#academic fraud

One of the most famous–and controversial– psychology studies ever conducted is a fraud, a scientist claims in a new report.

Not only was the Stanford Prison Experiment a sham, but it’s mastermind, Stanford psychology professor Philip Zimbardo, pushed participants towards the results he wanted, Dr. Ben Blum claims in a report published on Medium last week.

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The study was supposed to last two weeks but guards were reportedly so cruel, it had to be stopped after six days.

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One of the men who acted as an inmate told Blum he enjoyed the experiment because he knew the guards couldn’t actually hurt him.

“There were no repercussions. We knew [the guards] couldn’t hurt us, they couldn’t hit us. They were white college kids just like us, so it was a very safe situation,” said Douglas Korpi, who was 22-years-old when he acted as an inmate in the study.

In a recorded clip of the experiment, Korpi was seen locked in a dark closet, naked under a thin white smock, screaming “I’m burning up inside!” and kicking furiously at the door.

But the Berkeley grad now admits the whole thing was fake.

I can’t say I’m too surprised. We had to watch a film on this in a psychology course I took as an elective in college. It was pretty scary to say the least, so it’s a relief that it was acting and not real. 

By: Colin Wright

Published: May 29, 2026

We’re often told that science is “self-correcting.”

But that’s not really true.

Science doesn’t correct itself like a thermostat adjusting the temperature in your house. Science is a human institution run by human beings. And human beings are vulnerable to career incentives, groupthink, moral fads, political pressure, and fear.

And when those forces capture academic journals, peer review stops being a filter for bad ideas and starts becoming more of a credentialing system for fashionable nonsense.

This isn’t exactly new.

In 1996, the physicist Alan Sokal managed to publish a totally gibberish article in the journal Social Text full of trendy postmodern jargon. His point was simple: if you flatter the ideological commitments of certain academic editors, nonsense can pass as real scholarship.

Two decades later, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian pulled off the “grievance studies” hoax, placing over a half dozen absurd papers in peer-reviewed journals. One paper used dog parks to analyze rape culture and “queer performativity.” Another rewrote parts of Mein Kampf in the language of feminist theory.

The problem wasn’t just that fake papers got published. It was that they were completely indistinguishable from the real thing.

And today, the problem is even worse.

We now have serious science journals publishing papers about feminist lesbians marrying brine shrimp. We have disturbing papers that aim to “queer” and sexualize infants. We have scholarship on “lesbian-queer-trans-canine relationalities” and “trans-dog intimacies.”

But while Clown World papers are concerning because it makes a complete mockery of academia, the same broken, ideologically captured system is also publishing research in legitimate science and medical journals that pushes sex and gender pseudoscience, relies on deeply flawed data, and influences policies on the medical transition of children and young adults.

That’s not funny. That affects real people. It affects medicine. It affects law. It affects children.

And when critics try to respond, they often discover there’s no serious mechanism for correction. Submitted Letters to the Editor often go completely ignored. Contrary evidence is rejected without comment. As a result, the best critiques are often relegated to personal blog posts, social media threads, or newspaper op-eds, while the original paper remains in the literature wearing the armor of “peer review.”

That is untenable.

So Kevin McCaffree, editor-in-chief of Theory and Society, and I decided to do something about it.

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, we announced a first-of-its-kind article type called “Peer Review.”

The idea is simple: publication should be the beginning of academic scrutiny, not the end of it.

A Peer Review article can critique a paper from any scholarly journal. It can address problems with methods, evidence, logic, definitions, theory, or interpretation. But it has to focus on the claims and arguments, not personal attacks.

Submissions are capped at 2,500 words and go through a straightforward merit review instead of endless gatekeeping and ideological screening. We ask just one basic question: Is this critique coherent, serious, reasonable, or even popular enough to deserve scholarly attention?

If yes, it gets published.

And the authors of the original paper get a built-in right of reply, so readers can see the critique and the response in a legitimate academic venue.

That’s how science is supposed to work.

Science becomes self-correcting only when real people build the mechanisms that allow correction to happen.

That’s what we’ve done.

By: James L. Nuzzo

Published: May 11, 2026

Earlier this year, a meta-analysis on physical fitness in transgender individuals was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, one of the most historically important journals in sports medicine and exercise science. The paper’s eight authors, led by Sofia Mendes Sieczkowska, concluded that “transgender women do not exhibit significant differences in upper-body strength, lower-body strength, or maximal oxygen consumption relative to cisgender women after 1–3 years of [gender-affirming hormone therapy].” Based on this conclusion, the authors expressed support for “nuanced, sport-specific policies rather than blanket bans” regarding the inclusion of transgender individuals in sports.

