If you do the work we do then being criticised by your enemies comes with the territory - indeed, it’s the most reliable sign of that work succeeding - but when your friends criticise you it’s worth taking note.
I’ve had a lot of respect for your social justice work but not in this instance. As a barrister, you should have said ‘no’ and reserved judgment until you were in full possession of the facts - or at least had a much clearer picture. Instead, like the signatories, you assumed the right wing media were being racist and Arday needed support and solidarity. This is exactly what the right hate about the ‘woke’ left and you’ve all played into their hands. It now seems to me that you're looking for ways to defend a position that, with hindsight, was poorly judged. I’m not on the right but the uncomfortable truth is that this whole, sorry affair has exposed fundamental issues with DEI, especially in HE. Hard lessons to be learned - regardless of your political beliefs.
Having left academia in 2024 after nearly 20 years it has been utterly clear to me what has happened here. Also given that the only two academics to be speaking publicly against Dr Arday are disgraced people who were fired from their jobs for biggoted views broughtbinto their work. I'm very relieved to see GLP supporting him and others who signed the letter. As a white person who worked in 3 institutions across my career, I never saw other white (particularly male) academics or students undermined and constantly challenged in the same way I did those of colour.
I don't question your personal experience but I do question your argument. Ultimately, the supposedly racist source of the allegations is irrelevant. The case has exposed fundamental flaws in DEI/HE that urgently need addressing.
Hope you're satisfied now your denial of institutional racism and complete misunderstanding of how DEI is meant to disrupt discrminatory systems and challenge supposed 'norms' whilst also - which may be the only area we may find agreement on - holding naive institutions accountable for the inevitable backlash by those who do not have lived experience of such matters (i.e. people like you that think DEI is the problem rather than systems) and being ready to defend choices and actions properly instead of crumble at the claims of self-declared bigots - has had maybe what you desired???
And rather than slating a minoritised ECR for what he did or did not do , may I respectfully suggest you access the work of academics of colour who have long critiqued the wrongful and baseless institutionalisation of EDI/DEI that leaves minoritised individualsvat risk: https://zeteouk.substack.com/p/the-jason-arday-affair-and-the-oprahfication?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=255bya start here but search for her books on the subjectnand others like her. The issue is not DEI or with this now dead academic, it's with the insitution.
I understand your anger but consider first that my brother committed suicide. I would never wish this of anyone. I was deeply saddened by Jason Arday's death. As I've argued elsewhere, there are many lessons to be drawn from this case, not least about what can go badly wrong with DEI, even though well-intentioned. For the record, I posted on Facebook a few days ago that 'I now believe Arday to have mental health issues so I will refrain from further criticism.' My focus has always been on the bigger picture. The trouble is, of course, that people see this through an ideological lens. As I also argued in the post, 'The culture wars between left and right leave little room for critical thinking'. Unlike most, I have read widely on this case, in pursuit of some semblance of truth. I will read the article you've shared with interest.
The issue here is one of hypocrisy and holding people to different standards. I am not in the room and therefore cannot state whether Arday chose to resign or was 'forced'. I was in HE at senior management level long enough to know how these things work. If you work in academic misconduct you will also be aware that certain student groups are reported more than others due to bias and subjectivity of markers - which also means that others types of students constantly fly under the radar. The notion of 'prestigious' institutions is well, messy at most as Russell Groups named themselves special and gatekept. Tell yourself every day how special you are and you and then everyone else believes it.
I am not in a position to comment on Arday's actions or record but I am in a position to comment on what I experienced over a 20yr career in an industry that functions under it's own rules and bares little relation to the rest of the working world. The social contract of HE worldwide is based upon gatekeeping, nepotism, classism and fakery. I witnessed numerous hardworking academics with amazing teaching skills and ideas get nowhere against the thick tall ivory walls built to keep them out. I witnessed just as many mediocre or downright ignorant individuals whose face, social status and connections allowed them to be successful in a pre-defined system - lie, plaigiarise, claim student's work as their own, be first author on papers they never contributed to, claim ideas that first came from others, pay people to ghost right papers, bulk up cvs for promotion, build funding records of millions with little actual output, deliver keynote after keynote and never teach a seminar, earlier years get senior lecturer or professor chairs simply because they've been there for a certain amount time, bully others, harrass students the list goes on.
