Better in their words…

Disgraced sociologist’s plagiarism was enabled by decades of attacks on academic standards

Source: Left’s Weaponization of “Disability” Behind Cambridge’s Jason Arday Scandal

ALEX GUTENTAG
AUG 11, 2026. Jason Arday, former professor of sociology at Cambridge University (YouTube)
The picture presented by the media over the last two weeks of Jason Arday, the youngest black professor ever hired by Cambridge University, is that of a unique plagiarist and fabulist who managed to independently fool prestigious institutions and publishers. Arday, who resigned on Wednesday, acted alone in his academic dishonesty, Cambridge implied when it announced it would conduct an investigation into Arday’s “appointment and tenure.”
Yet Arday’s rise was only possible because of Cambridge’s willingness to hire someone unqualified and to turn a blind eye to his plagiarism. Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher of biology who first brought Arday’s verbatim copying of a PhD dissertation to public attention, also found that the ten papers listed on Arday’s Cambridge faculty webpage demonstrated essentially no rigorous academic work. And David Harris, a professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, had notified Cambridge administrators about Arday’s plagiarism in 2023. When reporter Jack Grove investigated Arday’s plagiarism last year, he submitted 97 pages of evidence to Cambridge. Still, the university did nothing.
Arday was, to be sure, singular in his pathological deception. He said he was in the famous BBC documentary series, “Seven Up!” even though it had started filming two decades before he was born. Arday also recounted raising over £5 million for charity, running 600 miles in six days, and running nine marathons with a fractured fibula. In his book proposal for Simon & Schuster, Arday wrote that he had experienced “locked-in syndrome” for months after an accident before waking up miraculously.
But Cambridge accepted Arday’s outlandish lies because they built a story of overcoming adversity in the face of racism, ableism, and discrimination. The university’s press office played up the announcement of Arday’s appointment to the media, and the BBC, CBS News, and Good Morning America coveredthe hire as inspirational. Arday’s account of not speaking until age 11, and not learning to read and write until age 18, flattered a narrative the university welcomed.
Upholding this narrative would prove more important than basic academic integrity. The head of Cambridge’s faculty of education, Hilary Cremin, suggested that Arday could not be expected to refrain from plagiarism given his difficult life. After Harris informed her about Arday’s copying in 2023, Cremin said Arday “spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions he was living in whilst the 2018 article was being prepared.”
Arday made allegations of racism and harassment to deflect scrutiny. He said someone had delivered a severed pig’s head to his parents’ home, and that London police had tracked it to a local butcher; the police told the Guardian that no investigation had ever taken place. In a keynote speech for the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference in April, Arday warned that black academics in the UK could be targeted with accusations of plagiarism. “It’s abhorrent, it’s a disgrace and, quite frankly, evil,” he said. “That’s the cancer that we need to eradicate from academia.”
Arday also used his autism diagnosis to imply that academic standards were unfair, saying in late July that he relied on mimicry to understand information and that he had “received inadequate supervision and support” given his disabilities.
While Arday may appear to be a special case, his hiring at Cambridge was only made possible by a widespread loosening of academic standards and weaponization of disability claims. Cremin, for instance, said last year that the British education system had an “obsession with grades” that worsened inequality. “I think we need to do away with the idea of high-stakes testing,” she added, because earning the highest possible marks “doesn’t signal intelligence or potential.”
Cambridge was once a highly competitive environment, and the university posted class rank lists publicly, discontinuing the practice in 2021. By 2024, one graduate noted, many exams had become open-book, and grade inflation was rampant. Workloads were reduced, and disability claims at Cambridge skyrocketed, largely in the areas of “mental health conditions” and “specific learning disabilities.”
The same has happened at other universities. In 2023, about one in five students accepted by Oxford declared a disability, compared to just one in ten four years earlier. The New York Times found that the number of college students reporting “disabilities” in the US increased by more than 50% over the last decade, including at elite universities. At both Harvard and the University of Chicago, 21% of students registered as having disabilities in 2024, while less than 3% did in 2015. At Stanford, the rate last year was 38%.
These reported disabilities require universities to offer extra time on tests, separate testing rooms, flexible deadlines, and other accommodations. Driven by diagnoses of ADHD, anxiety, and depression, the explosion in disability claims promotes a culture in which academic rigor is seen as unjust. Some students cannot simply be below average – instead, their underperformance, like Arday’s, must be a sign of victim status.
Arday’s plagiarism, and Cambridge’s decision to ignore it, are symptoms of a larger trend in elite universities. Why are prestigious institutions, once charged with preserving academic standards, working to erode them?
The “Higher Illiteracy”

