No Hollywood scriptwriter would have dared pen such an outrageously unlikely plot. A boy of immigrant parents raised on a south London council estate, who couldn’t speak, read or write for most of his childhood, overcomes such astonishing odds to become, at 37, the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge.
Ever since, life’s glittering prizes in the shape of honorary degrees and academic accolades have cascaded down on Jason Arday along with lavish and high-minded praise.
Yet this week, a fellow don has pulled the rug from under those achievements in an excoriating assassination of Arday’s work and character – more of which later.
Professor Arday, a sociologist who was diagnosed with a form of autism spectrum disorder at the age of three, was – to Cambridge’s pro- vice-chancellor – ‘an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education’.
The Bookseller magazine purred approvingly of his appointment, noting that he was ‘one of the youngest academics ever appointed to a professorial chair in Oxbridge’s almost 1,000-year history’.
And it is not just academia that has heaped blandishments on a figure career advisers predicted would spend his adult life in assisted living and require life-long support.
In the summer of 2023, he was named as a judge on the televised Pride Of Britain awards.
And that Christmas, he was chosen as one of the prestigious guest editors of Radio 4’s Today programme along with Nasa chief Nicola Fox, best-selling author Hanif Kureishi and Andrew Malkinson, the British man wrongfully jailed for 17 years for rape.
Jason Arday (pictured) was diagnosed with a form of autism spectrum disorder at the age of three but went on to became the youngest ever black professor at the University of Cambridge
But the 41-year-old’s CV boasts far more achievements and personal milestones: a torchbearer for the 2012 London Olympics, he has also claimed to have raised over £5.5million for more than 70 charities – a huge amount for someone who is not a household name.
He has also led a homeless drive across London, setting up soup kitchens and mobile washing facilities for rough sleepers. All very impressive, especially for someone who, as a ‘non-verbal’ child, was written off by experts.
But the accomplishments don’t stop with philanthropy. In 2010 he said he ran 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days, a feat of considerable endeavour, let alone stamina, which he explained thus: ‘If you have the will, it will always supersede skill.’
Next month there will doubtless be more extravagant compliments when his autobiography, Great And Unfortunate Things is published by Simon & Schuster.
‘That oft-used word ‘inspirational’ feels wholly inadequate to describe his incredible story of grit and resilience,’ gushed the aforementioned Bookseller, of the upcoming memoir.
Meanwhile Professor Arday’s UK editor Kris Doyle drooled: ‘During the editorial process, I laughed and cried many times at this extraordinary book.
‘I can promise you’ve never read a story like this… Jason’s a humble man, but he’s got a generous heart and he’s a tireless advocate for harnessing everyone’s unique potential.
‘This book is going to start some much-needed conversations and resonate with a lot of people.’
One such conversation, however, has already started. For it claims that despite his laudable struggles – Jason Arday says he communicated with his three siblings and parents via sign language until he began to speak at the age of 11 – questions should now be asked about his academic work, and in particular his 2015 thesis for his Doctor of Philosophy degree, which he undertook at Liverpool John Moores University.
A fierce debate has erupted online, which has seen Professor Arday accused of being ‘a plagiarist and a fabulist’.
These are serious and consequential allegations, and it is fair to say they have been strenuously denied.
Nonetheless, the claims have also triggered questions about other aspects of Professor Arday’s life.
One was his assertion in an interview in 2023 with The Guardian newspaper – one of his biggest cheerleaders – that ‘he has barely slept over the past 15 years’ because he was ‘working through most nights, often on his academic and charity work, but sometimes just to make ends meet’.
Students punt boats on the River Cam as it flows past Cambridge University’s King’s College
All the more remarkable, you might think, when you consider that period must have included his endurance marathon running.
To that end, last night it emerged that Arday’s profile page at Anglia Ruskin University appears to have been quietly edited. On February 28, the page seemingly claimed he had run ‘600 miles in six days for charity’. By yesterday, this had been amended to achieving the same distance ‘in 12 days’.
As if pre-empting the criticism coming his way, Arday writes in his book that ‘the suggestion that I somehow wasn’t worthy of my success would be levied against me time and again’.
‘To this day,’ he continues, ‘everything I do is scrutinised and challenged in a way that almost never happens to my white colleagues.’
But it is not the colour of his skin but the rigour of his academic work that is at the centre of a storm – that accusation of plagiarism.
Prior to this week the only public record of Arday’s alleged academic crime existed on the personal website of retired academic Dr Dave Harris, until recently Emeritus Professor of Leisure and Education at Plymouth Marjon University.
Among Dr Harris’s allegations, he includes an extraordinary correspondence between the pair. Having emailed Arday about discrepancies in his published work, the Cambridge professor replied: ‘Please do not email me again.
‘Should you have time to spare, I invite you to direct your resources elsewhere. Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.’
Even in the envious, backstabbing world of academia such a response has raised eyebrows.
But this week another figure entered the fray and let off something of a scholarly timebomb. It came from Nathan Cofnas, a free speech advocate who was sacked by Emmanuel, a Cambridge college, last year after Substack posts for which he was accused of ‘abhorrent racism’ and discriminating against black students.
Varsity, Cambridge’s oldest student newspaper, described him as ‘a crackpot biologist and a racist’. The complaints against him, however, were later dismissed.
