Jason Arday’s death on August 14th was a tragic end to a life marked by both remarkable achievements – as well as ongoing questions over research integrity and the possibility of data falsification.
Multiple things can be true. Jason Arday’s life inspired thousands of people. The media did target him disproportionately once evidence of deception arose, with many outlets and people leading the attacks on him clearly motivated by bad faith and racist ill will.
It’s also true his work appears to have significant errors, misattributions, and clear evidence of falsification - falsification that goes beyond anything that has yet been acknowledged sufficiently by journal editors.
In this article, I lay out my falsification concerns and call for closer academic scrutiny of published work. I also discuss wider epistemological and political aspects of the response to Arday by some on the academic Left. I suggest that both the Left and the Right are mirroring the other side’s essentializing framings of this tragedy. Biological racial essentialism on the Right is being matched by reactionary cultural essentialising of race on the Left. When Black journalists are mocked online for having white families, or told they have blood on their hands for Arday’s death, it’s a type of bullying and harassment, and it’s fair to identify it as such. Freedom of the press, academic integrity, and freedom of conscience are ideals that deserve vocal defence.
In the weeks before Arday’s very saddening death, I suggested on social media that his life was likely to be weaponized as the ‘Sokal Affair’ of our generation – a reference to the 1980s scandal engulfing the journal Social Text.
In that case, a physics professor named Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately faked article to the well-regarded humanities journal Social Text that claimed quantum theory was simply a literary and social construct of the imagination. Sokal’s gambit was that Social Text would publish a nonsensical article as long as it was sufficiently left-wing in tone, playing to the editors’ political biases. He was right. The fake article was published, and the hoax was celebrated as a triumph for the political Right. It seemed to prove that left-wing ideology trumped adequate academic review of the integrity and truth of scientific claims.
Fast forward 40 years, many on the political Right are once again jubilant, striking a vindicatory tone as growing evidence of Arday’s fabrications continues to mount.
The list of concerning questions over Arday’s claims about his life and his scholarship is a lengthy one. It ranges from evidence of numerous false claims about his life achievements, to the possibility that Arday’s used quotations from focus group research carried out by other scholars and passed them off as his own personally collected data. This is a serious academic offence and one that should merit an investigation by any reputable research institution or journal Indeed, one journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory, has a notice on its website noting that Arday’s article is under investigation. It is Arday’s second most-cited article (Arday’s citations were pointed to by University of Toronto philosopher Jason Stanley as evidence of his research excellence. Stanley either didn’t realize or chose not to mention that at least one journal has re-opened an examination into possible data falsification. Other scholars believe academic work itself – not simply the citations - should be read before extolling a body of work).
In hindsight, my earlier reference to the Sokal Affair may have been an understatement. The earlier case pales next to the implications of Jason Arday’s tragic life and death. The Sokal Affair was weaponized by the political Right against the political Left in general, with no specific targeting of Black scholarship. Yes, the Culture Wars of the 1980s had deeply racist elements, but the Sokal affair was not itself a specific, racially motivated ‘win’ for anti-Black eugenicists rampant at the time.
Things have been tragically different this time. Across social media, Arday’s race been targeted in a virulent way by his detractors, upheld as ‘proof’ that all DEI policies tended to promote people of colour in a tokenistic way, at the expense of research integrity and quality. This is unfair and deeply wrong and needs to be countered. Whatever errors happened in Arday’s hiring, it’s not ‘evidence’ of wider weakness with Black scholarship, just like Stephen Glass’s fabulism at the New Republic did not impugn all his colleagues’ work.
And yet, tragically, perception is a social phenomenon, and it’s illogical to pretend this doesn’t have negative reputational effects for sociology as a field. Just as Social Text’s sloppy editorial standards led to unfair attacks on the humanities, Cambridge’s questionable hiring decisions will be weaponized against academia in general, handing more ammunition to right-wing critics casting aspersions on the social sciences writ large.
The decisions *do* seem surprising given Arday’s slight scholarly and administrative record at the time of his appointment, with no PhD students supervised to completion, and only a relatively small output, based on an empirical body of work that seems to consist of a fairly small number of qualitative interviews in total – some of which appear to have not taken place at all. Of course, much humanities-based research is philosophical in nature, building on rich theoretical traditions rather than empirical work. But Arday’s research, by his own account in his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, is not in this vein. In his memoir, he refers to the interview method as his core sociological method, which makes scrutiny of his claimed interview data reasonable.
The University of Cambridge can afford a scandal. Its sociology recruitment will stay strong; its cornerstone position as a bastion of elite power in the nation won’t be dislodged. It is smaller, less wealthy institutions that can’t afford to see their sociology depts further depleted that may suffer worse fallout from Cambridge’s lapses.
