One of the biggest media stories in the UK at the moment involves Professor Jason Arday. He was the youngest Black man to ever be made a full endowed professor at Cambridge University, and was promoted as a leading example by the university for years. He was recently forced to resign amid allegations of plagiarism and lies, and was found dead last week in an apparent suicide. The tale is monumentally depressing. You cannot read the story without getting furious and sad in equal measure.
As a random white man born in London, I am not the right person to excoriate society for the issues here. I’m also not interested into delving into the question of whether a dead man made up aspects of his childhood in order to sound more impressive. It’s all ghoulish and awful and I want no part in it.
However, as a forensic metascientist—someone who examines academic work for serious issues such as fraud and the like—I have some thoughts about the published work and Arday’s treatment in the media. The entire story is remarkable because the facts have become completely overshadowed by the politics of the matter.
There are two main things that I think are important about Arday’s story.
It is not news when white men commit academic misconduct. It gets reported in a handful of stories, there’s a bit of media attention, but everyone quickly forgets about the problems. Many of the white dudes who do bad things at universities keep their positions for years after the allegations are proven, and some never face any real consequences for their actions. Specialty publications like Retraction Watch or the Chronicle of Higher Education will do some stories on these allegations or investigations, but there is almost no interest from the world at large.
Let’s take the example of Brian Wansink, former professor at Cornell University. After complaints about his papers were made public in early 2017, the university investigated and found no major issues with his work. Subsequently, sleuths identified dozens more problematic publications resulting in over a dozen retractions. In late 2018, Cornell announced that they’d conducted a more thorough investigation and identified “data falsification, a failure to assure data accuracy and integrity, inappropriate attribution of authorship of research publications, inappropriate research methods, failure to obtain necessary research approvals, and dual publication or submission of research findings”. Wansink was finally forced to resign, and left the university in June 2019. All of this got a fraction of the coverage that Arday saw, despite “data falsification” being worse than many of the allegations against Arday.
Or there’s Professor Dan Ariely. Several of his most well-cited studies were thrown into doubt when the data behind them was said to be fabricated. After a 3-year investigation, Duke University found that while the data behind a key paper was fake, there was no evidence that Ariely had knowledge of the fraud. The university has not elaborated further, and Ariely has kept his position despite one of his most impactful papers being retracted due to data fabrication and two more receiving expressions of concern.
Another case: Professor Tessier-Lavigne. He was the President of Stanford University when two papers where he was the corresponding author were retracted from the prestigious journal Science. This was after an institutional investigation that found that the papers had significant data manipulation in them, although again the university found no evidence that Tessier-Lavigne had manipulated the data himself. Tessier-Lavigne was forced to resign as the president of the university, but is still a full professor today despite dozens more of his papers being flagged with issues, several expressions of concern, and at least two further retractions since.
And then we’ve got Jason Arday. After allegations of plagiarism were made by self-described “race realist” Nathan Cofnas in July, Arday faced a wild storm of media criticism. More than 200 articles were written about him in the British media between the 24th of July 2026 and his death on the 14th of August 2026. The amount of public interest far outstripped anything that I’ve ever seen for any other case. Anaesthetist Joachim Boldt, the most retracted man on earth, whose fraudulent work almost certainly killed people, has had far fewer articles written about his papers since 2009 than Arday had in the space of a fortnight.
Arday was finally forced to resign on the 5th of August, just two weeks after the allegations were made public. He died nine days later.
This sort of massive media storm almost never happens for white academics who do naughty things, especially in the UK. They may get some pushback, but it fades far more quickly, and their careers often survive the investigations. Dr. William O’Reilly is still employed as a professor at Cambridge after he had “been found to have copied one of his undergraduate’s supervision essays” and the university had upheld the findings of “plagiarism” against him.
If Arday had not been a young, successful Black academic, the chances that anyone would’ve looked into his work are low. Even if someone did think to check his work, it’s likely that he could’ve just kept on going for years before there were any real consequences. On top of that, no one would’ve cared. Most of the time, even the most egregious plagiarists get one or two news stories about their misconduct and then are swiftly ignored by the world because it’s just not that interesting.
The second point is somehow even more frustrating. Yes, Jason Arday was hounded by a society that demands different standards for young Black men than white guys. Yes, the amount of scrutiny he received was obviously connected to the colour of his skin.
But also, he definitely did plagiarize. And not just a little bit. His work is riddled with clear, obvious, and extensive theft from other published academic papers.
Take his thesis. You can find it here. As many well-meaning left-wing people are saying online, Liverpool John Moores University—where Arday did his PhD—investigated this work and did not find any evidence of misconduct. The alleged plagiarism was “honest and reasonable error” caused by some deficiencies in his supervision.
This is absolute gibberish. You can very clearly tell that much of the thesis is straightforwardly copied from earlier work. There are sentences in the abstract of his 2015 thesis that are identical to sentences in the 2009 thesis from Brunel university by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Here’s a link to the 2009 thesis—download it and check for yourself. Arday’s work has extensive identical sections lifted directly from Zwozdiak-Myers’ work.
I had a quick go at identifying further plagiarism that has not yet been reported in Arday’s thesis, and it was trivially easy. Here’s a section starting at the bottom of page 44 of Arday’s thesis and taking up all of page 45. I’ve entered the text into a free online text comparison tool that flags it as 68% identical to segments of this 2010 paper.
I identified other clear examples of plagiarism on Threads. It was very easy to find, because large portions of the thesis are plagiarized.
You do not need to trust race realists or other unpleasant people. Just download the thesis and check for yourself. It is clear that a significant portion of the thesis was copied directly from other people’s work. This is not in doubt, it’s not in question, and the fact that so many people online are arguing that the plagiarism charges are false because a university said so is deeply depressing. It’s arguably the worst case of plagiarism I’ve ever seen.
There’s also extensive evidence about other papers by Arday. That’s the problem with plagiarism—it’s very easy to check. You can just search phrases from one paper and you’ll often find the source material.
I find this entire situation horrifying. Reading the dedication in Arday’s thesis—to his friends, wife, and children—was devastating. It is nightmarish that a pack of mean, nasty little men hounded Arday until he died. There is no question that much of this saga represents the sort of deeply unpleasant racism that requires anyone who isn’t white to be a paragon of integrity while white dudes often get away with warnings or slaps on the wrist.
However. In the context of Arday’s life and death, it’s understandable that people want to defend him. But his work is genuinely indefensible. He provably committed academic misconduct in a way that no one could possibly say was anything other than dishonest. You do not accidentally copy and paste lengthy sections from someone else’s PhD into your own. You certainly don’t craft your thesis out of a patchwork of identical text from other people’s work.
I don’t have any nice messages to end on. The entire saga makes me feel distinctly ill. Whatever your thoughts on plagiarism, it’s clear that Arday’s work harmed very few people. As he himself said, “I didn't murder somebody”. If he hadn’t been a Black academic and a poster child for diversity at Cambridge university, we’d probably have never known his name.
Arday was also failed by multiple institutions along the way. When he handed in his thesis in 2015, LJMU should’ve run it through plagiarism-checking software—which of course existed back then—and identified the issues. He would’ve been sat down in front of a very serious integrity committee and told to redo the thesis or be expelled. It happens. Instead, the university failed miserably and allowed this travesty to take place.
To be clear—he made his own bed. There is no excuse for plagiarism. It’s a truly ridiculous crime, and I’d expect any university to fire someone who was found to have substantial plagiarism in their PhD thesis and published work. But many others bear some responsibility for this enormous tragedy.
A man is dead and some of the most disagreeable people in the world get to celebrate. His poor family.
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