Writes Sonia Sodha, in "Jason Arday is the product of academia’s soft bigotry/Universities risk undermining genuine equality of opportunity when they reward identity over merit and sideline proper scrutiny" (London Times).
August 7, 2026
"Setting aside the plagiarism and fabrication allegations, I’m struck by just how … bad Arday’s work is."
"It makes me cringe to watch video of Professor Hilary Cremin, head of Cambridge’s faculty of education, fawning over him: 'We’re so lucky to have you. You’re the best in the world in terms of the research you do.' I’m gobsmacked that she didn’t think it might be worth trying to read the book he’d claimed to have written before offering him a plum academic job."
Excerpt from the review: "As young Arday failed to hit his milestones, doctors declared him 'deficient' and said he was 'no better than a vegetable.' Arday was, by his own account, a profoundly intellectually disabled child. He claims that he could 'register sounds, but I couldn’t shape them into meaning.' He also says that smearing his faeces on the wall was one of his few sensory releases.... 'Most of my memories of my early childhood are of generalised images, sounds, sensations, feelings, rather than specific events, perhaps because language helps us to form memories, and I didn’t have access to that until I was older.'"
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86 comments:
In Britain, class actions are called "Collective Proceedings", and every single academic who's been passed over for years so Cambridge Karens could wear Arday's fabulations like a skinsuit while demanding respect should enjoin them and destroy it as an institution.
Copying Arday by pulling numbers out my but, it's gotta be thousands.
"Dr Jill" comes to mind...
DEI, bloc ideologies, affirmative discrimination.
Looks like Cambridge has everything a first class research institution could want except meritocracy.
Did this fraud ever identify the event or circumstance which caused him to go from helpless to hero? (yes, I know it is all fraudulent).
If Eddie Murphy were 30 years younger he could do a comedy based on this huckster fleecing the academics.
Cambridge has been a Communist asylum for a century. At least, this chap entertains.
So it turns out that maybe scholarship, integrity, and truthfulness do have a value that exceeds that of skin color.
You see what happens when you demand trust, and then undercut it, implicitly? 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world'....
It's no longer "soft bigotry." Gad Saad nailed it: it's a combination of suicidal empathy and the end result of mind paraciticism masquerading as "higher education."
Didn’t Bill Clinton go to Cambridge? Or was it Oxford.
Now do the rest of the Cambridge faculty. 50% fraudsters, I bet. Fake data, crappy scholarship, irrelevant degrees.
This is a planetary class punking; hard to believe the University is not in on it and we are the ones being punked.
"soft bigotry Universities risk undermining genuine equality of opportunity when they reward identity over merit and sideline proper scrutiny" The problem is that, given diffferent distributions of skills and interests across subgroups, "genuine equality of opportunity" will not produce the equality of outcomes progs really want, and any unequal outcomes will be reinterpreted as showing that we haven't reached full equality of opportunity. So the prog critique of DEI corruption is itself fraudulent: they are bound to bring it back, as long as they obsess over "social justice." Which they will.
"He also says that smearing his faeces on the wall was one of his few sensory releases"
The walls in the hallowed halls of Cambridge are quite opulent.
"This is a planetary class punking; hard to believe the University is not in on it and we are the ones being punked."
Absolutely an intentional humiliation ritual.
He looks a lot like one of the guys from Milli Vanilli, a late 80's band who had a Grammy revoked when it came out that they lip-sync'd all of their material and the recorded songs were actually sung by someone else.
Bloc Bigotry Matters
It's his JD Vance style Cleopatra eye liner that's mesmerizing the academic cat ladies. They can't help themselves.
Feels like performance art - pushing ever more absurd background stories until the whole thing resembles a Monty Python sketch. Very British.
This is the title of his doctoral thesis, which is the main document that got him a professorship at Cambridge: "An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” That's not from a draft. That's the FINAL version. With a grammar error that would get an 8th grade essay tossed without reading. Oversight level = Zero.
I am convinced it was all a scam from the begining, just getting material for a "A Catch Me if You Can" 2.0. Who will play him in the movie?
Clinton was A Rhodes Scholar and thus went to Oxford.
“Who will play him in the movie?” It will be a white guy, the only choice for a fraud in this unrepentant woke era. Timothy Chalamet.
Benedict Cumberbatch in dreads is an odd image.
"With a grammar error that would get an 8th grade essay tossed without reading. Oversight level = Zero."
His major professor didn't catch that? Yikes!
When I was mentoring students, I went over their work with a fine toothed comb. It reflected upon ME, after all.
Think how many good scholars with original work Cambridge passed on to hire and promote this fraud.
I have my own Arday type story.