For his supporters, Arday’s death is being upheld today as proof that a racially motivated ‘digital lynching’ occurred. Anyone criticizing Arday before his death was engaged in concerted witch-hunt. Any criticism after Arday’s death is seen disrespectful to his life and his family’s requests for peace.
Arday’s death was deeply tragic. But in equating the right to mourn with a demand for silence, his supporters have constructed a moral trap for anyone sceptical of his research integrity, making further exploration of the truthfulness of his past claims difficult because he’s no longer alive to object. In doing so – in equating moral worthiness with silence – they’re engaged in strategic ignorance, a phenomenon I’ve written about extensively in my academic work.
One of the points I make about strategic ignorance is that the urge to dismiss or ignore inconvenient facts is a cross-political phenomenon, identifiable across the political Right and Left. It’s likely a human universal. Evidence from psychological studies that show we tend to prefer facts that confirm prior viewpoints over facts that threaten to discredit our ideological positions. We can all become ostrich-like when faced with information that forces deeply uncomfortable perspectival change. In my academic work, I call such individual, personal urges a type of ‘micro-ignorance,’ and I distinguish it from what I term ‘macro-ignorance,’ which I define as the institutional, structural capacity to foment preferential truths, through domination over systems of law, or through the corporate power to sue critics, creating structured silence through actions like SLAPPs.
For the most part, macro-ignorance – the structural power to engender mass ignorance – tends to be often dominated by ‘big money’ actors. The political Right and the corporations that lobby for right-wing governments to stay in power typically tend to benefit more so than the Left.
But in the Arday case, a dangerous cocktail of micro + macro-ignorance – the refusal by some of his supporters to acknowledge evidence of serious misconduct – is clearly winning out among some vocal groups on the academic Left who continue to deny any wrongdoing on his part.
From the philosopher Jason Stanley’s quick glance at Google Scholar to support his assumptions of Arday’s research excellence, to the Good Law Project’s effort to oust Cambridge’s vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice from her post, to the bullying implication that because the Guardian journalist Lanre Bakare is himself a Black man, he had no right to investigate whether or not Arday was telling the truth, some groups are acting worse than ostrich-like. They are not simply turning a blind eye to evidence, they’re doing something more concerted, which is to establish a body of ‘plausible’ counter-evidence which is voluminous enough to successfully taint all legitimate scrutiny of Arday’s scholarship as racially motivated and thus condemnable.
The steps they’re taking are both intricate and at times a little comical. Byline Media, for example, has tabulated the total amount of money that various charities Arday claimed to have given 5.5 million to over the years and suggested that because 5.5 million is a paltry portion of their overall total, Arday’s 5.5 million claim is possible. Writing in the Atlantic, Helen Lewis suggested a good parallel. It’s similar to her saying she ‘donated six fighter jets to the U.S. government, because they cost a minuscule fraction of the nearly $1 trillion defense budget. Why would you doubt me?’
Another key actor is the Good Law Project, which lobbies on different political causes, especially whatever causes-du-jour that its founder Jolyon Maugham deems worthy. By his own admission, Maugham knew nothing about the case before late July, but once he heard that Nathan Cofnas accused Arday of plagiarism, he immediately set up a petition garnering tens of thousands of signatures.
The Good Law Project’s petition offers a deeply selective and misleading portrait of the claims of research dishonesty and CV falsification made against Arday. It has never once acknowledged the strong evidence of dishonesty and implausible claims made by Arday over the years – nor that journals where Arday has published his work have inserted corrections, and that at least one is now reinvestigating his research.
The deliberately selective, extremely partial presentation of Arday’s case by Good Law has conferred what I term an ‘ignorance alibi’ on Arday’s supporters, something that I define as the ability to defend one’s own actions by mobilizing the ignorance of higher-placed experts. Because Good Law, a reputable non-profit in left-wing circles, has maintained throughout there is no credibility at all to any claims of plagiarism or misdoing, it gives its co-signatories licence to maintain the same assumption of total blamelessness, thus insisting they’re indisputably on the right side of moral worthiness and that any critics *must* be motivated by racial animus.
Maugham has also admitted that he pressured Bakare to pull his important investigation after Bakare could not corroborate any Arday’s claims to have been attacked multiple times, including once at knifepoint, or had a mutilated pig’s head sent to his parents’ home. Maugham is furious that Bakare refused to fall in line with Maugham’s attempt to guilt him into silence. ‘I sought to put a brave face on it,’ Maugham writes, ‘but we were all enormously upset by what we anticipated would be the effect of the story on Professor Arday. It repositioned what had hitherto been a culture war attack on a Black Professor as a genuine news story.’
