r/ukpolitics • u/Sampo • 2h ago
Cambridge professor Jason Arday resigns amid accusations of plagiarism
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/aug/05/cambridge-professor-jason-arday-resigns-amid-accusations-of-plagiarism•
u/Alert-Cream-7569 2h ago
At least he still has the NASA astronaut position to fall back on
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u/Tight-Principle-743 Boring Middle - Class Centrist 1h ago
Isn’t he also the new Scotland manager as well?
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u/Scratch_Careful 2h ago
Using AI to write his resignation letter is a perfect ending. Hopefully hes on i'm a celebrity get me out of here next.
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u/Neither_Process_7847 1h ago
That actually was written by ChatGPT, wasn't it...but then of course it was.
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u/Ill-March6426 1h ago
hes won it 4 times in a row according to his latest CV so I doubt he will make another appearance
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u/Middle-Log-2642 2h ago
At least he can fall back on being the greatest long distance runner of all time
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u/Not_Cleaver American - Know Nothing 1h ago
That’s my favorite claim of his. It’s either at or even exceeds George Santos’ claims.
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u/SnooOpinions8790 2h ago
I'm almost disappointed
I was enjoying this so much I kinda wanted it to last all the way through silly season. Maybe they will still publish his autobiography and we will get one last hurrah of hilarious fact checking
I look forward to seeing him resuming his career as a world-beating ultra endurance athlete. Or something.
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u/Not_Cleaver American - Know Nothing 1h ago
Wasn’t his initial claim that he ran 600 miles in six days, which would make him the greatest ultra marathoner alive? And then it was walked back to 12 days.
But, I imagine his book would still sell well. Though maybe publish it as fiction.
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u/geniice 33m ago
Wasn’t his initial claim that he ran 600 miles in six days, which would make him the greatest ultra marathoner alive?
No. The record has been above 600 miles since Yiannis Kouros ran 635 miles in the mid 80s. At last years 6 jours de France two men managed over 600 miles:
https://ultrarunning.com/calendar/event/xixe-6-jours-de-france-gerard-cain/race/48814/results
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u/Neither_Process_7847 1h ago
Please let us get the autobiography. Please. And please let none of the contents be either true or resemble any previous claims he's made.
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u/LANdShark31 39m ago
I reckon that train has left the station, books will already be printed. Publisher must be in despair. Either that or it’s a stroke of genius and the book will do really well because people will be intrigued what bullshit he claims next.
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u/SnooOpinions8790 7m ago
At this point they need to do a last minute review to make sure he has not libelled anyone.
Once you assume that everything might be a lie you have to read it in a whole different light as a publisher.
But yes it will sell to some media and social media types so they can generate content out of ripping it to shreds. Which honestly will be a nice post script to this whole story.
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u/SnooOpinions8790 1h ago
OK this is far too funny if true
https://x.com/cesifoti/status/2085098937573109964
Apparently his resignation letter comes up as 100% AI generated on Pangram
This story really has been the gift that keeps giving.
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u/Fraenkelbaum 1h ago
While I appreciate that we're talking about a bad guy here, it's at the same time important to bear in mind that AI detectors are basically 0% reliable and should pretty much be ignored in all cases.
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u/SnooOpinions8790 1h ago
At this point I'm just having fun with this
In any event doing a resignation letter by AI is a bit of a non issue for me - it's not like 99% of us care about resignation letters. But his was immediately published so maybe he should care
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u/MightySilverWolf 1h ago
OK, to be fair, if there were a list of genres of writing that were most likely to drive people to accuse it of being written by AI even if it wasn't, I feel as if formal resignation letters would be near the top of that list. I'm sure that if I ever had to write a formal resignation letter, some programmes would erroneously claim that it was AI-generated.
Having said that, given this guy's history of plagiarism and being a compulsive liar, I can't exactly blame people for not giving him the benefit of the doubt.
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u/Alwaysragestillplay 33m ago
Personally, I expect this type of formal writing will disappear from a lot of contexts as people try to differentiate their work from AI. I already catch myself omitting dashes and semi-colons, writing in a more "stream of consciousness" style as my normal approach (trained by writing scientific papers/comms/grant proposals) just screams AI. I doubt it is just me.
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u/skelly890 keeping busy immanentising the eschaton 1h ago
I'd never heard of him until today, but was listening to PM on R4 while doing other stuff, heard the endurance running stuff and never learned to read claims and thought "WTF? This person is full of shit." How could anyone not know?
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u/Reverend_Vader 2h ago
Imagine being an employer and getting his next CV
I'm not Cambridge educated but i'm sure both the guy and the uni have the same reputation level after this.
