And for those whose belief in meritocracy is often wilfully colour blind. On the other hand, it was a moment for serious reflection for genuine anti-racists.
Last Wednesday, Jason Arday, the “youngest black professor at Cambridge University” resigned from his post as Professor of Sociology of Education after a welter of allegations concerning his academic credentials including plagiarism in the course of acquiring his PhD thesis at Liverpool John Moores University and his backstory in which he had supposedly learned to speak at age 11, and to read and write at age 18, having been diagnosed with global developmental delay and autistic spectrum disorder as a child.
None of these disadvantages were to stand in the way of his appointment to that prestigious Cambridge post at 37. As well as the deconstruction of his academic credential, Jason Arday’s fantastical claims about his sporting achievements including that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days helping to raise £5m for charities over a twenty-year period and that he had played football for Crystal Palace as an under-18 (he actually turned out for Lewisham Borough in the Southern Counties East Division One – near the bottom of English non-league pyramid)[1]. As is inevitable on these occasions, this saga generated a quotidian of online and offline abuse towards the central character; “I told you so” triumphalism about the conservative media and academia and yet another culture war for respective combatants to engage in.
A hint of the looming storm ahead when Jason Arday delivered a talk entitled Wanted Dead or Alive: The Playbook at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year. It is unusual, to say the least, for such political polemics to be sounded at academic events such as these as they are usually occasions where academics discuss their work and possible breakthroughs. The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history described the MO of the playbook to his audience of academic peers.
In order to bring down some of the stellar names in US academia; conservative “activists” were trawling through the work of black academics; looking for any scraps of scholarly infractions to weaponise against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their works that appeared similar to work in existing papers. Errors duly identified would trigger pile-ons by right-wing media and political figures on universities to pressurise them to sever ties with the offending academic. High profile figures such as Claudine Gray, the first African American woman to become president of Harvard, fell victim to this blitzkrieg with her being forced to resign over plagiarism allegations. Other academics were forced to become passive spectators to the trashing of their work and some even committed suicide after being hounded out of their positions. But Arday warned that these tactics were being imported into the UK to deal similar fates to its high-profile black academics. He called for his peers to defend him from “the cancer that we need to eradicate from academia.”[2]
As if on cue, at the end of July 2026, the Telegraph reported that analysis had found that more than 100 passages in his PhD resembled another thesis by Paula Zwozdfiak-Myers, a student at Brunel University, published six years earlier. This followed two denouncements of Arday’s work by two academics with controversial views on race which for some anti-racists served as confirmation of the playbook narrative that Arday had expounded on at the British Sociological Association. The first was Nathan Cofnas, a self-styled “race realist” sacked by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after he suggested in a blogpost that, in a meritocracy, there would be “close to zero” black professors” at Harvard, who claimed in a Substack post that he had put Arday’s PhD through plagiarism detection software, which found that “many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source” (A disciplinary investigation into his blogpost about black academics concluded that Cofnas was not guilty of “discrimination or harassment” and that his views, “while seen by many as offensive, did not breach the law and did not contravene university regulations designed to uphold free speech.” He now works at Ghent University in Belgium).[3]
The second race-controversial critic of Arday was Dr David Harris, a professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, who had previously written to Cambridge with claims about Arday’s work. Harris had been stripped of his professor emeritus title after he wrote a post about critical race theory that was deemed “controversial” by colleagues, but it was reinstated this year. After Harris’s earlier queries about Arday’s work, two corrections were made to papers released in 2018 and 2020.[4]
The fact that his critics held so controversial views on race appeared to lead to a doubling down of support for Arday from those at the opposite end of the academic and political spectrum. Cambridge called the plagiarism claims a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility.” An open letter in support of Arday, signed by the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, (never one to pass up an opportunity to burnish his “woke” credentials regardless of the possible electoral and reputational impacts on his party) and the prominent black studies academic Kehinde Andrews, argued there was “an orchestrated and grim effort to delegitimise a brilliant, young working-class academic for the sin of being successful while Black”.[5] An open letter from the Good Law Project, signed by prominent public figures, denounced the allegations as “entirely false”, a “smear campaign” to “undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.”[6]
But yet, despite John Moores University’s rebuttal of the plagiarism allegations concerning him, more troubling evidence emerged about Arday’s scholarly attributes and achievement including his claims to have held a string of prestigious visiting fellowships and professorships at other universities. The website for Jesus College, where Arday was a fellow, stated that he had been a visiting professor at the Ohio State University and the University of Glasgow which both institutions have denied. This biography also stated that Arday was still an “honorary professor at Durham University in the Department of Sociology” where he had previously worked. The university told the Daily Mail that he no longer held any role there. He has also claimed to have completed a master’s degree in psychodynamic practices at Birkbeck, University of London which, according to enquiries by the Guardian has no record of any student named Jason Arday having studied there. He has claimed to have published a book with Palgrave Macmillan but while this publisher have confirmed that they took a proposal from Arday, the book was never published.[7]
And the suspicions about his false representations of his work did not go away. Prominent academics of colour, including one who has worked in the area of race and education for decades, who have spoken to the Guardian on conditions of anonymity, have agreed that the claims of plagiarism were legitimate. John Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex, asserts: “Having seen the evidence, it triangulates and there is, in my judgment, a case to answer here”.[8]
And so Cambridge’s DEI icon resigned and a full inquiry into the circumstances of Jason Arday’s appointment and his academic credentials has commenced.