Arday with head of Cambridge’s faculty of education, Hilary Cremin, 
Arday’s hiring shows the logical endpoint of anti-meritocratic policies. The sociologist Philip Rieff noted in the 1960s that institutions like universities had once served to shape and mold individuals according to the expectations and norms of their inherited civilization. In modern society, he argued, they work in a “therapeutic” mode to protect the individual from such expectations and norms. Hence the proliferation of “accommodations,” “trigger warnings,” and “safe spaces” to shield students from a difficult curriculum and from the Western cannon itself.
Under therapeutic logic, critics who demand that academic rigor and meritocracy be upheld are causing psychological “harm” to students. Therefore, while Cambridge lauded Arday, it punished scholars skeptical of DEI and critical race theory. Cambridge in 2019 rescinded a visiting fellowship from Jordan Peterson and implied, through a university spokesperson, that it was because of his position on DEI. “Cambridge is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles,” the spokesperson said. “There is no place here for anyone who cannot.”
David Harris’s university stripped him of his emeritus status in 2024 for criticizing critical race theory, and Nathan Cofnas was fired from Cambridge’s Emmanuel College after writing a Substack post arguing that in a true meritocracy, the number of black professors at Harvard “would approach 0%,” and black people “would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” The university ultimately concluded that “the ideas in the blog… represented lawful free speech” but did not reinstate Cofnas.
In contrast, after Cambridge lecturer Priyamvada Gopal tweeted, “White lives don’t matter” and “Abolish whiteness” in 2020, Cambridge promoted her to full professor and said, “The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial.”
When Jack Grove investigated Arday’s plagiarism for Times Higher Education, he was contacted by the Metropolitan Police. The police told him not to contact Arday again, and his publication dropped the story.
The police’s involvement in protecting Arday from criticism demonstrates the extent of therapeutic culture in British institutions. The UK police have arrested thousands of citizens for offensive social media posts in recent years, and separately record “non-crime hate incidents” to track incidents of racism and other identity-based hostility. In this way, the state has embraced the same therapeutic function as the university, enforcing ideological compliance in the name of caring for alleged victims.
Rieff observed that universities today train students in what he called “higher illiteracy.” Instead of teaching them truths from the past, they teach students to critique, repress, and reject the civilization they have inherited. It is for this reason that Cambridge English faculty decided in 2017 to “decolonise the curriculum” after an open letter from students said courses elevated “white male authors at the expense of others,” which messaged to students that “the stories of anyone who is not a white man, are not valued.”
In 2023, Cambridge took this logic further, teaching students that Anglo-Saxons never existed as an ethnic group. In courses on Britain’s early medieval history, the university worked to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism” by portraying the idea of a distinct Anglo-Saxon identity and history as “racist.”
Those most skilled in the “higher illiteracy” are those who most effectively rewrite curriculum, and history, to promote a great forgetting of the past for the sake of “justice” in the present. They are elevated to positions of authority, training leagues of young people to attack traditional knowledge in general, and Western civilization specifically.
The use of race in hiring and admissions has exacerbated this trend. An analysis of sociology departments in Compact magazine found, for instance, that “White men entering the lowest-tier departments in American sociology had far stronger publication records than black women entering the most prestigious departments in such universities as Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford.” These practices make race and anti-Western ideology serve as qualifications over academic prowess, ensuring that the elite institutions once charged with preserving and expanding civilizational accomplishments become structurally incapable of doing so.
Despite Arday’s near-total absence of intellectual merit, he was well-versed in the “higher illiteracy.” Every aspect of his fictional life story served as an indictment of the wider society, which he characterized as unequal, uncaring, and discriminatory. As a racial minority and someone with a supposedly significant disability, he offered himself as a symbol of resistance to the backwardness and evil of the West.
“Disability” claims at universities have come to play a central role in undermining meritocracy and framing past standards as arbitrary and oppressive. “At least a third of students when I was working in universities had a diagnosis of something or other,” explained Kathleen Stock in an interview with UnHerd. Their exams or papers “would have a sticker on them and now you would have to give reasonable adjustments,” which she and her colleagues understood to mean ignoring spelling and grammatical mistakes, as well as structural issues.
“As a marker,” she wrote in Unherd, “you are supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within… once the principle was conceded, it was only a matter of time before such accommodations were extended to staff too.”
Students today can claim they “get distracted,” “feel overwhelmed,” or have “trouble focusing,” and get doctors to sign off on accommodations. But thinking, reading, and writing quickly, turning in assignments on time, and organizing one’s thoughts logically are all intellectual skills that academic rigor demands.
Once universities decided that intellectual capability was no longer of primary importance for admission, hiring, or achievement, high expectations became impossible to uphold. An academic environment that discourages competition and excuses subpar work as a side effect of “racism” or “disability” does not incentivize achievement. It does the opposite.
It’s Almost All Rotten



Priyamvada Gopal, professor of postcolonial studies, Cambridge University
Many on the left will try to claim the Cambridge scandal is an isolated event, or that the real threat is racism resulting from the fallout. The BBC and others have quoted Cambridge professor Gopal, who tweeted “White lives don’t matter” in 2020, demanding an investigation into why Cambridge hired Arday. Gopal does not question the logic behind Arday’s race-driven appointment. Instead, she has emphasized that “the grotesque racism which this whole business has unleashed” is her main concern. She specifically cites “the harm done to both the individual in the line of fire, the Black academics as a group, and to the broader field of critical race studies.”
Center-left commentators weighing in on the issue have nearly all chosen to dismiss Cofnas in some way, even while admitting that without his initial work, Arday would certainly still be at Cambridge. They seemingly fail to recognize that an obsession with marking themselves clean from wrongthink by disparaging alleged racists feeds into the logic behind Arday’s hiring.
Cambridge’s Arday debacle will add to the growing number of academic scandals that have piled up in the last decade, but there are modest signs of reform. The UK Parliament passed the Higher Education Act in 2023, which began last year to require that universities protect lawful speech and academic freedom under a dedicated free speech director at the Office for Students. Harris, the professor who first alerted Cambridge about Arday’s plagiarism, was reinstated by his university earlier this year after pressure from the Committee for Academic Freedom.
These measures are still mostly Band-Aids. Cambridge’s reputation, and that of the university system in general, should not recover. Arday should not be remembered as an oddity or as a lone plagiarist who happened to fool an otherwise great university. Cambridge, and the wider academy in the West, have been revealed as promoters of higher illiteracy, working to undermine civilization instead of sustaining it.