Jason Arday, the disgraced Cambridge sociology professor who resigned on August 5 over plagiarism claims, will no doubt bounce back. As he said himself in a Times interview: “We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody.”
Arday, appointed professor of sociology of education and fellow of Jesus College at the age of 37, is now a national celebrity. He is a cause supported by a legion of wealthy anti-racist backers allied to the left-wing Good Law Project, who have defended him against accusations of bare-faced lying.
One of the UK’s leading defamation law firms, Carter-Ruck, is firebombing anyone who seeks to traduce Arday. The Metropolitan Police, no less, ordered a Times Higher Education journalist to cease approaching him for comment about allegations of plagiarism.
The memoirs of the youngest black professor at Cambridge, Great and Unfortunate Things, comes out this week from Simon & Schuster and is expected to sell very well. For Arday’s back-story is a publisher’s dream: He was unable to speak until the age of 11 because of autism and other neurodivergent conditions, and was unable to read or write until the age of 18. Some of this may even be true.
It is certainly true that he went on to receive a doctorate from Liverpool’s John Moores University in 2015 and was installed as professor of sociology of education at the University of Glasgow in 2021 before being appointed similarly to Cambridge in 2023. He is the youngest black professor ever appointed at that most prestigious institution in the UK.
So Professor Jason Arday, as he still calls himself, will surely overcome this latest setback. He claims it is the result of a racially inspired right-wing witch-hunt, and many believe him. It appears to confirm everything he has written about how black people are only allowed to progress so far before they are brought down.
The real casualty of this affair is not Arday, but Cambridge University, which stands accused of giving one of the most prestigious posts in the academic world to a serial fantasist. In a fawning BBC interview in 2023, Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, said that he was “the best in the world.”
Yet, it is now widely accepted that Arday reused other people’s work without attribution in his doctorate and published papers, and that he claimed honors and academic posts from universities such as Ohio State which he did not possess.
He has since resiled from exaggerated claims about his sporting prowess, such as running 600 miles in six days. His claimed first book, Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, was never actually published. The police deny his claim that they investigated his receipt of a pig’s head through the post.
But the man can’t help it. “To be honest with you,” he told the Guardian, “I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?” Why indeed. For such is the essence of this colorful tale. Everyone wanted to believe Jason Arday. His is a wonderful story, tailor-made for a Spielberg movie. No doubt the script is being optioned as we speak.
As far as the academy is concerned, Arday was simply playing the game as he has been taught to play it by universities addled by diversity and historic guilt. He also followed postmodern pseudo-intellectualism to its logical conclusion.
Take his own peer-reviewed, auto-ethnographic paper: “Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity: Negotiating Normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric Curriculum and Racial Micro-aggressions within the Academy.”
Most people reading that title would be inclined to file it under bin. Yet it is one of the works that helped Arday win one of the most prestigious academic posts in the UK.
Arday’s abstract explains that: “This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) storytelling method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experience of negotiating normative Whiteness… within the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness.”
The paper is at best advocacy scholarship at worst inverted racism. The “data” consist of the author’s interpretation of his own personal experiences of alleged discrimination. He includes every buzzword from the race-studies lexicon. He condemns the “normative Whiteness” of the “Eurocentric curricula,” and the “micro-aggressions” and “structural exclusions” he has experienced. Evidence is scant, but who is to contest this, for is it not his truth? Feelings are fact.
Indeed, if truth is relative, as post-structuralists like Foucault and Derrida claimed, and if academic discourse is simply another site of racial oppression—which is the essential philosophy of critical race theory—then how can anyone accuse Arday of doing anything wrong?
In an intellectual world which accords “auto-ethnography”—i.e. personal history—the status of a science and clouds meaning with impenetrable jargon, Arday was simply “deconstructing” the power structures of everyday racism. At least, this is what he will surely claim in the next instalment of auto-ethnography.
But consider how this structural power relationship operates in the real world as opposed to the abstract world of critical race theory.
In 2025, the Metropolitan Police opened a four-month investigation into the Times higher education journalist Jack Grove for alleged harassment of Arday. Grove first heard of this in February 2026 when an officer phoned him to tell him not to contact Arday again because it had affected his mental health.
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Grove’s alleged harassment offence was sending three emails to Arday asking for his response to plagiarism allegations made by, among others, an academic, Dave Harris, who was also the subject of a police complaint from Arday.
No charges followed, but as always in these cases, the process is the punishment. Grove’s legitimate journalistic inquiry was obstructed.
It seems those supposedly racist white power structures had weighed in behind Arday and protected him from scrutiny. Deconstruct that.