The paper caused an initial stir online—and rightly so. Below, I show how the authors misled the public by concluding that their meta-analysis provided evidence of no difference in muscle strength between women and transgender women (i.e., biological males) after “1–3 years” of cross-sex hormones. More specifically, the authors did not even follow their own inclusion criteria. In some cases, they included data that should have been excluded; in others, they excluded data that should have been included. Underlying all of this is the fact that the muscle-strength meta-analysis was underpowered from the start, with only a few studies contributing to the analysis.

Let us now take a closer look at the data and the claims.

Figure 2 in the paper, shown below, presents the data comparing muscle strength in cisgender and transgender women. Panel A is the forest plot for the meta-analysis of upper-body strength, while Panel B is the forest plot for the meta-analysis of lower-body strength.

On the left side of each plot are the labels for the individual studies included in the meta-analysis. These labels contain the surnames of the researchers who conducted the original studies, the year of publication, and the studies’ reference numbers in the paper’s reference list.

In total, six studies are shown in Panels A and B. The first is the Alvares 2025 study, which appears in both panels because it included data on both upper-body and lower-body strength. The others are Ceolin 2024, Hamilton 2024, Andrade 2022, Jenkins 2020, and Saitong 2025. Saitong 2025 appears twice in Panel B for reasons I will explain later.

In the plots, each study has a blue square associated with it. The blue square represents that study’s effect size, which reflects the magnitude of the difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The upper-body strength analysis included four effect sizes from four studies, while the lower-body strength analysis included only four effect sizes from three studies.

The thin black lines extending to the left and right of each blue square are the 95% confidence intervals (CIs). The narrower the CI around the blue square, the more confident we can be that the blue square accurately reflects the true difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The wider the CI, the less confident we can be.

The solid black vertical line in the middle of the plot aligns with zero on the x-axis and indicates no difference in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women. The farther a blue square appears to the left of this zero line, the stronger the cisgender women were relative to the transgender women. The farther it appears to the right, the stronger the transgender women were relative to the cisgender women.

A large, light-blue diamond is displayed at the bottom of each plot. This diamond represents the overall effect size when all the studies in that plot are pooled together. Researchers use this pooled estimate to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference in a given fitness outcome between two groups. If the diamond crosses the vertical zero line, researchers generally conclude that there is no statistically significant difference between the groups. If the diamond does not cross the zero line, they conclude that a statistically significant difference does exist.

As seen in both Panels A and B, the diamonds cross the vertical zero line. This is why the authors concluded that there was no difference in upper-body or lower-body muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women.

Story over, right?

Too Few Studies

The overall effect size—the diamond—is only as meaningful as the inputs that comprise it. If researchers include studies that are irrelevant to the question, or exclude studies that are relevant to it, then the diamond, and the conclusions drawn from it, become meaningless.

More fundamentally, the number of individual studies that make up the overall effect size is critical. A meaningful meta-analysis typically includes a dozen or several dozen effect sizes. Meta-analyses based on only three or four effect sizes are inherently fragile. They can be easily distorted by a single outlier study, and that is precisely what happened in Figure 2.

Sieczkowska and her co-authors are not at fault for the limited number of available effect sizes. But they are responsible for choosing to conduct a meta-analysis on a topic for which so little data were available. Reaching such a bold conclusion from such sparse evidence was a further scientific failure. Put bluntly, Sieczkowska and her co-authors should never have conducted the muscle-strength meta-analyses shown in Figure 2.

And low statistical power is not the only problem with the muscle-strength meta-analyses in Figure 2. Incompetence and misleading statements were also on display.

Andrade 2022 Study: The Wrong Sex!

Let us start with the most shocking error in Figure 2: the inclusion of Andrade 2022. This study should not have been included in the muscle-strength meta-analysis at all.

According to Sieczkowska and her co-authors, Figure 2 presents results from studies comparing muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women. But Andrade 2022 did not compare muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women. It compared muscle strength between cisgender men and transgender men!

This is stated plainly in the title of the paper itself: “Bone mineral density, trabecular bone score and muscle strength in transgender men receiving testosterone therapy versus cisgender men” [italics added].

