When identity politics takes precedence over academic standards, universities cease to fulfil their purpose.
By: Andrew Doyle
Published: Aug 3, 2026
Jason Ardayâs 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 Ardayâs 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 âto twice its normal sizeâ. 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 ÂŁ5.5 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 worldâs 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 âanti-racismâ. It might well be that some of Ardayâs 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-Cohenâs most shameful ploy has been to cite statistics regarding suicidality in autism and then raise concerns about the âimpact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autisticâ. 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 âbullying a vulnerable autistic manâ; 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 Ardayâs 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 Ardayâs promotion prevented other people â possibly also from minority groups â 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 academicâs work for his thesis. According to the BBC, Arday has insisted that his autism meant that in his early academic work he would rely âon using mimicry to make sense of information, and that similar scrutiny would find similar errors in work by other academicsâ. 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 oneâs 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 âTââ.
âOn one occasion cannibalism was a topic in the billiards-room. âI expect Iâm the only one here who knows what human flesh tastes like,â said Tâ. We exclaimed in astonishment. âYes, 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.â âBut didnât you feel horribly sick when you heard what your cook-boy had done?â we asked. âYes, I suppose I felt a bit squeamish but I have to admit that it was a really excellent soup.ââ
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 Ardayâs 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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University refuses to investigate DEI starâs plagiarism
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The inevitable result of DEI, affirmative action and identity politics.
Calling people "racists" for the crime of noticing things doesn't work anymore.
