The New York Times has finally noticed the academic credibility meltdown at one of the premier universities in the world, Cambridge: Ex-professor Jason Arday, a plagiarist and fabulist who rocketed up the academic ladder, enabled by gullible or perhaps intimidated fellow scholars, aided by lawyerly muscle and even Scotland Yard to keep doubters quiet.
Yet the Times article saved its harshest words for Arday’s exposers, smearing a scholar with the effrontery to challenge Arday’s ludicrous C.V. as “racist.”
The online headline deck: “Questions Mount Over a Star Scholar’s Life and Career -- A knife-wielding masked man. A pig’s head outside his parents’ door. Running 30 marathons in 35 days. The Cambridge professor Jason Arday, accused of plagiarism, says he’s been through it all. Not everyone believes him.”
Reporters Jennifer Schuessler and Alexandra Alter treated Arday with the journalistic equivalent of raised eyebrows -- yet reserved their true hostility for a scholar who dared expose Arday’s plagiarism. As “philosopher of biology” Nathan Cofnas wrote on X: “The only person explicitly smeared in the NY Times' write-up of the Arday affair is me.”
In 2023, when he was 37, Arday became the youngest Black professor at the University of Cambridge in its history. That appointment, trumpeted by Cambridge, inspired a spate of glowing media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic highlighting his dramatic life story, including his claims to have once run 30 marathons in 35 days to raise millions of British pounds for charity.
Arday has also told the press that his academic successes brought darker attention, including the delivery of a severed pig’s head to his parents’ home and repeated visits to his office by a masked intruder, once while wielding a knife.
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Concerns about some of Arday’s work had circulated quietly in scholarly circles since the appointment at Cambridge catapulted him to academic celebrity. But they exploded into public view late last month, after a scholar known for racist views about intelligence published a lengthy article in his newsletter questioning parts of Arday’s remarkable personal story and leveling extensive charges of plagiarism against him.
You can judge those “racist” views for yourself, which the Times linked to as evidence: an academic paper published in 2019 titled “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry.”
But over the weekend, as questions about his work and personal story continued to mount, a different debate emerged. Is Arday a victim of a campaign to discredit Black scholars? A fabulist whose tales of extreme adversity the academic establishment deemed too good to check? Or both?
After treating the noticing of fraud by Arday as possibly racist, the story's middle section politely provided the damning details. Arday was given plenty of room to defend himself by crying racism again, whining that “There is a well-documented playbook for discrediting Black academics in high-profile positions, and it’s been used to devastating effect in the U.S. and now with me in the U.K.”
The initial public charges made against Arday last month came from Nathan Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium who had previously been disciplined during his time as a fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, following an outcry over a 2024 blog post in which he argued that in a meritocracy, the number of Black professors at Harvard University “would approach zero percent.”….
In his newsletter, Cofnas published dozens of excerpts from Arday’s 2015 Ph.D. dissertation that had been flagged by plagiarism detection software, presenting them side by side with passages from a 2009 dissertation by another scholar. The passages from Arday’s dissertation appeared to copy verbatim, or only lightly paraphrase, the other scholar’s work.
Arday’s work on “race, education, neurodiversity and mental health,” even the non-plagiarized bits, read as ridiculous, his writing style punishingly abstruse even by the standards of modern-day academia.
And over the weekend, British news outlets, including some that previously ran admiring coverage of Arday, raised fresh questions about possible anomalies in his published work and unsupported elements of his personal story, including his claims about the pig’s head and the masked intruder.
Also racist? Conservatives having "weaponized" academic plagiarism by black scholars, including that committed by former Harvard president Claudine Gay.
At the time, some observers saw a targeted effort to discredit the work of Black scholars, particularly those whose work focused on race and diversity.