I reread that line about a ‘genuine news story’ multiple times, feeling the same deep bewilderment that many people across social media report feeling when they encounter bafflingly different interpretations of the exact same evidence. For Maugham to blame Bakare for ‘repositioning’ the story as ‘genuine’ – as if this was a slight of hand by Bakare rather than journalistic duty to follow the evidence and report honestly what he found – seemed jaw-droppingly unfair of Maugham, opening Bakare up to the predictable online harassment that Bakare later sadly endured.
The attacks on Bakare, himself a mixed-race Black man, came swiftly. Kelechi Okafor, a Nigerian-British actress with hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, launched a blistering attack the Guardian for going ahead with its news investigation into the ‘unfounded’ allegations, spurring many of her followers to target Bakare.
The insistence that charges against Arday must be ‘unfounded’ had at first, like much of this tragic affair, a kernel of logic to them. It is true that Cofnas is motivated by a stated desire to undermine DEI initiatives, and that a virulent, reactionary strand of alt-right groups are pushing new efforts to resurrect ‘race science’ and nonsense pseudoscience around IQ. I’ve written critically about these malicious, pseudoscience groups myself for Jacobin magazine.
But Maugham and Byline are also deeply engaged in a dangerous, post-truth type of confirmation bias, presuming that because Cofnas had bad faith intent, all claims of plagiarism, fabulous and misconduct must be ‘unfounded.’
Unfortunately, the opposite is clear. The concerns are very well-founded. The evidence for both plagiarism and data fraud is very real and warrants further academic scrutiny.
I looked closely at three of Arday’s published studies which he claims to have based on focus group research and semi-structured interviews carried out in 2018, one published in the journal Social Sciences in 2018, one in Educational Philosophy and Theory in 2021, and one in Higher Education in 2021/2022.
The first thing that surprised me might seem trivial – and has already been extensively discussed - but is it’s still worth mentioning: the exaggerated and incorrect way that Arday represented his achievements in his bios for the articles. In Arday’s 2021 Educational Philosophy and Theory piece, for example, his biography states that he’s a ‘Visiting Research Fellow at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion’ – something Ohio State has denied.
The 2021 bio also reads: ‘Jason is the author of the following titles: Considering Racialized Contexts in Education: Using Reflective Practice and Peer-Mentoring to support Black and Ethnic Minority educators (Routledge); Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the dominant discourse (Palgrave).’
These two books may certainly have been contracted by the publishers in 2021, but they were never published. Arday must have, or should have known, that it is misleading of him to imply both books were already published. It reads like a scholarly biography of major gravitas, and it helps to explain, in some ways, why Arday appeared like a very competitive candidate for professorships at first Glasgow and then Cambridge that he would shortly receive.
But these points are trivial next to larger concerns I have about content of the article texts. I’ll focus first on a matter I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere, then come to evidence of possible data falsification that has been reported by both The Times newspaper and Retraction Watch - but that continue to be ignored in plain sight by Arday’s passionate supporters at Byline Media, where any claims of fraud continue to be pooh-poohed or angrily denied.
My first major concern pertains to text on student experiences with mental health services that Arday attributes to the leading mental health charity MIND.
In Arday’s 2018 Social Sciences article, he writes the following passages about MIND’s research on student outcomes with mental health services. I quote them at length for reasons discussed below.
‘The extent of BME and white differences regarding student mental health is significant. Research undertaken by the mental health charity MIND (2013) suggests that nearly two-thirds of ethnic minority students experiencing mental illness often experience discriminatory encounters with healthcare professionals. Furthermore, MIND (2013) states that ethnic minority students already encounter hyper-surveillance within societal spaces, which heightens feelings of sensibility and vulnerability. The prejudiced scrutiny of environmental and socialization factors has often resulted in diagnoses that advocate medication above cognitive therapies and coping strategies for ethnic minorities (MIND 2013).
Comparatively, white students are often presented with a variety of cognitive and behavioral therapies aimed at not developing a dependency on medication instead of focusing on promoting continuity and stability in managing mental illness. White university students do continue to experience mental health support differently, with MIND (2013) finding that white students often report positive experiences with mental health professionals that are situated around several self-help interventions and building confidence within patients to create autonomous individuals that become aware of the potential triggers that may affect their mental health and physical well-being.’
These paragraphs were deeply surprising to me. They suggested starkly different student experiences with mental health services in a manner that didn’t square with my own observations from 20 years as an educator in UK universities. From my experience, both white students and ethnic minority students often report deeply negative experiences with mental health support. I was surprised to read that MIND found that white students self-reported such markedly positive experiences. But my observations are anecdotal. I was curious to read the MIND report cited by Arday directly.