As if on cue, at the end of July 2026, the Telegraph reported that analysis had found that more than 100 passages in his PhD resembled another thesis by Paula Zwozdfiak-Myers, a student at Brunel University, published six years earlier. This followed two denouncements of Arday’s work by two academics with controversial views on race which for some anti-racists served as confirmation of the playbook narrative that Arday had expounded on at the British Sociological Association. The first was Nathan Cofnas, a self-styled “race realist” sacked by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after he suggested in a blogpost that, in a meritocracy, there would be “close to zero” black professors” at Harvard, who claimed in a Substack post that he had put Arday’s PhD through plagiarism detection software, which found that “many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source” (A disciplinary investigation into his blogpost about black academics concluded that Cofnas was not guilty of “discrimination or harassment” and that his views, “while seen by many as offensive, did not breach the law and did not contravene university regulations designed to uphold free speech.” He now works at Ghent University in Belgium).[3]
The second race-controversial critic of Arday was Dr David Harris, a professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, who had previously written to Cambridge with claims about Arday’s work. Harris had been stripped of his professor emeritus title after he wrote a post about critical race theory that was deemed “controversial” by colleagues, but it was reinstated this year. After Harris’s earlier queries about Arday’s work, two corrections were made to papers released in 2018 and 2020.[4]
The fact that his critics held so controversial views on race appeared to lead to a doubling down of support for Arday from those at the opposite end of the academic and political spectrum. Cambridge called the plagiarism claims a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility.” An open letter in support of Arday, signed by the Green Party leader, Zack Polanski, (never one to pass up an opportunity to burnish his “woke” credentials regardless of the possible electoral and reputational impacts on his party) and the prominent black studies academic Kehinde Andrews, argued there was “an orchestrated and grim effort to delegitimise a brilliant, young working-class academic for the sin of being successful while Black”.[5] An open letter from the Good Law Project, signed by prominent public figures, denounced the allegations as “entirely false”, a “smear campaign” to “undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.”[6]
But yet, despite John Moores University’s rebuttal of the plagiarism allegations concerning him, more troubling evidence emerged about Arday’s scholarly attributes and achievement including his claims to have held a string of prestigious visiting fellowships and professorships at other universities. The website for Jesus College, where Arday was a fellow, stated that he had been a visiting professor at the Ohio State University and the University of Glasgow which both institutions have denied. This biography also stated that Arday was still an “honorary professor at Durham University in the Department of Sociology” where he had previously worked. The university told the Daily Mail that he no longer held any role there. He has also claimed to have completed a master’s degree in psychodynamic practices at Birkbeck, University of London which, according to enquiries by the Guardian has no record of any student named Jason Arday having studied there. He has claimed to have published a book with Palgrave Macmillan but while this publisher have confirmed that they took a proposal from Arday, the book was never published.[7]
And the suspicions about his false representations of his work did not go away. Prominent academics of colour, including one who has worked in the area of race and education for decades, who have spoken to the Guardian on conditions of anonymity, have agreed that the claims of plagiarism were legitimate. John Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex, asserts: “Having seen the evidence, it triangulates and there is, in my judgment, a case to answer here”.[8]
And so Cambridge’s DEI icon resigned and a full inquiry into the circumstances of Jason Arday’s appointment and his academic credentials has commenced.
But what has been and what will the likely fallout from the affair? For eminent black sociologist Paul Gilroy and other academics of colour, the manner of Arday’s appointment and the divisions around it, will have a chilling effect on blacks and other ethnic minorities in academe to come. For Gilroy, the
unthinking culture warriors who have supported Jason Arday unconditionally share responsibility with his racist critics for making life harder for black academics and dragging UK higher education deeper into the mire . . . (emphasising that) . . . reckoning with [Arday] and his impact-chasing enablers should not be allowed to obscure the vicious, irrational cuts to humanities that are wrecking UK universities.[9]
For Jason Okundaye, the “inspiring story” media circus around Arday’s appointment and the framing of his story as the “youngest black ever” asterisked by a tale of hardship has left the field wide open to the right to frame criticism of DEI on its own terms rather than a genuinely progressive critique of institutional diversity practices – one capable of examining how for many organisations and corporations symbolic or tokenistic representation has been a substitute for deeper reform. For, in his view, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Arday was treated as a mascot rather than a scholar, an expedient gesture for an institution frequently found wanting over its record on race in matriculation records such as in the Okundaye’s 2015 cohort in which there were only 15 black males out of 3,449 students; single-figure black academics (which is still the case); allegations of institutional racism.
