Jason Arday and Nathan Cofnas: Cambridge’s Double Standard

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.

I won’t recapitulate Jason’s deceits, expanded accounts of which are plentiful elsewhere. You’d have to be pretty po-faced not to find some of them amusing. Students defrauded of time, attention, and tuition fees may not be laughing so hard. And administrators at Cambridge will need large handkerchiefs to wipe that much egg off their faces. Here, I want to compare and contrast how an august and historic institution treated two of its own scholars once they presented the university with a problem. The two problems are tightly linked by the theme of race.