In the actual 2013 MIND report cited extensively by Arday, the word ‘student’ does not actually appear at all. The report is about general population referral services more broadly, and it makes no mention of student experiences or attitudes, despite Arday’s extensive passages discussing students – and claiming stark black-white differences – above. Two possibilities arise from this. Arday was simply careless and he meant to cite a different MIND report – or another NGO or policy report – about white student experience that may or may not have ever existed. I searched online and I couldn’t find such a MIND report, but it might exist. The other possibility is that Arday chose to entirely fabricate the paragraphs about student experience and to then attribute them to MIND. And if he did so, it’s likely to support any ongoing legal claims by white students against Arday’s employers for racial bias. The manufacture of imaginary, fake data that asserts starkly difference preferential treatments for white students is the type of ‘hallucination’ that academics would and should rightly condemn if an AI language model invented it. Why should we tolerate it if a human scholar falsely invents data and attributes it to a reputable mental health charity?
The sad irony is that Arday did not need to *invent* mythical empirical evidence of preferential treatment for white groups when plenty of very real empirical evidence of bias against racial minorities already does exist. Studies of hiring practices, and the way that Anglo-Saxon names get recruited more for interviews shows this, for example. But in inventing stories of preferential treatment for white groups, he was sadly handing more ammunition to anti-DEI extremists who would later target him.
Unlike many on the political Right, I take no delight in reporting this concern above. But as academics, we need to reassert that the truth is worth defending. I’m also very happy to be proved wrong. I’m very happy for the MIND report that I can’t find to surface, suggesting he simply accidentally cited the wrong report. That would be evidence of careless scholarship, but not that unusual – and not evidence of deliberately made-up paragraphs.
But if I am correct, and if Arday has either deliberately or accidentally ‘hallucinated’ findings about black vs. white student experiences that he attributes to MIND, then it is legitimate to criticize his claim. Social Sciences should correct the fabricated claims attributed to MIND.
In Britain today, it is deeply implausible that white university students feel overwhelmingly positive about mental health services while other groups suffer alone. Suicide data, for example, shows marginally higher suicide incidence among white university students next to Black students over the same period that Arday refers to (Gunnell et al 2020).
It’s also the type of research error can’t be dismissed or trivialized because of Arday’s autism. It can’t be ignored because he is a Black man. Any implications from the Left that such concerns should be ignored because Arday is now dead is injurious to other neurodivergent scholars and people of colour, wrongly implying that it is ‘ableist’ or ‘racist’ to expect truthful scholarship.
It is an injurious and infantilizing attitude to take, discrediting brilliant work by minority scholars by implying critical judgement of Black scholarship writ large is motivated by racism and thus should be ‘taboo.’ There is very weak Black scholarship and there is brilliant, life-changing Black scholarship, just as there is a wide range of both very poor and excellent scholarship by white scholars. To assert this is both obvious and banal, but also strangely taboo in today’s academy.
My next set of concerns aren’t new. They’ve all been widely reported. But they’re still worth highlighting, because the implications are serious if correct. There is clear evidence that Arday copied interview quotations published in an earlier paper and passed them off as his own collected data. As The Times reported in early August, multiple quotes in Arday’s ‘2018 paper that appear to have been plagiarised from a study by the renowned epidemiologist Anjum Memon and his team, which Arday now claims come from his own participants’ (Yeomans 2026).
Over early August, as outlets such as the Times, Retraction Watch, and the Tech Times cited damning investigations into Arday’s published work, other scholars understandably took notice. Writing on the social media platform X, University of Toronto economist Kevin A. Bryan placed Arday’s main published studies through an AI tool and found deeply unusual similarities in study design, suggesting that Arday simply tweaked the wording on focus groups and semi-structured interviews that Arday claimed to have conducted with ‘student’ BME participants, published in Social Sciences, and later termed it a ‘staff’ study. Reconfigured as a ‘staff’ study, he published the same interview material in an article for Higher Education in 2021/2022, and – with two co-authors - Educational Philosophy and Theory in 2021.
‘This is obvious and it ticks me off people pretend not to see it (and there is more!). Btw, *all* those quotes are fake, even in 2018,’ Bryan wrote on X in early August.
Bryan notes that it is unusual for Arday to suggest that the staff participant and the separate student sample would each come from precisely 14 universities – a high number of universities that itself raises red flags. 30 to 40 participants are not particularly large sample, so it’s a little surprising there 14 different universities needed to locate students and staff willing to be interviewed.
None of the 14 participating universities are named. Although anonymization demands are important, it is possible to say which universities cleared the studies to go forward, as well as *where* the focus groups took place, while still respecting informant confidentiality. Which specific institution did the focus groups take place at? How did different participants from 40 universities reach the focus groups? Were the participants remunerated at all, particularly if they travelled from each of the 14 universities to wherever the focus groups might have taken place?
The staff study is published in 2021/2022 in Higher Education, based on focus groups that Arday claims took place in March 2018. The student focus groups took place in April 2017.