Academics rarely celebrate anothers acheivements they prefer instead to attack and attempt to prove a person's worth is always to be questioned. They hold others to standards they can never maintain themselves.
In this feeding frenzy of media based opinions, noone is stopping to ask how he was doing in the position and what he was acheiving having gained a professor role at a highly regarded institutution. Noone is refering to the well documented and published research on the poor experiences of minoritized identities in academia, the endless careers of more privileged academics who get exposed but not struck off, they just get put on gardening leave, move to another institution or dept - such as those being interviewed on media platforms about this.
Utlimately, my comments are on expectations and standards within racist systems that hold people who are non-traditional to higher account than others; and it emboldens those with traditional privilege to use their personal discriminatory motives to go to extraordinary lengths to attack others.
Cambridge's mistake in all of this was not considering all of the above when deciding to award such a public profile to an early career academic and not having the conditions in place to protect him when it matters.
Two things can be true at the same time: we live in a racist society and DEI hasn't been working well to counter this. However, if you criticise DEI you're often assumed to be racist. I have no problem commenting on Jason Arday's misconduct - the evidence is plain to see. Whether it is mitigated by mental health issues or neurodivergence is another matter.
A pretty simple rule if you want to keep your credibility: don’t get involved in a fight when you don’t know all the facts. Your bristly and defensive post suggests you haven’t quite learned this lesson.
"....the Times Higher Education Supplement had been approached to run the story and decided not to"
This is not quite accurate and needs clarification. THE had investigated the story way before Cofnas published his blog. They were ready to run with it. Journalist Jack Grove was reported to the police and THE was threatened with legal action if they reported the findings of the investigation.
Sorry, I can only agree wholeheartedly with Steve Turnbull. I have a lot of time for your work — and consider myself on the left — but GLP should have approached the Arday affair far, far more carefully.
Arday is clearly a plagiarist and fantasist. Even without the — very extensive — plagiarism, his resume was thin and hardly warranted appointment to a Cambridge full professorship. By carelessly appointing him, then doubling down on denial until the facts became simply undeniable (instead of initiating an independent & rigorous investigation early on) Cambridge has done tremendous damage to academia & trust in science. That you — like the various letter-signers— waded in before being in command of the full facts has only compounded the wider social-political damage. Serious & seriously self-critical reflection is called for, not posthoc self-justification.
That Cofnas has some rather off the wall & even repugnant beliefs is neither here nor there, incidentally. Whistleblowers are often oddballs — often morally-dubious oddballs to boot. Allegations stand and fall on the facts, not on who makes them. Otherwise everything is just politics (a politics you and I are likely to lose, btw: that’s why this matters.)
"We also know that Dr Arday is profoundly neurodivergent. It’s not for me, as a non-expert, to talk about how that has contributed to his errors but I rather wish it had been properly addressed, by those with no axe to grind, in the reporting of this story"
I fully agree with you that this aspect of Dr Arday's story should be fully addressed (and by those with no axe to grind) but my reason, I suspect, is rather different from yours.
Firstly, we should clarify that 'neurodivergent' is not a clinical diagnosis; it is a description. As is 'profoundly neurodivergent'.
I am very interested in the subject of Dr Arday's childhood diagnoses. We have no independent verification of these, only Dr Arday's own statements on the matter. Of course, nobody is obliged to produce confidential medical records. However, certain inconsistencies and apparent anomalies in his descriptions do raise questions:
On several occasions (see his interview on Channel 4 with Krishnan Guru-Murthy as an example), he claims that his actual diagnosis at the time ("just before my third birthday) was Asperger's:
"..so, in old money, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome which is commonly now referred to as Autism". At the same time, he says, he was also diagnosed with "Global Development Delay".
This seems rather odd, since a formal diagnosis of "Asperger's" in 1988 would have been virtually impossible (it was not a recognised diagnosis) and, even after Asperger's was formalized in the 1990s (DSM-IV, 1994), the criteria explicitly excluded children with significant language delays. So this would not fit with Arday's description of being non-verbal.
In another video to be found on Instagram, Dr Arday speaks to the camera and explains "I have a form of Autism called Global Development Delay". It should hardly need saying that GDD is a temporary umbrella diagnosis used strictly for children under five years old and is not a form of Autism.
