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Jason Arday, the University of Cambridge sociology professor who resigned last week amid an academic plagiarism scandal, was found dead in London on Friday. In 2022, the then-37-year-old Arday received widespread attention after it was announced he would serve as the youngest black full professor in history at the prestigious college. But some of his colleagues came to have their doubts.
Scrutiny into Arday's work followed a viral Substack piece by Nathan Cofnas, a philosophy of biology professor who became embroiled in a free speech dispute with Cambridge after penning a defense of academic inquiry into group differences in intelligence. Cofnas ran Arday's work through plagiarism detection software and discovered that “many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source.”
As the story developed, assertions made by Arday about his life beyond academics came under the public microscope—including his purported struggles with severe autism, prolonged muteness, and illiteracy in childhood, along with grandiose claims of athletic accomplishments and philanthropic feats.
Arday's memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, was published on Tuesday, August 11.
Discussion (52)
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“At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious. The case is being investigated by officers from the Met’s central south command unit. A file will be prepared for the coroner.”
That’s a lot of words to say “suicide.”
London mayor Sadiq Khan issued the following statement:
What bull. Anyone who cheated the system they way Arday did should be shamed. There should be a campaign of shaming frauds. We wasn’t a “victim,” his students were victims of his grift.
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Those who enabled and promoted him should be ashamed.
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It is a shame itself to have people occupying major elected government posts to make statements like this when faced with the facts that have been uncovered.
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I think the former British Home Secretary had it about right:
We can argue about Arday's own motives, whether or not he suffered from some sort of delusional disorder, or whether he was simply a malevolent fraud. As it stands, the chances of our ever knowing the full story have just gone from "slim" to "none."
It cannot be argued, however, that those at the pinnacle of British academia, who have been fawning all over Arday for years, bear no responsibility for this state of affairs. Had the plagiarism accusations been taken seriously, and dealt with when they first came up; had the search committee done even a cursory bit of due diligence when he applied for the job; had anyone been keeping an eye on, and done something for, Cambridge's "youngest black professor" as his flights of fancy and unhinged claims grew ever more preposterous over the course of months and years; had anyone listened to, looked into, and done something about, the claims of his students regarding wasted class time and inappropriate subject matter, then the situation today might be completely different for all concerned.
But they couldn't, and we all know why.
Sadiq Khan is a disgrace. Cambridge University is a disgrace. The Metropolitan Police are usually a disgrace; I'm reserving judgement for now, until I see what comes next.
Arday leaves behind a wife and two young children. I'm sorry for them. For all I know, his poor family has been trying to cope--perhaps for years--with a situation most of us can only imagine. Count yourself lucky if you're one of them.
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Assuming that this was indeed a suicide, it's good that he did not take the rest of his family out as well, "family annihilator" style, in order to "save" them from the embarrassment/trauma resulting from his fabulist house-of-cards tumbling down for all the world to see.
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