I’ve deliberately, to this point, said nothing publicly about Professor Jason Arday, either prior to his death, or about the circumstances of his death.
That wasn’t because I didn’t have thoughts about what was happening and has happened. I had, and continue to have, lots of them.
It’s partly because I have my own personal circumstances right now which are taking up an enormous amount of my brain space and emotional energy, but mostly because there was already an extraordinary amount of noise, speculation, judgement, certainty and righteous indignation coming from practically every possible direction, and I didn’t want to add myself to all of it.
And now a man is dead, and yet somehow the noise has become even louder.
So, I feel a compulsion to say ‘something’.
That compulsion comes from my own need to speak out. That I have not done so already publicly is not an indicator of not having done anything at all, or not engaged in work and conversations about this subject.
A disclaimer
Not one person, aside from the protagonist, is named or pointed at. When I am referencing ‘people’, unless named I am not referencing one person. I exist in a lot of spaces and have colleagues, friends, and connections globally. If you perceive a criticism of yourself in what I say, then I can only say that nothing here is targeted. I would however, suggest reflecting on why you might be perceiving that criticism personally.
I know things I shouldn’t know, and so do you
If I say ‘something’ then what I say has to be meaningful, reflective, accountable, and in recognition of the privileges I hold; which is why I have taken my time with it. And yes there is a privilege to me having done that, but there are also deeper complex reasons.
So this is my attempt.
What I want to say is not about whether Professor Arday lied, or not. Not about whether or not he embellished parts of his life. It’s not about whether plagiarism took place, or not.
All those things are irrelevant because I shouldn’t even know that those things exist.
The reason that I do know is the driving factor. Everything else becomes irrelevant after that fact.
I didn’t know Professor Arday beyond one email exchange, working in connected fields and via crossovers in colleagues.
I wasn’t involved in investigating Professor Arday and, like almost everyone who has and is still currently passing judgement on him online, I am spectacularly unqualified to tell you what happened inside another human being’s life.
It’s not my fucking business.
Despite all that, I do know of these things because it’s all out there in the open.
Because it was dragged out into the open, legitimate questions about academic integrity were raised. Of course there were.
But that is a completely different proposition from pretending that everything which subsequently happened was a normal, or proportionate response to concerns about academic integrity.
Professor Arday had previously been investigated over plagiarism allegations and cleared of wrongdoing. Further ‘concerns’ were subsequently raised, new investigations were beginning, and he denied deliberately plagiarising while acknowledging mistakes in his doctoral work.
Previous allegations had NOT been upheld.
New processes had not reached their conclusion when he died.
Yet somewhere along the way this stopped being an academic integrity process and became the GLOBAL public, media and cultural forensic dissection of a human being.
His qualifications. His employment history. His childhood. His disability. His sporting achievements. His charitable fundraising. His injuries. His family stories. Whether he could have run a particular distance with a fractured fibula. Whether somebody had seen him doing it.
People who had never met him became investigators, psychologists, doctors, detectives and jurors.
And I keep coming back to one very simple question:
Why?
Why did this become something hundreds of thousands of strangers apparently needed to investigate?
Why did this become something that hundreds of thousands of strangers could even know about?
Because if plagiarism, CV embellishment, exaggeration, lying, or inconsistencies in people’s accounts of themselves ordinarily justified this level of national and international scrutiny, we’d apparently need rolling news channels dedicated solely to misconduct in academia, let alone employment more broadly.
An ENORMOUS number of people in positions of influence and power should be hiding behind the sofa if that were the case.
Because they are all going to be held to account, aren’t they? They all deserve this level of scrutiny and harassment, right?
RIGHT?
It’s not the like the ‘leader of the Free World’, and most of his government literally embellishes or distorts nearly everything he/they say. (This is sarcasm, just in case you missed it)
Context is king, speculation is harmful
There may well have been things Jason said about himself which weren’t true. There may have been exaggerations. There may have been embellishments.
I don’t know.
But neither do most of you.
And even if there were embellishments, or exaggerations, or even lies, human behaviour doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
People exaggerate, embellish, conceal, project and perform versions of themselves for all sorts of reasons. Anxiety, fear, shame, unsafety, pressure, the desperate need to meet other people’s expectations are among the possibilities, alongside an exertion of power (and of that last one Professor Arday didn’t really have much to exert).
From my personal experience in engaging with the public and the media, things that you say can be taken out of context, or assumed, and you don’t always get an opportunity to correct the record (especially where the media is involved). Sometimes you can give a two hour interview and 15 second snippets of what you said are used. And once that’s out there it becomes the factual statement of what you said, with no way for you to correct or retract it.
This becomes exacerbated the higher profile you have. Assumption and speculation go hand in hand with escalating harm. I have friends who, from a public perspective are deemed ‘celebrities’, nationally and or internationally known, due to their work in film and television, who have experienced substantial trauma from this.
Sometimes, people say things that in their head are correct and hold the full meaning of what they are trying to communicate, but out loud are missing information and context that others interpret literally. Sometimes there are further factors that compound communication breakdowns, or misinterpretations, or the presentation of information that can be interpreted in multiple ways and aren’t necessarily embellishments, but can appear to be so.
Sometimes there is a context which comes from being Autistic.
There is another possibility in all of this which I don’t think has received anything like enough consideration: that some of what is being described as embellishment may sit in the space between what Professor Arday communicated, what he understood himself to be communicating, and what other people subsequently understood him to mean.