Then there are the descriptions of the speech therapy Dr Arday says he received from the age of three/four which range from "three hours a day, every day, from the age of three" (podcast with James O'Brien) to "four to five hours every day" to (in his new book) "multiple hours of speech therapy, three days a week, every week, for the best part of ten years". He states in his book that this was all funded by "the local council".
Again, these claims do appear to be rather incredible. The most basic research will confirm that in the late 1980s/early 90s (when there was a severe shortage of speech therapists), the chances of a child receiving any more than a 30-45 minute session once a week (probably only for a 4-6 week block), funded by the ILEA/NHS would have been almost impossible. Even for those with severe impairment.
Given that Dr Arday's descriptions of his Autism and his childhood struggles have been central to his story (and, indeed, something which you, Jolyon, are suggesting should be "addressed" in relation to plagiarism claims - as a mitigating factor?), I do think it is reasonable to ask Dr Arday if he can clarify the inconsistencies and apparent anomalies above. If only, to stop further questions and scrutiny.
The University’s announcement of his appointment seemed extremely keen to present the institution’s commitment to diversity and was pretty vague about his scholarship, and even without the subsequent issues it is indicative of a shallow approach to addressing inequality, including the pressure someone like Arday might be put under - https://news.educ.cam.ac.uk/230223-jason-arday
Thank you for this post. It’s obvious Arday is nothing more than the victim of a witch-hunt. One journalist harassed and threatened Arday to the extent where Arday was forced to involve the police.
Arday was also the victim of a violent crime - a deranged maniac broke into his office and menaced Arday by threateningly rattling a saber.
Again this is just an example of a racist witch-hunt, victimizing a young man whose only sin is caring too much and working too hard.
Would that be the intruder with the knife who somehow managed to evade CCTV and who Arday failed to report and warn his colleagues in the building about? Or the person who sent him the mysterious missing pig's head?
I’ve had a lot of respect for your social justice work but not in this instance. As a barrister, you should have said ‘no’ and reserved judgment until you were in full possession of the facts - or at least had a much clearer picture. Instead, like the signatories, you assumed the right wing media were being racist and Arday needed support and solidarity. This is exactly what the right hate about the ‘woke’ left and you’ve all played into their hands. It now seems to me that you're looking for ways to defend a position that, with hindsight, was poorly judged. I’m not on the right but the uncomfortable truth is that this whole, sorry affair has exposed fundamental issues with DEI, especially in HE. Hard lessons to be learned - regardless of your political beliefs.
Having left academia in 2024 after nearly 20 years it has been utterly clear to me what has happened here. Also given that the only two academics to be speaking publicly against Dr Arday are disgraced people who were fired from their jobs for biggoted views broughtbinto their work. I'm very relieved to see GLP supporting him and others who signed the letter. As a white person who worked in 3 institutions across my career, I never saw other white (particularly male) academics or students undermined and constantly challenged in the same way I did those of colour.
I don't question your personal experience but I do question your argument. Ultimately, the supposedly racist source of the allegations is irrelevant. The case has exposed fundamental flaws in DEI/HE that urgently need addressing.
Hope you're satisfied now your denial of institutional racism and complete misunderstanding of how DEI is meant to disrupt discrminatory systems and challenge supposed 'norms' whilst also - which may be the only area we may find agreement on - holding naive institutions accountable for the inevitable backlash by those who do not have lived experience of such matters (i.e. people like you that think DEI is the problem rather than systems) and being ready to defend choices and actions properly instead of crumble at the claims of self-declared bigots - has had maybe what you desired???
And rather than slating a minoritised ECR for what he did or did not do , may I respectfully suggest you access the work of academics of colour who have long critiqued the wrongful and baseless institutionalisation of EDI/DEI that leaves minoritised individualsvat risk: https://zeteouk.substack.com/p/the-jason-arday-affair-and-the-oprahfication?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=255bya start here but search for her books on the subjectnand others like her. The issue is not DEI or with this now dead academic, it's with the insitution.
