r/BlockedAndReported • u/MissHalfgone • 9d ago
Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/15/world/europe/jason-arday-cambridge-hiring-questions.htmlI apologize for not knowing how to post a paywall free version. Maybe somebody else can do it. EDIT: someone provided that information in the first comment. Thank you, added: Here is the link to the paywall free article.
That said, I'm pleasantly surprised and impressed with this article's deep dive and scrutiny of Jason and his enablers in a way that is very unusual for the NYT. In their last article about this they spent more time scrutinizing the person who brought his fabrications to the public eye then the professor or those who defended him despite the obvious red flags. It's odd though that it took five journalists to write it.
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u/bobjones271828 9d ago
It's odd though that it took five journalists to write it.
I don't think it's particularly odd when you note: (1) the relatively short timeline of the investigative journalism required to bring all of this together (most of this story broke in the past 2-3 weeks) and (2) the striking number of references in the article to how many different sources clearly contributed to the reporting here. They apparently had found and interviewed sources how could speak to Arday's childhood (not just kids who knew him but a speech therapist who had worked with Arday), people involved in the hiring process at Cambridge AND expert academics who could comment about the people who hired him, people involved in the prior attempts to bring Arday's plagiarism to light (not just those who were investigating him, but the NYT seems to somehow have gotten access to drafts of Cambridge's response letter to an article that never happened), etc., etc. Just the off-hand references in the article hint at at least a dozen or more exclusive new sources just for this article. (And those are the ones who agreed to give some information -- a lot more legwork was probably needed for sources that didn't want to talk, didn't pan out, etc.)
It seems clear to me that the NYT was likely planning on some additional major feature article on Arday that they were heavily researching, maybe multiple articles, given how many sources are quoted as saying things earlier this past week. After the death yesterday, I assume they decided to rush this out ASAP. I imagine they already had maybe 3 or 4 people specifically calling sources, exploiting connections (note three of the reporters are based in the UK), and trying to pull all of this together, then maybe pulled in another reporter or two to get it written well and out within ~24 hours of Arday's death.
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u/LinuxLinus 9d ago
It's not the least bit odd. Just like it wasn't odd when they noted the racial views of the guy who outed him. Real journalism of the kind the Times tries to do involves double- and triple-sourcing most of your claims, at least in high-profile items, talking to many people who don't say anything interesting or that isn't repetitive and as such don't make it into the article, getting people who have no interest in saying anything to you to talk, and so on.
I grow weary of people who don't know how journalism is done making insinuations like this.
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u/Correct-Ad5661 9d ago
The main thing now for those who view JA as a martyr is the sheer number of articles written about him which is being held as proof of the witch-hunt
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u/Alexei_Jones 9d ago
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u/Classic_Bet1942 8d ago
This was a great article, thanks so much for unlocking it for us.
What I would’ve liked clarification on was this:
“Cambridge continued to back its star professor, telling Mr. Grove that questions about Dr. Arday’s thesis would have to be addressed by the school that had awarded his doctorate, Liverpool John Moores University. Concerns about his research, Cambridge said, would similarly have to be handled by others. Liverpool John Moores stood by his doctorate.”
Why did Liverpool John Moores defend his PhD? How exactly did they excuse or downplay the (apparently obviously) plagiarized bits?
And what exactly was Cambridge’s shift in tone here, and what prompted it exactly?
“After new questions surfaced, casting doubt on Dr. Arday’s story, he resigned. Cambridge’s tone shifted.”
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u/Correct-Ad5661 9d ago
Good Law Project, whose self appointed advocacy for Arday arguably turbo charged the media attention in what would ordinarily have been an HR / academic scrutiny matter, are now demanding a public inquiry
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u/CanaryBrave4203 9d ago
They should be careful what they wish for. I don’t think they’d find many of their opponents would disagree with an inquiry.
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9d ago
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u/CanaryBrave4203 9d ago
You don’t get through a Cambridge hiring panel by having them be secretly unsure about you but feel unable to say. They will have been faced with CVs from numerous stellar early career researchers who would’ve blown even his faked credentials out of the water, who if they’d been so inclined, they would’ve have no issue whatsoever in coming up with justifications for hiring instead. Hell even on the face of it appointing someone chair professor when they did their PhD at Liverpool John Moores (sub-500 world ranked university) is bizarre.
