Arday claimed “he didn’t speak until age 11 or learn to read until he was 18”.
The story of ‘Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’ is a reminder that prestigious UK universities have gone as stupidly woke as American ones and have replaced actual intellectuals with woke ‘public intellectuals’ who fit the right DEI profile.
Here’s a sampling of Arday’s backstory.
Cambridge professor claimed he was on TV show… decades before he was born – The Telegraph
I couldn’t have finished a PhD two weeks after my brain surgery. But I’m not Jason Arday – The Telegraph
Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor – The Telegraph
Cambridge’s diversity poster boy faces questions over ‘miracle’ 600-mile run – The Telegraph
And that’s before delving into the plagiarism accusations.
The University of Cambridge is publicly calling the plagiarism allegations against Jason Arday “a vile campaign.” The Good Law Project published a petition calling the plagiarism allegations “entirely false,” gathering signatures from politicians including MPs John McDonnell, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, and Clive Lewis, as well as Lord Paul Boateng and Cambridge college principals. The open letter, which had already drawn more than 10,000 signatories, argues that Arday — the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s nearly 1,000-year history — is being targeted because of his race.
Cambridge’s response also invoked a panel finding from Liverpool John Moores University, the institution that awarded Arday his 2015 PhD, which concluded in March 2026 that citation issues were the result of “honest and reasonable error” and that textual overlap with Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s work was “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time.” Neither Liverpool John Moores nor Cambridge has engaged with the specific finding published by The Telegraph in July 2026: that a fresh statistical analysis identified 188 sentences in Arday’s thesis that are identical or highly similar to Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 thesis, with statisticians placing the probability of chance overlap at one in 100 billion.
In 2023, he famously became Cambridge’s youngest black professor—an enviable appointment in British academia that is equivalent to receiving an endowed chair in the United States and is typically granted only to elite academics after years of scholarly output—studying race in higher education. All this despite, according to his claims, having grown up in the British equivalent of a housing project and with autism so severe that he didn’t speak until age 11 or learn to read until he was 18.
In a 2023 podcast, Arday, who writes about the “decolonization” of academia, claimed that in 2017 he was “awarded” a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his charity work, which he said he turned down due to his critiques of empire. The 2017 London Gazette honours lists make no mention of an award to Arday, and there are no public reports that he was ever offered an MBE.
So the non-wokes are having a good laugh at Arday’s wild claims and how long they were tolerated, but what’s deeply disturbing is the role of British authorities in intimidating and suppressing critics.
Scotland Yard investigated a journalist trying to expose a plagiarism row and told him to stop asking a Cambridge professor questions.
Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE), was accused of harassment after he emailed a series of questions to Prof Jason Arday about his academic record. Mr Grove said officers told him to stop contacting the professor because his “mental health” had been affected by the questions.
Prof Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, which suggested in a letter to THE that its “apparent attack” on him “may be… racially motivated”.
The Metropolitan Police spent four months looking into the claim of harassment before deciding in February to close the case.
Would the Met have acted this way if a conservative academic had complained about a Guardian reporter? I doubt it.
The UK authorities routinely intimidate private citizens and journalists to warn them against speech involving Islamists and Leftists. This 1984ish state of affairs is deeply disturbing and typical of the totalitarian system that the United Kingdom is becoming.