The Great and Unfortunate Story of Jason Arday
A One-Stop Shop For the Craziest Scandal of 2026
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I hadn’t heard of Jason Arday before last week and now I’m obsessed. Not just by him but by this whole story, which is something like the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal for academia. It is embarrassing or shaming a whole cross-section of eminent individuals and weighty institutions. It’s also just an insanely compelling story.
There have already been many words expended on it. I’m adding to them here because I find it endlessly fascinating. I also suspect that many of you haven’t heard much about it, or perhaps have registered it vaguely between more important matters like the war in Iran or which beach to go to today. So this post is, first of all, a one-stop-shop for the Arday scandal - an attempt to order what we know, and how we came to know it. Secondly, it’s a chance for me to work out what I think about it, and to tell you. What follows is in five sections:
A summary of who Arday is; his remarkable rise in academia.
Arday’s fall - the plagiarism scandal and how it hit the headlines.
His lies - the many eye-popping lies he has told about his life story. This section is simply breathtaking.
His work - a look at his scholarship and teaching. Was he, despite everything, good at his job?
Implications. So what does it all mean?
Quick note: I strongly advise reading this online (click on the title), because it’s too long for email, and because I will probably have to correct or add details post-publication. The story moves fast and I’ve had to write this in a hurry. Also: I’ve tried to minimise links to Twitter/X because many of you don’t use it but I’m afraid there are still quite a few. It’s been an essential information source on this scandal.
The Rise of Jason Arday
Jason Arday was, until this week, a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University. When appointed in 2023, he became the youngest black person to hold such a position. He was already something of a minor celebrity was the subject of numerous adoring media profiles, invited to speak at numerous events and appointed to numerous establishment bodies.
Why was he such a star? It wasn’t just that there aren’t many black professors at Cambridge. It’s that Arday had an absolutely astonishing life story. Born to Ghanaian parents, he grew up on a council estate in Clapham, South London. At age three he was diagnosed with a neurological condition known as “global development delay” and also with autism. He did not learn to speak until he was 11. He only learnt to read and write at 18. (He was also diagnosed with dyslexia and developed epilepsy later on.)
Miraculously, Arday overcame these barriers, together with those of institutional racism, to scale the heights of British academia. Arday graduated from St Mary’s University with a BA in education studies and physical education. From there he became a scholar of racial inequality and the sociology of education. He completed a PhD at Liverpool John Moores University and climbed the academic ladder at speed, moving from senior lecturer at Roehampton to associate professor at Durham to professor at the University of Glasgow, all within three years. He became a professor at Cambridge aged 37, less than two decades after learning to read and write.
If that wasn’t enough, Arday was quite an athlete: a talented footballer, snooker player, and distance runner. He was also a very good person; a moral exemplar. Before he could speak he used to wonder "Why are some people homeless?" and "Why is there war?” After a visit to a homeless shelter, when he was 17, he decided to make it his life’s work to help the poor by raising money for them. In interviews, Arday was proud to declare that he had raised over five million pounds for charity by running. In 2010 he ran 30 marathons in 35 days to raise money for homeless charities. He had an epileptic seizure on the twentieth day, and fractured his fibula, which caused his leg to swell to twice its normal size; nonetheless, he completed the course.
Earlier this year, Simon & Schuster acquired the rights to Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. It is scheduled for publication next week. Excerpts have circulated online, including one which relates a prophetic encounter in a South American shantytown. At 21 he travelled to South America and South Africa as a volunteer to install water pumps in deprived communities with the charity WaterAid.
At some point, the aid worker studied me as I bent down to help one of the children. Then she said quietly, almost to herself but loudly enough for me to hear: “You have a very beautiful heart.” I smiled and swiftly replied, “That’s really kind of you.” Then she moved towards me and rested her hand on my arm before speaking again. “I can tell you’re destined to do great things. But I also believe you’re destined for very sad and difficult things as well.”
Now is the time of sad and difficult things.
Arday’s Fall
There were already signs that Arday’s work might not be of unimpeachable integrity. In 2023 he had to issue a correction to a paper he published in the journal Social Sciences in 2018, because it had drawn extensively on two articles without properly citing them.