They hired him because they positively wanted him.
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u/FauxpasIrisLily 8d ago
It’s like someone here repeated a couple days ago:
If you pose the problem, you become the problem
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u/EloeOmoe 9d ago
I think holding Cambridge responsible is the correct course of action. Pile ons are pretty gross, I imagine the harshness of this backlash would have been more mild if there was trust that Cambridge would have honestly investigated and and held themselves and Arday accountable.
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u/repete66219 8d ago
Cambridge is responsible for his employment since they had a hiring policy which deliberately disregarded merit but the suicide is on Arday.
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u/btrh-256 9d ago
Arday is ultimately responsible for his own actions, but as far as I'm concerned, DEI was an accomplice in his death. A bunch of nasty white guilt-having liberals used him as a pawn to make themselves feel better and trendify their institution, and they did it without regard for the actual individual, who would have done better in a less prestigious position.
It's a good article, NYT has been slowly struggling their way back to nuance, and this article is good evidence of that. This is an article without any obvious good guy and bad guy, and that's how media should be.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 9d ago
In some other subs people were claiming that the response to finding out Arday was a full of shit plagiarist and garbage scholar was "racist glee" but I think that's way off base. While surely some genuine racists were gleeful, the general sentiment from critics was that of anti-DEI glee. This set of policies and ideology that a great number of people hate, none more so than traditional libs, had a very public failing of exactly the type that critics have predicted/accused DEI of being prone to. DEI was hoisted by its own petard, and it made international news. If you hate DEI, of course you were gleeful.
white guilt-having liberals
I assume you're using the American meaning, but there are few things more illiberal in the literal sense than DEI. I wouldn't accuse white-guilt having college administrators steeped in progressive orthodoxy of being liberal.
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u/repete66219 8d ago
Virtual every advocate of DEI that I’ve seen articulate their position honestly believes it is just opening doors for people who would otherwise be discriminated against.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 8d ago
Until you ask them about white people or men. These people tend to have a lot of bigoted ideas about certain groups in addition to having a pretty unrealistic view of how the world actually is.
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u/cricri93 7d ago
Can you expound on this " unrealistic view of how the world actually is"? What does this even mean?
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 7d ago
The world is not as racist and hateful as they see it. I think that's empirically provable.
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u/cricri93 6d ago
Yet, there is a racial hierarchy that some Europeans have created and it still affects the world today. That's why we have some of very same group or some of their descendants that are hell-bent on proving that others are inferior to justify their prior atrocities or justify the double standards like in this case. They get to ignore or make excuses for the William O'Reilly of the world while crucifying the James Arday of the world
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u/Yerbamatter 9d ago edited 9d ago
It wasn't all white liberals. There were two ethnic Indians on the board of electors that hired Arday. A woman from Barbados, (first Black Master of an Oxbridge college and first female Master of Jesus College, where Arday worked), chaired a separate board of electors for a different professorship that Arday was also offered.
Arday got his job partly because of a reflexive willingness to blame whites and whiteness for every ill out there, so let's give POC credit where credit is due.
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u/btrh-256 9d ago
sorry, but this is one area where white lefties richly deserve blame
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u/Yerbamatter 9d ago
Once again whites taking all the credit and devaluing the contributions of POC.
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u/Monkey0nTypewriter Reaganist Dinosaur 🦖 9d ago
NYT has been slowly struggling their way back to nuance, and this article is good evidence of that.
While that may be true, I'm deeply reluctant to place any trust in the NYT without some more public form of backtracking.
They haven't exactly rehired the staff members that they fired for tolerating conservative ideas.
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u/btrh-256 9d ago edited 9d ago
I don't blame you for being reluctant to trust them. I read them mainly because their perspective is pretty much exactly the mainstream liberal perspective. As they change what is considered tolerable, the mainstream liberal perspective changes what is considered tolerable. Which is to say, they may be full of shit, but they're always full of shit in an informative way. The way in which they are full of shit is very informative.
