educational Leadership in Higher Education 2. What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students? Here are some funny mistakes I found: - “Increasing diagoneses of mental illness” He was attempting to write diagnoses, the plural of diagnosis. This typo appears in the opening sentence of the introduction. - “will enviably impact attainment outcomes.” Enviably means in a manner worthy of envy. He means inevitably. - Mental illness supposedly “destabilizes individuals’ mental facilities.” He means mental faculties. - “Racism is unlikely to ever go way, owing to its penetrative, divisive and persistence nature.” Two errors in one sentence: go away and persistent nature. - The mental-health paper promises insight into “the barriers to preventing access and uptake.” That literally means barriers that stop someone from preventing access. He means barriers preventing access and uptake. - “There is a cultural cognizance and sensitivity that is are required.” is are - “There were no visible interpretation services were available.” wrong grammar - The bibliography links to raceeequalityfoundaiton.org.uk misspelling both “race equality” and “foundation” in the same URL - “a need to reinvest inequitable structures” Presumably he means "reform" or "restructure" inequitable structures. As written, he recommends reinvesting in them - “heightens feelings of sensibility and vulnerability” he meant sensitivity, not sensibility - “services that have a designated remittance to support the mental well-being” A remittance is money sent as payment or support. He meant remit - “the impact of cultural pressure and expectation on this phenomena” Phenomena is plural; this is singular - “there are few opportunities available for them gain these types of opportunities” them gain Source : https://x.com/chrisbrunet/status/2083847337848275325

Personally, I'm rather impressed by someone who managed to fool so many people for so long. It's reminiscent of the hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, the physics professor who published a ludicrous article denouncing the lack of intellectual rigor in certain publishers. To extricate himself from this precedent, I suggest Jason Arday draw on this earlier example and argue that everything he did was simply aimed at denouncing the decline in intellectual rigor in universities.

The Jason Arday affair is obviously providing ammunition for critics of "wokeism," and they're certainly making the most of it on social media.

I'll conclude with this quote from the New York Times (8 August 2026), which everyone knows is far from being a right-wing newspaper:

This was a prime example of academia’s maddening tendency to embody the worst caricatures painted by its critics. The available evidence strongly suggests that, when faced with the allegations against Mr. Arday years ago, Cambridge and the other academic institutions connected to him responded not by genuinely investigating them with integrity and transparency, but acting in ways that helped him avoid scrutiny.