Are congratulations in order for Sacha Baron Cohen? The more I read about Jason Arday, the Cambridge sociology professor and DEI poster boy caught up in a plagiarism row, the more convinced I am he’s the comedian’s greatest creation.
Arday’s academic career, like his athletic achievements, reads like a fairy tale
First, there’s the over-the-top back story. He claimed to have been totally mute until the age of 11 – having been diagnosed with autism – and unable to read or write until he was 18. Yet in spite of these disadvantages, he earned a PhD by the time he was 30 – which he managed to complete while suffering from a brain tumour!
On the face of it, utterly incredible. But it begins to make sense if you think of Arday as an Ali G-like character designed to test the limits of how unwilling white do-gooders are to challenge the claims of black people suffering from ‘intersectional oppression’, however implausible.
And test the limits he has. He chalked up some truly extraordinary achievements in ultra-endurance running, or so he says, completing the 600 miles from Edinburgh to London in just six days – 50 miles short of the world record for ultra-distance running over six days – and 30 marathons in 35 days. During this latter feat, he suffered a hairline fracture on day 21 and, according to him, his leg swelled to twice its normal size. Yet, remarkably, he went on to complete another nine marathons. In all, he maintains, he raised £5.5 million for charity.
All of these claims have been accepted at face value by the four universities who’ve awarded Arday honorary degrees, as well as the BBC, which published a laudatory profile when he became a Cambridge professor. How Baron Cohen must have laughed – assuming I’m right about Arday being a satirical creation. A stunt designed to expose the wilful blindness of hand-wringing liberals has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
Arday’s academic career, like his athletic achievements, reads like a fairy tale. After getting a degree in education studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, he went on to do a PhD at Liverpool John Moores University, before becoming a professor of sociology at Glasgow in 2021, then a sociology professor at Cambridge in 2023. At the age of 37, he was the youngest black person ever to be given a Cambridge chair.
Baron Cohen, who’s apparently been developing this character as a long-term sleeper project, must have been cock-a-hoop. But could he push the joke even further? Doubts about Arday’s academic integrity began to surface in 2023 when two sociology professors started asking awkward questions about his doctoral thesis and some of his journal papers. Not so fast, thought Baron Cohen, who must have anticipated that his hastily-cobbled together ‘thesis’, masquerading as original research, would one day be rumbled – the title of Arday’s PhD even includes a rogue apostrophe.
To deflect these allegations, the comedian appears to have come up with the genius idea of enlisting his cousin, Sir Simon Baron Cohen, as a co-conspirator. In 2025, the director of Cambridge’s autism research centre co-authored an open letter furiously accusing Arday’s detractors of being racists. This was the academic equivalent of Ali G’s famous catchphrase whenever anyone challenged him: ‘Is it because I is black?’
It seemed to do the trick for another year, but last week the allegations resurfaced in the form of a Substack post by Nathan Cofnas, an academic philosopher at the University of Ghent. He identified dozens of passages in Arday’s PhD thesis that are almost identical to passages in a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a reader at Brunel University. An independent analysis by the Times corroborated the charge, citing ‘multiple examples of identical or near identical passages’, and Kathleen Stock, reviewing Arday’s academic output in UnHerd, pronounced it ‘unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible’.
At this point, Baron Cohen must have thought the game was up – but no. This is a gag that keeps on giving. Jolyon Maugham, the vainglorious left-wing lawyer, has started a petition accusing ‘rightwing newspapers’ of ‘trying to smear’ Arday. Once again, Arday’s critics are charged with ‘racism’ and the petition calls on the great and the good to ‘stand up to hate and division’. So far, the signatories include the heads of three Cambridge colleges, five Labour MPs, Zack Polanski, Mothin Ali and our old friend Simon Baron-Cohen. (Arday has not responded to the latest allegations. A spokesman for the University of Cambridge said: ‘Allegations of plagiarism regarding [Arday’s] 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.’ Liverpool John Moores University said: ‘A confidential procedure was conducted in response to those allegations and Professor Arday’s PhD still stands.’)
But from Sacha’s point of view, it gets even better. Somehow, he’s also found the time to write what purports to be Arday’s autobiography entitled Great and Unfortunate Things, due to be published by Simon & Schuster next month. This subproject has already paid dividends, with effusive blurbs supplied by James O’Brien (‘a remarkable and brilliant man’), Kathy Burke (‘a unique and extraordinary man’) and Chris Gardner (‘the most inspiring book I’ve read in decades’). Baron Cohen must be rubbing his hands with glee just thinking about the industrial quantities of egg on face when he finally reveals the truth.
So hats off to the Juvenal of 21st century Britain. He has succeeded in highlighting the flagrant double standards of our academic and political elites. It goes without saying that any white professor accused of similar misdeeds would most likely have been defenestrated from the academy long ago. But because Arday is black and neurodivergent, he has been instinctively defended by people desperate not to seem racist. As Cofnas points out, to hold a scholar to lower standards because he is black is effectively to say that if he was held to the same standards as a white scholar, he couldn’t possibly succeed – and that, surely, is a tad patronising, if not outright racist.
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