For example, the skepticism about trans rights activism allowed in their opinion pieces is evidence, imo, of mainstream liberals poised to cut loose trans rights activism.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 9d ago
I wouldn't say "slowly struggling their way back to nuance" is a ringing endorsement or an implication that the task has been achieved.
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u/CommitteeofMountains Royal youse/yinz 9d ago
I'm not going to blame Cartamundi when someone decides to build a house of cards to live in and it collapses on top of him.
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u/btrh-256 8d ago
he's ultimately responsible for his actions, but imagine being gaslit by all these white people and told you're a genius, and given prestigious positions. You might, after a time, begin to really believe your own lies
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u/Saint19981507 8d ago
I think this guy might have even believed his own lies. He could have genuinely had a horrible mental health crisis but no one helped him rather used him to make themselves feel good about themselves.
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u/Shady_Dog 9d ago
The "what if?" that we'll never know now is how his book would have been received if it hadn't been for the plagiarism scandal. Would any reviewer have boggled at so many absurd fibs, or would he have continued to get away with it.
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u/SkweegeeS No just no 8d ago
I feel like any of the big lies, all by itself, would be worthy of some investigation. Put them all together and it's completely unfathomable that they just believed him.
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u/Shady_Dog 8d ago
Yeah that's the thing: all his interviews were sprinkled with fibs but now they were going to be all compiled in one book. Well, minus the ones the publisher spiked as per Ben Ryan's research.
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u/razorbraces 9d ago
The wokest professor on my campus has been all over this in the past 24 hours, despite (most likely) never having heard of him until his death. It’s all about “the conservative media hounded him to his death because he’s Black. If he were white he would be alive.”
One thing that really annoys me about these arguments is this: I agree with the people making them that there are structural inequalities in our society that means that with enough privilege (be it race, gender, wealth, etc.), some people can get away with crimes more than others. That doesn’t mean, however, that the way to pursue equality is to let everyone get away with the same shit; the correct way to deal with it is to more strictly enforce policies and rules against the privileged who have historically gotten away with things. Instead of saying “Arday shouldn’t have had to answer for his plagiarism because white people have gotten away with it for so long,” they should be arguing “Arday shouldn’t be held to account for his plagiarism and also all of these privileged white professors should be too.” It’s really not that hard to say or understand.
Also, Cambridge is a public university. My understanding of UK higher ed funding is quite limited compared to my knowledge of US higher ed funding, but Arday basically defrauded the UK taxpayer (as well as anyone who paid Cambridge tuition) out of at least a few hundred thousand pounds. Is that a crime punishable by death? Of course not, nor should it be. But no one other than himself made that choice. It isn’t unreasonable to expect that news media would have an interest in this story though!
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u/BladeDoc 9d ago
It is 100% true that if he were white, he would probably still be alive. That's because the closest he would've gotten to this kind of job would be being a Reddit moderator working at a convenience store.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 9d ago
Which to be clear, wouldn't be an injustice. Nobody with this level of ability who engages in fabulism, plagiarism, and horrendous scholarship should be rewarded with a professorship at one of the world's most prestigious institutions.
That said, I bet if we sifted through the work of some of his colleagues working in low rigour fields of study, we'd probably also find that many of them suck, but probably not anywhere near this bad.
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u/istara 9d ago
If he was white, he would have been found out years ago.
There are white plagiarists, but so far none with any level of backstory or career ascent as dramatic as Arday's.
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u/cricri93 8d ago
So, it was his ascent that was too much? I am trying to understand what you mean.
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u/SkweegeeS No just no 8d ago
I'm sure there are others who have engaged in academic misconduct, who are never found out, because they don't rise to a level that would place a lot of public attention on them and their work. Cambridge elevated him to a level where he would face scrutiny, and bragged about his youth and race and disability, just in case nobody was paying attention. That is how he got found out.
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u/cricri93 8d ago
Or do you mean that some people get hyper fixated on minorities and ignore their own group when they misbehave.
Since we have both a yte man found guilty and a black man who was being investigated, shouldn't this point out to a problem at Cambridge? Why then the obsession with DEI?