Now, in a lengthy post, Cofnas – based these days at Ghent University in Belgium – says the story of Jason Arday’s ‘metamorphosis from arguably the most disadvantaged person in the UK to elite scholar-athlete-philanthropist would make even Walt Disney raise an eyebrow’.
Trotting through Arday’s CV, he details how the sociologist, whose parents are from Ghana, ‘rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education and inequality’.
He adds admiringly: ‘In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021).
Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.’
(Indeed, in that gushing Bookseller profile, it relates how Arday once wrote a set of personal goals on a bedroom wall at his parents’ Clapham home. One of them read: ‘One day I will work at Oxford or Cambridge.’)
Quoting Arday himself, Cofnas writes: ‘Wouldn’t it be the most ridiculous story ever told, if the boy who couldn’t read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he’s 30?’
To which Cofnas adds this crucial rider: ‘But how much of ‘the most ridiculous story ever told’ is true?’
One aspect that irks the Chicago-born Cofnas is that Arday left school with two GCSEs, in physical education and textiles. Despite being vocational subjects, he points out, these qualifications ‘require literacy’.Cambridge’s pro- vice-chancellor – ‘an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education’.
Cambridge University’s pro- vice-chancellor said Arday was ‘an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education’
Acknowledging that he may have received ‘special arrangements’, he concedes that Arday may have been permitted to sit the exams with a helper or ‘scribe’.
All the same, Cofnas adds: ‘A write-up of his forthcoming memoir says that he ‘left secondary school with two GCSEs to his name, still barely able to read or write’, which may be backing away from his original story.’
But, as Cofnas admits, it is impossible to prove or disprove Arday’s biographical claims without more evidence. So, he directs his forensic attention to questions about his scholarship.
And it is the professor’s dissertation that he especially scrutinises, claiming: ‘Arday routinely passes off the words and ideas of others as his own. If one removes the apparently plagiarised material from his record, there is little or no real scholarship.’
In an attempt to prove his point, Nathan Cofnas ran the 2015 thesis of Arday – now Professor of Sociology of Education – through Copyleaks, online plagiarism-detection software.
It found striking similarities between his paper on peer-mentoring among student teachers with a 2009 dissertation submitted by another educator, one Paula Zwozdiak-Myers.
Arday, claims Cofnas, ‘relies heavily’ on the ‘ideas and arguments’ of Zwozdiak-Myers, an academic at Brunel University, Middlesex.
‘Many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source.’ In his blog he lists examples, of which there are many, of verbatim copying, stylistic changes and paraphrasing.
The similarities start from the very beginning. An identical paragraph in both theses reads as follows: ‘Student teachers are unique individuals and differ in their personal biographies and prior experiences, disposition to enquiry, cognitive and perceptive abilities, communication, interpersonal skills, adaptability, values and belief systems.’
He highlights dozens of paragraphs as examples of ‘copying’, including using identical references from other peer-related studies.
He says Arday also reproduces Zwozdiak-Myers’s grammar mistakes, such as an unnecessary apostrophe in the plural ‘teachers’.
Which brings us back to the criticism of Dave Harris, an expert and published author on ‘critical race theory’, the deeply divisive ideology that sees blackness as victimhood and whiteness as oppression and which has taken root in so many British educational establishments, including Cambridge.
Three years ago, he wrote to Professor Arday about some of his papers, admitting to ‘confusion’ over data he provides.
He was particularly struck by a 2022 paper about mental health among students in which Arday quotes a 38-year-old Latin-American academic talking about her struggles learning English.
According to Dr Harris, she uses many of the same words attributed to an Asian undergraduate he quotes in a 2018 study. Both talk about their fear of being ‘heavily medicated’.
Elsewhere, Dr Harris notes ‘several unorthodox spelling and grammatical constructions’, such as ‘boarder’ for ‘border’ and ‘curricula’ for ‘curricular’.
He acknowledges that some of these inconsistencies can arise through speech recognition software, but suggests Arday has been ‘let down badly’ by his peer referees who failed to pick them up.
After having these ‘oddities’ pointed out, several journal administrators issued corrections to some of Arday’s material.
The author himself was less impressed. In an email to Dr Harris, he wrote: ‘Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism, you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes and then reporting them to various institutions.
‘I have no problem with constructive criticism, but the tone of your emails are unkind and hostile.’
Referring to himself as a ‘black, autistic man with global development delay and severe dyslexia’, he adds: ‘You are a monument to the fact we live in a society where grammar is valued above equity.
‘If only all academics were as diligent in their fight for equality as you have been in attending to my spelling.’
For its part, the University of Cambridge strongly defends Arday, too, amid accusations that it hired him ‘explicitly to advance the cause of racial diversity’.
The institution has long been at the forefront of the so-called culture wars involving free speech and wokeism and it is alleged the university has known about the claims surrounding Arday for more than a year.
A spokesperson for the university told me: ‘Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop.
‘Allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications have been thoroughly investigated by the relevant institution and the journals in question. Professor Arday has been cleared by those investigations of any wrongdoing.’
Jason Arday was approached for comment.
All in all, the claims should greatly add to the buzz around the professor’s new book.
And who knows, perhaps there will be a film in it after all.
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