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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8137 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Wake up babe, Britain has its very own Juicay Smoll-yay

UPDATE: Arday has resigned from Cambridge.

My single favourite genre of non-fiction is stories about liars getting exposed as such. It's why I've read Buzz Bissinger's long-form piece "Shattered Glass" (an account of the New Republic writer Stephen Glass, who passed off utterly fictional stories as journalism and ended up disgraced) so many times, and watched its utterly unremarkable and overwritten film adaptation a comparable amount. It's why I've read Dan Davies's Lying for Money three times and have little doubt I'll read it again. It's why I read so many articles about the downfall of Theranos and want to watch the miniseries with the dumb girl from Mean Girls. It's why my idea of a relaxing evening in is watching the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, why I read every instalment in the Observer's multi-part exposé about the couple who wrote The Salt Path. And it's why I followed the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax so closely at the time it was in the papers. For those unfamiliar with the latter case, the gay black actor Jussie Smollett claimed to have been attacked by two white men wearing MAGA hats, who poured bleach on him and tied a noose around his neck. While many leading Democrats (and, I suspect, at least one poster who posts here) accepted his version of events uncritically, Smollett was ultimately arrested, charged and convicted for filing a false police report.

Now, England has its very own Smollett, and it is a doozy.1

Jason Arday is one of Cambridge University's prize academics. At 41 years of age, he is the youngest black person ever to be made a professor in the university's eight centuries. [This originally read "youngest person"; thanks to @incognitomaorach for pointing out the error.] His relatively photogenic appearance and easy charm have resulted in numerous television appearances and at least one TEDx talk; he has received various honours in recognition of his extensive philanthropic work; and his rags-to-riches story has served as an inspiration to thousands. Simon and Schuster offering him a lucrative deal to turn said story into a memoir (Great and Unfortunate Things) was a no-brainer, and it's due for release next week. Surprisingly for an academic and purported man of letters, the book is being written in collaboration with (read: ghostwritten by) Eve Claxton, who is uncredited on the book's preorder Amazon page and American cover. He's probably the closest thing to a legitimate celebrity the sociological field has produced in decades, and has produced a respectably extensive body of work about the intersections of race, class, disability and neurodiversity (some of which is of the "auto-ethnographic" variety i.e. Arday "interviewed" himself then wrote up what his "subject" thought).

Three years ago, some people (including Arday's colleagues at Cambridge) began raising uncomfortable questions about various factual claims Arday has made about himself, or which have been made about him in promotional materials.2 Jack Grove, a journalist for Times Higher Education, launched an investigation into allegations regarding the quality of Arday's scholarship. Grove's article, however, was never published, as Grove's bosses received a cease-and-desist letter from the law firm Carter-Ruck, threatening them with legal action and directly accusing Grove of targeting Arday for racial reasons. (Grove was also reported to the police, accused of harassing Arday, although the police dropped their investigation after four months.) Two weeks ago, Nathan Cofnas (an academic formerly employed by Cambridge who left the university in a row over his endorsement of human biodiversity, and who now teaches at Ghent) bit the bullet and published a Substack article in which he ran various papers Arday has put his name to (including his PhD thesis) through plagiarism-detection software and found compelling evidence thereof. Cofnas also alleges that Arday's contributions to the papers in which he was one of several listed co-authors were likely minimal, and that his little original scholarship rarely rises beyond the level of undergraduate mediocrity.

Now, if this was merely a story about plagiarism in academia, I wouldn't be writing a top-level post about it. "Sociologist who writes auto-ethnographic papers doesn't adhere to the most rigorous academic standards" is a quintessential dog-bites-man story, reminiscent of the old observation that, if one was to strip Lance Armstrong of his medals, you'd have to go down about thirty places in the Tour de France to find a cyclist who'd never been implicated for doping. Where it gets interesting hilarious is that, in addition to being a plagiarist, Arday is one of the most compulsive, remorseless fabulists this century has yet given us. Here is a non-exhaustive list of claims he's made about himself, his background and his family:

  • Among his various academic honours, he claims to have received an MA in education studies from Liverpool John Moores University.
  • He claims to have previously played both football and snooker at a professional or semi-professional level.
  • He claims that his mother has five different third-level degrees.
  • He claims to have raised at least £5 million for various charitable causes.
    • Specifically, he claims to have donated his £20,000 advance for a book about neurodiversity, race and class to charity.
  • He claims to have run thirty marathons in thirty-five days, the last nine of which after suffering a hairline fracture in his femur which caused his leg to swell up to twice its normal size.
  • Separately, he claims to have run 600 miles in six days.
  • He claims to have been awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his charity work, which he turned down owing to his critiques of the British Empire.
  • He claims that he was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, didn't learn to feed himself until he was seven, and was unable to speak until he was ten or eleven years old (but overcame this with "four or five hours" of speech therapy, six days a week). When he and his wife appeared on a talk show, she claimed that he was unable even to write his own name until he was sixteen, only for him to correct her that he was really eighteen.
  • He claims that, shortly before finishing his PhD in 2015, he was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumour, which he underwent surgery for just three weeks before his PhD viva. The surgery supposedly left him unable to remember all of the material he was supposed to defend, but he successfully completed his viva by summoning all his reserves of mental strength. (In one written account, he later claimed that, after completing the PhD, he was diagnosed with two brain tumours that turned out to be benign. From context, I'm unsure if these tumours are in addition to the one he developed prior to his viva, or instead of.)
  • He claims to have been a participant in the Up documentary series, which interviewed a cohort of children at seven-year intervals (thus the instalments are titled 7 Up, 14 Up and so on) to observe how their lives progressed from childhood to old age. The original documentary series followed a group of children born in 1957: Arday was born in 1985. A second series following a different cohort of children was later released, but all of the children in that cohort were born in 1993.3
  • Now we get into Smoll-yay territory. Arday claims that he and his family have been victims of a torrent of racist abuse ever since he first entered the public eye. In addition to the claims that he's been sent bananas and bullets in the post (neither of which he photographed) and death threats via email, he made two specific, dramatic claims:
    • He claims that a masked man confronted him twice on the Cambridge campus and threatened him with violence unless he resigned. On the second occasion, the man produced a knife. Allegedly, Arday reported the first altercation to Cambridge campus security, to which they dutifully responded by installing a panic alarm and additional CCTV cameras near Arday's office. The intruder was not captured on the CCTV cameras during the second altercation, and no members of the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious on that day. Arday did not report the second altercation to police or campus security on the day, nor made any attempt to warn anyone about a masked man with a knife stalking the campus. Despite having just been threatened with a knife, he attended a PhD candidate's viva less than two hours after the alleged altercation occurred.
    • He claims that someone left a severed pig's head on his parents' front doorstep, which he fortunately managed to intercept and dispose of before either of them discovered it (again failing to take photos thereof), only reporting the incident to the police several months after the fact. Not even the Guardian can disguise their incredulity at this specific howler. "When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said 'that’s the kind of thing we’d remember'. When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were 'categorically' incorrect and no investigation had taken place." When asked about the veracity of the claims he'd made, Arday is directly quoted as saying "To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?"

It need hardly be said that many of these claims would strike a casual observer as unlikely, implausible or outright impossible. For those claims residing within the realm of plausibility (and some of these), hard evidence thereof is sorely lacking. Running 600 miles in six days would put Arday among the most elite endurance runners in the world: no contemporary reports of this astonishing feat can be found. No public evidence has emerged of his having been awarded (or offered) an MBE. His mother has never claimed to hold five academic degrees. No one knows in which hospital he underwent surgery to remove his malignant brain tumour.

Beginning last year, various organisations affiliated with Arday began to quietly retract or hedge some of the more grandiose claims they'd made about him. "600 miles in six days" becomes 600 in twelve, with a rest day every other day. Cambridge stealth-edited Arday's profile on their website to remove his claim to have received an MA in education studies in Liverpool. The text of his forthcoming memoir has been softened and edited in places. Arday himself has belatedly attempted to downplay some of his claims, claiming that the £5 million he'd raised for charity was as part of a syndicate of over a hundred people (none of whom he can legally name, conveniently, owing to non-disclosure agreements).