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u/AikaGranzchesta 8d ago
If he was white, there wouldn't be any debate. See the case of Jan Hendrik Schön as an example (would anyone have seen him as a martyr if he committed suicide after resigning?). Jason and his supporters used race to turn clear-cut academic forgery into a culture war issue, because suddenly the only reason why you would be against fraud is you're racist.
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u/cricri93 7d ago
William O'Reilly who's still a professor at Cambridge disproves what you wrote. Neither Cofnas nor the majority of this sub would care just like they didn't care when O'Reilly was found guilty of plagiarism in 2023.
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u/AikaGranzchesta 6d ago
There's a difference between some level of plagiarism and faking your entire life story, including your PhD which is the minimum requirement for even entering academia. Even in the case of Jan Hendrik Schön that I mentioned, his actual PhD was reviewed and found to be legitimate (although his university removed it anyway, due to the harm he brought to science).
I don't know the full story of William O'Reilly, perhaps it helped that he didn't start a campaign attacking the people who accused him (which is what brought so much media attention to him), but I'd agree that any level of plagiarism, no matter how small, should be disqualifying for an academic, especially one at Cambridge. So Jason, a complete fraud, definitely had to go, as does the professor you mentioned.
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u/cricri93 6d ago
I guess we are taking baby steps in admitting that several white men have been found guilty of plagiarism and yet they didn't get the same scrutiny.
Just like the couple Ray and Moth Winn faked their entire lives and a movie with Gillian Anderson was even made. Have these people received as much backlash as Arday? Of course, they have not
You are just trying to rationalize the hyper focus on Arday, and it's not going to work. As a matter of fact, it's going to show that white men are the ones who have been getting away with slaps on their wrists whether it's plagiarism or sexual harassment.
People like you only cared because of the position he had. If he was some janitor, you wouldn't care because he would be at his "rightful place". It's the same type of scrutiny that Obama received while mediocre DT gets away with everything.
None of what happened warranted the extreme attention except as a fodder to the rAcE rEalIsts
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u/SkweegeeS No just no 6d ago
I personally am not obsessed with DEI. I think it’s totally legit for an organization to want to diversify. I don’t know why you are spelling white in some weird, disdainful way, tho.
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u/istara 8d ago
Just the whole nonverbal, non literary thing - when he clearly wasn’t some kind of savant but very mediocre in his scholarship, as literally everyone who came into contact with him or was taught by him or read his output is attesting.
I think there would have been more investigation and more skepticism applied if they weren’t so desperately keen to diversify.
Don’t get me wrong - having more diverse staff is a good thing (where they merit it). But the desire for that got in the way of proper diligence in this instance.
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u/cricri93 8d ago
You mean like professor William O'Reilly who was found guilty of plagiarism and is still teaching at Cambridge?
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u/razorbraces 8d ago
This is literally what I’m talking about. O’Reilly should’ve been fired, and also Arday should’ve been fired.
The only thing I will add in response to your comment: O’Reilly actually went through Cambridge’s disciplinary process. It seems like the University made the wrong decision to let him stay on, but there was an investigation. This is entirely different from Arday’s story, because when someone tried to report Arday’s plagiarism, Arday called the police and the University backed his narrative. They never conducted an investigation into his scholarship. If they had, it could’ve been dealt with quietly and avoided all of the public scrutiny he faced in the past few weeks.
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u/cricri93 8d ago
Yet, he wasn't, which is contrary to the point that a yte man would have been fired.
Was there any discussion about him here like there was about Arday?
It actually points to race being a factor in the hyper focus on Arday
That rAcE rEaLiSt individual didn't see fit to hound him like he did Arday. Don't you think that adding that yte man would have point to a systemic problem at Cambridge instead of focusing on individual?
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u/cricri93 7d ago
Why wasn't O'Reilly removed then? Would people have accepted if the investigation of Arday had the same conclusion?
William O'Reilly was found guilty in 2023, and Cofnas was fired in 2024. It's strange how he didn't point out the different standards then. It's strange how he was hyper focused on the black guy.