I understand your anger but consider first that my brother committed suicide. I would never wish this of anyone. I was deeply saddened by Jason Arday's death. As I've argued elsewhere, there are many lessons to be drawn from this case, not least about what can go badly wrong with DEI, even though well-intentioned. For the record, I posted on Facebook a few days ago that 'I now believe Arday to have mental health issues so I will refrain from further criticism.' My focus has always been on the bigger picture. The trouble is, of course, that people see this through an ideological lens. As I also argued in the post, 'The culture wars between left and right leave little room for critical thinking'. Unlike most, I have read widely on this case, in pursuit of some semblance of truth. I will read the article you've shared with interest.
The issue here is one of hypocrisy and holding people to different standards. I am not in the room and therefore cannot state whether Arday chose to resign or was 'forced'. I was in HE at senior management level long enough to know how these things work. If you work in academic misconduct you will also be aware that certain student groups are reported more than others due to bias and subjectivity of markers - which also means that others types of students constantly fly under the radar. The notion of 'prestigious' institutions is well, messy at most as Russell Groups named themselves special and gatekept. Tell yourself every day how special you are and you and then everyone else believes it.
I am not in a position to comment on Arday's actions or record but I am in a position to comment on what I experienced over a 20yr career in an industry that functions under it's own rules and bares little relation to the rest of the working world. The social contract of HE worldwide is based upon gatekeeping, nepotism, classism and fakery. I witnessed numerous hardworking academics with amazing teaching skills and ideas get nowhere against the thick tall ivory walls built to keep them out. I witnessed just as many mediocre or downright ignorant individuals whose face, social status and connections allowed them to be successful in a pre-defined system - lie, plaigiarise, claim student's work as their own, be first author on papers they never contributed to, claim ideas that first came from others, pay people to ghost right papers, bulk up cvs for promotion, build funding records of millions with little actual output, deliver keynote after keynote and never teach a seminar, earlier years get senior lecturer or professor chairs simply because they've been there for a certain amount time, bully others, harrass students the list goes on.
Academics rarely celebrate anothers acheivements they prefer instead to attack and attempt to prove a person's worth is always to be questioned. They hold others to standards they can never maintain themselves.
In this feeding frenzy of media based opinions, noone is stopping to ask how he was doing in the position and what he was acheiving having gained a professor role at a highly regarded institutution. Noone is refering to the well documented and published research on the poor experiences of minoritized identities in academia, the endless careers of more privileged academics who get exposed but not struck off, they just get put on gardening leave, move to another institution or dept - such as those being interviewed on media platforms about this.
Utlimately, my comments are on expectations and standards within racist systems that hold people who are non-traditional to higher account than others; and it emboldens those with traditional privilege to use their personal discriminatory motives to go to extraordinary lengths to attack others.
Cambridge's mistake in all of this was not considering all of the above when deciding to award such a public profile to an early career academic and not having the conditions in place to protect him when it matters.
Two things can be true at the same time: we live in a racist society and DEI hasn't been working well to counter this. However, if you criticise DEI you're often assumed to be racist. I have no problem commenting on Jason Arday's misconduct - the evidence is plain to see. Whether it is mitigated by mental health issues or neurodivergence is another matter.
A pretty simple rule if you want to keep your credibility: don’t get involved in a fight when you don’t know all the facts. Your bristly and defensive post suggests you haven’t quite learned this lesson.
"....the Times Higher Education Supplement had been approached to run the story and decided not to"
This is not quite accurate and needs clarification. THE had investigated the story way before Cofnas published his blog. They were ready to run with it. Journalist Jack Grove was reported to the police and THE was threatened with legal action if they reported the findings of the investigation.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-police-over-arday-case-i-was-just-doing-my-job
Sorry, I can only agree wholeheartedly with Steve Turnbull. I have a lot of time for your work — and consider myself on the left — but GLP should have approached the Arday affair far, far more carefully.
Arday is clearly a plagiarist and fantasist. Even without the — very extensive — plagiarism, his resume was thin and hardly warranted appointment to a Cambridge full professorship. By carelessly appointing him, then doubling down on denial until the facts became simply undeniable (instead of initiating an independent & rigorous investigation early on) Cambridge has done tremendous damage to academia & trust in science. That you — like the various letter-signers— waded in before being in command of the full facts has only compounded the wider social-political damage. Serious & seriously self-critical reflection is called for, not posthoc self-justification.
