Jason Arday: Victim of “The Culture War” Or Compulsive Liar That Got Caught Out?

The Internet is currently aflame with debate about Jason Arday and unfortunately I have been tasked with unpacking this nonsense because somehow a professor resigning from the most elitist university that ever toffed amidst plagiarism accusations has become a left vs right issue. 

So begrudgingly, join a comrade with a cup of tea and a FETAC level 5 in wading into a mess those dripping with accolades cannot solve. 

Part 1: The Case for “Culture War” Casualty: 

In this version of events, Jason Arday is a Black man of immigrant parentage who had a meteoric rise in academia based on his own merits and joined only 5 other Black professors in Cambridge University, only to be taken down by a “Race Realist” hack with a grudge based on his race and area of study. A victim in the never ceasing attacks from the right against “DEI” which they believe is what is stopping them from the success promised to them from birth by their masters. 

Let’s examine the evidence for this: 

Firstly, the reliability and bias of his accuser: 

Nathan Cofnas. 

• Cofnas has long been a polarising figure in academia, ideologically aligned with “Race Realism” and believes that race influences intelligence amongst other things. 
• He has called for a "hereditarian revolution" against DEI.
• He was sacked from Cambridge due to writing a blog post where he stated that Black people would "disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment" under a meritocracy.
• He launched his attack on Arday after his sacking from Cambridge. 
• He has since taken up a post at Ghent University that sparked protests about his belief in “race science”
• His work "Research on Group Differences in Intelligence: A Defense of Free Inquiry" has over 80,000 downloads. He has also published extensively on topics like moral psychology and evolutionary science.
• His legal challenge against his dismissal is being funded by “Free Speech Union” 

This demonstrates that there is ample motive here beyond concern for academic integrity.

Multiple right wing figures such as Toby Young have latched onto it as well. 

Regarding the allegations themselves there are several issues: 

• Cambridge originally supported him and dubbed the accusation a “vile smear campaign” and stated on the record that he was cleared by prior investigations. 
• LJMU investigated the plagiarism allegations and cleared him, attributing textual similarities to “honest and reasonable error”. An academic misconduct panel also found “no plagiarism or academic misconduct”.
• Arday admits there were errors in his PHD work but attributes them to his Autism and lack of supervision during his PHD. 
• Expert support: A letter of support coordinated by The Good Law Project has reached over 17,000 signatures many of whom are amongst the most celebrated academics of our generation. The letter describes the allegations as “an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence” and “a malicious right wing smear campaign” 

There is also the double standard element to it. He wouldn’t be the first, and certainly will not be the last academic to have plagiarism accusations levied against him. This is the first time in my lifetime that I remember hearing so much about it. There are also echoes of the case of the first Black president of Harvard, Claudine Gay. It is worth however noting that not only did Arday receive overwhelming scrutiny from day one given his background and position, but that 3 years ago William Reilly, Dr of History, another Cambridge professor also had a plagiarism accusation which was unlike Arday found to be valid under investigation and Reilly is still teaching at Cambridge. He actually plagiarised the work of his own students. 

In this current moment in politics, all that can be done to undermine the idea that we are all equal in humanity, is being done. Any person who has an identity other than western, white, Christian, wealthy and male is once again in the firing line to be “knocked down a peg” after a very brief period of liberal “diversity washing”. 

The question also must be asked, why was a university alleged by the right to be “riddled with DEI” and “woke” hiring a race scientist like Cofnas? 

Arday has described himself as a "lightning rod" for criticism of DEI, stating: "Since arriving at Cambridge, there has been an organised, coordinated campaign to remove me from this position." This element of the situation cannot be ignored. 

Part 2: The Case for Lying, Cheating, Fraud: 

In this telling Arday was a wholly under qualified “DEI hire” who got where he was via a web of lies, both mundane and outlandish. A fraud who brings the whole of academia and particularly Cambridge into disrepute. A symptom of inclusion and representation at any cost that runs through liberalism divorced from materialist analysis of why exclusion and lack of representation exists in the first place. Liberal window dressing gone awry if you will. 

The evidence of this is as follows: 

Firstly the core allegation: 

• Nathan Cofnas alleges that he ran Arday’s PHD thesis through plagiarism detection software and found as he described sections "lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source"
• The Daily Telegraph reported that in it's analysis it found 180 passages identical or nearly to the thesis of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers of Brunel University London.
• The Times of London presented new evidence to Cambridge that some of Arday's research was "fabricated" and contained "impossible" evidence, including false funding declarations and participant quotes that appeared to come from another researcher's analysis.