Ceolin 2024 and the Duration of Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy

Removing Andrade 2022 reduces the number of relevant muscle-strength studies in Figure 2 to five, and the number in Panel A, on upper-body strength, to three. One of these three remaining studies is Ceolin 2024.

Sieczkowska and her co-authors stated that, to be eligible for their meta-analysis, a study needed to include a group of transgender individuals who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy, apparently for any duration. With that inclusion criterion in mind, the next most shocking error in Figure 2 is the inclusion of Ceolin 2024.

Ceolin 2024 did not include transgender women who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy. In fact, this is stated explicitly in the paper’s title: “Bone health and body composition in transgender adults before gender-affirming hormonal therapy: data from the COMET study” [italics added].

Ceolin 2024 reported baseline data on upper-body strength in transgender women before they underwent gender-affirming hormone therapy. For this reason, the study should not have been included in the meta-analysis of upper-body strength shown in Panel A of Figure 2. Removing it reduces the number of eligible studies to four overall, and to only two for upper-body strength.

But the problems concerning the duration of gender-affirming hormone therapy do not end there.

In their conclusion, Sieczkowska and her co-authors stated that the transgender women in the meta-analysis had undergone “1–3 years” of gender-affirming hormone therapy. A closer look at the four remaining studies suggests otherwise.

The Alvares 2025 study did not state explicitly the average duration of the participants’ gender-affirming hormone therapy. So, how could Sieczkowska and co-authors possibly know that all the transgender women in the Alvares 2025 study had undergone 1-3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy? If anything, one can assume that the average therapy duration was longer than 3 years based on the average age of the transgender women in the study (30.3 years old) and the average age at which the transgender women in the study started their gender-affirming hormone therapy (23.0 years old).

The Saitong 2025 study reported that the transgender women had “been undergoing feminizing gender-affirming therapy for 8-10 years.” Thus, the Saitong 2025 study clearly falls outside of the 1-3 years range mentioned in Sieczkowska and co-authors’ concluding remarks.

The Hamilton 2024 study reported that the transgender women had undergone one year or more years of gender-affirming hormone therapy, with an average therapy duration of four years. Thus, several of the participants in the Hamilton 2024 study would have been undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy for more than 3 years.

The Jenkins 2020 study reported that the transgender women had undergone a minimum of 2 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy, but no group average or range was provided. Thus, some participants in the Jenkins 2020 study would have also likely been undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy for more than 3 years.

To their credit, Sieczkowska and co-authors did mention elsewhere in their paper that “[t]herapy duration varied widely, ranging from 3 months to 14 years, with most studies reporting the following participants for 1–3 years of therapy.” Their statement confirms large heterogeneity in therapy duration, and this heterogeneity amplifies the existing problems in the already underpowered meta-analysis. Their statement also reveals that the “1-3 years” remark, which was used in their concluding statements, was a rough range based on all 52 studies in their paper—not just the studies that compared muscle strength in cisgender and transgender women.

So, Sieczkowska and co-authors misled readers when they said there was no difference in muscle strength between cisgender women and transgender women who had undergone “1-3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy.” In fact, one could argue that none of the studies that were included in panels A and B in Figure 2 are represented by that remark.

Remarkably, the errors do not end there.

Alvares 2025 Study: The Small Men

The Alvares 2025 study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, examined body composition and physical fitness in cisgender women, transgender women, and cisgender men who had “engaged in regular volleyball training for at least 1 year.”

Alvares 2025 is a clear outlier in Panels A and B. It “pulls” the diamonds in both panels to the left and is the main reason the diamond in Panel A crosses the zero line. It also contributed substantially to the diamond in Panel B crossing the zero line.

Given that Alvares 2025 was an obvious outlier that strongly influenced the conclusions of the meta-analysis, one might have expected Sieczkowska and her co-authors to explain why this study was an outlier. Yet no such explanation was provided.

Here are some key details about Alvares 2025. First, the transgender women in the study were, on average, 5 cm shorter than the cisgender women and 13 cm shorter than the cisgender men. Second, the transgender women had an average body mass 7.8 kg lower than the cisgender women and 17.8 kg lower than the cisgender men. Third, the transgender women practiced volleyball 10 hours per week less than both the cisgender women and the cisgender men.

So what explains these bizarre results?

The cisgender women in Alvares 2025 were not ordinary recreational volleyball players or weekend warriors. They played in “second division national level championships.”