The ‘student’ study, published in Social Sciences in 2018, has received the most media attention by outlets such as The Times and Retraction Watch, because it’s the article where it was first noticed three years ago that Arday replicated verbatim material from Memon et al’s 2016 article, including verbatim quotations from informants. But even that journal, as Retraction Watch writes, ‘glossed over the most significant post-publication changes Arday actually made to the text.’
Major changes to methodology were altered. In the original article, Arday states that he used Nvivo software analysis tools, and that his findings were independently analysed. The corrected version removes both claims. Major sections were removed, include multiple original quotations. As Retraction Watch puts it, ‘None of this is described clearly in the correction notice.’
Arday’s later publication in Higher Education has received, interestingly, the least amount of journalistic or academy scrutiny. Indeed, it’s being citing favourably by his supporters and for understandable reason. Its title is compelling and carries a deep pathos given Arday’s death: ‘No one can see me cry.’
But it also has highly improbable statements about methods that warrant closer examination.
The most remarkable and unusual aspect of the paper is Arday’s discussion of a group of co-researchers who he vaguely describes as ‘mental healthcare professionals’ who he claims both facilitated his focus groups with staff and worked closely with him in analysing his interview findings.
As noted above, the cohort for the ‘staff’ focus groups claimed to have taken place in March 2018 was remarkably similar to the ‘student’ cohort who he carried out focus groups with over April 2017. In both cases, the institutional location of the focus groups is never stated, nor is institutional ethical approval provided.
The ‘staff’ study does include far more detail, however, about extra research personnel involved. Arday writes of the focus groups with staff that ‘Mental healthcare professionals were on hand to facilitate the focus group and any potential traumatic episodes that may have required professional intervention’ (Arday 2021/2022).
In carrying out focus groups, it is very important for sociologists to be sensitive to the possibility of trauma. But for a small empirical study such as this, it’s unlikely – but not impossible – that Arday would have material, financial capacity to enlist a team of ‘mental health professionals’ to execute the focus groups for him. Usually, professional sociologists who conduct focus group data have the training and expertise to carry out their focus groups themselves, especially if a cohort is not deemed especially vulnerable, e.g. with children. Most NHS staff and/or private practitioners are deeply busy individuals and if they are in the room to steering and facilitating the focused discussions, they would typically be formal acknowledged and/or have some co-authorial credit. How many ‘mental health practitioners’ were there in total? Ten co-researchers? Two? How were remunerated for their time? Did they volunteer as facilitators, or were they paid?
Arday writes in his memoir that his brother works in mental health nursing, so he has close connections to mental health professionals. It’s possible that family might have assisted him, but if so, it’s likely something that should be stated. The ethical clearance protocols involved to study or involve any NHS staff is even more intricate than social sciences work carried outside a clinical setting. If ‘mental health professionals’ facilitated the focus groups, there would likely or at least should be an institutional paper trail.
These ‘mental health professionals’ also make a reappearance in the data analysis phase. Arday also notes that ‘In an attempt to minimise [his own potential] bias, other researchers and mental health professionals were enlisted for this phase of the data analysis process. The researchers and professionals independently read the scripts and coded and analysed the data to enhance the validity of the emerging themes and claims’ (Arday 2021/2022). This is not completely implausible, but it might again typically lead to more formal acknowledgement and possible co-authorship.
Instead, the mental health practitioners, of which we never learn a precise number, float through the article like phantom ghosts and their institutional affiliations are never specified. When separately pressed by the journal Social Sciences, Arday later amended his initial claims, dropping the emphasis on NVivo, and removing the claim that another scholar analysed transcripts. But the Higher Education article remains unchanged.
Another unusual claim in the Higher Education article is this: ‘The overwhelming majority of participants were the only Black or ethnic minority within their university’ (Arday 2021/2022 – my italics).
Really? How is that possible? Academic staff at UK universities number in the thousands at most Russell Group and post-92 universities. Over 18,000 academic staff at Oxford, for example. Arday doesn’t state how the 40 staff participants from 14 universities are distributed across the 14 universities, but let’s assume 2.7 each. It’s extremely implausible that Arday’s sample of 2.7 staff were ‘the only Black or ethnic minority’ at their institution. It’s a nonsensical statement.
There are odd multiplication errors. In the Higher Education article, Arday includes a table on ‘Participant Demographics’, which he notes that his participant sample is drawn from both academic staff and professional staff. The ‘mixed-heritage’ total number of staff is listed as 13, but the ‘academic’ + ‘professional’ numbers are six each. Latin American heritage is 5, but the breakdown 1 for ‘academic’ and 2 for ‘professional’. ‘Asian/Asian-British’ lists a total of 8, but the ‘academic’ number is 5 and the ‘professional’ is 4.