That isn’t an argument that every disputed claim was true. Nor is it an argument that Autistic people can’t lie, exaggerate, misremember or present themselves favourably. Of course we can. It’s an argument that before deciding that a discrepancy between an account and the available evidence constitutes deliberate embellishment, we ought to consider how communication actually works, particularly when the person at the centre of the story was Autistic and reportedly had a profoundly atypical developmental history of speech, language and literacy.
The Crystal Palace story is a useful example.
It has repeatedly been reported as one of Professor Arday’s questionable claims. The Guardian, for example, reports that questions were raised about his claim to have played for Crystal Palace as an under-18, while Crystal Palace themselves have said that they don’t retain records from the period in which he would have been there. The same reporting acknowledges that he subsequently played non-league football, including for Lewisham Borough.
But go back to the source and the story becomes considerably less straightforward.
The relevant conversation comes from an episode of Talking Matters with Nick Halkes, recorded in 2021 and subsequently published in August 2024.
In the section concerning football, Professor Arday describes himself as having been ‘at a professional club‘. The interviewer then asks which professional club he was involved with. Professor Arday answers: Crystal Palace.
There is a vital distinction there:
Because being at a professional football club and being a professional footballer aren’t the same claim.
Indeed, in the same conversation Professor Arday subsequently says that he wasn’t good enough to become a professional footballer and that he instead went on to play non-league football for around twelve or thirteen years. An archived copy of the audio and machine-generated transcript places the relevant exchange at approximately 19–20 minutes into the episode.
So what exactly are we alleging that he embellished?
Perhaps he was registered with Crystal Palace’s youth system. Perhaps he trained there. Perhaps he played in one of the multiple developmental streams he refers to in the interview. Perhaps he was there on some basis that wouldn’t leave the sort of surviving historical record people now expect to find. I grew up with a significant number of kids who ‘played’ for professional teams – Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea, Arsenal, West Ham, Charlton Athletic, Leyton Orient, Wimbledon (I’m showing my age now) – All of these boys were signed to schoolboy streams, and none of this was doubted at all. Football clubs hoover up relatively talented young players, barely any of them make it. Those kids were still playing for those teams.
Perhaps his memory was inaccurate.
Perhaps the story became inflated over time.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. The point is that we don’t know, we probably never will, and underlying that all is the fact that it doesn’t actually matter.
I’m not here trying to prove whether Professor Arday lied or not, I am trying to provide context, now that this is an international conversation/witch-hunt.
Using this example, what can we say for certain?
Well, that there is an enormous semantic difference between:
I was at a professional football club.
and:
I was a professional footballer.
And Arday appears, in that interview at least, to explicitly distinguish between the two.
What happened afterwards is potentially much more interesting.
A complicated piece of autobiographical information: I spent several years within the youth structure of a professional football club but didn’t make it professionally and subsequently played semi-professionally/non-league; is extraordinarily easy to compress into Jason Arday played for Crystal Palace. From there, played for Crystal Palace is extraordinarily easy for another listener, journalist, university communications department or member of the public to hear as professional Crystal Palace footballer.
At each stage the statement has moved slightly further away from the original one.
Nobody necessarily has to be lying for that to happen.
Talk to me like I’m not in your head
Autistic communication provides a potential context for understanding the apparent embellishment.
One possible factor is pragmatic under-specification. Humans don’t always provide every piece of contextual information another person requires in order to construct precisely the same meaning that exists in our own heads. And this can be a specifically relevant trait to Autistic people.
The phrase “Talk to me like I’m not in your head” is a common one within Autistic relationships. If, within my autobiographical memory, Crystal Palace refers to a perfectly clear period of my life: the training ground, the people, the youth system, the years I spent there; then saying I played for Crystal Palace may feel entirely sufficient.
I know what I mean. What I may not anticipate is everything you will infer from those five words.
This can also be defined as a mismatch in shared context. The person telling an autobiographical story possesses thousands of pieces of information unavailable to the listener. Because those qualifications are present internally, it isn’t necessarily obvious which ones need saying aloud. The listener receives the compressed version and fills in the gaps using their own assumptions.
This is one of the problems with the traditional framing of Autistic communication as simply deficient. Communication isn’t transmitted intact from one brain into another. Meaning is constructed between people. Research associated with the Double Empathy Problem has increasingly demonstrated that communication difficulties between Autistic and non-Autistic people aren’t adequately explained as a unilateral Autistic deficit; cross-person communication itself creates opportunities for misalignment.
I often describe this as two human beings having very different cultural touchstones and reference points. Shared use of language does not instantly assume shared understanding or clear communication.
There may also be differences in linguistic category boundaries.
What does it mean to have played for a football club?
Does it mean making a senior first-team appearance? Being professionally contracted? Being registered as a youth player? Playing for an academy side? Being part of a development programme? Training within the club structure?
Those distinctions are socially constructed and highly context-dependent. Two people can therefore use the same phrase while attaching different boundaries to the category it describes. Neither necessarily realises that the other person’s category is different.
Then there is what I would describe as narrative compression.
Human beings don’t recount autobiographical experience by retrieving a perfectly preserved recording. We reconstruct it. Decades of complicated experience become stories; stories become familiar phrases; familiar phrases become shorthand.
For an Autistic person this can intersect with differences in autobiographical memory, the relative salience of particular details, reliance on established linguistic formulations, and the sheer cognitive demand involved in constructing an answer in real time.
A huge experiential package can therefore become attached to a small linguistic handle.
Crystal Palace.
Couldn’t speak until eleven.
Learned to read at eighteen.
Thirty marathons.
Darts.
Visiting fellow.
Pick your narrative and the same rules apply.
The handle retrieves the story for the person telling it. The problem is that everybody else only receives the handle.
There are two other paradoxes here.
