Jason Arday's
Borrowings

| published August 28, 2026 |

By Bob Armstrong, Thursday Review contributor

Great and Unfortunate Things is a terrific title for the memoir by Jason Arday, the British scholar and youngest Black person awarded a full professorship at the University of Cambridge. Sadly, far more than simply unfortunate news broke last week, only few days before his book got published: Arday was found dead in his London home, almost certainly by suicide, although that has not yet been officially confirmed.

The PR blast from his publisher, Simon & Schuster, tells us this memoir is "a powerful story for our moment." Arday's "journey is a testament to resilience, dignity, and the life-changing force of a community in action."

It is also a testament to mendacity, serial lying, fraud, self-indulgence, and intellectual incompetence. A fantasist and fabulist, Arday topped off his high-tone resume by indulging in the big no-no for novelists, journalists, academics and anyone else who makes a living processing words with finger taps, pens or pencils. Nine days before his death Arday resigned his professorship at the university where he had been embroiled by accusations of plagiarism.

The Arday affair became the biggest academic scandal since Claudine Gay resigned as president of Harvard in 2024. She too had plagiarized some passages in her PhD dissertation although she somewhat weathered the storm by retaining her departmental teaching position for a cool million-and-a-half bucks a year. And to be fair, her academic borrowings, while unjustified, were minimal.

Arday did the full Monty, cutting and pasting large swaths from others. His academic reputation had been soaring for a few years, but it then came crashing down after it became clear generous helpings in his 2015 PhD thesis had been lifted from a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a leading figure in teacher education programs in Great Britain. He also bit off a few paragraphs here and there, with minor word changes, from the writings of Nicola Rollock, professor of Social Policy and Race at Kings College in London and the author of The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival. Here is a sample from a 2012 paper by Nicola Rollock, published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education:














































Before the fall from grace came the meteoric rise of a young scholar on the move, appointed at age 37 in 2022 as a professor of sociology of education at one of the oldest and finest universities in the world. Exactly what white progressive intellectuals are looking for, the pull-up-your-bootstrap Black brainiac who despite discrimination and disadvantage overcomes and rises to a prestigious seat hundreds of thousand adjuncts and lecturers and even tenured profs at MSU—Mediocre State University—yearn for.

This cool cat with chest-length dreadlocks and a charming demeanor wowed the head of the Faculty of Education, Hilary Cremin, who called Arday a "world-class scholar" and added that "you are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do." But sometimes it is not the research that counts. It appears skin color may have been the driving factor behind his appointment, along with the unfathomable urge on the part of progressive intellectuals to atone for what they see as the crimes of racism, sexism, colonialism and capitalism.

Showered with praise and affection, all went swimmingly for the celebrity professor. Until it didn’t. Enter now the dirtbag, a spoiler—and, of course, a conservative—another academic, Nathan Cofnas, who spent several years at Cambridge on a fellowship. While there he began hearing whisperings around the quad that Arday's world-class research might not be entirely his own. He looked into it with one of those plagiarism machines. Bingo. Cofnas proceeded to then dump his findings in a Substack newsletter, including the samples above in the side-by-side columns.

This effort blew the lid off Arday's con but also backfired on Cofnas. After unleashing his "I accuse," he got a touch of the Dreyfus treatment, albeit without prison time at the penal colony on Devil's Island. He took a lot of heat at Cambridge for his alleged racism. After his fellowship came to an end he decamped on another post-doc in the philosophy department at Ghent University in Belgium. Didn't help. Last week [August 21] Cofnas wrote in the Wall Street Journal Opinion's Free Expressions column that he had just picked up a message from Petra De Sutter, the rector at Ghent, notifying him that "in the wake of the backlash from the Arday affair, she was suspending me from my position as a postdoctoral researcher" even though "no one has found so much as a mistaken comma in the article I wrote about Arday."

It must also be noted that Cofnas kinda helped things along with some rather retrograde notions of his own which do not sit well in today's political climate—the Age of Equality. By his own admission he is a "race realist," that is he holds true to the belief human intelligence is mainly shaped by a person's inherited genetic structure rather than the environment in which he or she was raised. Race realism is not racist, he said, and then, I suspect deliberately, he stuck an IQ battering ram up the progressives' favorite aperture: "In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%," he wrote. "Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment."

This may or may not be true, but for sure it is not going to get you on a tenure track, or for that matter even a "freeway flyer prof" spot with part-time positions at three community colleges in LA. In progressive circles Arday was not a fraud but an extraordinary public intellectual hounded down by disgruntled anti-diversity conservatives like Nathan Cofnas, even though it was Cofnas who was hounded

No matter.

A group of prominent politicians, writers, and academics released a letter of solidarity under the banner "We stand with Jason." The signatories claimed Arday was the victim of "entirely false accusations" and in addition they were "appalled by the sustained and malicious attacks on the academic integrity of Professor Arday." The celebrity race hustler in the United States, Ibram X. Kendi, screeched that what happened to Arday was a "lynching." Cue up George Floyd and the rapper straight outta Compton. London Mayor Sadiq Khan posted on X that "Jason Arday was the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn't have faced." Cambridge Chancellor, Lord Chris Smith, claimed attacks on Arday revealed a "racist feeding frenzy."

However, although the university initially ignored the plagiarism charge, later it reversed itself and opened an investigation. But the waffling and hand-wringing turned into a public relations nightmare. As many commentators have noted, Cambridge only appeared to be supporting Arday while in reality seeking mainly to protect its own reputation.

The biggest media surprise in this sordid saga came from that champion of DEI, the New York Times. The first paragraph in a front page article stated outright Arday was "underqualified by the school's own standards" for the prestigious academic position bestowed on him. He had only a "modest publications record" at the elite university which requires research at the highest level. Presumably, high standards fell by the wayside since his "published papers and his thesis had dozens of grammatical errors, along with identical quotes attributed to different people." When the plagiarism charge came out "Cambridge defended Dr. Arday, saying he was 'the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop.'"

The New York Times also pointed out that although "Dr Arday was underqualified for his job" the university "administrators gushed publicly about Dr. Arday's scholarship and privately disregarded complaints about his work." [all NYT quotes from August 16, 2026 story]

The escalating controversry over Arday's academic misconduct also unearthed some major issues surrounding his riveting back story. He claimed he only learned to talk at age 11 and read when he turned 18, yet provided little evidence to back it up. He said he had run 30 marathons in 35 days, an almost impossible feat. He claimed to have played semi-pro soccer. Again, no proof. Raised millions of pounds for charity, but the money was raised by other fundraising vendors. Most telling, his sickness unto death list beggars belief; overcame a battery of ailments including autism, brain tumor, dyslexia, epilepsy, and testicular cancer. All this seems over the top.

I anticipate the final chapter of this story to appear in the next few weeks. Great and Unfortunate Things will debut on the New York Times best seller list. Maybe even at the top, where the author once was.



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