In 2025, Liverpool John Moores University received allegations of plagiarism on his PhD and cheating on his viva voce. It carried out a confidential, private investigation. The evidence considered by the LJMU panel included a 63-page dossier submitted by the Times Higher Education journalist Jack Grove, who had been carrying out an investigation after receiving tip-offs. The panel cleared Arday of any serious malpractice. Since we aren’t privy to the details of the review or even who was on the panel, we don’t know how they arrived at that conclusion.
This year, in July, Nathan Cofnas, a biologist, IQ fundamentalist and “race realist”, who had been fired from his position at Cambridge for his views, published a Substack post highlighting anomalies in Arday’s life story, and presenting strong evidence of plagiarism: dozens of near-verbatim lifts from a 2009 thesis by another student. (Cofnas hadn’t seen Grove’s dossier at this point but had discovered some of the same evidence).
The story bubbled away on social media but only went mainstream after The Times took it up. For this, they were fiercely condemned by academics. Cambridge University issued a statement criticising a “vile campaign to undermine [Arday’s] credibility”. The prominent left-wing historian Alan Lester accused the paper of pursuing this ‘non-story’ out of racism. The idiotic left-wing pressure group Good Law Project whipped up a petition on Arday’s behalf.
Until this point, if you weren’t following the story closely (I wasn’t) it was easy to ignore or dismiss as another minor skirmish in the culture wars. People sometimes “plagiarise” by accident, perhaps it was no big deal. But then two big things happened to make the story more urgent, and, well, more amazing.
The first is that Retraction Watch weighed in. Retraction Watch was founded by a couple of American academics who weren’t satisfied with how universities and journals investigate issues of research integrity. It is now an established institution in its own right, trusted by scientists and scientific journals to be rigorous, objective and fair. It doesn’t do culture wars.
Retraction Watch looked at Jack Grove’s dossier and came down firmly on the side of Arday’s critics. The allegations were justified. Arday had engaged in extensive plagiarism, both in his PhD thesis - which actually lifted passages from many different sources - and in multiple journal articles (his work is riddled with fabricated data). His transgressions went way, way beyond the normal range of “error”.
The Retraction Watch article also revealed institutional corruption. Senior figures at Cambridge knew about the problem but had been trying to ride it out. Most egregiously, Cambridge conspired with Arday to bully his critics off the trail. Grove had sent polite emails to Arday with questions about his work. Arday did not deign to address them (he has never addressed any allegation in detail) beyond admitting to some minor errors. Cambridge officials intervened to tell Grove to stop contacting Arday because it was affecting his mental health.
Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck to write a cease and desist letter, which led to the Times Higher Education spiking Grove’s story. I need hardly add that this is not normal behaviour for an academic facing questions about their work (not least because it’s extremely expensive). Cambridge, or Arday, or both, complained to the Metropolitan Police, accusing Grove of harassment. Grove had sent three polite, factual emails to Arday over the course of two months. The police spent four months investigating this accusation (this jawdropping episode is a whole other story in itself).
The second thing that happened is that Arday’s public self-presentation - his amazing life story - came under intense scrutiny from journalists and amateur investigators on social media. It quickly fell apart. It turned out that Arday hadn’t just fabricated research; he had fabricated much of his biography. It wasn’t that he exaggerated a few things or indulged in a few fibs. It’s that he lied and lied and lied. Big lies and small lies; blatantly self-serving lies and apparently pointless ones. His lies were purveyed in multiple interviews and and talks and self-penned descriptions and then repeated, unquestioningly, by journalists in fawning profiles.
Cambridge finally launched an investigation into Arday on Wednesday. He resigned within hours.
The Lies
The extent and nature of Arday’s lying is difficult to convey because of the sheer scale of it. New ones get revealed every day. It’s a bit like trying to process Trump’s multiple deceptions and offences. Any one of them would in itself be enough to discredit or disgrace the individual concerned but there are so many that before you have time to be amazed or appalled by one, another comes along. Some of Arday’s claims have been proved false beyond doubt, others at this point are only suspected. Here’s a list. It is by no means comprehensive.