While the Daily Telegraph and Times of London are not without their own spin, in spite of having been cleared by earlier investigations there is a fair bit of evidence that there may not be smoke without fire. 

Regarding the accusations that his qualifications are exaggerated or fabricated: 

• The University of Glasgow denies that he was ever a visiting professor there in spite of it being in his official Cambridge biography. 
• Ohio State University has also denied he was a visiting professor there. 
• Birkbeck, University of London where he claims he earned his masters in psychodynamic practices, said it had not been able to find records of a student named Jason Arday having studied there.
• Arday repeatedly asserted that he authored a book entitled "Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse". The book was never published. Palgrave Macmillan accepted his proposal, but the book was abandoned several years ago and never hit the shelves. There is no evidence that any book was written or published. 

Jason Arday has also made a series of outlandish claims in his life outside of academia which may illustrate a pattern of compensatory compulsive lying. 

• He claims that he has raised over £5,500,000 for charity through trials such as running 30 marathons in 35 days, when scrutinised after only a little over 6k could be verified he claimed this was in conjunction with 100 other people and he couldn’t reveal who due to an NDA
• He claims he has run 600 miles in 6 days which would be a feat only possible to the worlds best ultramarathon runners, later admitting that the story was wrong and it actually took 12 days. Even this could not be verified by marathon organisers. 
• He claims to have been awarded, and to have declined an MBE for services to charity in 2017 however no evidence of this has been presented. 
• He claims he appeared on “Seven Up” a TV series that aired 20 years before he was even born. 

This presents a pattern of wild, self aggrandising, unproven claims many of which are utterly unbelievable and casts serious aspersions on his character as well as his reliability in telling his own story. 

The institutional response since these things came to light has been entirely different to their early support. 

• Cambridge has launched a new investigation after new information has come to light. 
• Cambridge announced that it would be reviewing it's hiring process for academics off the foot of this case. 
• Jesus college launched it's own parallel investigation 
• Queen’s University Belfast has launched an investigation into a paper co-authored by professor Arday that was published in 2021
• Glasgow University has announced it is reviewing it's hiring of him. 

Which demonstrates that regardless of the findings of the aforementioned investigations, trust is already shattered in him amongst his peers. 

Part 3: Why It Matters: 

As I said earlier, there were only 5 other Black professors at Cambridge out of circa 1800 while it is impossible to catalogue them all without looking through the full 1800 and I am under a 24 hour turnaround on this article these are some with public profile which I have found: 

• Dr Ola Osman, Assistant professor of African Politics in POLIS. Interestingly given her field of study the first  Black woman appointed to her department. 
• Dr. Michael Joseph: Assistant Professor in Black British History and a Fellow at Gonville and Caius College.
• Professor Hakim Adi: Although now retired, he was the first Black British historian to be appointed a Professor of History in the UK

The representation of Black academics at Cambridge is a long-standing issue. In 2023, the university described Arday as joining "only five other Black professors at Cambridge". It’s worth also noting that out of the ones I could find, 1 is now retired and 2 are only assistant professors in the fields of studying their own people. This is not the profile of an institution dyed in the wool on identity politics. Seemingly there should be 2 others by Cambridge’s own telling but they are so obscure I couldn't find them unless I was to spend a week looking through a full 1800 person workforce. This has been lost like a fly in the sauce. Intentionally obfuscated in a debate about Black academia — are the Black academics. 

Yet, along with Jason Arday, they are on trial in the court of public opinion due to who they are. Due to sharing a skin colour. All of black academia is. If you are ever wondering where in the paradigm Irish people sit, the aforementioned professor Reilly who kept his job after not only plagiarism but breaking the trust of his own students and exploiting them, was Irish. All of Irish academia wasn’t on trial then nor should it have been. No more than all of Black academia should be now. 

The second reason this is important is, how is it being glossed over that a race scientist was hired by the oldest and most prestigious university in the world in the first place? 

The third reason this is important is, if the allegations are true, why was Jason Arday hired ahead of hundreds of better qualified Black academics whose CVs can be verified if they wanted a facade to hide their institutional racism behind? 

In the case of Nathan Cofnas specifically, in spite of his article claiming that Black people would disappear from high profile positions, despite receiving 58 complaints and a petition of 1200, Cambridge originally ruled that his views fell into the remit of “Legitimate Free Speech”. 