Firstly, Autistic people are routinely told that we communicate with too much detail. That we’re pedantic. That we over-explain. That we don’t know which details matter. That we need to get to the point.
So we can learn to compress.
We can learn the socially recognisable version of the answer.
Nobody wants the four-minute explanation of exactly what type of youth football programme somebody participated in twenty-five years ago. They want to know:
“Who did you play for?“
Crystal Palace.
Conversation successfully moves on.
Until five, or twenty-five years later somebody takes the sentence apart as though it was a statement drafted by a lawyer for the purposes of establishing a precise contractual relationship with Crystal Palace Football Club.
Secondly, some Autistic people are genuinely chronic over-achievers in a variety of specialisms across completely different and what can appear to be random skill sets. The term ‘spiky profile’ exists for a reason. I personally know Autistic people whose back-story ‘looks’ as wild as Professor Arday’s. The difference being I’ve been there to witness it, so know that it’s true.
There are other Autistic-specific or ‘Autism-adjacent’ factors that could contribute too.
Masking involves learning how to produce versions of ourselves which other people can expect and accept. Fawning and acquiescence can make challenging somebody else’s flattering interpretation difficult. Processing pressure can reduce precision. Established scripts can become easier to access than freshly constructed explanations. We may fail to recognise an inference somebody else has made and therefore fail to correct it. A journalist might say, effectively, so you were a professional footballer, while the Autistic person answers the next question without realising that anything requiring correction has happened.
And once a public narrative has been established, it acquires a life of its own.
Universities copy biographies from previous universities. Conference organisers copy biographies from university websites. Journalists read conference biographies. Interviewers introduce somebody using those biographies. The person being interviewed hears versions of their own story repeated back to them hundreds of times.
Eventually it becomes extremely difficult to establish who originally introduced which adjective. Memory is reconstructive rather than reproductive; repeated retelling can alter what subsequently becomes easiest to retrieve.
None of this means Professor Arday couldn’t have embellished elements of his life.
He might have. Again I would like to point out that this shouldn’t even be the conversation, neither you nor I should know any of this. There should be no conversation at all. Professor Arday should be busy right now writing papers on social inequalities in education, not dead because of his job and some did he or didn’t exaggerate a bit about things that don’t harm anyone and played no role in him getting his job.
How many other Cambridge or any other University academics can you confidently name if you don’t work in Academia? Probably at best one or two? And only if you have a relevant interest that requires that sort of knowledge.
The claims exist though and form part of this narrative, so as much as I fundamentally insist that this is all noise and distraction from targeted racism, I have to acknowledge those claims because they are now part of the narrative, and the fact that there are allegations relating to him for which this sort of communicative explanation may be completely inadequate.
But embellishment is itself a claim about process.
It doesn’t merely say that two accounts are inconsistent as much as everyone would love that to be the case. Superficial people argue superficially. The superficial version implies that somebody took a less impressive truth and deliberately made it more impressive.
And there are several routes by which a statement can become more impressive without that deliberate choice ever happening.
The speaker can under-specify.
The listener can over-infer.
An interviewer can supply a premise.
A biography writer can compress.
A communications department can simplify.
A journalist can paraphrase.
The speaker can fail to correct.
Memory can reconstruct.
A familiar story can become increasingly categorical through repetition.
And somewhere at the end of that chain, decades later, somebody can place the final formulation beside an incomplete historical record and conclude that the person at the beginning must have invented it.
Maybe they did.
But the distance between “this account cannot now be independently verified” and “this person deliberately embellished their life” is much greater than much of the discussion around Professor Arday has allowed.
For an Autistic man who reportedly didn’t speak until eleven and didn’t learn to read and write until eighteen, communication itself shouldn’t be treated as an irrelevant footnote to the investigation of how his life story came to be told.
It ought to be one of the things we allow context and nuance for. The truth, should it ‘matter’, exists in that nuance, somewhere in between.
Add marginalisation, racism, ableism and the profoundly unsafe environment that academia can be even for people who aren’t marginalised, into the mix, and perhaps we could muster enough curiosity to ask what conditions surrounded a behaviour before reducing an entire human being to the word: ‘liar’
To the word: ‘fabulist‘.
None of this is excusing anything. None of this is what I want to be addressing.
This is all context, and potential context at that
I’ve provided this context, not to fuel speculation, not to add to the noise, but due to the fact that any context is enormously vital here because:
A) a man is unnecessarily dead
B) race is a motivating factor (as named by the instigator of this whole abhorrent story)
The person whose ‘intervention’ propelled these allegations into public prominence is Nathan Cofnas, a self-described “race realist” who had previously written that under what he regarded as ‘a meritocratic system’ there would be “close to zero” Black professors at Harvard.
Cofnas subsequently lost his research associate position at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, following controversy over those writings and other claims in them relating to race science, intellect and white supremacism. The wider University separately investigated him and ultimately concluded that his published views did not breach its regulations.
Yes, the same Cambridge University who hired the ‘youngest ever Black Professor’ and made lots of public noise about doing so.
I’ll let you draw your own conclusions regarding the correlation between the two.
In an interview recorded before Professor Arday’s death, Cofnas joked that:
“After the revolution, I’ll be the head of the department of Eugenics and Race Science at Harvard.”
You do not have to believe that the source of an allegation determines whether the allegation is true.
It doesn’t.
‘Evidence’ stands or falls on ‘evidence’, not the supplier of it.
But you would have to be astonishingly incurious to believe the motivations behind selecting a Black academic for this degree of scrutiny, the structures which made that scrutiny so extraordinarily combustible, and the racial politics of the person prominently driving it, are irrelevant to understanding what happened next.