Then there’s a funding disclosure. Arday states: ‘This research was supported by MIND.’ Times reporter Emma Yeomans reached out to MIND for comment, and MIND told her they had no record of such funding support ever taking place.
Mistakes can and do happen. I was once told by the editors that a book chapter of mine would be forthcoming shortly in an edited book collection, so I wrongly cited my chapter as published. The edited collection was subsequently cancelled, making my citation wrong on my part.
But the oddities pointed out above go beyond mistakes. They suggest the possibility of wholesale imaginary ‘mental health professionals’ participation in the carrying out and analysis of focus groups.
Jason’s memoir is helpful – but also elusive – in trying to substantiate the existence of the focus groups. It’s written in chronological order, so it’s easy to locate the period of 2017-2018, where he discusses his transition from a PE lecturer to an expert in the sociology of race and education. He mentions that in 2017 that he took a job as head of department at a university in London. But it was short-lived: funding cuts led to his redundancy. He doesn’t name this institution. He then took a job as lecturer at Roehampton, another teaching position at an institution he does not name, before taking up an Assistant Professorship at Durham in 2019, just before the Covid pandemic hit.
He’s explicit in this section of his memoir about the fact he had no training in sociology, and that he felt very unprepared for his job as a researcher.
‘I still had to publish, bring in grants, get my work out there, and have a public impact so that I could get invited to conferences and deliver keynotes, making a name for myself and my work. But how to pull this off? I didn’t even know my stripper from my paint, to paraphrase Peter Gabriel’ (p. 229).
He mentions that immediately following his PhD, during a lectureship in physical education at the Leeds Beckett, he was asked to focus on researching the sociology of sports, not race and education: ‘The mandate from my department was that they wanted me to focus on sports-related research – anything I did outside of it would have to be on my own time. But I wasn’t going to let that directive, or my lack of training as a sociologist, stop me’ (p. 230).
Arday writes that he only learned about sociological method of interviews after he had received his PhD. He had never heard of it earlier. But once he did, he found the method suited him well, because he was a good listener and observer – and these points seem very plausible. He comes across as very earnest, empathetic, and likeable in Great and Unfortunate Things, deeply attentive to others and determined to use his life and his work to help others. He also writes of the deep pressure he felt to succeed, to make a decent living for his then-wife and his daughter and son. Did this feeling of deep pressure incline Arday to study the methods section of earlier papers, mimic them, but not actually conduct the work claimed? I think that’s highly possible.
In his memoir, he mentions interviewing his own friends and peers about their experience as minorities in higher education, and these claims also seem possible. But the published, peer-reviewed work does not state he simply interviewed his friends and colleagues.
It’s possible that at some point in these very busy years, as he moved across four or five institutions, he did carry out the empirical work he later claims. That over April 2017 and again March 2018 he found the time for weeks of labour involved in carrying out two focus groups and carrying out dozens of semi-structured interviews, learning to code, facilitating the involvement of ‘mental healthcare professionals,’ and overseeing their ethical clearance. And that amazingly the people he interviewed made verbatim comments to him identical to those published in 2016 by Memon et al.
But it’s hard to know for certain. Certainly, the memoir mentions none of this focus group work, and it’s still unclear where he carried out the focus groups – which institution hosted the dozens of participants travelling from their 14 separate institutions to sit together in intimate semi-circles. Trying to feel comfortable in the classroom chairs that many qualitative researchers are familiar with shuffling back and forth across a dusty floor, seeking to put participants at ease.
The only institution that *is* mentioned is the mental health charity MIND. Which has denied funding the work. And false funding disclosure alone is grounds for retraction.
After 2018, when his first disputed article was published in Social Sciences, Arday’s career took off swiftly. He writes of travelling to the United States, South Africa, Brazil, and New Zealand to give the keynotes he dreamed of delivering. ‘This was an arena of academic life where I could definitely thrive. Thanks to Sandro’s training and all those hours at karaoke, I was becoming a good orator. I’d also spent a lot of time in the early days of my academic career studying Barack Obama’s delivery. I would watch his speeches, observing how he used cadence, diction, and body language to captivate and inspire a crowd. I wanted to communicate complex ideas in interesting and simple ways as he did, to make things informative and entertaining, to put on a good show’ (p. 234).
**
We would not support such work – vague and unclear involvement of research personnel without ethical clearance, false funding declarations – if an undergraduate student did it, so why does this have a pass, with all three studies in Social Sciences, Higher Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory all still available and being cited? The last journal, Education Philosophy and Theory, is publicly reinvestigating. They should all reinvestigate. They should retract on ground of false funding disclosures. They should remove paragraphs that appear to be falsely attributed to MIND.
Which would not and should not be end of this deeply saddening tragedy.