Importantly, Alvares and colleagues themselves addressed this issue in a section of their paper titled “Confounding factors.” There, they explicitly identified training experience, body height, and body mass as confounding factors that help explain why the average grip strength of the cisgender women in their study was greater than that of the transgender women.

Yet Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not inform readers about these confounding factors, which help explain why Alvares 2025 is an outlier in Figure 2. Moreover, because the cisgender and transgender women in Alvares 2025 were so oddly mismatched, the results of that study, and any meta-analysis that relies heavily on it, are of little scientific or practical value.

Jenkins 2020: Missing Data

One of the other problems with the muscle-strength meta-analysis in Figure 2 is that it omitted data that were eligible for inclusion under the authors’ own stated criteria.

The first example is Jenkins 2020, which examined body composition and physical fitness in cisgender women, transgender women, and cisgender men. One of the fitness tests Jenkins conducted was the vertical jump. Results from this test appear to be what Sieczkowska and her co-authors displayed in Panel B.

However, Jenkins and colleagues also reported grip-strength data for cisgender and transgender women. Yet Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not include these data in their meta-analysis of upper-body strength in Panel A.

This omission matters because the grip-strength data run counter to Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ conclusion. The average grip strength of the transgender women was 93.0 kg, compared with 63.9 kg for the cisgender women and 112.7 kg for the cisgender men. The 29.1 kg difference between transgender women and cisgender women was statistically significant, whereas the 19.7 kg difference between transgender women and cisgender men was not.

Saitong 2025: Missing Data

Sieczkowska and her co-authors categorized the vertical jump test as a measure of lower-body “strength.” But today, the vertical jump is more commonly, though still somewhat debatably, described as a test of “power.” In fact, this is how Alvares, Jenkins, and Saitong referred to it. Strength and power are correlated, and strength does correlate with vertical jump height. However, velocity and power are stronger correlates of vertical jump height than strength.

I highlight this issue of nomenclature for two reasons. First, inconsistent use of terminology can confuse readers about which fitness attributes are, and are not, affected by sex and gender-affirming hormone therapy. Second, in this meta-analysis, the inclusion of only the vertical jump as a lower-body strength test is odd, especially because at least one of the included studies—Saitong 2025—reported results from a more direct test of lower-body muscle strength: isokinetic peak torque of the knee extensor and knee flexor muscles.

Saitong 2025 examined these attributes in cisgender women, cisgender men, transgender women with orchiectomy (the surgical removal of the testes), and transgender women without orchiectomy. The group comparisons for the vertical jump and isokinetic peak torque tests were similar, with cisgender women tending to score lowest among all groups, though not necessarily at statistically significant levels. Nevertheless, Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ decision to include the vertical jump results, but not the isokinetic peak torque results, is odd.

Even stranger, Saitong 2025 also included two tests of upper-body strength that Sieczkowska and her co-authors did not include in their meta-analysis in Panel A: isokinetic peak torque of the elbow extensor muscles and isokinetic peak torque of the elbow flexor muscles. The results from these two tests are presented below. They show that cisgender women had the lowest average strength values, although their averages were not statistically different from those of transgender women who had undergone approximately 8–10 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy.

Elbow extensor isokinetic peak torque:

Cisgender women: 25.9 ± 4.9 Nm

Transgender women with orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 27.2 ± 5.4 Nm

Transgender women without orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 29.1 ± 5.2 Nm

Cisgender men: 47.3 ± 14.7 Nm

Elbow flexor isokinetic peak torque:

Cisgender women: 19.2 ± 5.1 Nm

Transgender women with orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 21.5 ± 5.7 Nm

Transgender women without orchiectomy and ~8–10 years of gender-affirming therapy: 21.3 ± 5.0 Nm

Cisgender men: 36.3 ± 9.0 Nm

Another important point about Saitong 2025 is that the results from both transgender women with orchiectomy and transgender women without orchiectomy were compared against the same reference group of cisgender women. From the standpoint of study feasibility, this is understandable: it avoids the need to recruit a second reference group of cisgender women. But from a statistical standpoint, the double inclusion of the same reference group in a low-powered meta-analysis is problematic. If that reference group of cisgender women is unusual compared with the broader population of cisgender women, then its uniqueness will disproportionately influence an already flawed analysis.

The Non-Included Alvares Study: More Missing Data

Another bizarre aspect of the meta-analysis in Figure 2 is that at least one other study referenced elsewhere in the paper appears to qualify for inclusion in the figure but is absent from it. This was a second study by Alvares, listed as reference #38 in the paper and included in Figures 1 and 3.