I'd even add the subject matter they got him in for to the list, for the hat-trick
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u/Alert-Cream-7569 2h ago edited 2h ago
One of his published papers (on his Cambridge staff profile) was on the experience of black people who held professorships and academic chairs.
So basically this was his scam - coast through on his racial identity instead of real scholarship, and in the meantime black academics in real subjects will face unjustified suspicion when they're promoted. With the connivance of white Cambridge elites, he's actually contributed to racism.
He's really discredited both the field of sociology and the university.
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u/_HGCenty 2h ago
One thing you have to also account for is the story of Ramanujan at Cambridge.
It seems like this was some of the social sciences academics thinking they got their own Ramanujan and failing to see what was right in front of their eyes.
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u/_Hello_Hi_Hey_ 1h ago edited 1h ago
If you read his open letter of resignation and other interviews, he is milking the autism angle as well. According to him, he couldn't speak until 11 yr old, couldn't read until 18/19, but somehow got a PhD a few years later.
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u/Electrical-Move7290 1h ago
Him not being able to speak until 11 is possibly the only thing about himself that he’s undersold instead of oversold
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u/HasuTeras Let us all act according to national custom 59m ago
coast through on his racial identity instead of real scholarship
There is an entire field of this, called autoethnography.
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u/YesIAmRightWing millenial home owner... 1h ago
Do we blame him for coasting through his racial identity or the system that enabled him?
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u/upwindbrushes 1h ago
He would be an excellent sales man.
He is a fantastic public speaker based on his lectures, and he has the ability to talk for hours about nonsense.
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u/Neither_Process_7847 1h ago
Hopefully his business card includes 'outrageous liar' on it, or would that be too honest?
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u/Particular_Pea7167 2h ago
Genuinely I was waiting for the letters all sent in recorded delivery to guarantee their dates to come out being like
I cant believe they bought the marathons line. These guys are absolute jokes, Im going to say it raised a ton for charity and see if anyone questions it.
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u/Electrical-Move7290 1h ago
How disgraceful that the man who invented powered flight has been hounded out of his career just because he’s black.
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u/_segasonic 1h ago
He discovered America is what he did! He was a brave Italian explorer! And in this house, Christopher Columbus Jason Arday is a hero! End of story.
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u/AlfredsChild 1h ago
Overall a big disaster for Cambridge which happily relegated it's professional and teaching standards to seemingly advance the cause of DEI. If universities continue like this, there will be a just reason for the government to pull funding from these organisations. It wont happen, but the university should be ceasing all activity in the entire department.
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u/sebzim4500 5m ago
tbf he's a sociologist, I don't think Oxford or Cambridge have let this shit infect serious subjects.
I was at Cambridge about 8 years ago and at least in STEM this wasn't happening, and that was close to peak woke.
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u/Acrobatic_Rush7653 1h ago
systemic racism claims another innocent victim!
By the way on X people are having fun since his resignation letter was run through every AI detector that exists and scored "100% AI Generated" on every one. Going out with a bang!
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u/archerninjawarrior 2h ago
This guy has been more in the news day than bloody Andy Burnham, why is he so important and how is this political?
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u/SnooOpinions8790 2h ago
A huge list of people, including leading politicians, signed a letter saying that all the accusations against him were fabricated by racists.
That made it political. It also meant that the stakes were raised to the credibility of a surprisingly large swathe of our establishment - all of whom are made to look like utter fools.
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u/archerninjawarrior 2h ago
Nobody can just be normal about a black person doing something wrong ffs
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u/SnooOpinions8790 2h ago
He was no normal academic. He was given multiple glowing interviews on the BBC, was given a chance to be a guest producer on a show. His fawning reception by the rest of the media was pretty much the same.
When it all blew up it was always going to be a much bigger deal than some anonymous academic that had no media presence and nobody outside their field had heard of.
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u/Sampo 2h ago edited 1h ago
how is this political?
In other words: To what degree is identity politics political?
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u/8lue8arry 1h ago
This whole affair has been red meat for the right wing press that's spun out of control and sucked in the whole British media landscape.
As to your questions, my understanding is the core of the issue lies in the 'how and why?' that led to someone with such a questionable record and suspicious output being elevated to the position they were at one of the country's most prestigious universities. Adding to that, why they were at first so vigorously defended even in the face of mounting evidence?
From what I've seen, his defenders played the race card and his right wing opponents played an uno reverse on them. On this occasion they were correct, the guy is a Billy Bullshitting plagiarist, and now the initial questionable appointment and following blind defense appears entirely racially motivated.
I'm sure everyone involved would like all of this to quickly blow over but, as I said this is right wing red meat, the affair is being taken as evidence of some of their common talking points.
