Prof Jason Arday has defended his academic work after becoming the centre of a plagiarism row at Cambridge University. He said he was accountable for errors in his work, but insisted in an interview on Saturday that “what I am not is a liar”.
The row began after another academic, self-defined “race realist” Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024, said he had found numerous instances of plagiarism in Arday’s work and questioned some of Arday’s stated achievements. While some critics say the treatment of Arday, who is black, has been motivated by racism, others have said the claims of plagiarism were legitimate.
Arday told the Times, external that there had been “a very well orchestrated and co-ordinated campaign to unseat me from my position” since he arrived at Cambridge. He argued that the criticism was “racially motivated” and that he had become a “lightning rod” for attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policy.
He said some errors in his early academic work were linked to his autism, explaining that he had relied on mimicry to make sense of information. He added that similar scrutiny would likely find similar errors in the work of other academics.
“We’re talking about academia here. I didn’t murder somebody. I think the cruelty that I’ve experienced and the positioning of me as this kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable,” he told the newspaper.
In 2023, the then 37-year-old sociologist became the youngest ever black professor at Cambridge. He told the BBC at the time that his work focused on neurodivergence and race in education.
He was diagnosed with autism and global development delay in his early years, and his inability to speak until the age of 11 and to read or write until 18 was attributed to those conditions. Arday worked as a PE teacher before earning his doctorate at Liverpool John Moores University and later teaching at Roehampton, Durham and Glasgow.
Accusations of plagiarism in Arday’s work were first raised by Cofnas, a US researcher whose role at a Cambridge college was terminated after backlash to his view that, under a true meritocracy, black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”. Cofnas claimed on Substack that he had put Arday’s work through plagiarism-detection software, which found that “many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source”.
He reproduced several sections of Arday’s PhD dissertation, which he said the software had identified as copied verbatim or lightly rephrased from earlier academic works by other authors. Cofnas also said a retired professor had previously raised concerns about Arday’s later academic articles, leading to two journals issuing correction notes.
Cofnas also questioned Arday’s claims that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days and 300 miles in three days for charity, saying Arday had claimed these efforts raised more than £5m for charity. He also challenged Arday’s account of running 600 miles on a treadmill in six days.
Arday told , external that the £5m had been raised with the help of others over a 20-year period, but said he could not name them because he had signed non-disclosure agreements. When asked about the 600 miles challenge, he said it had actually been completed over a 12-day period to allow for rest days because of the “cumulative wear and tear of training” from previous challenges.
He told the Times that he stood by the other running records.
“I can’t make people believe me,” he said. “Nobody lives their life having a receipt for every single thing they say or they’ve done.”
Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, but said he had not received adequate supervision during his PhD because of his autism and learning disabilities. He also said he could not afford a proofreader to catch mistakes when he started out in academia.
The controversy has drawn a wide range of reactions, including within academia. More than 12,000 people — including Green Party leader Zack Polanski, at least five Labour MPs and some Cambridge academics — have signed a petition organised by the Good Law Project in support of Arday.
Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, called Arday the victim of a “smear campaign” that was “as predictable as it is baseless”. Alan Lester, a University of Sussex geography professor who specialises in colonialism, described it as a “non-story”.
Simon Baron-Cohen, a cognitive neuroscientist and fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, raised concerns about the effect the media coverage was having on Arday.
“We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards,” he wrote on Friday. “However, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues. This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues. It’s time to stop.”
But some academics said there were questions to answer over academic propriety. John Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex, said “there is a case to answer here”.
“Mistakes happen. If sociology of education is to ever be a field with any credibility, we need to be able to point these out, correct them, and move on,” he wrote, adding that there was “no personal shame in making mistakes and admitting them”.
A Cambridge University spokesperson told the BBC that it took allegations of academic misconduct “incredibly seriously” but that it was “standard practice” for investigations to be carried out by the institution at which the research was done. They added: “Allegations of plagiarism regarding Professor Arday’s thesis and some of his journal publications have been investigated by Liverpool John Moores University and the journals in question.”