This second Alvares study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2022. It compared cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender women who had undergone gender-affirming hormone therapy for 14 years, on average. One of the outcomes was grip strength. Grip strength was about 19 percent higher in transgender women than in cisgender women, 35.3 kg versus 29.7 kg, though this difference was not statistically significant. The grip strength of the cisgender men was 48.4 kg.

Including the grip-strength data from the transgender and cisgender women in Panel A would have “pulled” the diamond to the right, away from Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ conclusion.

Conclusion

On March 26, 2026, about a month and a half after Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ meta-analysis was published, the International Olympic Committee announced its new policy restricting eligibility for the female category at the Olympic Games and other IOC events to biological females. Thankfully, the IOC does not appear to have been influenced at the last minute by Sieczkowska’s paper. That said, findings published in papers like this can still influence sports policies developed by organizations other than the IOC, and they can still impact law.

As I have detailed, the meta-analysis of muscle-strength data in Figure 2 contains many flaws. It included multiple studies that do not meet the authors’ own stated eligibility criteria, while excluding multiple studies that do. Moreover, the meta-analysis was unsound from the start, because too few studies were available to support meaningful conclusions.

Sieczkowska and her co-authors should either issue a correction to their work or retract it altogether, particularly if similar problems exist elsewhere in the paper. Their conclusion that transgender women do not exhibit significant differences in upper-body or lower-body strength compared with cisgender women after 1–3 years of gender-affirming hormone therapy is inappropriate in light of the flaws highlighted above.

At this point, the more appropriate format for synthesizing this literature would be a narrative review, which would allow researchers to take a deeper look at the few available studies in this emerging area. Unfortunately, exercise scientists are often overly eager to publish meta-analyses because they are easier to complete than laboratory experiments, frequently cited by other researchers, and carry a patina of prestige because they are quantitative and require researchers to check a long list of procedural boxes that supposedly improve research quality.

Yet, as we have seen, these supposedly gold-standard procedures are no cure for good old-fashioned human incompetence.

This meta-analysis had eight authors, presumably two to four peer reviewers, and at least one editor. Yet apparently none of them identified one or more of the problems I have highlighted here. That is terrifying!

Finally, it is important to note that three of the papers discussed above were published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. This meta-analysis makes four. Two of those papers—the Hamilton 2024 study and the second Alvares study—required formal corrections. If Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ meta-analysis is corrected, it would become the third paper on this topic in the journal to require correction. That is a remarkably high proportion, and it reflects the British Journal of Sports Medicine’s failing peer review process.

Over the past few years, the British Journal of Sports Medicine has become increasingly political. It has placed itself at the center of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in sports medicine and exercise science publishing. One of the boxes Sieczkowska and her co-authors were required to check before publishing in the journal was the author DEI statement. These statements take up one or two paragraphs of valuable space in papers already limited to 5,000 words. Sieczkowska and her co-authors’ DEI statement took up 80 words.

Think about that for a minute.

Consider the one or two important points of scientific clarification that could have been made with those 80 words. For example, they could have been used to explain why Alvares 2025 was such an outlier and to caution readers against overinterpreting the results of the muscle-strength meta-analysis. Instead, readers learned about the authors’ sexes, gender identities, sexual orientations, career stages, geographic locations, and marginalization statuses—none of which help policymakers understand whether there are meaningful differences in muscle strength between cisgender and transgender women.

By: Frederick Attenborough

Published: Aug 5, 2026

Professor Jason Arday reported fellow academic Dr David Harris to police after Harris raised concerns about apparent errors and possible plagiarism in his work

Cambridge University’s embattled “academic superstar”, Professor Jason Arday, reported a fellow academic to the police after being challenged over apparent inconsistencies, errors and possible plagiarism in his work – raising troubling questions about the use of harassment law as a shield against awkward scholarly scrutiny in an increasingly litigious, low-trust society.

The academic was Dr David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University and one of the first scholars to raise concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and several subsequent peer-reviewed publications on race, inequality and education, including his treatment of concepts such as structural racism, whiteness, decolonisation and racial microaggressions.

It was not Harris’s first encounter with institutional hostility arising from his scrutiny of critical theory and related intellectual traditions, including Critical Legal Studies, Black Studies and strands of Marxist and Frankfurt School thought. Last year, Marjon revoked the emeritus title he had held since retiring in 2011 after he published a monograph critically examining the body of ideas now commonly described as critical race theory. Internal emails later obtained through a Subject Access Request showed senior administrators describing his research as “controversial” and suggesting that the University should “probably sever ties” with him. Following an intervention by CAF, however, the University reversed its decision and restored the title earlier this year.