I don’t think race can credibly be separated from why Professor Arday became the target. Cofnas himself has explicitly located his interest in Professor Arday within his opposition to DEI and what Arday represented to him. Especially given that said protagonist, in the above interview, stated that Professor Arday was not unique in academia, but he had a story attached to him that Cofnas knew he could sell.
The level of scrutiny applied to him, scrutiny given to no other academic, was because, I believe, of racist motivations. The level of accountability he was being held to that other academics, indeed other public figures, are not held accountable to, is because, I believe, of racist motivations.
What other reason is there? Why him? Why in this way? Why not others?
Cofnas has since been suspended by Ghent University, in Belgium. And the Trump administration has intervened in Cofnas’ defence via the US ambassador to Belgium.
Racism didn’t only enter this narrative when Jason Arday became a target.
That’s the part I think some people in my own communities desperately need to reflect upon.
Before he was publicly torn apart, Professor Arday had been elevated.
He was held up as an extraordinary Black Autistic success story. An inspiration. A representation of overcoming. A paragon of what was possible.
Institutions did it.
The media did it.
Other ‘celebritised’ academics did it.
Cambridge University definitely did it.
And yes, Autistic people did it too.
A human being was turned into a symbol.
How many people have camera crews following them on their first day at work?
His Blackness, his Autism, his childhood, his achievements and his position in academia became part of an inspirational narrative which other people consumed, celebrated and circulated.
That’s racialisation too.
That’s ableism too.
Being placed on a pedestal because your marginalisation makes your achievements inspirational, isn’t liberation.
Once somebody has been made to represent something much bigger than themselves, every perceived flaw in that person suddenly becomes a flaw in everything they’ve been made to represent.
The exceptional Black Autistic professor becomes the fraudulent Black Autistic professor.
The inspirational story becomes the scandal.
And the same characteristics which made somebody extraordinarily marketable on the way up, makes them extraordinarily newsworthy while they’re being torn down.
There is a strong argument that in terms of representation, Black people need to see other Black people being celebritised, but like this?
I understand why Professor Arday’s visibility mattered. I understand Black people saying that seeing him at Cambridge made them feel seen, or made something previously unimaginable feel possible. Representation does matter. But representation cannot become a substitute for redistribution.
I say this absolutely acknowledging that any opinion I have on this is soaked in privilege.
If Professor Arday was needed to become an international symbol of Black achievement in order for Black people to imagine themselves at Cambridge, then the question is what did Cambridge do with that responsibility?
Did it widen the road behind him?
Did it change who was recruited, retained or promoted?
Did the extraordinary become ordinary?
Or was one extraordinarily visible Black man required to carry the symbolic weight of an institution within which, years later, just 270 of the UK’s 26,110 professors are Black, and at Cambridge specifically, according to their own statistics, of their 795 professors in total, 0.4% were Black.
That percentage works out at roughly 3–4 Black professors.
Visibility matters immensely. But if the drawbridge comes down for one person, everybody photographs him crossing it, and then it goes back up again, that isn’t structural change. Arguably, Professor Arday was made into evidence that the door was open, when the real test was always how many people could actually walk through it after him.
So in my privilege I would add an ‘however’. And the however is that context is important, and understanding the honest intentions and motivations of his employers in the celebritising of Professor Arday are important here.
None of this makes racialised celebration morally equivalent to racist hostility.
But it does mean they can and do exist within the same ecology.
And in the socio-cultural climate manufactured by the press and social media within which we exist today, and delivered on a plate by Nathan Cofnas, Professor Arday experienced both.
No part of this, or those involved should escape scrutiny
The role of academia (and how much of a pedestal academia is placed upon), Cambridge University, the news media and the press, even the governmental systems that have curated the conditions that have played the prominent roles here. At the heart of which lies structural and institutional stigma towards all sorts of marginalised groups.
Academia
It’s incredibly telling how many people, from journalists, to the public, seem to have no idea how academia and academic processes actually work, but seem very happy to act as though they do. I would suspect, from his own words, that Cofnas knew that and deliberately took advantage of that fact, knowing that an illiterate media, awash with structural racism and a lust for sensationalism would come running when someone shouted ‘plagiarism’, especially when there was a curious story, about an even more curious Black man, ‘elevated above his station’, sitting behind it.
From the writing of papers, the conduct of research, through to hiring and firing processes. If you are going to pass judgement from an informed perspective, rather than hearing the word plagiarism and leaping on a bandwagon, this article: “It sure looks like Jason Arday was horrifically wronged (based on citation data)” by Dr Jason Stanley, might be a good place to start.
While I don’t agree with every framing of this article, there is a good explanation of the academic meaning of plagiarism and how plagiarism and citation are structured in academia, and also how irrelevant embellished, or not embellished achievements and life experiences are to academic hiring processes.
The priorities of academia are academia itself. Professor Arday achieved that title on merit, not embellishment or plagiarism.
There are questions too to be raised about how the academy itself, is propelled and held up as a bastion of virtue. THE fundamental place of knowledge. Where logic and logic alone prevails in the form of scientific study that is unquestionable in actions.
Perhaps one of the strangest things about this entire story is the pedestal upon which academia itself has been allowed to remain.
We have a cultural mythology of the university, and particularly of institutions such as Cambridge, as something approaching a republic of knowledge: egalitarian in intellectual purpose if not historically in access; populated by people selected because of the quality of their thinking; governed by evidence, peer review, intellectual rigour and reason.
There is a version of elitism contained within that mythology that I don’t necessarily object to. I want universities to contain people who know extraordinary amounts about things. I want scholarship to be difficult. I want people to spend decades becoming extraordinarily good at thinking, researching, arguing and understanding. Intellectual rigour is not itself the problem.