Should plagiarism, academic misconduct, or embellishments to a CV cost a man his life? Certainly not. In her Atlantic article, Helen Lewis suggests that the intense media scrutiny might have eased if Arday’s admitted that fabulations took place. I think there is truth to this.
I also think some of Arday’s supporters bear some responsibility for continuing to dig down, rather than simply admitting he made major mistakes. As my colleague Emeritus Professor John Preston has suggested to media over recent weeks, when it comes to Arday’s plagiarism, it’s clear there was a case to answer, and when mistakes happen, one should admit them and face them.
While Arday was alive, it seems unfortunate that his friends and supporters weren’t able to ‘speak truth’ to him, to question, for example, why he listed books on his academic biography as being published that were not published. A remarkable column by Guardian writer Afua Hirsch published on August 13, a day before Arday’s death, states this: ‘The fact is that many of Arday’s black peers in academic sociology have been voicing concerns about him for a while. He seemed, to them, to have come out of nowhere. His performance at high-profile academic events did not match the credentials that were being touted.’
If Hirsch is correct, and many scholars of colour shared doubts about Arday but none could admit it, then a type of virulent, internal self-silencing is taking place. In academia, the heroizing, even the deification of big-name, star academics is a problem, something true across all racialized groups, but it’s possible it’s a particular burden for minority communities where individual success is upheld as representative of the group’s collective achievements.
A number of important voices within the Black community also made this point before Hirsch, such as a compelling Substack article by Seyi Akiwowo where Akiwowo pointed out that the scrutiny of Arday’s scholarship was warranted, and that it should have been possible for Black individuals to state this out loud without being condemned for ‘poor allyship.’
It’s possible that treating Black superior achievement as a hallmark of advance for the community overall makes it harder for Black individuals to publicly err without feeling like they’re letting down their community.
It is disingenuous to claim Black excellence is representative of Black life everywhere – to salute promotions or elections to senior roles as a win for the community writ large, while decrying it as racist whenever Black failure is wrongfully used as evidence of so-called ‘inferiority.’ It’s *not* evidence of ‘inferiority,’ and shouldn’t be treated that way. Indeed, if anything, Arday’s incredible rise and stratagems have an air of brilliance, just as the fabulations of Stephen Glass at New Republic were ingeniously elaborate.
Some on the academic Left are demanding that heads roll at Cambridge, claiming that Arday’s managers tokenized and fetishized him. This seems sadly true to some extent, but he also bears responsibility for CV misrepresentation. It’s also possible that tokenisation may be an unfortunate result of the aggressive demand by many on the academic Left to redress what is upheld as a glaring representation problem.
It’s academic Left – not the Right – that has proclaimed time and time again that the paltry number of Black senior professors is an indictment of UK academia overall and needs to be aggressively battled through preferential hiring practices. Only 1 percent of all Professors are Black, the statistic goes. Similarly, Arday criticized the dramatically low number of Black students studying for PhDs. Arday has written, for example, of the fact that of ‘full time United Kingdom (UK) domiciled PhD students in their first year of study…just 3% of those students were Black’ (Arday 2021).
Currently, about 4.3 per cent of the British population is Black. Given that percentage, 1 per cent of Black individuals in senior professorships and 3 percent of all PhD students being Black are is not dramatically unrepresentative of the UK population.
Personally, I am in strong favour of much higher migration by Black emigrants, leading to more diverse, plural communities across the UK. I also have no doubt that racism persists across the UK academy – the targeting of Arday is a tragic example - as well as classism and gendered bias. Only about 28 percent of professors are women, for example, and there are also far too few professors from working-class backgrounds. The question is the best strategy for challenging these different, intersecting forms of gendered, racial, and class-based prejudice. More cross-racial insistence on opportunity for scholars from immiserated financial backgrounds might be a better goal of universities, casting a wide net of inclusion and advancement rather than a narrow focus on targeted racial groups in a way that is disproportionate to the UK’s current demographic make-up, or that sets up a hiring committee to tacitly or explicitly rush a due diligence process. We need to have more nuanced discussions about which DEI approaches work best. Neither the Left or Right has yet gotten things right, with horrifying costs for minority colleagues and students, both among academics of colour and those from lower-income demographics.
This also underscores the need for overarching, more critical – and less taboo - discussions on how we understand and discuss racialized agency and identity in today’s world.
Increasingly, some members of the polarized Left and Right are each digging ever-deeper epistemological trenches when it comes to their determination to trade in racial identity, with both sides upholding race as *the* most important determinant factor in how one’s character is judged and should be judged.
Left-wing attacks on Lanre Bakare, for example, were deeply racialized in nature, with social media users attacking him for having the apparent sin of having ‘white family’ and posting Instagram photos of them over early August as media scrutiny of Arday blew up, before Bakare took his profile private.
Is the ‘sin’ of a Black or a mixed-race man having white family or friends really something that the Left should proudly despise and mock online?
