Jason Arday, I miss you already. The resignation of the Cambridge professor, sporting Adonis, charity-fundraising extraordinaire and credibly accused fantasist has brought to a close the most delicious silly-season story for some time.
Cambridge traded academic rigor for phony virtue. It chose political expediency over the pursuit of truth
On Wednesday night, Arday announced he was stepping down from his positions at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College, after a trickle of plagiarism allegations, as well as questions over his extracurricular achievements and his wild claims of violent intimidation, became a flood.
That’s not how he put it, mind. “For my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away,” says Arday, in a self-pitying statement published by the Good Law Project.
He is at pains to say this isn’t an admission of guilt. Ho no. “This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge,” Arday adds. “Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.”
With clanging inevitability, the statement now looks to be not the work of JA, but of AI. The Spectator has run it through an AI generator, which reckons it is “100 per cent” machine-made. I hate to say it, Jase, but if you did use AI that rather does burnish the “narratives that surround” you, doesn’t it?
I’ll be careful what I say here, given Arday is lawyered up to his eyeballs and legal letters – and even complaints to the police – have greeted those who have dared to raise questions about his alleged academic pilfering. But if this were simply a “racially motivated” smear campaign, as his lawyers have alleged, he wouldn’t be stepping down.
The Daily Telegraph has found more than 100 passages from Arday’s PhD which appear to have been lifted from another thesis, vindicating whistleblowers who had been calling Arday out to Cambridge and academic journals for years. Now he stands accused of misattributing, some might say fabricating, quotes as well.
Then there is his “backstory,” which reads like a cross between Homer’s Odyssey and a pap celebrity memoir. He claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, raised an astounding £5 million ($6.7 million) for charity, appeared in a TV series that began two decades before he was born, broken the land-speed record on an e-scooter, won Rear of the Year four times in a row, and translated the entire works of Shakespeare into Klingon… aged seven.
Okay, I made the last three up. But they are only a little less plausible than his other superhuman feats, many of which he has since been forced to qualify. More disturbing were his claims he was menaced at work by an intruder, which a devastating Guardian report has called into question – not only did he fail to tell the police that a masked-up knifeman once threatened him in his faculty building, he didn’t tell his colleagues, and it wasn’t picked up on CCTV, either.
I dare say it isn’t a coincidence that Arday’s resignation coincides with both Cambridge and Jesus College announcing they have opened investigations into him. This comes after weeks of digging in, with Cambridge accusing his critics of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.”
Clearly, the potential reputational damage became too much. But Cambridge did this to itself – throwing out its supposedly elite standards in order to ingratiate itself with know-nothing identitarians who had spent recent years insisting it is an “institutionally racist” hellhole.
I’ll be careful what I say here, given Arday is lawyered up to his eyeballs
This goes back to the appointment itself. When Arday became Cambridge’s youngest black professor in 2023 he did so off the back of sub-Critical Race Theory slop, inveighing against the racist undertones of Britpop and the Australian soap opera Home and Away, that would not meet the level of a decent student newspaper, let alone academic journals.
With or without the plagiarism, he had no business being at Cambridge – or any university, for that matter, that values old-fashioned things like merit and academic excellence. Tellingly, a welcome statement hailed Arday more for his backstory – as a black, underprivileged, “neurodiverse” man – than his achievements: “His experiences highlight the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education.” This was recruitment-as-atonement – a response to the nonsense peddled by the Black Lives Matter mob that Cambridge and its ilk are cauldrons of bigotry.
Cambridge traded academic rigor for phony virtue. It chose political expediency over the pursuit of truth. But this goes beyond mere PR. Identitarianism, left unchecked, corrupts academia. Critical Race Theory preaches subjectivity over objectivity, the rage of the “oppressed” over reason. No wonder Arday’s truth was deemed more compelling than, well, the actual truth.
It’s tempting to feel a bit sorry for Arday. After all, he didn’t invent fibbing. The problem is he was indulged by those who should have known better – by academic and journalistic institutions who believed what he was saying implicitly, even when what he was saying was barmy. Here was a man in way over his head.
But I’m reserving my sympathy for those who were pushed down as Arday soared. The journalists and academics who were threatened with lawsuits and police investigations. The black scholars who never asked to be “represented” by him, and would have been far more deserving of a professorship. The Cambridge PhD students who were being ticked-off about their pronoun usage while Arday peacocked around town.
Thankfully, it seems we won’t miss him for too long. While surely Arday’s career in elite academia is over, he insists he isn’t going anywhere. “This is not the end of my work. It is simply the end of this chapter,” his AI assistant assures us. I can’t wait for his tell-all interview, perhaps on Gary Lineker’s podcast. After losing the great Rod Liddle this week, we could all do with a laugh.
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