The problem comes when we confuse intellectual rigour with institutional virtue.
Universities are not temples of dispassionate reason staffed by people who have somehow transcended ordinary human prejudice. Academia is hierarchical, competitive and extraordinarily status-conscious. It has its celebrities, networks, factions, orthodoxies, patronage, precarious labour, institutional politics and gatekeepers. It reproduces inequalities of race, class, disability and gender while simultaneously congratulating itself for studying them.
This isn’t an ideological accusation from outside the academy. The sector’s own organisations document it. There are frequent acknowledgements of persistent racial inequalities in recruitment, progression, seniority, employment conditions and pay, and it has previously been reported that Black academics comprise around one per cent of UK professors. It is explicitly recognised that structural and institutional racism exists within higher education.
That context needs to be applied liberally to the narratives around Professor Arday, because academia didn’t simply employ him, it made something of him.
When Cambridge announced his appointment in 2023, its own publicity didn’t simply say that it had appointed a sociologist whose research concerned race, inequality and education. It announced the latest chapter in a “remarkable academic career”. It foregrounded that he would become the youngest Black person appointed to a professorship at Cambridge. It told the story of the Autistic child reportedly unable to speak until eleven or read and write until eighteen who had ultimately reached Cambridge. It explicitly located his appointment within Cambridge’s attempts to diversify higher education. Cambridge’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor described him as an “exceptional scholar” whose experiences demonstrated the barriers facing under-represented groups.
The institution did not merely appoint Jason Arday the academic. It participated in the construction of Professor Jason Arday the symbol.
That’s important, because institutions gain something from stories like his too.
A Black, Autistic professor who supposedly couldn’t read until eighteen and became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor is an extraordinary human story. But it is also an extraordinarily useful institutional story. It allows one of the oldest, wealthiest and historically most exclusive universities in the world to present itself as a place in which extraordinary barriers can now be overcome; somewhere becoming more diverse, more accessible and more representative.
The danger is that the individual then carries an impossible amount of symbolic weight.
Professor Arday wasn’t simply permitted to be an academic who happened to be Black and Autistic. He became evidence of progress. And when someone is transformed into evidence of institutional progress, any imperfection in that person’s story can subsequently be transformed into evidence that the progress itself was fraudulent.
That is almost exactly what happened.
The argument stopped being solely about whether particular passages were appropriately cited, whether particular biographical claims were accurate, or whether particular entries on a CV had been described correctly. Professor Arday became incorporated into an existing ideological argument about merit: whether diversity had displaced standards, whether Black academics were being promoted for reasons other than scholarship, whether universities had become so consumed by equality and inclusion that they were no longer capable of recognising academic quality.
Nathan Cofnas didn’t arrive at Professor Arday as an ideologically neutral observer of citation practice. His previous writing had already concerned race, intelligence, affirmative action and the racial composition of elite institutions; his arguments about meritocracy had themselves generated a major controversy at Cambridge. Cambridge responded to that controversy in 2024 by saying explicitly that everyone at Cambridge had “earned their place on merit”.
Whatever one thinks of Cofnas’s subsequent allegations, that context cannot simply be deleted.
Professor Arday was an almost uniquely powerful figure through whom to prosecute an argument that diversity had corrupted academic merit. If the highly celebrated youngest Black professor at Cambridge could be reframed, not as an exceptional scholar, but as somebody who had somehow talked his way into Cambridge, then his individual biography could be made to stand as an indictment of an entire philosophy of inclusion.
And this is where widespread public and journalistic illiteracy about academia became extraordinarily consequential.
Most people understandably have very little idea how academic appointments work. They don’t know how professorial chairs are filled, what academics actually value on a CV, the difference between a visiting title and substantive employment, how disciplinary citation practices work, how co-authorship operates, what constitutes significant research impact within a particular field, or how allegations of academic misconduct are normally investigated and adjudicated.
They therefore hear words such as Cambridge, Professor and plagiarism, and fill the enormous spaces between them with cultural assumptions.
Dr Jason Stanley’s analysis above of Professor Arday’s publication record is useful precisely because he asks an extraordinarily obvious question which much of the coverage didn’t appear interested in asking: was Arday actually an academically impactful scholar?
His answer, based particularly on citation data, is yes. Dr Stanley notes that several of Professor Arday’s early papers accumulated unusually substantial citation counts for their age and field, and argues that his publication impact compared favourably with scholars working in sociology of education at other leading institutions. He also makes another important point: claims about running marathons, playing football or holding relatively minor visiting positions are largely irrelevant to why a university appoints somebody to a senior academic position in the first place.
That doesn’t settle every question about Professor Arday’s scholarship. Citation counts aren’t synonymous with quality. Academic misconduct matters enormously when it occurs. Fabricated research, stolen ideas and genuinely deceptive academic practice should be investigated rigorously.
But that is precisely the point:
Academia already has processes for doing that.
Academic misconduct is supposed to be investigated carefully, contextually and by people capable of distinguishing between different forms and degrees of misconduct. There is a profound difference between stealing somebody else’s intellectual contribution, poor citation practice, textual overlap, inaccurate attribution, administrative error, and deliberate research fraud. These distinctions purposefully and meaningfully exist inside academia even if the word plagiarism collapses them into one enormous moral category outside it.
The same applies to recruitment.
Whether Professor Arday completed thirty marathons, exactly what relationship he had with Crystal Palace, or whether a visiting affiliation was described with perfect administrative precision tells us remarkably little about whether he was capable of doing the job of Professor of Sociology of Education.
And yet those things were eventually bundled together.
Football.