I was hired as second in command in one of the earliest corp attempts to build internal online courses. The first in command was a young black man with a very impressive degree, John. He was a total failure. He clearly knew nothing about how to manage a process. In fact, he didn’t even try. He did something, Arday is described as doing. He turned our team into a perpetual discussion group on the subjects of racism and inequality. Within a very short time the entire group was at one another’s throats. The situation became so dire that the corp ended the project (not before I’d produced 24 online courses), and disbanded the group. It fired John and kept the worthwhile employees (me included), but transferred them to different departments. Now, the kicker. John called me at work about six months later, laughing and bragging that a U.K. employer had hired him at a much greater salary.
It's always humorous to see the downfall of a fraud - and then the cultist cockroaches come out and disavow him by claiming the fraud is like someone they hate on the "right"
This has been going on for all of my lifetime. "We wanted to lie and you wanted to believe us." Remember how they--we know who they are--praised China and the Great Leap Forward as the antechamber to Utopia. Oops. My bad. But this Chavez fellow really seems to have it together.
LOL
The entire academic profession is a fraud.
The crime is that we force taxpayers to support it.
He's certainly got a lot of advance publicity for his book. I wonder if it will sell. Given a choice between that and the memoir of Biiden or Kamala, I'd choose his book.......As a fraudster, was he really that skilled or were his interviewers really that fatuous? As Cambridge profs go, he's not much, but, as fraudsters go, he's in the hall of champions.........It would be cool if he wrote a follow up memoir, "How I Got Away With It".
Universities risk undermining genuine equality of opportunity when they reward identity over merit and sideline proper scrutiny.
Nathan Cofnas broke this story ("DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge"). He was a research fellow at Cambridge until he got in trouble for saying that Harvard would have virtually no black professors if it hired purely based on academic merit:
"In 2013, an internal study by Harvard found that, if undergrad admissions were based solely on academic qualifications, black representation would fall from 10.5% to 0.67%. Since professors are drawn from the more extreme right-hand tail of the bell curve, the percentage of black professors would be less than that, i.e., it would 'approach 0%.' That's why we have affirmative action—because without it there would be a politically unacceptable lack of diversity in certain positions."
Arday wasn't on the brink of getting forced out at Cambridge because they realized he doesn't meet their standards. They began to take action only because Cofnas demonstrated they have no standards, and the bad publicity embarrassed them.
Shouting Thomas said...
I have my own Arday type story.
I suspect most people who have worked - in the public or private sector - have a similar story filed away in the memory.
Are the children alright?
A Learing moment. Another one.
Related: University of Michigan will HIDE first-semester grades on transcripts for students in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
"It’s to “curb the mental health crisis”"
"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." - Stein's Law
I can accept that Arday believed that this could go on forever. It is much harder for me to think that those who lifted him to his precarious academic height believed it to the same degree. If so, there is not as much difference between their credentialing and that of Arday as we have been conditioned to accept.
There sure was a lot of pride, though. When that goeth, what goeth next?
"Who will play him in the movie?"
Richard Ayoade gets my vote.
London bridge is falling down is a theme on the Thames of climate change in the Times.
Yeah, we had one of these at the Large County department I was in. Hired a black woman as an IT manager, who it was apparent knew nothing about IT. In meetings she'd spew some sort of corporate-speak gobbledygook and everyone would just sit there silently because no one understood a word she said (think Kamala). Plus she accused people of stealing her stuff and yelling the N-word out at random times.
One interesting thing that came out of the ensuing investigation was that most people who were interviewed said that their staplers kept disappearing.
"A Learing moment. Another one."
LMAO. *Hinc Lucem Et Pocula Sacra* is Latin for "Quality Learing Center".
He wrote his biography during a 5 minute break between marathons.
For Asians you have to actually perform with rigor in academia, the supply of capable Asians is higher so they are less of a luxury good. If you are a weirdo Asian about the best you are going to get is Governor of a quirky midwestern state.
So what if Cambridge hired a retard- it isn't like the job is something that requires brains like being a plumber.
"He also says that smearing his faeces on the wall was one of his few sensory releases"
This is a therapy shared by the department heads of the most prestigious US Universities. But today they are quickly scraping it off and sending it out to the bush leagues before it is discovered and they get their own day in the news.
A very modern model of Diversity (i.e. color judgment, class bigotry). Say its name: racism, sexism, etc. #HateLovesAbortion
"..'We’re so lucky to have you. You’re the best in the world in terms of the research you do.' I’m gobsmacked that she didn’t think it might be worth trying to read the book he’d claimed to have written before offering him a plum academic job.."
she meant, he was the best DEI candidate that they could find?
or, perhaps, the loudest?
Putting shit on walls is how libs communicate with each other.
Well Hitler would never had said it, but "DEI Uber Alles".
..she didn’t think it might be worth trying to read the book he’d claimed to have written before offering him a plum academic job..
