A TikToker who says he attended the same primary school as Professor Jason Arday has claimed the academic was not mute until he was 11 but would talk ‘all the time’.
Professor Arday, 41, this week resigned from the University of Cambridge following a storm of plagiarism allegations and claims he has embellished details of his personal life and achievements.
The university has launched an investigation following the furore, which has seen countless details of his biography – including his claims of charity fundraising and roles he has held at academic institutions – questioned.
Professor Arday has often told of his journey to academia after overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds – such as being diagnosed with autism and global development delay as a youngster, being non-verbal until he was 11 and illiterate until 18.
But now a former classmate appears to have disputed the most often repeated details of his struggles, claiming that far from being mute, Professor Arday was actually a ‘chatty patty’.
The TikToker, who goes by the moniker ‘strictlyvibeswithga’, said he attended Heathbrook Primary School in Lambeth in the year below him and socialised with him at Sunday School and associated clubs.
Taking to the social media platform this week, he alleged: ‘I knew it was a joke thing and I knew it was fraud, man said he was a mute.
‘What do you mean bro? I went school with you, I was in primary school with you.’
Professor Jason Arday (pictured) resigned from his role at the University of Cambridge this week after it opened an investigation following claims about his academic and personal life
A TikToker who says he attended the same primary school as Professor Jason Arday has claimed the academic was not mute until he was 11 but would talk ‘all the time’
Heathbrook Primary School previously congratulated Professor Arday on his appointment to Cambridge
He went on to claim Professor Arday had been a ‘class clown’ and a ‘chatty patty all the time’, adding: ‘It’s bait. You should have known it was going to be peak for you bruv, you should have known they were going to dig up.’
In a second video, he continued: ‘The brother [Professor Arday] was chatting, the brother was chatting all the time. And I didn’t just go school with him, I went Sunday school with him as well.’
Speaking to the Daily Mail, he added: ‘I would just stress I feel I’m making light of the situation and I’m playful [but] this is actually serious and people regardless of who they are should not be allowed take liberties.’
Representatives for Professor Arday have been contacted for comment.
After Professor Arday’s appointment as Cambridge’s youngest black professor aged just 37 in 2023, Heathbrook Primary School publicly congratulated him.
A spokesman said: ‘Thrilled to see one of our ex-pupils Jason Arday become the youngest ever black professor at Cambridge.
‘We share his aim to inspire others from disadvantaged and under-represented backgrounds’.
It’s understood that both Jason and his older brother attended Heathbrook, in Lambeth, London, and lived on the same estate as the TikToker.
It comes after Cambridge – and now Glasgow – launched an investigation following allegations of plagiarism by Professor Arday, who quit this week as Cambridge’s youngest black professor over the ‘personal cost’ of the furore.
He was accused of using passages of another academic’s work in his 2015 PhD thesis without proper credit.
An investigation by Liverpool John Moores University cleared him of plagiarism, but the allegations surfaced in recent weeks and put Professor Arday under the spotlight.
The anecdotes appeared in a 2024 proposal for Great and Unfortunate Things, which is due to be published next week, but not in the final version (pictured: Professor Jason Arday)
Since then, other claims about his life have been called into question, including around his superhuman fundraising feats which he claimed in various talks saw him raise £5.5million for charity.
Professor Arday said as part of this effort he had run 600 miles in six days – a feat that would have been a near-world record-breaking achievement.
He later admitted this was actually undertaken in 12 days, and that the £5.5million was raised by multiple syndicates of more than 100 people. He could not name any of these contributors, Professor Arday said, because they had all signed non-disclosure agreements.
At least three universities have also disputed roles he claimed in his Cambridge biography on the Jesus College website.
It stated Professor Arday ‘is a Visiting Professor at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’ and at the ‘University of Glasgow in the School of Education’. Both denied he had ever held the roles.
The profile also described him as an ‘honorary professor at Durham University in the Department of Sociology’. Although Professor Arday previously held several roles at Durham, the Daily Mail has been told he no longer has any ‘formal’ position there, contradicting his online biography.
Elsewhere, claims the academic made in a book proposal for his upcoming memoir due to be published next week, have mysteriously changed in the final work.
In the proposal he claimed he had locked-in syndrome and testicular cancer, in addition to his previous detailing of a brain tumour, epilepsy and muteness.
In the proposal, Professor Arday recounted being struck by a car as a teenager and spending several months in a coma – whereas in the memoir he described simply finishing school and taking his exams at that time.
The proposal said he had locked-in syndrome during the coma, and witnessed doctors telling his parents that he would never recover and should be taken off life support ‘as an act of mercy’.
It read: ‘As I will describe to readers in the book, these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.’
It added he awoke ‘miraculously’ from the coma, and spent a year ‘relearning everything—how to walk, to talk’.
The proposal also referred to a bout of testicular cancer, rather than the two brain tumours described in the final version of the memoir.
In an anecdote about a group of boys beating him up – an experience he says left him suffering with epilepsy – they were four years older in the proposal than in the book.
A suicide attempt was described in the proposal as happening before the pandemic – whereas in the memoir it happened during.
Today former students of Professor Arday at Cambridge have called for their grades to be reviewed after receiving lower than expected results.
They claimed supervision by him was ‘inadequate’, with some even reporting he told them they did not need it because they were so talented.
It emerged this week that when Times Higher Education magazine began investigating the academic’s record, Professor Arday made a complaint to the police, resulting in officers calling the journalist involved.
On Thursday, Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police commissioner, admitted the force ‘dropped the ball’ when it spent four months investigating the journalist.
The University of Glasgow has now said it will review its past appointment of Jason Arday as a professor following controversy over alleged plagiarism and claims made by the academic.
A spokesman said on Friday evening: ‘Jason Arday was employed as Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Glasgow, from January 2022 to March 2023.
‘He left the University to take up his role as Professorial Chair at the University of Cambridge.
‘The Principal has commissioned a review of the appointment with the aim of understanding all the facts and learning lessons for the future.’
Dozens of academics at the University of Cambridge have signed a letter calling for an independent inquiry into the processes around Mr Arday’s appointment.
In a statement earlier on Friday, Cambridge said: ‘As has been widely reported, Jason Arday has resigned from his post at the university with immediate effect.
‘Regardless of this, and for clarification, the university will continue to investigate the circumstances around Jason Arday’s appointment and tenure. The findings will feed into a review of the process for the appointment of senior academic roles.
‘In addition, and as previously stated, the university’s Research Policy Committee will review the misconduct in research policy.’
Professor Arday said in his open resignation letter that the ‘only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away’.
In the letter, addressed to colleagues and published on the Good Law Project’s website, he said: ‘This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge.
‘Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.
‘It is simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.’
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