Marathons.
Charity fundraising.
Literacy.
Autism.
Visiting positions.
Authorship.
Citation practices.
Academic appointments.
Everything became evidence of everything else.
The allegation was no longer merely that individual claims required clarification. The accumulating narrative became that the man himself was fraudulent, and therefore that his presence at Cambridge required explanation.
That inversion should trouble academia enormously, because the institution had already provided an explanation for his presence there: When Cambridge appointed him, it called him an exceptional scholar.
Yet once the controversy began, public discussion increasingly behaved as though a Black man’s professorship at Cambridge was something that had to be retrospectively justified by the perfection of his entire biography.
That is not a standard we routinely apply to professors.
And it is certainly not a standard we routinely apply to white professors.
Nor can Cambridge be completely separated from what followed.
It would be unfair to suggest that the University created every element of Professor Arday’s public biography, and institutions are entitled, obliged, even, to investigate genuinely new evidence concerning their staff. But Cambridge had participated enthusiastically in promoting the inspirational narrative surrounding him. It had attached its enormous institutional authority to that narrative, celebrated what his appointment represented, and benefited reputationally from the symbolism of appointing its youngest Black professor.
An institution cannot reasonably help place somebody on a pedestal and then pretend to be entirely external to what happens when the pedestal becomes a scaffold. And I do use that word unapologetically and deliberately. There have been many parallels and equivalences made to this being the public lynching of a Black man. And I find it hard to disagree with that rhetoric.
There is a wider problem here too.
Academia loves exceptional marginalised people.
It is considerably less good at changing the structures which make their exceptionality remarkable in the first place.
One Black professor becomes evidence that the academy is opening while Black academics remain profoundly under-represented at professorial level. One disabled scholar who survives an inaccessible system becomes an inspirational story rather than evidence that the system is inaccessible. The extraordinary individual is celebrated precisely because the ordinary route remains closed to so many people like them.
This creates a grotesque double bind.
To enter elite spaces, marginalised people are often expected to be exceptional.
Once there, their exceptionalism becomes part of the institution’s story about itself.
But because they have been made representative, they aren’t subsequently permitted the mediocrity, messiness, contradiction, poor judgement, insecurity, ego, mistakes or ordinary human fallibility afforded to everyone else.
They have more to prove, and more to lose.
Ironically, “More to Prove and More to Lose” was the title of Arday’s own 2022 paper about racism and precarious employment in higher education. His academic work repeatedly examined precisely the institution that would eventually form the stage upon which his own legitimacy was publicly contested. Cambridge’s own academic profile lists that paper among his publications.
Perhaps the most important lesson academia could take from Professor Jason Arday, then, has remarkably little to do with citation formatting.
It is that universities cannot simultaneously position themselves as neutral arbiters of merit, continue to reproduce enormous structural inequalities, turn the handful of people who breach those inequalities into institutional symbols, and then express astonishment when those individuals become lightning rods for every cultural anxiety about whether they ever belonged there.
Academia doesn’t stand outside this story adjudicating what everybody else did wrong.
Academia helped create the conditions in which this story could happen.
Government
In the same way, the Government cannot be separated from the cultural conditions within which this happened.
Over the last eighteen months, Autism and ADHD have increasingly been discussed by government not simply as questions of unmet need, inequality or access to support, but alongside the language of cost, sustainability, worklessness, incentives, overdiagnosis and excessive demand. The Government’s own Pathways to Work Green Paper explicitly draws attention to the particularly rapid increase in people reporting “mental health or neurodiverse conditions” while arguing that the growth in PIP expenditure is “not sustainable”.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting went further, publicly agreeing that there was a problem of “overdiagnosis” and suggesting that too many people were being “written off”, before later acknowledging that his intervention had been divisive and commissioning an independent review. That review has since produced a far more complicated picture: recognising improved identification and continuing under-recognition alongside possible institutional incentives and changes in help-seeking, and explicitly warning against reducing what is happening to a single narrative.
The damage, though, isn’t confined to whatever policy eventually emerges, because political language also creates a permission structure.
When ministers repeatedly place Autism and ADHD in conversations about whether people are really disabled, whether diagnoses are being handed out too readily, whether support is affordable, whether children need labels in order to receive help, and whether disabled people are being economically “written off”, they change the questions the wider culture learns to ask of us.
Are there really this many of them?
Do they really need this?
Is that diagnosis legitimate?
Is the difficulty as significant as they claim?
Are they taking advantage?
The burden quietly shifts from institutions having to justify why Autistic people aren’t adequately supported, to Autistic people having to demonstrate that our accounts of ourselves are sufficiently credible.
The Media
I can’t write anymore without commenting on the reprehensibility, complicity and culpability of the media. This could be a 200,000 word essay in and of itself.
The media has played a parallel role alongside government.
There has been a relentless stream of stories asking whether Autism and ADHD are being overdiagnosed, whether ordinary behaviour is being medicalised, whether parents have financial incentives to obtain diagnoses, whether SEND provision is financially sustainable, whether ADHD medication is being handed out too readily, and whether neurodevelopmental diagnosis itself has become fashionable, socially contagious or somehow advantageous.
In June 2026, The Times ran the headline “Children too easily diagnosed with ADHD and autism, GPs say”, reporting claims that families may be financially incentivised to seek diagnosis; elsewhere it has asked whether “a generation” is being overdiagnosed with ADHD, and carried Uta Frith’s argument that the Autism spectrum has become so broad that it has “lost all meaning”.
Most extraordinarily, Channel 4 broadcast ‘The Great ADHD Myth?’ in August 2026, a programme which questioned the very status of ADHD and was subsequently criticised by participating academics who said their contributions had been misrepresented and that the programme risked increasing stigma.