That monograph formed part of a wider research programme Harris had pursued for several years, examining how such ideas and frameworks were used in empirical educational research. Arday’s work was therefore directly relevant to his interests, but it came to Harris’s attention only amid the considerable publicity surrounding Arday’s appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge in March 2023.

Harris’s opening email to Arday, sent on 4 May 2023, was almost absurdly polite: unmistakably scholarly, but also courteous and measured. He explained that he was reviewing Arday’s work as part of a wider research project and attached a detailed document setting out concerns about what he described as “puzzling similarities” in the reported data, repeated passages and possible failures of attribution. The covering email concluded simply: “I would welcome any response.”

When none came, Harris sent a brief follow-up a week later.

Arday replied that same day but did not address the substance of Harris’s concerns. Instead, he recast Harris’s intervention as little more than pettifogging criticism of spelling and grammar, and as evidence of a failure to appreciate the structural racism and ableism which, in his view, such scrutiny helped to perpetuate.

It was, he wrote, “disappointing that you have imposed yourself on me in the manner you have, i.e. without any reflexivity or humility whatsoever”. He continued:

“You will likely know, from your literature reviews not from experience, that the academy is a hostile place for Black scholars. There are very few of us that become professors, and even fewer in the fortunate but precarious position I am in, which is having the platform to represent and uplift other people of colour even beyond academia. As a Black, autistic man with global developmental delay and severe dyslexia, the odds are even less likely; my hope has always been that people like me feel inspired to pursue academia, and that people like you can make space for this.”

“Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism,” Arday added, “you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes.”

Harris was, he said, “a monument to the fact we live in a society where grammar is valued above equity”. He ended with the warning: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

Harris nevertheless replied, prefacing his remarks with an expression of admiration for Arday as someone who had overcome considerable personal and professional adversity, before returning to the academic issues and correcting what he regarded as an inaccurate and damaging account of his own disciplinary history.

What followed is now a matter of public record. Arday contacted the Metropolitan Police to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris. Because Harris is based in Plymouth, the matter was referred to Devon and Cornwall Police, which declined to pursue it.

As an organisation that defends academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law, CAF takes no view on the ultimate merits of the allegations concerning Arday’s work. We are, however, deeply concerned by what appears, on the evidence available to us, to have been an attempt to use the criminal law to suppress legitimate scholarly scrutiny.

It might be said that no great harm was done, since the legal threshold for harassment is high and the police declined to pursue the complaint. But that assumes that the threshold will always be properly understood and applied at the outset. Where lawful speech is recast as criminal harassment, much may depend on whether those receiving the complaint recognise just how demanding the law actually is, rather than allowing subjective offence or the complainant’s own characterisation of the conduct to stand in for the statutory test.

In this case, that statutory test is found in the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. Section 1(1) prohibits a person from pursuing a course of conduct which amounts to harassment and which they know, or ought to know, amounts to harassment. Under the Act, a “course of conduct” must involve conduct on at least two occasions, although two instances do not, without more, establish harassment. Section 2 makes breach of that prohibition a criminal offence, while section 3 creates a civil remedy through which damages or an injunction may be sought.

Since Arday complained to the police, it was presumably the section 2 offence, rather than the civil remedy under section 3, that was under consideration. But the substantive threshold is demanding in either context. A civil claim rests on the same section 1 prohibition, and, at the outset of Hayes v Willoughby (2013), Lord Sumption described harassment as a “persistent and deliberate course of unreasonable and oppressive conduct, targeted at another person”, calculated to cause, and actually causing, alarm, fear or distress. Because the same statutory concept of harassment governs both the tort and the criminal offence, the conduct must, even in a civil claim, be grave enough to sustain criminal liability under section 2.

Lord Nicholls explained the nature of that threshold in Majrowski v Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Trust (2006):

“[C]ourts will have in mind that irritations, annoyances, even a measure of upset, arise at times in everybody’s day-to-day dealings with other people. Courts are well able to recognise the boundary between conduct which is unattractive, even unreasonable, and conduct which is oppressive and unacceptable. To cross the boundary from the regrettable to the unacceptable the gravity of the misconduct must be of an order which would sustain criminal liability under section 2.”

