Groucho Marxism

Almost everyone agrees that the suicide of Cambridge professor Jason Arday last week was a terrible tragedy, both for him and his family. There is far less agreement on who should be held responsible for his untimely death. Many have blamed the drive towards greater equality, diversity, and inclusion (ED&I) for propelling Arday to a level above his natural ability. According to this narrative, Arday was a con artist who got to where he was by plagiarising other peoples’ work and exaggerating his achievements; and the universities that employed him turned a blind eye because Arday was black, and they knew that employing him would improve their ED&I statistics. This narrative has been pushed hard by the right-wing media, who claim they were simply doing their job by pointing this out.

Does this narrative hold any water? Let’s start with the accusations of plagiarism. In 2023, David Harris, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University, emailed Arday to enquire about similarities between sentences in Arday’s 2018 Social Sciences article and an earlier BMJ Open article by Anjum Memon. Social Sciences published a correction to Arday’s article, with revised citations, later that year. Times Higher Education reporter Jack Grove then investigated Arday’s alleged plagiarism and assembled a 63-page report. Arday responded with a letter from Carter-Ruck, a legal firm specializing in libel, after which the Times Higher Education chose not to publish the story, presumably because they knew it wouldn’t withstand legal scrutiny.

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. 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”. Nonetheless, allegations of plagiarism became public in July this year through a Substack post by Nathan Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at Ghent University and self-described ‘race realist’. This post was then picked up and amplified by the mainstream media.

Cofnas used AI software to demonstrate that Arday had copied and pasted some passages from another academic into his PhD thesis. However it turns out that these passages were all in the introductory chapter, which Arday would not have been examined on when he was awarded his PhD. That explains why the misconduct panel did not find him guilty of plagiarism. Thus the sum total of the plagiarism claims levelled against Arday are based on one 2018 article which has since been corrected, and the introductory chapter of his PhD thesis. I don’t know about you but that hardly screams ‘serial plagiarist’ to me. Listening to the mainstream media talk about this, however, you’d think that Arday had plagiarised at least half of his academic output.

So much for the plagiarism accusations then. What about the accusations that Arday exaggerated his achievements? Arday apparently made some fantastical-sounding claims: that he was non-verbal until the age of 11; that he was illiterate until he was 18; that he played semi-professional football; that he personally raised “£5.5m for over 80 charities”; and that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine marathons with a hairline fracture of the fibula. It turns out however that at least two of these claims – about playing semi-professional football, and running 30 marathons in 35 days – are actually true. I suspect that some of the other claims have been taken out of context and do not faithfully reflect what Arday actually said or meant.

Even if Arday was a fabulist who exaggerated his non-academic achievements, this should have had no bearing on his meteoric career progression, which would have been based solely on his academic output. And it seems that his academic work was highly valued by other academics in his field. A quick look at Google Scholar shows that Arday’s publications regularly attract hundreds of citations; and his 2018 book Dismantling race in higher education: Racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy, co-authored with Heidi Safia Mirza, has been cited over 600 times. These are citation numbers most academics can only dream of. Compare that with Nathan Cofnas, Arday’s tormentor-in-chief, whose academic output has achieved less than 700 citations combined.

The image of Arday that has been portrayed in the media – an ED&I hire who was propelled to a level above his natural ability through a combination of plagiarism and falsified claims – does not tally with the facts. On the contrary, Arday was clearly a talented academic who was well-respected by his peers. This is another example of a lie that gets repeated so many times, everyone assumes it must be true. It is not difficult to understand why the right-wing media would want people to believe this lie: it deflects attention away from the fact that they are the ones that need to take some accountability for Arday’s death. The truth is that Jason Arday was a gifted academic whose work shone a light on institutionalized racism in academia and wider society. And the right-wing media hounded him to his death for it.