Eva Marie said...
"..Now do the rest of the Cambridge faculty. 50% fraudsters, I bet.."
and there you go! she didn't think to read the book;
because she herself didn't know how to read
Update to the Hellen Keller fraud of 100 years ago. A deaf and blind woman supposedly wrote a bunch of stuff and became famous...and she just so happened to be living with the academic Sullivan couple and "wrote" about all the socialist causes of the day that he advocated.
The quasi-religious left wants to believe. They really really want to believe in their causes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller
If you find a small enough niche to research in so that no one else is doing it you are "the best in the world".
Until they can be purged, the best thing to do is mock them. Mocking works, especially when it comes from those they despise. They hate it.
Mock them daily.
Mock them often.
Mock them noon and night.
Mock them. They deserve it.
What they did, they did from spite.
They did a deep dive on where Abdul El-Sayed‘s strongest support came from: voters with advanced degrees. Tells you everything you need to know about higher ed.
I thought this was run off the mill plagiarism but then I heard this morning that he said he had a benign brain tumor 2 weeks before his PhD defense.
Soft bigotry of low expectations indeed. This guy didn't have to do anything to end up at Cambridge.
"Setting aside the plagiarism and fabrication allegations, I’m struck by just how … bad Arday’s work is."
Why?
It's exactly the same as ALL the other work in the field.
The field is complete garbage, invented for the purpose of giving "academic" credentials to pathetic losers who aren't "white males".
Arday's "Sin" was that he was clever / cunning enough to realize the losers who push DEI would never call him on his lies, no matter how blatant they were.
What he was too stupid / blind to realize is that there are people outside the circle who still matter.
Even when his plagiarism was called out, Cambridge and his University doubled down on the lies to defend him. It's only when people outside the University focused on him that things went awry for him.
He's a small time con man who couldn't figure out where to draw the line. But everyone doing anything related to CRT is a con (wo)man, as is everyone doing "Marxist" anything.
Which is the vast majority of current academia
To be fair, he was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge. Cambridge probably designed whatever that is to be a perfect fit for whatever he is. So I don’t see a problem.
If the glove doesn't fit, you must abort.
I had a surprising experience with a young Black Ivy B-School Grad who was hired as a junior analyst at a "bulge bracket" investment bank. He repeatedly said "physical year" rather than "fiscal." I immediately concluded he was a AA/DEI admit in school and employment. The problem is that it makes you wonder about the qualifications of all POCs you encounter, including the people who are truly deserving of their positions.
tommyesq (9:18am):
In pictures where you can see the full length of his hair, he looks a LOT like the members of Milli Vanilli. Which answers the question of who should play him in the movie of his life. If I'm not mistaken (too lazy to look it up), either Milli or Vanilli, I forget which, killed himself, but the other is still alive, and would, I'm sure, be glad to make a little money playing Arday. He can't be making much in the music business.
Finallly, I wonder if Arday making himself look like a notorious pair of musical frauds was some kind of subconscious cry for help. Or worse, a conscious hint giving one more reason that you had to be a damned fool to believe him, or believe in him.
He should claim it was all a big Sacha Baron Cohen like put on. Gather up a bunch of clips of people praising him etc., and release a movie.
Has this man taught any class yet?
Effect on his students?
Cause for action?
How Teaching Works at Cambridge
University-led teaching: Central faculties and departments organize large-group lectures, seminars, and practical laboratory classes.
College-led teaching: Colleges organize supervisions, which are weekly small-group tutorial classes where students review work closely with an expert.
Term structure: Terms are very short (typically eight weeks long), meaning the schedule of lectures and classes is fast-paced and intense
It used to be that prestigious institutions, once plagiarism alone was found, would immediately root it out and hold those responsible to a public exit and shaming. Protect their reputation.
Arday's fabulism and personal ethics were, by the things I've seen, so in your face bad - so easily and clearly and repeatedly unverifiable and extreme claims, or easily refuted claims - that Cambridge's early defense of him and letting him resign on his own is far more damning of the Institution than it could have been.
Does anyone believe these reviews would've said the same, if they had been written 2 weeks ago?
I hear he's working on three sequels (all at once) to his soon-to-be released totally-true memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things:
Great and Unbelievable Things
Great and Incredible Things.
Things That Didn't Happen For $600, Arday
He's the first black scholar to have ever written three memoir sequels at once.
TreeJoe said...
"..Arday's fabulism and personal ethics were, by the things I've seen, so in your face bad - so easily and clearly and repeatedly unverifiable and extreme claims, or easily refuted claims.."
extreme claims? this sounds RACIST!
this sounds like the sort of thing a RACIST would say!