Where the alleged harassment consists of speech, the domestic courts have warned against silencing expression on the basis of subjective assertions of offence or insult. In publication cases, they have also stressed that even robust criticism will not ordinarily amount to harassment.

The European Court of Human Rights has likewise repeatedly underlined the importance of academic freedom and scholarship to the functioning of democratic societies. In Erdoğan and others v Turkey (2014), it held that academic works addressing matters of public concern should receive the highest level of protection under Article 10. Its case law also recognises that the “public watchdog” role is not confined to professional journalists, but may extend to academics and researchers contributing to public debate.

Measured against those principles, nothing in the correspondence reviewed by CAF remotely approaches the threshold for harassment. No doubt it would have been more prudent for Harris not to send a further response after Arday warned that any additional contact would be treated as “bullying and harassment”. But, viewed in the context of the exchange as a whole, one additional reply arising directly from a dispute over published scholarship could hardly be described as the persistent, oppressive and unacceptable course of conduct described in Hayes and Majrowski.

In taking no further action, Devon and Cornwall Police got the decision right. But as the recent cases of Maxie Allen, Darren Brady, Julian Foulkes, Kellie-Jay Keen, Markus Meechan, Jennifer Swayne, and David Wootton demonstrate, police forces have not always covered themselves in glory when deciding whether lawful but contentious expression warrants arrest or investigation under broadly framed communication offences.

Harris’s experience does not, of course, establish a pattern, and it would be wrong to suggest that academics routinely report their critics to the police. Even as a one-off, however, it augurs badly for the future in an increasingly litigious and low-trust society if criminal harassment law begins to look like an available response to awkward scholarly criticism.

Part of the danger is that the consequences of an allegation of harassment, or another speech-based allegation of a similar kind, can begin long before a court determines whether the legal threshold has been met. The police may investigate, arrive at an academic’s home in full view of their neighbours, request a voluntary interview under caution or, where the legal test for arrest is satisfied, take the still more serious step of arresting them. Stress and uncertainty do not lie dormant, waiting for a charging decision – and nor, for that matter, does reputational damage. Once the whispering begins within a university department, professional consequences may start to accumulate of their own accord. In that sense, the process can itself become punitive, exerting a powerful chilling effect even where no charge ultimately follows.

Academics will be less likely to engage in robust debate and scholarly inquiry – testing published claims, identifying apparent errors or raising concerns about research integrity – if doing so exposes them to allegations of criminal wrongdoing and the prospect of a prolonged police investigation. That is why any tendency to reach for the criminal law when confronted with academic criticism must be checked before it becomes, if not normalised, then at least an attractive means of avoiding difficult but legitimate questions.

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By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Aug 3, 2026

Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times. As the youngest black person ever to be appointed a professor at the University of Cambridge, there are good reasons why those who have championed him are rushing to his defence. But with each passing day, new revelations of his slippery relationship with reality seem to be emerging.

As with many fabulists, it is difficult to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Some of Arday’s boasts are quite obviously false. For instance, nobody believes that he completed the last nine of thirty consecutive marathons with a fractured leg that had swollen ‘to twice its normal size’. Or that he appeared in the television series Seven Up! as a child, even though its participants were selected in 1963 and Arday was born two decades later.

Other claims might well be embellishments on kernels of reality. No doubt he has raised money for charity, but it seems highly unlikely that his vaunted sum of £5.5 million is accurate. We know that he played snooker, but his assertion that he did so professionally would carry more weight if someone on the circuit had heard of him. Few would dispute that Arday is a keen amateur athlete. But if his claim to have run six hundred miles in six days were true, that would place him among the world’s elite sportsmen.

Perhaps most serious of all are the accusations of plagiarism. Cambridge has been quick to dismiss the matter, stating that an investigation has already been conducted by Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD thesis, and no evidence of plagiarism was found. Many readers who have compared the relevant passages side by side have reached a different conclusion. Numerous examples have been collated by Nathan Cofnas and can be seen here.

The refusal of the authorities at Cambridge to investigate the allegations properly has naturally raised suspicions that Arday is being protected because he is the poster boy for DEI. If it is true that he was raised on a council estate, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, first spoke at the age of eleven, and learned to read and write at eighteen, then his success story is unparalleled. Yet plagiarism is an extremely grave matter for an academic, and the evidence is difficult to dismiss.

The failure to hold Arday to the same standards as anyone else is, of course, a soft form of racism.

