DEI Fraud and Cover-up at Cambridge

“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?”

Those are the words of Jason Arday—the 2002 Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University. Indeed, the story of his metamorphosis from arguably the most disadvantaged person in the UK to elite scholar-athlete-philanthropist would make even Walt Disney raise an eyebrow.

Born to Ghanaian parents, Arday grew up on a council estate (the British equivalent of Section 8 housing) in south London. At age three he was diagnosed with global development delay and autism. Therapists said he would be confined to an assisted living facility. Miraculously, at 11 years old, he spoke his first word (“hello”). When he was 18, he learned to read and write.

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. 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. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

In his spare time, Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days.

As of 2023, he had worked with “more than 70” charities and raised more than £5 million.

Up until his appointment at Cambridge, Arday continued to face unspecified hardships. As reported by the Guardian in 2023, despite previously being a professor at Durham and Glasgow, “He has barely slept over the past 15 years…, working through most nights—often on his academic and charity work, but sometimes just to make ends meet.”

He has received “hundreds of thousands of letters and emails” from fans “all over the world.” This indicates a level of fame comparable to an upper-middle-tier household name celebrity.

But how much of “the most ridiculous story ever told” is true?

I was recently contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge (whose name I will not reveal) who alleges that Arday is a plagiarist and fabulist. My source claims that many if not most professors at Cambridge have known about this for more than a year. However, Arday and/or Cambridge’s administration are using intimidation and legal threats to squelch the story. As far as I am aware, the only mention of Arday’s alleged plagiarism that exists in the public domain is on the personal website of retired Plymouth Marjon University professor Dave Harris. (More on that later.)

Besides the plagiarism, there are serious questions about Arday’s biographical claims.

Developing normal speaking abilities after being nonverbal until age 11 is medically improbable.

Arday has repeatedly made unequivocal assertions that he could not read, write, or even spell his own name until he was 18. But he left secondary school with General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) qualifications in Physical Education and Textiles. Despite being in vocational subjects, these tests require literacy, and they are normally taken at age 15 or 16. Based on publicly available information, it is possible to recreate a timeline that places Arday’s test date before age 18. It is conceivable that he received “special arrangements” to allow him to take the test with help from a reader and scribe. However, 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.” So he may be backing away from his original story.

30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days are feats of dubious believability. Wikipedia lists running 50 marathons in 50 days as one of the highlights of professional ultramarathon runner Dean Karnazes’s career. 30 in 35 days is possible for an amateur, but only with intensive training and planning. 300 miles in three days is an even bigger stretch. For comparison, Yiannis Kouros, who has been described as “the greatest ultrarunner of all time,” set a world record in 1984 when he ran 359 miles in three days. Arday asserts that he was able to do all this because “If you have the will, it will always supersede skill”—a proposition that anyone with experience in athletics knows to be false.

However, it is impossible to prove or disprove Arday’s biographical claims without more direct evidence. Therefore, I will only address questions about his scholarship.

Here I present evidence that, starting with his PhD dissertation, Arday routinely passes off the words and ideas of others as his own. If one removes the apparently plagiarized material from his record, there is little or no real scholarship. I discuss the cover-up by senior administrators at Cambridge and the broader implications for free speech and DEI ideology.

The Dissertation

I ran Arday’s 2015 PhD dissertation through the plagiarism-detection program Copyleaks. It found substantial overlap with previously published work, particularly a dissertation submitted by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers in 2009. (Zwozdiak-Myers received her degree from Brunel University London, where she is currently a Reader in Education.) The chart below compares passages from Arday (2015) and Zwozdiak-Myers (2009). From literally the first page of the Introduction to his dissertation (which starts on page 17 of the manuscript), Arday relies heavily on Zwozdiak-Myers for key ideas and arguments. Many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source.

Arday appears to borrow from other sources without attribution. I won’t go through all of the examples detected by Copyleaks, but here are two more.

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Harris writes that he first read Arday’s work with the intention of summarizing the arguments to make them accessible. However, what he euphemistically refers to as “oddities” were “so frequent that they dominated [his] reading.” Harris emailed Arday, pointing out examples and asking if he could provide clarification.

Arday replied to Harris as follows: “Please do not email me again. Should you have the time to spare, I invite you to direct your resources elsewhere. Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

After Harris and his colleague prodded several journal editors and administrators at Cambridge, two journals issued corrections to Arday’s publications.