It seems like a deep shame for the academic and political Left to rightly reject Cofnas’s virulent, insidious, back-door biological racial essentialism only to proudly parade a type of deep cultural essentialism – the insistence that strong cultural racial divides are unchanging, insurmountable, and will always exist – through the front door. Attacks on Bakare, for example, stemmed in part from a type of Black radicalism that insists that Black people have a particular obligation to support their community unreservedly in the name of Black liberation.
Fifty years ago, James Baldwin wrote poignantly about the flaws with that version of Black Radicalism, criticizing, for example, Elijah Muhammad’s segregationist version of Black radicalism. Baldwin insisted that people can love who they wish to love. Today, some senior Black academics in the UK celebrate an extreme form of Afro-pessimism and Black radicalism that insists ‘nothing has changed’ over the past 300 years when it comes to race relations. Individuals who argue otherwise are castigated for being ‘Uncle Toms’ and subjected to relentless attacks for purportedly undermining the cause.
Kehinde Andrews, for example, defends the use of racial slurs like ‘house negro’ against Black Britons. That’s his prerogative. He rightly notes that his defence of the term does hark back to the Black radical tradition of Malcolm X and others. He is also right, in my view, to argue that no academic should lose their job over using the phrase ‘house negro.’
But let’s be truthful: it is seen by many Black people as an unfair slur, and it has been used by Black leaders to insist that solidarity with Black radical group means turning a blind eye to internal forms of abuse.
Against demands for blind conformity, it is valid to celebrate the diversity of brilliant Black scholarship that exists today. To join with writers such as Akiwowo who called for the right to their own space, to have time for discernment, and freedom of conscience before joining the Good Law petitions, for example. It’s valuable to stress that internal nuance and difference within communities exists and deserves to be valorised, rather than to presume one monolith of voices exists, or that senior scholars such as Andrews have the definitive word on Black radicalism – or that deeply serious academic errors should be glossed over if a scholar happens to be Black.
As scholars we owe a debt to past truths. We owe debts to the brilliance and courage of scholars like James Baldwin who refused to ally himself with Elijah Muhammad simply because of their shared race.
Just as Baldwin celebrated the right of all men and women to choose freely when it came to the pursuit of cross-racial and interracial love, community building, and scholarship in the 1960s, we can celebrate cross-racial cultural integration today, rejecting both white identitarian and Black identitarian demands for more racial separation, segregation, or special preservation away from academic scrutiny.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank my University of Essex colleague John Preston for reading this piece and for discussing our shared concerns about research integrity and its defence. Thanks also to valuable comments by other colleagues that helped inform my thinking and this piece.
References
Akiwowo, S. 2026. ‘Social Media, Identity Politics and Community Accountability’ Aug 06. Social Media, Identity Politics and Community Accountability
Andrews, K. 2024. “This is an attack on our community”: Kehinde Andrews blasts police probe over ‘House Negro comments - Voice Online (8th September 2024).
Arday J. 2018. Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University? Social Sciences. 7(10):196. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7100196
Arday, J. 2021. Fighting the tide: Understanding the difficulties facing Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Doctoral Students’ pursuing a career in Academia. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(10), 972–979. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1777640
Arday, J. 2021/2022. ‘No one can see me cry: understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic staff in higher education’ High Educ 83, 79–102, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00636-w
Arday J. 2023. Correction: Arday, Jason (2018). Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University? Social Sciences 7: 196. Social Sciences.12(12):672. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12120672
Arday, J. 2026. Great and Unfortunate Things. Simon & Schuster.
Baldwin, J. (2017 [1963]) The Fire Next Time. London: Penguin.
Gunnell D, Caul S, Appleby L, et al. 2020. ‘The incidence of suicide in university students in England and Wales 2000/2001-2016/2017: record linkage study.’ J Affect Disord 2020;261:113–20.
MIND. 2013. Mental Health Crisis Care: Commissioning Excellence for Black and Minority Ethnic Groups. London. bme-commissioning-excellence-briefing.pdf
Yeomans, Emma. 2026. Jason Arday: Times analysis finds ‘impossible’ data in his work
Culbertson, D. 2026. Cambridge Professor Jason Arday Faces 188-Sentence Plagiarism Finding; Charity Claims Disputed. Tech Times.
A detailed and nuanced piece on a complex, challenging case, combining compassion with diligence. Imho it's just the approach that's needed if we're to move forward as a society. (And the reason I value Substack!) Many thanks, I hope this is widely read.
I’ve been trying to make sense of the Arday case in light of my own experience in higher education. This is the first thing I’ve read about this sad case that truly resonates with the many forms of strategic ignorance, ideological biases, and fetishisation I saw at play at the elite and non-élite institutions I worked for.