Earlier on the day when Jason Arday’s death was announced, Rosalind Arden published an article comparing the treatment that Jason Arday received at the University of Cambridge with how the same university treated another faculty member, Nathan Cofnas. More on this telling comparison can be found here: “Institutional Failures in the Garden of Great Intellects,” by Rosalind Arden, Quillette,
Editor’s note, 15 August 2026: Jason Arday was found dead at his home in south London on the afternoon of 14 August. He was 41. The Metropolitan Police have said the death is being treated as unexpected but not suspicious. This essay was published earlier that day, before the news was reported. It concerns the conduct of Cambridge University, and we have left the text as published. Our sympathies are with Arday’s family and friends.
Jason Arday—fantasist, fabulist, fraud, and (until recently) Professorial Chair in the Sociology of Education at Cambridge University—sold a bolus of lies to students, faculty, and administrators, and they gobbled it up like a dish of ice cream on the hottest sunniest driest summer day in English memory. Months earlier, Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher at the same university, was accused by students of racism. Would nobody rid Cambridge of this turbulent scholar? Rid of him it got—through suitably tortuous means.
That you and I know about Jason and his Argo of lies owes to Nathan Cofnas, who broke the story by publishing evidence of Arday’s many apparent plagiarisms on his own Substack. The faculty of education at Cambridge University was first alerted to the possibility that Arday was a plagiarist by David Harris, a former professor emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University, in 2023, the year that Arday was appointed. Then, about a year ago, rumours began to circulate that Arday’s inspiring story of overcoming unbelievable childhood hardship was, in fact, not believable. But when Jack Grove, a journalist from Times Higher Education (THE), contacted Arday requesting comment and clarification for a forthcoming article, Arday hired doughty defamation lawyers Carter-Ruck to threaten THE with litigation. For good measure, Arday also reported Harris and Grove to the police, alleging harassment….
Compare the two cases and a pattern emerges. Cofnas cleared every formal bar that Cambridge erected—a competitive fellowship, a strong publication record, an eventual ruling that he’d broken no law and no policy—but he was punished anyway, and his position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence.
The university did not renew Cofnas’ fellowship; nor was another position found for him, despite the quality of his scholarship, that dared to examine the genetic basis of intelligence. Arday was hired as a full professor with tenure, in the sociology of education, without any due diligence that would have discovered not only his massive plagiarism, but that his claims to have written several books, and taught at several universities, were both false. The head of the faculty of education, Hilary Cremin, after Arday’s mythomania had been exposed, nonetheless stood by her man, insisting that “we remain immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship … he has our full support.” Vice chancellor Deborah Prentice called Arday “world-class.” When will these people, who by hiring Arday in the first place, and repeatedly lavishing unmerited praise on him, set him up for failure and ridicule that led him to take his own life, be called to account?
And will the University of Cambridge rethink its mistreatment of Nathan Cofnas for his scholarship that dared to study a subject that for so many is deemed to be beyond discussion? After the hysterical assaults, first on Arthur Jensen, and then on Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, for their work on race and intelligence, The Bell Curve, it was brave of Nathan Cofnas to write on such a topic. His intellectual bravery ought to have won him plaudits. Instead, Cambridge was determined to be rid of him just as soon as his three-year Leverhulme Fellowship came to an end. His scholarship was toxic. The “scholarship” — plagiarized or nonexistent — that Jason Arday listed on his tell-tale curriculum vitae, on the other hand, was praised as “world-class” and “ground-breaking.”
England Invaded says
I’m more concerned with how the entire UK treats genuinely British folk.
In other UK offerings, retired police officer Stephen Gray, found guilty of sharing a grossly offensive memes about islam, is to appeal the convictions.
As we all know, blasphemy laws are back in force in the UK.
Now would such happen if something was said about Christianity?
࿗Infidel࿘ says
You know things are bad when Emirates no longer allows its students to study in UK, fearing that they”ll turn out as jihadists
Wellington says
It is a fact which even consulting an AI source will confirm that blacks in the aggregate score lower on IQ tests than whites (and those of East Asian descent score slightly higher than whites other than Caucasian Jews). All this is not disputed but what is is why.