The Smoll-yay comparisons are particularly apt because, as you may have guessed, Arday is black, and as the evidence of his duplicity mounts, his ethnicity has proven more of a help than a hindrance. Despite stealth-editing his online profile, Cambridge has stood by him and insisted that allegations of plagiarism in his career prior to joining Cambridge are irrelevant to his career in Cambridge. The Good Law Project published an open letter defending Arday and denouncing the "entirely false allegations" against him, which has been signed by, among others, the Green Party leader Zack Polanski, Simon Baron-Cohen and assorted MPs and public officials. (Interestingly, Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, president of Wolfson College at Cambridge, initially signed the letter, before asking for her name to be taken off.) "It is difficult to ignore the question of motivation. When a distinguished Black academic is repeatedly subjected to baseless allegations after being fully exonerated, it signals there is an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence."

Cofnas, of course, is rightfully crowing about all of this, quipping "Jason Arday should NOT be fired. He was hired to represent DEI, and he’s doing a great job". In his Substack write-up, he notes that Cambridge hiring Arday was specifically touted as a deliberate step to redress the university's longstanding inequities in faculty composition. The official announcement included the following quote:

Jason Arday is an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education. He will contribute significantly to Cambridge’s research in this area and to addressing the under-representation of people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds: especially those from Black, Asian, and other Minority Ethnic communities.... We are making extensive efforts in this regard—including the expansion of the ‘Get In Cambridge’ programme which provides financial support to address systemic disadvantages and the lack of social and educational capital which often constrains the ability of minority ethnic students to continue with their education. A great deal remains to be done and Jason’s expertise will inform and enhance these ongoing endeavours.

Similarly, "Arday stated that he was coming to Cambridge to 'open doors' to members of underrepresented groups:"

My work focuses primarily on how we can open doors to more people from disadvantaged backgrounds and truly democratise higher education. Hopefully being in a place like Cambridge will provide me with the leverage to lead that agenda nationally and globally.

"In other words, hiring Arday was an overtly political act. Everyone involved—including Arday himself—understood that he was being recruited to promote the ideology of DEI and increase the representation of certain groups."

You can imagine how embarrassing it must be for the university administrators to learn that their poster boy for diversity, equity and inclusion is a fabulist who lied about basically all of his accomplishments (academic and otherwise).4 Reputations other than Arday's own are at stake here.

A common refrain when the Jussie Smollett story (along with assorted other hoax hate crimes) collapsed was that, among white progressives, the demand for racist hate crimes now exceeded the supply, such that they had little choice but to invent them from whole cloth, or at least avoid asking difficult questions about those that had been invented. So too, it seems, in academia: the demand for talented academics from minority ethnic backgrounds (and if they have disabilities too, all the better) exceeds the supply, such that they have no choice but to hire academics who have burnished exaggerated invented their credentials. It seems like an inexorable law of the universe: whenever an institution begins optimising for something other than merit, it's only a matter of time before the liars and cheats begin clawing their way in.

More than anything when I read stories about fabulists like this, I just have an extremely hard time putting myself in their shoes. It's one thing to tell white lies that no one is ever likely to investigate and for which no corroborating evidence would exist even if the claim was true. It's one thing to tell exactly one extremely brazen lie and bank on no one bothering to check it. It's one thing to tell multiple extremely brazen lies, then going to quite extensive lengths to cover your tracks (credit where credit is due: Stephen Glass was a liar, but he put his hours in). But to tell dozens of extremely brazen lies over and over again for decades and make no effort to cover your tracks at all? That's just baffling to me. It genuinely seems never to have occurred to Arday that he would eventually be found out.

1 Much of the following information was taken from Benjamin Ryan's piece in the Washington Free Beacon. I strongly encourage you to read it, and the articles by Nathan Cofnas and Kathleen Stock linked elsewhere, along with this piece by Donna Louise Flowers.

2 There is little doubt Arday was aware of this, and attempted to do some preemptive damage control by rubbishing the forthcoming allegations months in advance. From the Guardian:

When the superstar academic Jason Arday took to the stage at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year, he delivered a talk called Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook.

The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history told an audience of his peers that the playbook in question had helped bring down some of the biggest names in US academia. Conservative "activists" were trawling through the work of black academics, looking for anything to use against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their work that were similar to existing papers.

Once an error was identified, rightwing media outlets and conservative politicians joined the pile-on – heaping pressure on universities to cut ties.

Claudine Gay, the first black woman to become president of Harvard, was only in the post for seven months before she was forced out over plagiarism allegations... Some academics have killed themselves after being hounded out of their positions.

