That said, per the header, what IF?
Substacker Aurelien, of whom I said in restacking this piece:
On the surface, about Jason Arday, but below the surface, about much more, from someone who may be at least in the same sport, if not necessarily the same ballpark, as my skeptical leftism.
(Note the caveats.)
Tackled just that.
Let's start here:
These ideas had been vaguely circulating at the back of my mind for a while, but they were brought into focus by the bizarre and almost unbelievable case of the late Jason Arday, the confidence trickster who secured a Chair at the University of Cambridge before being revealed as a liar, a cheat, a plagiarist and fantasist who probably needed treatment.
Painful? Yes.
Then, lots of details:
Very briefly, Arday, the youngest Black full Professor in the history of Cambridge claimed to be born autistic, not to be able to speak until about the age of about ten (the details vary) or able to write until the age of eighteen. Somehow he went on to a dazzling academic career including a Doctorate, with visiting fellowships at other universities, and he was an international athlete and an ultra-marathon runner. Oh, and he raised millions of pounds for charities and appeared a lot on TV. Again, many of these details changed over the weeks : their only common features are that they are either lies, or cannot be verified, or there are severe doubts (as with his Doctorate) about whether they were actually honestly gained.
That's the big picture.
Assuming this is all grounded on actual claims Arday made?
Yeah, he's a confidence trickster, and if The Nation isn't going to address that, it remains partially part of the problem.
Aurelian, who seems British, or at least from the non-American Anglosphere, by things like "-ise" versus "-ize," has more at that link. On the big picture beyond Arday, he does use the word "wokery" once. Beyond that? He does talk a lot about pomo French philosophy, i.e., Foucault, Derrida and others. He also talks about the "professional and managerial class."
But, he goes on to talk more about Arday in academia, narrowing the focus again:
To return to Arday for a second, he was awarded a Doctorate by Liverpool John Moore’s University, (previously Liverpool Polytechnic teaching trade-related skills), named after a pioneer of sports betting in the UK. A couple of things are clear. One is that he was pretty much unsupervised (it is alleged that he saw his supervisor only once), and the other is that he copied and plagiarised most of his work. It’s astounding that he was awarded his degree in the first place, but it’s actually beyond debate that he indeed copied and plagiarised, and that the university authorities knew about it, but didn’t care.
But, that's not all.
Going beyond The Nation's take on Cofnas, there's this:
[T]here are now Internet sites through which students can be instructed to submit their work, and which have an excellent record of detecting plagiarism. Arday’s work was apparently submitted to the Anglo-Saxon site known as Turnitin (there is a European equivalent called Urkund, although the two are merging.) These sites run a search, and produce a Similarity Index (SI) for each submission, flagging up extracts which directly resemble other identified texts, thus enabling the examiner to make word-for-word comparisons. In most subjects, there will be some similarities, if only because standard bibliographies and the use of common citations and a common vocabulary will produce an SI higher than zero. For the sort of subjects I’ve taught over the years, an SI of 10% isn’t necessarily a problem. Over 15% could be a problem, and if I see an SI of over 20% my heart sinks, because it means that at a minimum the student hasn’t produced work that is original enough. The risk is always, at best, of an argument held together with long quotations from other people.
In other words, somebody else, and someone not necessarily a full-bore racialist, could have outed Arday.
Oh, but it gets worse? According to Aurelien, Cambridge knew about the possible plagiarism. The Liverpool university did before him. That, I cannot verify, so it puts him on the wrong foot.
Speaking in European political science terms, he may be a left-wing version of a classical liberal.
But, we can turn to Arday's Wikipedia page.
He claimed all this, and per the links, people other than Cofnas were wondering why:
Arday said that at the age of three, he received diagnoses of autism, global developmental delay, deafness, and dyscalculia, and was non-verbal until the age of 11.[9] The claim of being non-verbal was later contested in the media.[1] Arday also said he could not read or write until he was 18, and that he received a diagnosis of dyslexia in his first year of university.[10][11][12] The statement that he was illiterate until 18 also came under media scrutiny.[13]
Arday reported being attacked at the age of 18 and developing epilepsy as a result. According to Arday, two of his attackers later became his students, with one asking him to be the godfather of his child and Arday "gratefully accepted".[3] He claimed that in 2006, aged 21, he went to Brazil with the charity WaterAid to install water pumps for poor communities in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro; media later disputed this, as WaterAid did not send volunteers abroad.[3][14]
There's more bullshit here:
He claimed to have completed his PhD in two-and-a-half years,[18] and to have relearnt the content of his dissertation weeks before defending it due to memory loss following the removal of a brain tumour and suffering a transient ischemic attack, or mini-stroke.
Again, why weren't non-skeptical leftist opinion sites jumping in earlier?
Wiki's page notes that questions arose on plagiarism back in 2023. And, when called out, he called the police and made a harassment report against the accuser. And, yes, Aurelian is at least semi-right on Liverpool giving him a pass:
Having been alerted to allegations of plagiarism in Arday's PhD thesis in 2025, Liverpool John Moores University—who had awarded him his PhD—established a misconduct panel. Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, but said he had not received adequate supervision given his autism and learning disabilities, and described the allegations against him as being part of an "insidious and relentless" strategy to undermine black academics. Accepting that there were problems with Arday's supervision, the panel concluded that the similarities between Arday's thesis and an earlier PhD thesis by another academic were the result of "honest and reasonable error", not deliberate plagiarism, and were "well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time".
And again, where was The Nation? (The author of The Nation's piece doesn't mention any people, or dates, pre-2026.)
And, today, where are the "Why" questions?
That's the bottom line.
Assuming he was a confidence trickster, why? Is this, to go in a different direction than Aurelien, part of the social media world? Did some other Black second-generation immigrant from his neighborhood do better academically? Was he pressured by teachers?
As for his hurdles? Without being a trickster, being not only Black but a second-generation African immigrant were real hurdles. Without the lies, though, get a real bachelor's degree and a basic job, then night school on a master's if you're ready.
As for that immigrant hurdle?
There are also others with hurdles to get over.
People who actually have autism.
People who actually have epilepsy.
People who are child abuse survivors.
People who grow up in the homes of drug or alcohol addicts.
As for Cambridge? Yes, if it had only six Black professors at the time of Arday's hiring, that itself is an issue. That said, as his Wiki notes, Cambridge had other options on "people of color" they interviewed for the chair they eventually gave to Arday.
This gets back to the old bon mot of skepticism: If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Finally, it's a reminder of my Venn diagram piece about non-twosiderism.
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