Exclusive: News Outlet Killed Story on Plagiarism Allegations After Cambridge Prof Hired Law Firm

In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself.

But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

One of the sources was David Sanders, a biochemist at Purdue University in Indiana, and a sleuth who contributes to the Times Higher Education on topics related to academic misconduct. He reviewed a 63-page dossier of text comparisons prepared by the publication last year and came back with his own findings. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” Sanders told us.

The allegations against Arday finally emerged last week following a Substack post from Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Cofnas, who is known for his controversial writings on racial differences, independently identified dozens of passages in Arday’s 2015 dissertation that were taken nearly verbatim from the 2009 dissertation of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a reader at Brunel University of London. Cofnas says he learned about the unpublished Times Higher Education story only after he began working on his own piece about Arday.

Arday is known for his work on topics related to race, inequality and education. His interest was more than scholarly: From humble beginnings as a nonverbal autistic kid in South London, he became, at age 37, the youngest Black person appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.

That achievement was covered by the BBC, CBS News, and Good Morning America. He is listed as a collaborator on more than $10 million in recent grants from two U.K. funding agencies, U.K. Research and Innovation and the National Institute for Health and Care Research.

Arday’s achievements have not been limited to academia. He has said he has raised more than $8 million for charity and performed impressive athletic feats, including running 30 marathons in 35 days. His forthcoming memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, is slated to be published next month by Simon & Schuster.

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A spokesperson for Cambridge told Retraction Watch that Arday was a “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility” and that he had been cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications.”

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The unpublished article in Times Higher Education was bylined by Jack Grove, who has written extensively about the challenges faced by minorities in U.K. institutions, according to Harris, Hammersley and Sanders.

After Grove sent Arday a detailed email in September 2025 offering him an opportunity to respond to the allegations, Times Higher Education received a letter from Carter-Ruck, a law firm known for defending clients ranging from the Church of Scientology to the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.

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In its letter, the firm wrote that the allegations were false and they would damage Arday’s reputation. The publication subsequently killed the story.

At the British Sociologists Association meeting, Arday said that he and his colleagues needed to create “their own playbook to combat” the attacks on Black scholars. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence of good people,” he said. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.”

Cofnas told us he first began looking into Arday’s case on June 13 of this year, when he was contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge who was disappointed by the university’s wan response to the Arday situation. {snip}

In his new post, Cofnas alleged that Arday was hired “to advance the cause of racial diversity” and wrote, “by hiring Jason Arday and refusing to investigate credible accusations against him, isn’t Cambridge making a statement that the only way to have black professors is to abandon all standards?”

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