The playbook was not restricted to the US, Arday explained. The same tactics were being used to bring down some of the UK’s most high-profile black academics.

“The instruments that are designed to protect academic integrity, designed to protect our wellbeing and our intellectual property, are weaponised,” he told the audience in April.

He called for his peers to defend him. “There isn’t any room to sit there and watch your fellows suffer for no reason. It’s abhorrent, it’s a disgrace and, quite frankly, evil,” he added. “That’s the cancer that we need to eradicate from academia.”

I increasingly feel that "weaponise" is one of many modern words whose use we urgently need to impose a temporary moratorium on.

3 This incident produced my single favourite howler from the entire calamity (emphasis mine):

Last night Professor Arday said that when he talked of 'Seven Up', he didn't mean 'Seven Up' the famous TV series, which followed children at seven-year intervals in the format he described. He says that in fact he was referring to 'a local community and parent-led initiative developed around the Ubuntu principle that "it takes a village to raise a child".

'It was organised by Black women to support Black mothers raising children with complex learning needs.'

He asked that we attribute the quotes to 'a source close to Professor Arday'.

4 Over at Unherd (paywall warning), Kathleen Stock has a rather different interpretation for why Cambridge might stick to their guns on Arday:

I have a possible explanation that is only secondarily connected to skin colour. Namely: at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well.

Lecturers are now routinely expected to make adjustments to their ordinary critical approach as soon as someone has a diagnosis: to ignore spelling mistakes; mentally rearrange sentences without critical comment; try not to mind paragraphs that go on for days, or seem utterly arbitrary in their shape. I speak from experience. As a marker, you are supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within. Most often, this nonsensical strategy is applied at the level of students; but once the principle was conceded, it was only a matter of time before such accommodations were extended to staff too.

... For instance, in correspondence between Harris and Head of the Cambridge Faculty of Education, Dr Hilary Cremin, Cremin said that when she had asked Arday about Harris’s plagiarism allegations, the former had “spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the… article was being prepared”. She also stressed that her faculty remained “immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking here that Cremin was trying to offer mitigating circumstances for a troubled but promising undergraduate — except that she was talking about someone holding a Professorial Chair. Once a narrative of mental disability is firmly in place, it seems that a presumed experience of racism can just be added to the list, as yet another unfair impediment to intellectual achievement. Minority ethnicity plus disability now equals the suspension of critical judgement.

What's been so interesting to me here is the way it's being minimized by many on the left.

NYT:

Martyn Hammersley, an emeritus professor of educational and social research at the Open University in Britain and an expert on research methodology, contacted Cambridge in 2023 with questions about what he said was significant plagiarism in some of Arday's work. In an interview with The Times last week, he lamented that the political and racially charged debate has overshadowed important questions about academic rigor.

"We now have a public scandal in which right and left confront another, so that there is not much space for sensible discussion of the issues," he said.

Cofnas, I think correctly, translates this as "We now have a situation where the right is demonstrably 100% correct and the left is 100% wrong, so really there's no way to have a sensible discussion." (via twitter)

The particularly interesting bits to me are,

  1. The stranglehold of the left on political discourse seems to be slipping. It seems more and more common lately that issues which the left would like to sweep under the rug instead get enough mainstream exposure that they can't actually do so. Sure, there's tons of comments like Hammersley's which fall back on their feminine strategy of rolling their eyes at how uncouth the right is being by continuing to hammer on topics which the left would much rather see treated as not important actually and impolite to talk about, but that doesn't seem to be working any more. I think this is nearly 100% downstream of Elon purchasing twitter, and I'm increasingly horrified by a hypothetical counterfactual world where he didn't.
  2. I didn't think I had much respect left to lose for the academy, but from what I can tell Arday would have continued to get away with this indefinitely no matter how egregious and flamboyant his fraud. I don't know that, of course, but to the degree that it's true I'm surprised to feel something dying inside of me where I thought nothing still lived.

I think this is nearly 100% downstream of Elon purchasing twitter, and I'm increasingly horrified by a hypothetical counterfactual world where he didn't.

There's a huge lesson here that the right may never learn, because they got lucky with Elon. The thing is you cannot have your strategy revolve around getting lucky with a billionaire. You need to build institutions that will accomplish what you want.

In the right's defense, they were learning this before Elon bought Twitter, and they have made progress on that front.

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