That Cofnas has some rather off the wall & even repugnant beliefs is neither here nor there, incidentally. Whistleblowers are often oddballs — often morally-dubious oddballs to boot. Allegations stand and fall on the facts, not on who makes them. Otherwise everything is just politics (a politics you and I are likely to lose, btw: that’s why this matters.)
"We also know that Dr Arday is profoundly neurodivergent. It’s not for me, as a non-expert, to talk about how that has contributed to his errors but I rather wish it had been properly addressed, by those with no axe to grind, in the reporting of this story"
I fully agree with you that this aspect of Dr Arday's story should be fully addressed (and by those with no axe to grind) but my reason, I suspect, is rather different from yours.
Firstly, we should clarify that 'neurodivergent' is not a clinical diagnosis; it is a description. As is 'profoundly neurodivergent'.
I am very interested in the subject of Dr Arday's childhood diagnoses. We have no independent verification of these, only Dr Arday's own statements on the matter. Of course, nobody is obliged to produce confidential medical records. However, certain inconsistencies and apparent anomalies in his descriptions do raise questions:
On several occasions (see his interview on Channel 4 with Krishnan Guru-Murthy as an example), he claims that his actual diagnosis at the time ("just before my third birthday) was Asperger's:
"..so, in old money, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome which is commonly now referred to as Autism". At the same time, he says, he was also diagnosed with "Global Development Delay".
This seems rather odd, since a formal diagnosis of "Asperger's" in 1988 would have been virtually impossible (it was not a recognised diagnosis) and, even after Asperger's was formalized in the 1990s (DSM-IV, 1994), the criteria explicitly excluded children with significant language delays. So this would not fit with Arday's description of being non-verbal.
In another video to be found on Instagram, Dr Arday speaks to the camera and explains "I have a form of Autism called Global Development Delay". It should hardly need saying that GDD is a temporary umbrella diagnosis used strictly for children under five years old and is not a form of Autism.
Then there are the descriptions of the speech therapy Dr Arday says he received from the age of three/four which range from "three hours a day, every day, from the age of three" (podcast with James O'Brien) to "four to five hours every day" to (in his new book) "multiple hours of speech therapy, three days a week, every week, for the best part of ten years". He states in his book that this was all funded by "the local council".
Again, these claims do appear to be rather incredible. The most basic research will confirm that in the late 1980s/early 90s (when there was a severe shortage of speech therapists), the chances of a child receiving any more than a 30-45 minute session once a week (probably only for a 4-6 week block), funded by the ILEA/NHS would have been almost impossible. Even for those with severe impairment.
Given that Dr Arday's descriptions of his Autism and his childhood struggles have been central to his story (and, indeed, something which you, Jolyon, are suggesting should be "addressed" in relation to plagiarism claims - as a mitigating factor?), I do think it is reasonable to ask Dr Arday if he can clarify the inconsistencies and apparent anomalies above. If only, to stop further questions and scrutiny.
The University’s announcement of his appointment seemed extremely keen to present the institution’s commitment to diversity and was pretty vague about his scholarship, and even without the subsequent issues it is indicative of a shallow approach to addressing inequality, including the pressure someone like Arday might be put under - https://news.educ.cam.ac.uk/230223-jason-arday
Congratulations on taking this action. You should hold your head high.
I salute Ghent university for their decision to suspend an academic who I am not going to speculate on
Thank you for this post. It’s obvious Arday is nothing more than the victim of a witch-hunt. One journalist harassed and threatened Arday to the extent where Arday was forced to involve the police.
Arday was also the victim of a violent crime - a deranged maniac broke into his office and menaced Arday by threateningly rattling a saber.
Again this is just an example of a racist witch-hunt, victimizing a young man whose only sin is caring too much and working too hard.
Would that be the intruder with the knife who somehow managed to evade CCTV and who Arday failed to report and warn his colleagues in the building about? Or the person who sent him the mysterious missing pig's head?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/aug/01/playbooks-plagiarism-pigs-head-new-claims-surrounding-cambridge-professor-jason-arday
And would that be the journalist who 'threatened and harassed' him by sending a few polite emails to give him the right of reply?
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/i-was-reported-police-over-arday-case-i-was-just-doing-my-job
Rigorous critical thinking is supposed to be the hallmark of the legal profession and academia right? But even common sense should have prevailed.