Many have argued that IQ tests are culturally biased while others look upon this argument as an excuse masquerading as an argument. The debate here, to put it mildly, continues. I would only proffer this: that if skin color, hair texture, skeletal structure (N.B., a good forensic anthropologist can determine from a 10,000 year old skeleton whether that human being was a Caucasoid, Negroid or Mongoloid), etc. can be different among the races, then why couldn’t intellectual capacity be as well? Not sure here but even raising this issue in today’s silly era we live in can rather easily open you up to charges of racism, though what if Negroids scored higher on IQ tests than Caucasoids? Ah yes, ponder this scenario and ask yourself if charges of racism would still be raised.
In any case, this is why Cofnas has met with so much “difficulty,” though I make no judgment on the merit of his work since I am not familiar with it. As for Arday, he was a fraud indeed and what the Hell is this “Sociology of Education” garbage—evidence I would argue as just one more example of how out of whack and stupidly rarified academia has become.
John Pepple says
I’m not quite ready to accept racial differences in intelligence. To me, it seems like IQ tests primarily test studiousness. Asians are the most studious, and blacks are the least, and it shows up in these tests. I recall a day in 1970 when I was 19 and someone had handed me a radical newspaper. In one article in it, a black objected to the idea that blacks needed to do well in school just to be accepted by white society. That attitude soon became predominant among blacks in America, as blacks decided that doing well in school was “acting white.”
Meanwhile, Asians go overboard in studying. I assume you have seen those silly cartoons of a disapproving Asian father saying something ridiculous to his child, like “After you have done your homework, you can play … the piano for five hours.” Or my favorite: “Your blood type is B and not A? Failure runs through your veins.”
But the studiousness pays off for Asians, and the only reason the lack of studiousness does NOT pay off for blacks is because they are pulled up by well-meaning but clueless leftists.
Wellington says
I have kept an open mind about this and am ready to consider numerous possibilities (many aren’t), I also have reservations about IQ test because they don’t measure other types of intelligence such as moral intelligence, common sense intelligence and street smarts intelligence. Nevertheless I do find this subject matter interesting.
somehistory says
Many write and speak of *equity.* But, like *racist* and *bigotry,* *equity* only goes one way. There is no ‘equal treatment’ when it comes to this kind of thing. Justice is missing from the Courts, and equality is missing from the universities.
Those two women who praised arday for his lies….must have something missing from their own brains. They certainly can’t make claims of honesty
James Lincoln says
Yes, somehistory.
Equality of opportunity is missing from the universities.
What they value is equity – which is predetermined outcomes.
Alkflaeda says
My suspicion would be that Cofnas was a victim of the most fashionable form of racism in the UK – anti-Semitism. And that Arday had Munchausen’s Syndrome, but his colleagues reinforced his pathology. I have only skimmed a Wikipedia article about Cofnas – but I hope that he is not deriving his theory of the genetic basis of intelligence from a US population, because White Americans are descended from people who chose to migrate, whereas Afro-Americans’ forebears were forced to do so. This makes it possible that there was a larger number of intellectually curious people amongst those who had made an informed choice, than amongst those who had been denied that option, simply because one group was self-selected, whilst the other was a broad cross section, with no implications at all for the gene pools present in the ultimate countries of origin.
John Pepple says
While Cofnas was treated poorly, others of us were treated even worse. In 1993, I made a major discovery about Plato, but I could never get it published because I was a nobody who came from a nothing graduate program. (I’m not going to give the details of my discovery unless people want them.) While Arday’s time in academia was like a fairy tale, mine was Kafka-esque.
My experiences with peer review led me to be skeptical about global warming and also about what they were telling us about Covid. Meanwhile, Cambridge says it’s going to do an internal investigation of the Arday affair, but will they be as hard on themselves as they and other academics were on me? I doubt it.