These aren’t isolated stories, instead, they sit within a much wider journalistic ecology in which Autism and ADHD repeatedly appear alongside welfare expenditure, SEND budgets, NHS demand, school absence, social-care pressures and questions about who genuinely deserves support.
The point isn’t that journalists shouldn’t investigate diagnostic practice, welfare expenditure, poor private assessments or failing SEND systems. They absolutely should. The problem is what happens when the organising question repeatedly becomes whether Autistic and ADHD people are as Autistic, as ADHD, as disabled, as ‘impaired’ or as deserving as they claim to be.
Repetition makes that suspicion culturally ordinary. It establishes an epistemic hierarchy in which the Autistic person’s account becomes the least authoritative evidence about the Autistic person’s own life, while institutional absence: no record, no document, no conventional developmental trajectory, no external witness; begins to function almost automatically as evidence against them.
That wider ecology is fundamentally important when considering Arday.
The public didn’t encounter questions about his biography with culturally neutral eyes. They encountered them during a sustained period in which some of the country’s most powerful political and media institutions have been teaching people, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that claims surrounding Autism and ADHD warrant scepticism.
Once that frame exists, the transition from there are inconsistencies here which deserve examination to this Autistic person’s entire account of himself is suspect becomes considerably easier to make. And once that transition has been made, treatment which might otherwise look cruel, invasive or grotesquely disproportionate can begin to look like legitimate investigation instead.
Then there is the relentlessness of this situation to consider. The frenzy.
According to Professor of communications, Steven Barnett, fromUniversity of Westminster, the UK mainstream press published 289 stories about Professor Arday in 22 days, almost two-thirds of them after Professor Arday resigned. News outlets across the globe had ticker headlines about it on rolling 24 hour TV-news. Social media was awash with media reports. Predominantly ‘right wing’ media, but all outlets across the political spectrum and those who claim ‘neutrality’ took part.
Whatever legitimate journalism may have existed within it, the scale and relentlessness became, in my opinion, something resembling a lust for blood on a global scale motivated by journalistic illiteracy and racial factors, that nobody gets to be absolved from.
There is a deep, deep irony that I happened upon a debate segment on Sky News, just several days ago, where journalists and political commentators were discussing whether the media had gone too far in the case of Professor Jason Arday… The lack of critical reflection and self awareness is off the charts.
Collectively
Against that background, the treatment of Jason Arday doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Once his story began to fracture, it entered a culture already being taught to regard Autistic identity, Autistic need and Autistic self-report with suspicion. That doesn’t explain every criticism of him, and it certainly doesn’t make disputed claims immune from scrutiny. It does help explain why disbelief could escalate so quickly into something much more absolute: not simply is this particular claim accurate?, but is this person fundamentally what he says he is?
The fact is that all these systems, institutions, bodies, and the people within them hold levels of responsibility, and should be held accountable.
The fact is also that realistically none of them ever will. There is no real meaningful way to hold any of this accountable.
There might be a public enquiry. That will drag on for years if not decades. I’m sure ‘lessons will be learned’, as they always are, and never applied.
People will make performative actions, and the world will continue to spin.
Autistic people
I can’t hold any of these places, people or systems to account with any influence, anymore than you can, but I can focus one area of scrutiny, which exists within my domain and which I can claim a smidgeon of influence over; in that I can directly speak to aspects of it it at least: and that’s about the role parts of the Autistic communities have played in contributing to the very narrative around Professor Arday and this abhorrent situation, that many are now railing against.
As I said earlier, I exist in a lot of different spaces across social media, across all platforms, within communities that are global and geographically specific, not just UK-based. I’ve been around a long time and have friends, colleagues, associates and networks across many of the many, many facets of communities that collectively make up what is undeniably a hugely broad global community, both online and offline.
Across those spaces I am seeing predominantly white Autistic people who hold considerable status and influence within our communities continuing to speculate about whether this dead man was a liar, a fabulist, mentally ill, manipulative, confused, dishonest, or something else entirely.
People who didn’t know him.
People whose lives were not meaningfully affected by whether Professor Arday ran the number of miles he said he ran, in the time he said he ran them.
People now discussing the minutiae of a dead stranger’s autobiography as though they’re entitled to arrive at a verdict.
And then, on the other side, I’m watching another performance.
The sudden outpouring of grief.
The repeated posts.
The “say his name” declarations.
The calls for action that come from no place of influence other than to be an ‘influencer’.
The public demonstrations of grief from Autistic people who hold status and influence in our communities, who also didn’t know him, some of whom will have found another injustice around which to build content and an audience by next week.
Some of that grief will be completely genuine. Of course it will. There is anger, rage, distress and upset. And rightfully so. As someone who didn’t know Professor Arday, I am feeling that myself. As a collective group of people seeing one of our member openly and publicly treated like this is not only abhorrent and viscerally painful, it’s also a trigger for the many stigmatising experiences Autistic people have, the public shamings, the unfair treatment, the lack of understanding, the lack of empathy. All that, in Professor Arday’s case, bottled up and magnified a million-fold. It leaves us feeling helpless, hopeless, scarred, scared and confused. It leaves us feeling powerless and angry.
Black Autistic people must be terrified, distraught and raging. I know my friends and colleagues who are Black, particularly those who are academics, are utterly bereft and distressed.
But white people, particularly white Autistic people, particularly white Autistic people with platforms or influence of any sort, need to be capable of asking themselves, and capable of being held accountable to one question:
Of whether we are actually centring the person who has died and the structures which surrounded him, or whether we’re once again making ourselves protagonists in somebody else’s marginalisation.