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On his Cambridge University faculty webpage, Arday lists 10 publications under the heading “Principal and Recent Publications.” Entries range from the year 2018 (the year he published his first paper) to 2023 (the year he moved to Cambridge). These are apparently the publications that he believes represent his best work, in recognition of which he was awarded a chair professorship at Cambridge. I will go through the papers one by one.

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When you take away the work that is plagiarized or not otherwise written by Arday, there is essentially nothing resembling real scholarship. There is no indication that Arday is familiar with even elementary statistics. His research involves reporting his own experiences of alleged racism or having conversations with people and providing subjective commentary.

The Cover-Up

Jason Arday was hired by Cambridge explicitly to advance the cause of racial diversity. When he joined the university in 2023, the official announcement included the following quote by Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education Bhaskar Vira:

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.

(Readers of this Newsletter may remember Vira as one of the administrators who tried to get me fired from Cambridge in 2024 for writing about race and affirmative action.)

The head of the Faculty of Education, Hilary Cremin, told the Times of London that “hiring Arday was proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities.” She provided the following statement:

Not only is Jason Arday a world-class scholar, he also brings a wealth of experience that can help us to take forward our efforts to widen participation at all levels. Hopefully it is becoming increasingly clear that with concerted effort and a genuine commitment to change, those barriers that still exist either to working or studying at top universities can be overcome.

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 Vira, Cremin, and others felt when in June 2023 they received an email from Dave Harris’s colleague alerting them to Arday’s alleged plagiarism. If hiring Arday was “proof of the university’s commitment to tackling existing inequalities,” what would it prove if the university placed him under investigation, let alone held him accountable if it turns out he engaged in wrongdoing?

I have the correspondence between the tipster and the administration. Dr. Rhys Morgan—Head of Policy, Governance and Integrity—replied as follows:

As set out by the UK Research Integrity Office, universities “are responsible for the research conducted using their facilities and resources or in their name”….The University of Cambridge takes issues of research integrity very seriously and we will always consider allegations relating to research conducted under its auspices in line with our policies.

In this instance the research that your concerns relate to was carried out before Professor Arday joined the University and it would normally be for the institution at which the work was done to consider any research integrity concerns with a particular paper published in their name. As such we do not consider it within our remit to investigate the paper to which you refer.

Professor Cremin sent this reply:

[W]e remain immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship, and…he has our full support.

I can confirm that, having looked into your concerns about Prof Arday’s work, I arranged a meeting between myself, Prof Arday and my director of research. We discussed the paper in question and the circumstances under which the paper was written, which was clearly before Prof Arday was employed at Cambridge. During this meeting Prof Arday said that he wanted to take the article down from the journal online platform in order to address concerns and re-upload it. The journal has now enabled this, and Prof Arday is working on the changes. We are very grateful for your detailed feed-back on the article in question that has formed the basis of these revisions.

During our meeting Prof Arday spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the 2018 article was being prepared (in 2016). At this time he was early career and living away from home whilst dealing with significant health issues.

From the perspective of the university (represented by Rhys Morgan), any pre-2023 plagiarism was irrelevant. It is difficult to understand this position. Arday was hired on the basis of his work. Surely the university would wish to know whether or how much of this work was fraudulent.

For the Faculty of Education (represented by Hilary Cremin), it was enough for Arday to state that he experienced “direct and indirect racism” and “health issues” to absolve him of responsibility. I sympathize with Arday for his health problems. However, it is unclear how illness or alleged racism can explain why he stole other people’s work. And if he committed plagiarism in 2018, wouldn’t the Faculty want to know whether or not it was a one-off? Yet, with no real investigation into the facts, Cremin declared that “he has our full support.”

I have heard from multiple sources that Arday and/or the university have sicced the law firm Carter-Ruck on journalists or academics who raised questions about Arday. In any case, there are obvious questions about Arday’s work and life story. The fact that literally no one at Cambridge has spoken about this publicly suggests that, at the very least, the administration has created an atmosphere of intimidation where people are afraid to express controversial ideas. This is consistent with the experience I wrote about a couple months ago in “Cambridge University’s War on Free Speech.”

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There is a conflict between what universities such as Cambridge call “DEI” and something else that they claim to value, namely, free speech. DEI demands that we accept the fiction that people like Jason Arday, who are hired because they tick certain identity and ideology boxes, are just as qualified as scholars selected on the basis of academic merit. But if people are allowed to speak freely, they might point out that this is false. The Cambridge administration resolves the dilemma by siding with DEI against free speech. Faculty know what is likely to happen to them if they speak about the Arday situation. That is why the administration has been able to bury the story for three years.

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