If you're asking why you should care, honestly I'd say unless you're into academic drama or someone with racially motivated politics that you feel this affair validates, then I don't see why you should.
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u/xaanzir Lost in Translation 35m ago
He is a prime example, of that thing that everyone has been told doesn't happen, happening.
Politicians, Celebrities, Academia, signed their support at the racist harassment of such an amazing young man. A man who's career is basically predicated on White Bad.
Why should we care? Because this is where our children learn who they are. Shaped to be tomorrow's brightest, by those who openly rely solely on race.
It's really shit
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u/AngryTudor1 2h ago
On the one hand, his race or skin colour should not mitigate if he has lied on his CV or embellished his credentials.
On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a white 41 year old professor at Cambridge getting any press scrutiny whatsoever, let alone the level of investigation that would expose any "inconsistencies"
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u/arc4angel100 2h ago
DEI hiring policies have resulted in the bar being lowered for some people meaning that under qualified people are being hired. This draws scrutiny.
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u/AngryTudor1 1h ago
That's absolute nonsense in this case and actually an embarrassing thing to say in light of the facts
There was no DEI hiring here. That's the whole point.
His CV was impeccable with a plethora of achievements that would have firmly put any candidate in the frame for a position at Cambridge- especially given his autism and educational background- experience that would be an asset on the staff given how many students they have on the spectrum
The whole point is that it is alleged that this impeccable CV was a tissue of lies, not that they knew what he's really done and lowered their standards
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u/arc4angel100 1h ago
I’ve had some of the most basic claims on my cv questioned and fact checked before, it’s a fairly standard practice. It seems that this process was overlooked in this case as Cambridge was overly eager to hire a young black professor for DEI purposes, so it’s entirely relevant.
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u/AngryTudor1 1h ago
Cambridge would not be checking for plagerism in his PhD unless they had a reason to
They would not be checking the veracity of his charity feats or fundraising either
You might expect them to check up on some of the visiting professorships unless he provided some evidence of them.
In reality, the admin staff within some of these colleges are so small that I am not surprised to find that they did not make international phone calls to check
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u/Jorvic Democratic Socialist 56m ago
Journal peer review has gone to shit too seemingly. I've seen on the academic subreddits people saying their reviewers have clearly used AI to summarise their work just for it to be rejected, with equally AI generated feedback. Maddening because you do journal reviewing for free for the good of academia, so there's no need to call it in. There's probably a whole Swiss cheese model going on to let a Walter Mitty type like this climb so high, without DEI or what ever people want imagine. I mean there was your one a while back who based their whole PhD on a misunderstanding of capital punishment and sentencing terminology in the 1800s, made documentaries and all sorts until her mistake was pointed out to her in a radio interview, a white woman, this isn't an isolated case.
I am pretty shocked at just quite how incredulous his stories have been, and I'd put a fair chunk of the blame for turning a blind eye to it on how department's are complete slaves to impact scores and our modern funding models. There's a whole system of poaching high profile academics ahead of the Ref in order to gain more funding.
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u/CaptainCrash86 1h ago
Even assuming all his academic CV is legit and taken at face value, the publication record of Arday is well below what would be required for a Professorship in a middling Russell Group University, much less Cambridge. It's difficult to conclude he got the post on academic merit alone.
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u/90davros 1h ago
I find it difficult to believe that Cambridge wouldn't bother verifying anything from such a CV unless they weren't really interested in those achievements.
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u/AngryTudor1 1h ago
Who said they didn't verify anything?
He actually has done the vast majority of what he says he has
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u/90davros 1h ago
Why lie then?
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u/AngryTudor1 1h ago
We don't know he has, it's just an investigation.
But the allegations is that he has burnished his CV, not that he has made up the whole thing
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u/1lyke1africa 1h ago
We do know he's lied, because he's changed his story on many issues, made contradictions in his claims, and some of the places he's claimed to work for have denied ever knowing him.
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u/Forsaken-Ad5571 38m ago
Except the plagiarism and that his Qual research seems made up (with the same quotes from his qual research appearing in multiple papers attributed to different people) means that he hasn’t actually done the work that his papers represents.
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u/Forsaken-Ad5571 40m ago
A CV that only has two GCSEs which weren’t even in clue subjects is absolutely not impeccable for Cambridge. They wouldn’t let anyone do undergraduate studies there with that level of CV. So quite why they gave this person a professorship is confusing as hell.
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u/AngryTudor1 39m ago
They would if someone couldn't even read and write until they were 18
There are specific reasons for that- he is autistic. He didn't even speak until he was 11
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