Because the answer to a racialised public spectacle isn’t another racialised public spectacle with ourselves cast as the heroic allies this time.
A secondary factor here is that there is a tendency within Autistic online spaces and communities to elevate and idolise ‘celebrity’ Autistics, especially those who are seen in some way to be advocating for Autistic people and our rights (even though that advocacy can often be intensely problematic).
Our communities are also guilty of assumption and embellishment. Often people are elevated to a status they neither want or have asked for, simply because Autistic people haven’t been critical enough in their research or understanding.
Anthony Hopkins is a case point for that. For years many Autistic people held him up as a role model of a highly publicly recognised Autistic person. It turns out he never made that claim about being Autistic at all, he just happened to mention in an offhand way in an interview that his wife ‘thinks’ he might be. That’s it. In fact Hopkins holds some pretty superficial views on the subjects of autism and ADHD.
Yet over the years the ‘Autistic celebritisation of Anthony Hopkins grew to the point where he was held up as representative, as a publicly recognisable achiever, to the point where people often asked him to weigh in and comment about public Autistic narratives (which he never did of course and I’m quite glad he didn’t).
Interestingly, I have seen criticisms across a lot of social media platforms, from Autistic people who are speaking out loudly about Professor Arday, of Autistic people who have not publicly spoken out. This has come mostly from white Autistic people.
I find those criticisms alarming, honestly.
While there may be an ‘element’ of truth to the criticism that comes from the privilege of it not being a problem for white people so therefore many don’t engage, there is also a huge element of ‘j’accuse’.
Finger pointing and ‘yelling’ at people for not being an activist in the way someone else is being an activist is not helpful to anyone’s cause. It’s more likely to be divisive. Just because someone has not filled their social media with visible upset, outrage, or rightful or righteous indignation, that is not an indicator of their lack of engagement with, or work on a particular topic. Conversations and work can and often does happen in spaces where others aren’t privy to, or see it happening. Posting on social media is one of many ways to do things.
Also, different people have different capacities, and different understandings of different contexts.
This whole situation is incredibly messy and confusing. Two things can be true at the same time: While there is an overall simplisticness to the narratives around, and death of Professor Arday, there are equally a huge amount of complexities and nuances wrapped around this situation that can make it overwhelming and terrifying to engage with.
Loudness can be and is important, but a lack of loudness does not immediately make someone complicit. If we are to learn anything from the whole situation with Professor Arday, it’s that personal circumstances, nuance and complexities go hand in hand.
Professor Arday’s family have said that years of abuse, misinformation and harassment became overwhelming for him. People close to him have described the profound distress he was experiencing during the final days of this scrutiny. His death is being treated by police as unexpected, but not suspicious.
I don’t know precisely what caused Professor Arday’s death, and neither do the armies of people confidently assigning causation.
But I know what narratives and conditions existed around him and continue to do so, even after his death.
I know racism existed within them.
I know ableism existed within them.
I know public humiliation existed within them.
I know institutions were involved.
I know the press was involved.
I know social media was involved.
Our own communities were involved too.
*I* would rather people sat back, listened, paid attention, learnt, critiqued and applied, than blundering in mindlessly, yelling at the top of their lungs about an injustice they might not meaningfully understand well enough.
We can argue forever about whether every claim Professor Arday ever made was accurate or not, but that’s all bluff and noise
A distraction used to continuously delegitimise Professor Arday, and those directly and indirectly connected to the narratives he, rightly or wrongly, was made representative for.
Speculation and debate won’t answer the questions I think matter much more now:
- How were a set of conditions created within which the biography of one Black Autistic academic became public property, an international spectacle and entertainment for hundreds of thousands of strangers?
- And then, in what ways have WE contributed to this, directly and indirectly?
Before writing another speculative comment or posting about him for the seventeenth time, and beating our chests on social media, we should sit with those questions for a while.
I’m not absolved from this. I’ll be sitting with this for a very, very long time.
Professor Jason Arday wasn’t an inspirational story.
He wasn’t a diversity success story.
He wasn’t proof that inclusion works.
He wasn’t proof that inclusion doesn’t work.
He wasn’t a paragon.
He wasn’t a scandal.
He wasn’t an argument about DEI.
He wasn’t an opportunity to demonstrate our anti-racist credentials.
And he isn’t those things now.
He, and his death, shouldn’t become content for those of us who want everyone to see how appalled we are by his death.
Whatever you believe about him, Jason Arday was a partner, a father, a son, a sibling, a friend, a colleague.
A human being.
Perhaps the most radical thing we could have done was allow him to be one.
Perhaps the most radical thing we can do now he’s gone, is to stop using him.
There is a final, bitter irony in me writing any of this at all, because this piece only exists because you and I know so much about Professor Arday that we never needed, and were never entitled, to know.
None of this needed to become public property. And yet it did.
While there are an infinite number of narratives caught up in this. While him being an Autistic person, and fundamentally ableism, is relevant to the way this has evolved.
The ONLY reason this became a ‘story’…
The ONLY reason his life was subjected to this extraordinary level of public scrutiny and investigation on a level that no other academic has ever received, despite the huge numbers accused of plagiarism…
The ONLY reason you and I and everyone else knows enough about a stranger to even be having these conversations…
Is because of racism.
And that is the only take-away necessary from this.
Additional resources/reading
Everything Good About Jason Arday – a site built by former students of Jason to gather “everything good about Jason Arday, in the words of the people who were there.”
Books by Jason:
We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity by Chantelle Jessica Lewis and Jason Arday (2025)
Great and Unfortunate Things by Jason Arday (2026)