There have been allegations that students who raised concerns about racism were accused by college managers of being "racist" themselves for doing so.

Some facts and figures: 

• At all staff levels at Cambridge out of a total staff count of 6,180 persons, only 75 are Black. 
• In 2024, the proportion of BAME (Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic) professors at Cambridge stood at just 11.3%.
• Cambridge itself publicly acknowledged this was an ongoing problem as far back as 2020
• Their students union survey found that 83% of Black students reported facing racial bias, while only 4% felt Cambridge was free of prejudice. 
• Over 40% of Asian, Middle Eastern and multiracial students reported facing racial bias. 
• 38% of overseas students reported experiencing xenophobia based on their nationality. 

Then you have the specific cases beyond the statistics. Beyond Cofnas, Cambridge's veterinary college had it's accreditation downgraded in 2024 due to allegations of ignoring racism and student safety concerns. 

In spite of window dressing which amount to the institutional equivalent of “I have a Black friend” such as starting initiatives they then proceed to under resource such as their “End Everyday Racism” campaign. 

Critics argue that the hiring & public promotion of Arday was an attempted “quick fix” for Cambridge’s image problem. 

Conversely others have argued that the attacks themselves amount to “grotesque racism” and that Cambridge has a lot to answer for, for subjecting him to that level of scrutiny in the first place. 

On the academic integrity level as well, if the allegations are true Jason Arday plagiarised the work of a female professor in a different institution without giving due citation and credit to her. 

It also opens questions of overall integrity and how Cambridge can be allowed to make hiring decisions and appointments with no transparency or academic rigour. 

However, this is far from the only case of academic rigour being put aside for the positioning of the institution or even individuals within. 

• Post-graduate President Vareesh Pratap went on hunger strike in 2024, alleging the SU had become a "quasi-family business" characterized by nepotism and corruption.
• Former and current staff accused the SU of a "deep-rooted culture of corruption," with the Senior Management Team allegedly recruiting and promoting based on loyalty rather than merit.
• In 2026, Trinity Hall College faced backlash for a policy to actively recruit from elite private schools to improve the "quality" of recruits. Critics called the move "immoral" and a step backward for social mobility
• Reports of bias towards a few elite schools are well-researched and recently heavily publicised. 
• The Cambridge University Press has previously published research on the effects of nepotism as well as cronyism in the institutions within the college. 
• The university's small-group teaching system was labeled "nepotistic" by the Justice for College Supervisors (J4CS) campaign, run by the Cambridge branch of the UCU. They allege that "connections and favouritism" play a "significant role" in allocating teaching hours, which is problematic due to the "informality of the system” 

None of these things have been given their due space and exposure, and they represent far more widespread structural injustice than the Jason Arday case does, so I am taking this opportunity to highlight them because without them there is no clear picture possible. 

Part 4: Why None of This Matters: 

At the end of the day this is a controversy for controversy’s sake. It is as we say around here “a thing of nothing” appointments based on who someone is, is widespread throughout academia and it makes not one ounce of difference if it’s so and so Von Toffs fool of a son getting ahead based on generations of elitism and an elite schooling background that costs about the national median wage per year or more. 

Or inversely a second generation immigrant with an interesting inspirational backstory being propelled beyond his qualifications to cover the prevalence of the former. 

The difference here is, the latter captures the political moment manufactured by the needs of Von Toff senior, the former is the institutional truth he wants obfuscated. To paint the rise of his son who couldn’t run a dishwasher let alone run a department as the true meritocracy and the window dressing that has advanced beyond it's usefulness as an affront to academic rigour as well as evidence of anyone darker than them being biologically intellectually inferior. 

Why none of this matters is because this circus is a veil over the true reality: The reality where advancement is a lie and dependent entirely on the whims and needs of these people. 

The problem with “DEI” is not that it “has gone too far” or that it “lowers the quality” of leadership or academia. Elite “Inbreeding Depression” is where you should be looking to find a biological basis for anything in human bloodline that causes temperament instability and limited intelligence. 

Beyond the literal, well established fact that “race scientists” intentionally gloss over in their nonsense about biological race, in spite of the fact that there is less genetic diversity between a Norwegian and a Japanese person than there often is between 2 groups on the African continent, is the metaphorical for what nepotism and elitism breeds structurally. 

