Jason Arday
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 Cofnas says he learned about the unpublished Times Higher Education story only after he began working on his own piece about Arday.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.
Arday did not respond to three requests for comment sent to his Cambridge email address, but during a plenary he gave at the British Sociological Association conference in Edinburgh this April, he spoke vividly about recent attacks on Black academics.
“You get the email and they say you conducted academic misconduct. And you think to yourself, ‘Well this is incredible. I’m on the back foot here. How do I defend myself against this machine?” he said. “The instruments that are designed to protect academic integrity, designed to protect our wellbeing and our intellectual property, are weaponised.”
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.”
Carter-Ruck and Times Higher Education did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
In interviews, Arday has said that his path to academic publishing was a rocky one, in part, because he only learned to read and write at the age of 18. “The peer review process was so cruel, it was almost funny, but I treated it as a learning experience and, perversely, began to enjoy it,” he told the BBC in 2023.
Within months of the media attention around his appointment at Cambridge, questions began surfacing about the caliber of that work. On May 4, 2023, Dave Harris, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University in England, sent Arday a lengthy email. He explained that he had been posting summaries evaluating articles related to critical race theory on his personal website, and he wanted to clear up a few things about Arday’s own work, including a 2018 study in the journal Social Sciences.
In the study, Arday said he conducted focus groups with 32 Black and minority university students in April 2017 to understand the mental health issues they were facing. Although Arday wrote he obtained “informed consent” for the interviews, the article did not include a statement indicating whether his study was approved by an ethics board, as was required by the journal at the time.
Harris wanted to know if Arday could explain some “puzzling similarities” between sentences in that article and a BMJ Open study from epidemiologist Anjum Memon about mental health services in Black and minority communities. Arday ignored his first email, but when Harris followed up several days later, Arday was blunt. “Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism, you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes,” he wrote. Arday told Harris not to contact him again: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”
Harris soon recruited a colleague, Martyn Hammersley, a sociologist at Open University, to review the Social Sciences article himself, and he, too, was concerned. On May 19, 2023, Hammersley sent an email to Hilary Cremin, the Head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, and to Rhys Morgan, the university’s Head of Policy, Governance, and Integrity:
There is substantial plagiarism from one source, and some from another. It is also the case that a considerable portion of the article follows the structure of the paper by Memon et al: even where their words are not used exactly, these are paraphrased (though also elaborated). It even looks as if a couple of the quotations from informants may have been derived from Memon et al. Both of these articles are cited by Arday, but the quotes from them are unattributed.
In a response dated June 21, 2023, Cremin wrote that Arday had agreed “to take the article down from the journal online platform in order to address these concerns” but Arday had the department’s “full support.” Morgan, meanwhile, noted that because the alleged plagiarism occurred prior to his arrival at Cambridge, “we do not consider it within our remit to investigate the paper to which you refer.” (Morgan did not respond to our request for comment, and our email to Cremin received an out-of-office response.)
Six months later, in December 2023, Social Sciences published a correction, adding new citations to make it “clear where ideas were adapted from past research.” A second article, published in Educational Philosophy and Theory, was corrected the following year for text overlap with the Memon paper and other publications.
But the Social Sciences correction notice glossed over the most significant post-publication changes Arday actually made to the text. He removed claims that he analyzed the transcripts from interview subjects with “an iterative coding scheme using NVivo qualitative data analysis software” and had a second researcher “independently read the scripts” and code the data to “enhance the validity of emerging themes and claims.” Instead, he said, he recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim and identified salient themes through “review and reflection.”
In addition, Arday changed or removed quotes that had previously been attributed to his interview transcripts. Out of 31 quotes in the original manuscript, he trimmed or reworded 12 of them, and cut 6 of them entirely. Some of the original quotes appear to have been patched together from subjects in Memon’s BMJ Open paper.
Arday numbered his participants from 1 to 32, but there were actually two 13s: One of them he described as a Black female undergraduate and the other as a Black male undergraduate. The Black male undergraduate, according to Arday, viewed clinicians as being instruments of oppression:
Let’s face it … with the stroke of a pen you could be sectioned or sent away for some counseling. Or … have administered some ridiculous dose of whatever kind of medicine.
A similar quote about clinicians appears in Memon et al. attributed to Male D in focus group 1:
With the stroke of a pen to decide whether you are going to be sectioned or whether you are going to be sent away for some counselling. Or … administered some really, really high doses of whatever kind of medicine.
The Black female undergraduate in Arday’s study expressed similar distrust toward the healthcare system:
Within African and West Indian communities … people do not trust psychiatrists in particular.
This sentiment, too, appears to come from Male D in Memon et al:
In the West Indian community … people do not trust psychiatrists particularly.
In the corrected version of Arday’s paper, the quote from the female 13 has been trimmed of the overlap, while the quote from the male 13 has been cut entirely. None of this is described clearly in the correction notice.
“Bloody awful work creeps in when standards are relaxed … in ‘special editions,’ often devoted to ‘activist’ issues like racial inequality,” Harris told us.
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.
Private Eye, a British satire magazine that once tangled with the firm, refers to them as Carter-Fuck.
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. In 2024, Cambridge’s Emmanuel College cut ties with him just two months after he aired his controversial views on race and the meritocracy on his Substack.
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?”
Sanders said that what happened at Cambridge is part of a broader phenomenon that has nothing to do with race, which is that journals and universities across the board “do not regard plagiarism by researchers as actionable.” While he abhors “the singling out for investigation of particular members of the academic community because of their ethnicity,” he said that “sometimes the allegations are true, and they need to be addressed fully.”
In one of his follow-up emails to Cambridge, Hammersley had noted that he hoped there had been “a systematic investigation of Professor Arday’s other publications to check for plagiarism … since these were presumably a major part of the basis on which he was appointed at Cambridge.”
He told us he believes that Cofnas’s Substack post was just about the worst place for them to emerge. “It’s an unfortunate situation because it could have been dealt with by Cambridge,” he said. “The result of that is that it means that the only people who will take it up are the people on the radical right.”
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For context I provide my complete statement. “I have reviewed a number of the cases where scholars of African origin have been accused of plagiarism. I deplore the singling out for investigation of particular members of the academic community because of their ethnicity. Many times the accusations are false or exaggerated. They are being made by people who don’t understand academic standards and have political objectives. Nevertheless, sometimes the allegations are true, and they need to be addressed fully.”