Those who have been wildly accusing his critics of racial prejudice might want to take a moment to consider whether they are engaged in a form of projection. Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at Cambridge, had circulated a letter to fellow academics urging them to sign in the name of ‘anti-racism’. It might well be that some of Arday’s critics are gleefully leaping on the controversy to discredit a prominent black man, but these are unpleasant outliers. Most people are simply concerned that academic standards are being degraded out of a misguided fealty to the creed of identity politics.

Baron-Cohen’s most shameful ploy has been to cite statistics regarding suicidality in autism and then raise concerns about the ‘impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic’. This kind of emotional blackmail ought to be beneath him. While it is natural to feel sympathy for anyone who is caught in a media storm, we cannot get around the fact that Arday is a high-profile academic at a top university. The reporters who have covered this controversy are not ‘bullying a vulnerable autistic man’; they are simply doing their job.

The notion that minorities ought to be judged by lower standards is undeniably racist, and yet this is precisely the stance taken by Arday’s cheerleaders. It is possible to investigate and report on this story without veering into cruelty, and virtually all reporters have acquitted themselves admirably in this regard. But it is no small matter that Arday’s promotion prevented other people – possibly also from minority groups – from securing a role for which they may have been better qualified. Arday is not the victim here.

At present, we have no idea why Arday lifted whole passages from another academic’s work for his thesis. According to the BBC, Arday has insisted that his autism meant that in his early academic work he would rely ‘on using mimicry to make sense of information, and that similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academics’. But it is simply not the case that plagiarism on this scale is commonplace. Mistakes, of course, can be made. One might, for instance, jot down a quotation in note form without an attribution and then later take it to be one’s own writing. But look again at the sheer volume of identical passages; plagiarism does appear to be the most plausible explanation.

Hard as it is to believe, this may not even be a straightforward case of fraudulence. There are those for whom lying comes completely naturally, so much so that it is often their first instinct. The novelist Compton Mackenzie called such people the improvisatori, and famous examples he knew personally included Dr Axel Munthe, Ford Madox Ford, Lawrence of Arabia and the artist Dion Clayton Calthrop.

In the third volume of his autobiography, Mackenzie gives an example of one of these improvisatori, a military man who he refers to only as ‘T—’.

‘On one occasion cannibalism was a topic in the billiards-room. “I expect I’m the only one here who knows what human flesh tastes like,” said T—. We exclaimed in astonishment. “Yes, when I was on safari in Matabeleland soon after the war we had an unusually good soup one night. When I told my cook-boy how good it was he beamed and said it was because he had put in it a dead baby he had bought from its mother. Of course, I gave him a flogging and forbade him ever to do such a thing again.” “But didn’t you feel horribly sick when you heard what your cook-boy had done?” we asked. “Yes, I suppose I felt a bit squeamish but I have to admit that it was a really excellent soup.”’

It is a perfect example of the genre: an anecdote rich in detail and told with conviction, but utterly false. In such cases, it is not that the lie serves a purpose, but that it reveals a curious tendency in the man whose first instinct is to dwell in fantasy.

Some liars believe their own lies. Some simply relish the attention or the sense of power that often accompanies a successful deception. It is useless at this point to speculate on Arday’s motives, or even if he is aware that he has done anything wrong. Yet as a high-profile figure at a top university, any evidence of professional misconduct must be investigated. The issue is not race but standards, and a university that cannot distinguish between the two has lost sight of its purpose.

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The inevitable result of DEI, affirmative action and identity politics.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gwao.70122

Abstract

This paper explores the negotiations surrounding the identity of a nonbinary academic across multiple business schools. These institutions increasingly pledge their support for gender equality and prominently display queer, rainbow-related discourses. Employing an autoethnographic approach and drawing on insights from identity work and stigma identity management, this study explores the multiple interactions encountered throughout my journey as a nonbinary faculty member. These interactions include negotiations with faculty leadership, committees, and offices within business schools, spaces within these institutions, and external academic entities like associations, accreditation bodies, and ranking organizations. The findings highlight the persistence of imbalanced symbolic power between actors and the pervasive dominance of a traditional male/female binary framework, which continues to overshadow efforts to foster more inclusive understandings of gender. Despite instances of negotiation conducive to broader acceptance of nonbinary identities, the large majority of these interactions expose the persistent presence of gender-washing within business schools. This work thus challenges the narratives of diversity and gender equality promoted by business schools, highlighting the enduring barriers faced by nonbinary faculty.

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These freaks and weirdos think they and their "identities" are the most import things on the planet.