The lesson of the Jason Arday scandal is that the left must advocate for diversity not tokenism, the celebration of excellent BME and other minority scholarship without the iconography of exceptionalism or celebrity academic. It does not entail taking on trust the entreaties of someone who alleges a racist campaign of intimidation including a severed pig’s head, a masked man wielding a knife and bullets in the post on the reasoning that “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me” as Jason Arday responded to the Guardian after their queries found they were either non-existent or could not be verified.[10]
As is often the case with disability and neurodiversity, the story of the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history was framed as a triumph over adversity. However such heroic narratives prioritise the individual story of amazing success over the struggle for equality and justice by the community of group from which they have. Black, disabled, neurodiverse or any other minoritised excellence deso not have to be redemption stories to be coherent or empowering.
The Jason Arday affair can be seen as another deleterious example of imported US style, tick box, institutional feel-good DEI culture whose outworkings have disastrous consequences for societal harmony as well as the advancement of genuine equality for BME and other marginalised groups as the Henry Novak case showed in policing. To counteract the “DEI hires”, surrender of academia to “wokeness” and “bogus” disciplines like sociology jibes from the right means not just acknowledging plagiarism and fraud where it is found even among black academics but also attacking the falsity, tokenism and blackwashing of corporate wokeness. It means also resistance to the self-appointed guardians of woke orthodoxy in parts of the left – – the dictatorship of the woketariat as Anthony McIntyre has christened them.
References
[1] Lanre Bakare, 2026. Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head. New claims surround a star Cambridge professor. The Guardian. 3-August.pp.6-8
[2] Ibid, p.6
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid, p.7
[6] Kenan Malik, 2026. The racism black academics face isn’t helped by leaping to Jason Ardat’s defence. The Observer Forum 9 August. p.25
[7] Lanre Bakare, 2026. Jobs, sport and charity. Long list of Arday’s claims now being scrutinised. The Guardian. 7 August. pp.12-13
[8] Bakare, 3 August op cit p.7
[9] Chris Osuh. 2026. Jason Arday. Scandal has a chilling effect on black lecturers. The Guardian. 8 August 2026 p.5
[10] Jason Okundaye, 2026. The right made DEI a weapon and the left just let it happen. The Guardian Opinion. 6 August. pp.1-2
As is often the case with disability and neurodiversity, the story of the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history was framed as a triumph over adversity. However such heroic narratives prioritise the individual story of amazing success over the struggle for equality and justice by the community of group from which they have. Black, disabled, neurodiverse or any other minoritised excellence deso not have to be redemption stories to be coherent or empowering.
The Jason Arday affair can be seen as another deleterious example of imported US style, tick box, institutional feel-good DEI culture whose outworkings have disastrous consequences for societal harmony as well as the advancement of genuine equality for BME and other marginalised groups as the Henry Novak case showed in policing. To counteract the “DEI hires”, surrender of academia to “wokeness” and “bogus” disciplines like sociology jibes from the right means not just acknowledging plagiarism and fraud where it is found even among black academics but also attacking the falsity, tokenism and blackwashing of corporate wokeness. It means also resistance to the self-appointed guardians of woke orthodoxy in parts of the left – – the dictatorship of the woketariat as Anthony McIntyre has christened them.
References
[1] Lanre Bakare, 2026. Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head. New claims surround a star Cambridge professor. The Guardian. 3-August.pp.6-8
[2] Ibid, p.6
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid, p.7
[6] Kenan Malik, 2026. The racism black academics face isn’t helped by leaping to Jason Ardat’s defence. The Observer Forum 9 August. p.25
[7] Lanre Bakare, 2026. Jobs, sport and charity. Long list of Arday’s claims now being scrutinised. The Guardian. 7 August. pp.12-13
[8] Bakare, 3 August op cit p.7
[9] Chris Osuh. 2026. Jason Arday. Scandal has a chilling effect on black lecturers. The Guardian. 8 August 2026 p.5
[10] Jason Okundaye, 2026. The right made DEI a weapon and the left just let it happen. The Guardian Opinion. 6 August. pp.1-2
⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.
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