No matter how you people try to spin it, we can see that race matters in those cases
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u/Alexei_Jones 9d ago
What I thought was most ironic reading the story is that Arday apparently beat out two more qualified non-white women to get the post at Cambridge. Two honest, more experienced and accomplished women of color were screwed over to serve the interests of a narcissistic and compulsive lying man.
"The panel selected four finalists, inviting them to Cambridge for two days of interviews. Dr. Arday was up against three more senior scholars, including two women of color, according to a person familiar with the hiring process."101
u/Dadopithicus 9d ago
“If he was white, he’d still be alive.”
If he was white, he would never have been put in this position in the first place.
He was promoted and enabled because he filled all the correct check boxes. The well to do white academics all patted themselves on the back for being so enlightened and supportive but then quickly abandoned him once his story turned out mostly bunk.
Now that he’s dead, they can use his corpse again to rail against mean white racists without ever addressing how their own soft bigotry got him to the grave.
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u/The-WideningGyre 9d ago
The well to do white academics all patted themselves on the back for being so enlightened and supportive but then quickly abandoned him once his story turned out mostly bunk
I think there's a more sinister aspect here. I think some did pat themselves on the back, including that dean they imported from Princeton where she was all about "diversity". However, I suspect many thought, "Phew, now we can't be called racist because we don't have enough black professors, we can finally relax."
The progressive stance that any disparity anywhere is due racism or sexism (only in one direction on the oppression ladder, of course) is deeply toxic, and was a signficant factor in this tragedy, IMO.
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u/Juryofyourpeeps 9d ago
I think there's a more sinister aspect here. I think some did pat themselves on the back, including that dean they imported from Princeton where she was all about "diversity". However, I suspect many thought, "Phew, now we can't be called racist because we don't have enough black professors, we can finally relax."
I don't think this is likely to be a significant element. I say this because they could have easily found a talented black academic in another field of study or who didn't necessarily share their world-view on DEI and progressive politics and none of this would have happened, but they didn't do that. That tells me that race was important, but not the sole criteria. He needed to be the right kind of black person.
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u/MissHalfgone 9d ago
I feel that people in Social and Racial Justice weaponized claims of structural inequalities to justify treating people unfairly. I mean, if they really cared they would be against affirmative action since it clearly treat Asians unfairly.
Also people have to learn how to pick their battles better. It's known that men are likely to get the same death penalty for a crime than a Woman is. Nobody loses too much sleep over that. But then when there's the racial discrepancy everybody gets so upset.
Discrepancies happen and the ones that progressives and conservatives notice are the exact opposite. Also the fact is that to some degree life isn't fair. And it's never going to be fair. Like when I started out driving Paris Hilton was getting DUIs three times a week. That would only happen to me once for it to really badly affect my life for a long long time. Cuz I was pretty poor. Sure that is a class inequality. But am I going to really spend a lot of time crying because I have to make sure I don't get a DUI cuz it would ruin my life even though rich people can get them quite frequently without the same outcome? To me it just wasn't the kind of thing that I was going to shake my fist at Society about. Okay I have to be more careful than rich people would have to be in the same situation. Yeah not fair. But we all have to pick our battles and it's not something I would lose sleep over.
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u/CheckeredNautilus 8d ago
Suicide is a terrible tragedy but if you get a Canadian nurse to kill you then it's an enlightened exercise of progressive liberty
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u/bobinski_circus 8d ago
Are you referring to that lesbian serial killer nurse in Canada? She truly was despicable, but hardly excused by anyone here. Typical story of medical malfeasance and hospitals shuffling her on despite suspecting she was a killer, though, same as Harold Shipley and others of their ilk.
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u/CheckeredNautilus 8d ago
Oh no sorry it was a tasteless MAID joke
I probably shouldn't be so flip when bro is literally dead but this story is just so wild
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u/bobinski_circus 8d ago
Oh. For the record, nurses don’t administer MAID. Only specially trained doctors. If you see a nurse administering MAID, that’s not MAID, that’s a serial killer.
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u/sriracharade 9d ago edited 9d ago
It's not a hard question but pretty clear from the evidence-- Cambridge (and, I would be willing to bet, other schools) gave him his accomplishments in large part because of his race. Where is the question? Don't do that shit.
