Jason Arday's Fairy Tale Is Over - The Atlantic

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Even before the push alert about his resignation from the University of Cambridge this week, Jason Arday might well have been the world’s most famous living sociologist. In early 2023, Arday received a professorship at Cambridge; at 37, he was the youngest Black scholar ever to have done so, and his appointment made international headlines. A year later, he set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”<br>That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”<br>But in the past two weeks, Arday’s near-mythic (or perhaps purely mythic) tale has disintegrated. In July, a philosopher named Nathan Cofnas published a long Substack post reviewing apparent evidence of plagiarism in Arday’s academic work. Cofnas posted 36 passages from Arday’s 2015 dissertation, about student teaching, which reproduce or closely track text found in a 2009 dissertation from another scholar in the field, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Arday looks to have even copied from and rearranged Zwozdiak-Myers’s title, and in doing so to have misused an apostrophe.<br>Arday’s grad-school alma mater, Liverpool John Moores University, which first received direct complaints about the dissertation last fall, did its own investigation and cleared Arday of wrongdoing. “A confidential procedure was conducted,” the university told me in a statement. “Professor Arday’s PhD still stands.” But some of Arday’s other academic papers had potential problems too—and they seemed much worse than the mere borrowing of language. Quotes from structured interviews that Arday claimed to have performed closely resembled those used by other researchers; parts of some interview responses also reappeared across different studies under Arday’s name, attributed to different people. This duplication, if deliberate, would be something other than plagiarism—it would be academic fraud. (The website Retraction Watch reports that two of Arday’s papers were quietly corrected.)<br>Yesterday, Cambridge announced that it had “begun an investigation following new information about Professor Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments.” By the end of the day, Arday had resigned. “I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life,” he said in a statement. “I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”<br>Read: The multibillion-dollar foundation that controls the humanities<br>Arday did not respond to questions from The Atlantic, but he told The Times last week that he is not a “liar” or a “fantasist” and that he’d been given insufficient supervision as a graduate student, especially in light of his learning disabilities: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake, there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” He also seemed to address such allegations at a conference in April for the British Sociological Association, where he gave a talk about pervasive efforts to discredit Black scholars including himself. “These people are brilliant, perversely brilliant,” he told his colleagues. “There are times when you look at what they’re doing and you say to yourself, Well done, well played, very good. You’ve caught me [in] a thousand knots—how do I get myself out of this situation?”<br>This much is true: Some of the people who were going after Arday had a political agenda. Cofnas, the philosopher who put Arday’s dissertation through a plagiarism checker last month, argues for a “hereditarian revolution” based on the idea that innate differences in intelligence and other traits exist across racial groups. (He also claims that “the humanities and much of the social sciences have been slain on the altar of DEI.”) But the challenges to Arday’s credibility quickly went beyond the realm of Cofnas and his fellow white reactionaries, and beyond familiar arguments about diversity hiring. Taken all together, they exposed a broader, self-destructive tendency that has long been present in...