WHO (other than a RACIST) could have a problem with a Black man saying
that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days,
and 300 miles in three days for charity,
which Arday said had raised more than £5m for charity,
as well as running 600 miles on a treadmill in six days.
a Black man, that was disabled after a RACIST attack!
Arday was attacked aged 18 and developed epilepsy as a result. When his attackers were sentenced, he asked the court that they not be sent to prison. Later, when teaching PE at a university in London, two of his attackers were in his class; they thanked him for his plea for leniency, which they said had changed their lives, and hugged him. According to Arday, one of them subsequently asked him to be godfather to his child.
Arday was SO KIND, that he forced the police (and the hospitals (AND the attackers)) to remove ALL records (and memories) of this EVER happening.
That's right! Arday was so unassuming, that he had ALL knowledge of this horrible attack to be FOREVER forgotten (except in Arday's version)
ANY ONE that doubts the GREATNESS of this man is a RACIST!
Arday was a Magic Negro, until he wasn't.
He’s gone and his enablers stay. That’s the way these DEI fraud stories always end. He should have held out. I doubt he could be fired. He could simply state: you never hired me to do anything except be black, and I upheld my end.
The thing I liked best was his outfit. That red gown and the floppy hat? I thought he was DJing a rap gig before I realized that is how a Cambridge Don dresses.
The Brit and Scots have the coolest doctoral outfits. There was a prof at UPR Mayaguez whose hat looked like a WWII helmet but it was covered in sky blue velvet and had a fringe along the lower edge, like an old fashioned lampshade.
I told my daughter I wanted to get a doctorate from there just for the outfit!
John Henry
@ hawkeyedjb "He could simply state: you never hired me to do anything except be black, and I upheld my end."
Well played!
Ixnay on the Arday.
How about we DON'T set aside the plagiarism and fabrication accusations...
That's so (Claudine) Gay!
Arday looks sexually ambiguous. That's always good in academia.
Hillary Cremin is one of those education professors whose work has nothing to do with actually teaching pupils reading, writing, and arithmetic. Lawrence Cremin was a prominent US professor of education a half century ago. No word on whether they are related.
Compact Mag article by two sociologists who examine how race and sex affect hiring in their field:
"The median white man hired into a top-fifty sociology department had eight peer-reviewed publications. The median black woman had two. Forty percent of the white men had published in the top-ranked American Sociological Review or the American Journal of Sociology. Only one of the twenty-eight black women—less than 4 percent—had done so. Nearly one-third of the white men had first-authored an article in one of those journals. None of the black women had. Yet half of the black women were hired by top-twenty departments, compared with 40 percent of the white men."
We don’t hate academia enough.
Baghdad Bob, something about 'fiscal' makes it hard to pronounce. I have heard all sorts of people say 'physical' who definitely knew it was spelled 'fiscal.'
Kind of like 'nuclear,' which even Jimmy Carter the submariner couldn't pronounce as written. CC, JSM
What a low bar of institutional intelligence that the grifter had to cross. How prescient he was to see and act upon that knowledge of Cambridge's utter self harming stupidity..
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
It's academia, Joe. No honesty, no honor. Just silence from those retaining their posts because they're greedy and abuse of truth by others. It's more pathetic than journalism.
How many hiring committies have you sat silently through? Come on, Althouse. Tell the truth.
One of Arday's claims is that he was nonverbal until he was 11. Yesterday on TikTok a man claiming to be a former classmate at his primary school, says Arday was a "chatty Patty."
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16038031/TikToker-primary-school-Jason-Arday-NOT-mute.html
"...Universities risk undermining genuine equality of opportunity when they reward identity over merit (London Times)."
ANY agency, school, corporation or organization, "risks undermining genuine equality of opportunity when they reward identity over merit".
BarrySanders20:
I’d like to see someomone write this trilogy:
Where Arday Went Wrong
Some More of Arday’s Greatest Mistakes
Who Is This Arday Person, Anyway?
An academic sin enables the worst of the identity politics bullshit to go on: the professors at "elite" institutions DO NOT READ the stuff they are expected (and paid) to read. If things are read at all, they are skimmed in the hour before the meeting or DURING the meeting in which decisions are being made. On rare occasions garbage is noticed and there is a sudden upheaval when someone points it out, but if there aren't a few old-school professors involved in the decision, things will just sail through without anything beyond the title and the summary being read. And it's easy for political scam-artists types to engineer committees and meetings so that there are not because actual working professors do whatever they can to avoid committees and meetings (this avoidance is what has enabled the administrative elimination of self-governance, but I digress...).
I would be that Arday's 'mentors' didn't read beyond the title and the abstract of his 'research.'
Generative AI is going to make all of this more common until the entire edifice collapses and we have a repeat of 1536-39 and, as was the case then, no one cares.
The soft bigotry of low expectations.
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