Cambridge Has Itself to Blame for the Jason Arday Debacle

National Review Online

Thursday, August 06, 2026

 

Jason Arday is now Cambridge University’s youngest former black professor.

 

The media and academic sensation made a name for himself becoming a Cambridge professor at the astonishing age of 37 in 2023 — and that may be the only verifiably true claim about his life. Recent investigations have exposed serious flaws in his academic work, falsified credentials on his résumé, and, almost certainly, bogus achievements in his personal life.

 

Much of what he presents as his life story would make Walter Mitty blush, and it finally caught up to him when he was forced to resign after Cambridge — belatedly and under pressure — finally announced an investigation of its faux prodigy.

 

Arday’s worst offense was repeat plagiarism — of both words and data.

 

His doctoral dissertation, for instance, had nearly 200 sentences that were identical or highly similar to the work of a student at another institution. Despite stealing material from others, his dissertation was filled with grammatical errors and typos — including in the title.

 

Other published articles by Arday have required extensive revision. For example, the journal Social Sciences updated Arday’s 2018 article “Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?” and issued an editor’s note saying that the piece had been revised and citations had been added so that “it is clear where ideas were adapted from past research.” In other words, the journal tried to reframe plagiarism as just a matter of insufficient citations.

 

Arday defended his work, explaining to the media that he relied on mimicry to make sense of information because he is autistic. Yet, he worked furiously to silence coverage of his misconduct. Times Higher Education had been researching an article in 2025 related to Arday’s plagiarism, but it was killed after Arday hired a leading defamation firm to warn off the publication, according to Retraction Watch.

 

Arday filed a harassment complaint to the police against the Times Higher Education reporter, who had emailed questions to Arday; the Metropolitan Police spent four months investigating the journalist, surely one of the dumbest police investigations ever undertaken. Arday reported at least one other person who identified the plagiarism to the police.

 

Even if Arday did not commit any instances of plagiarism, his academic work contained other flaws that are either deliberate research misconduct or extreme carelessness — both of which should have disqualified him from his faculty position. Retraction Watch notes that in one study, a participant is described as black on one page, Asian on another page, and mixed heritage on another page.

 

For the article “Understanding Race and Educational Leadership in Higher Education: Exploring the Black and Ethnic Minority (BME) Experience,” which was published by the journal Management in Education in 2018, he conducted interviews with just three people.

 

Like his purported “scholarship,” Arday’s résumé was filled with dubious claims, some of which have been proven entirely false. Abigail Anthony reported for us on Tuesday that Arday’s official faculty website states that he is a visiting professor at Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion — but Ohio State’s DEI office shuttered in 2025, and the school said he was never an employee.

 

His biographical claims were equally dubious. He said he helped raise millions of dollars for charity, accomplished in part by running 300 miles in three days, 600 miles across six days, and 30 marathons in 35 days — the last nine of which he claimed to have completed with a broken leg. These feats, if real, would have made him one of the most exceptional runners on the planet.

 

Arday said he assisted with “installing water points” in South America and West Africa through the international nonprofit WaterAid, but the organization does not send volunteers abroad.

 

In 2021, Arday claimed he had completed his doctoral work with a brain tumor, which he says was removed just two weeks before his oral defense. Arday says he then suffered a stroke that required him to relearn the material because of memory loss. But that type of surgery usually requires a much longer recovery time, and universities are generally willing to make accommodations (such as pushing back an exam) in circumstances like these.

 

His most notable claims were that he was diagnosed with autism at age three, was nonverbal until age eleven, and illiterate — struggling to even spell his own name — until age 18. (Other articles say he was deaf in one ear and used sign language to communicate until age eleven.) But that’s a highly unusual trajectory for language acquisition, and it is hard to explain how he passed two secondary school exams (normally taken before age 18 in the United Kingdom) if he couldn’t read or write.

 

And on and on.

 

Little of this passed the laugh test, and some of it was indeed laugh-out-loud funny. It didn’t take much to realize we were probably dealing with the Jussie Smollett of British higher education.

 

Nevertheless, academics, high-profile politicians, the publisher of his forthcoming memoir, and — until just yesterday — the University of Cambridge stood by Arday. The university denounced the “vile” campaign against him. The Good Law Project, a nonprofit in the United Kingdom, issued a statement that was signed by University of Cambridge affiliates, members of Parliament, leaders of the Green Party, and others, claiming that racism was behind the questions about Arday’s truthfulness.

 

This was rank intellectual corruption. There was no justification for keeping a supposed researcher whose research is largely, if not wholly, bogus. Even if Arday was scrupulously honest, he never should have been hired as a professor, let alone at such an elite institution. His “studies,” to the extent they can be described as such, did nothing to advance the production and dissemination of knowledge. Arday manufactured data and arguments to support the preconceived notion that everything is racist all the time.

 

Ultimately, Arday was responding to incentives created by the DEI-obsessed culture that abandoned meritocratic standards to achieve enhanced racial diversity and treated questioning a minority’s qualifications as an unforgivable “microaggression.”

 

He played the game and got away with it for a long time, until he encountered a little bit of real scrutiny. His resignation letter was characteristically clichéd and self-pitying, and admitted no wrongdoing. But the most blameworthy party was the University of Cambridge, one of the oldest, most prestigious universities in the world, which was willing to look the other way when it came to Arday’s manifest inadequacies and deceptions for DEI reasons.

 

This travesty should be long remembered and serve as a warning to other academic institutions that have distorted their own judgment and standards for the same reasons.