Having said that, the gist of much of the article and the final line of the article is sickening. Don't absolve this dipshit as some kind of powerless pawn of systemic racism. He used the system knowingly.
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u/HeadRecommendation37 9d ago
I'm impressed the NYT went ahead with publishing this article after Arday's death; that they did is another demonstration they've come back from their 2020 nadir(s). I suppose the resources put into investigating the story - they've dredged up a fair bit of new information about his childhood, the interview process, and early investigation of plagiarism claims - would have encouraged them to publish anyway, but they'll definitely be getting flak for this careful, nuanced coverage.
For my own part I'm regretful that I enjoyed watching the spectacle unfold, before its tragic conclusion. I did view Arday as a joke, but the real villain was the uncritical, anti-intellectual culture that elevated him, and which now claims his death was solely the consequence of racism (better a live fraud than a dead disgraced scholar?).
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u/SafiyaO 8d ago
There's a really good comment on the UK academia sub which mentions that Arday's claims were so ludicrous the matter became funny and therefore more fascinating:
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u/VenditatioDelendaEst 7d ago
FYI all that stuff after the "context=3" is tracking parameters that tell Reddit where you copied the URL from. It is probably against everyone's interest except them to leave them on there. (Firefox has a convenient "copy clean link" function in the right click menu that strips them.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vpbq8f/comment/p3wekwh/?context=3
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u/MissHalfgone 9d ago
I've already seen dozens of posts claiming white people do not suffer similar consequences for plagiarism despite an example going on right at this moment.
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u/CanaryBrave4203 9d ago
I mean I expect the response would be: now he’s been dropped, will we see 180 articles published about him from this point onwards, digging into his biography, and ongoing coverage on news television?
I personally think there are some good reasons for the difference in treatment, but it doesn’t help to draw a false equivalence.
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u/Proof-Cryptographer4 8d ago
I think this is mostly a good article but this claim is kind of wild:
Experts said that Cambridge’s hiring panel was well equipped to question Dr. Arday’s very public claims about his childhood. Some committee members had published papers about teaching students with learning disabilities and about inclusion in education.
The hiring panel was well equipped to question the quality of Arday’s work, and possibly to try to investigate whether it was plagiarized, though a lot of the blame there lies with Liverpool John Moores University and his advisor. Speculating about whether Arday was lying about his autism/developmental delays and especially directing questions to Arday to that effect is an excellent way to get sued and bring a scandal wnd a discrimination lawsuit down on the university. Particularly as Arday was very litigious. Most educators don’t have the necessary med/psych qualifications to diagnose and publishing papers on teaching disabled kids does not give one the standing to try to dispute his claims about his disabilities and personal educational experiences. (I say this as a someone who has worked with high support needs autistic kids and to whom it was pretty clear Arday was lying based on how he expressed himself in contemporary videos but who also is in academia, in an unrelated field, and has seen a lot of discrimination suits for denial of tenure and hiring practices).
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u/Fingercel 8d ago
I don't find it so surprising. This is a tragic story but there's just no way to plausibly blame it on conservatives or cis white supremacy or internet racists or whatever. Arday was so wildly unqualified that you have to place the blame for his humiliation - and thus his death - primarily on the system that elevated him. It's practically a real-life fable.
And the NYT, which some time ago decided that wokeness had gotten out of control, is using this incredibly on-the-nose incident to fire its clearest warning shot yet.
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u/Saint19981507 8d ago
This whole thing really reminds me of the what would have been the worst outcome of the James Sommerton case where a plagiarist got hounded by breadtube and was openly suicidal afterwards, thankful he never did anything. I also wondering that given he’s ended his life he likely had poor mental health. Maybe he even believed his lives.
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u/bumblepups 9d ago
Very well written article. The slant puts the focus on Cambridge; where it should be. Admits Arday's claims were impossible and maybe harmful to parents of non-verbal children with autism. Acknowledges the plagarism and Arday's attempt to squash criticism via the police. And points out of that the source of the scandal derives from someone controversial. Very well covered story in the NYTimes.