What happens in a closed herd? vigour drops, defects accumulate, the system becomes brittle. 

What happens in a closed shop? Metaphorically the same thing. 

The inverse is hybrid vigour, and that’s the point the culture-war mobs miss. Diversity isn’t charity; it’s resilience. Any farmer knows that. Any aristocrat or their pet theorists pretending otherwise is describing a strategy that would fail in any field based entirely off of a purity doctrine, literal as well as metaphorical that has no foot in reality and no foundation other than the fact it helps them keep themselves in and the rest of us out. 

We have always been led by and preached to by victims of their own “purity doctrine” and they have always been propped up by riding on the excellence of others. You can’t tell me black people are less intelligent than us. I wouldn’t be alive today without the Black doctors that delivered me and treated me after my very complicated premature birth or the Indian paediatrician that treated my various childhood infirmities.  

The problem with “DEI” has always been that it never goes far enough. It never examines the structural or social injustices. It never examines the biases taken as “status quo”. It never delivers justice or a level playing field. Because it’s afraid of what may occur if the veil was lifted. If we were to realise what we are being led by and what our guiding minds represent. 

So instead, what we have is a tapestry of nonsense hiding structural fractures so we continue buying into the institutions who manufacture both the tapestry and the cracks. 

The cracks go right to the foundations. In 1381 Cambridge was subject of a major peasants revolt. One of the main rallying cries was “Away with the learning of clerks, Away with it” roared by an elderly peasant woman named Margery Starre.  Way back then our class forebears knew more than we do now, with a fraction of the education. Institutions like Cambridge exist solely to educate the officials that enforce the oppression levied out against us all. 

The staff of Cambridge back then enjoyed special royal privileges. They also took a heavy handed role in the towns policing and could not be subject to ley courts. They charged exorbitant rents based on the number of candles in a house in the environs of the college. Corpus Christi College was sacked on the 15th of June by townspeople and even the mayor and some students. It is historically painted as illiteracy and idiocy that over the course of the subsequent days they burned documents and title deeds but not literature. It is historically claimed that they were objecting to literacy. 

I don’t think so. I think they knew what they were doing and were attacking power and privilege. 

The true conflict remains the same today as it did 645 years ago. The people vs the establishment and it’s institutions. 

Part 5: Conclusion

Between the 2 tellings, both have merit. But it must be remembered that Jason Arday is a man not a monument. He is not a totem for every black person in an elevated position in the UK. Not in his rise nor in his fall. 

Jason Arday may or may not be a plagiarist. This is yet to be independently verified and the results of the investigations into him are not complete. In either direction he is a victim of the culture war, likely in his rise and most certainly in his fall. What should be taken from this, if anything, is that Arday is not the property of the left or the anti-racist movement. 

He is a human being with agency, one whose life is destroyed either by his own hand, which was led hand in hand by an institution that sought to use him to veil their collective and far reaching sins, or by the hand of the establishment elite who have decided that we have gotten too close to equality for their liking and are burning Arday as an effigy of all Black “Tall Poppies” in front of the mob who feel vindicated and a little closer to the top not realising the spot vacated was never for them. 

Until we stop treating anyone on the rise as collective property which is of itself gross crime against their human autonomy, as well as “great man” fallacy, we will be locked in a battle like a mediaeval papal enquiry where all presented needs to be proven as saint or sinner. 

Elements of both are likely true, there is no one truth in this situation. This is “Gamer Gate” all over again but black vs white instead of men vs women. The elite are very good at turning one persons alleged sins into a witch hunt against all who share their visual characteristics, a new battle in the culture war and a new way to undermine hard won freedoms and equalities. 

You may notice however, it’s always dressed up as a noble concern for ethics. 

In this situation however you will never see a full out clear out of all the frauds in Cambridge or someone putting everything ever written by the other 1800 professors through a plagiarism checker. 

This is not to absolve Arday of potentially serious misconduct. If the allegations are valid, regardless of who levied them, then he should be sanctioned with a due and fair process. This is to chart a map of the battlefield on which they were laid and to serve as a reminder to any Black or Working Class young minds that you are not in the club regardless of what’s dangled in front of you to make you serve your purpose. 

You never will be, so tear down the clubhouse and reject their gritted teeth “recognition” protect with your life your own agency and your own free will. You will never be thanked for taking flack for them and they will throw you to the crowd to be burned for sins they themselves were party to. This is the true history and legacy of the establishment and their academia .