Jason Arday the alleged plagiarist and teller of fabulist tales who was employed by Cambridge University as a professor until it was revealed that neither Mr Arday’s academic qualifications nor his backstory were trustworthy, is now dead. It is believed, from reading various news reports that Mr Arday took his own life.
I do not crow about Mr Arday’s death. His passing is an enormous blow to his family and friends. I believe that the exposure of Mr Arday’s questionable qualifications and his outrageous fabulist tales that he told about himself needed to happen, but it should not have ended up like this with the death of Mr Arday.
One of the commenters at Harry’s Place Muncii92 (see below) said that Mr Arday had ‘backed himself into a corner and couldn’t find a graceful way out’ and on this I tend to agree. Mr Arday’s exposure as a person of less than acceptable honesty about his background and possibly his qualifications is the sort of thing that could lead many to think that there was no way out of their predicament.
Whilst it is very likely that it is suicide rather than some health issue that has caused the death of Mr Arday the path to Mr Arday’s sad ending was paved with the misguided ‘good’ intentions of Cambridge University’s academics and administrators. It is they who went along with Mr Arday’s fabulist tales about his sporting, charitable and academic achievements along with his accounts of overcoming adversity and did so without taking due care and attention to the veracity of Mr Arday’s record. From what I can gather there were numerous opportunities for Cambridge University to be able to look into Mr Arday’s background and his academic record and discern the truth from lies, but these do not seem to have been taken.
It appears that Cambridge University was so desperate to climb on the diversity train that they appointed Mr Arday as professor without it seems any sort of robust background check or even any interest in his background. Cambridge saw the man’s skin colour, heard an exciting tale of recovery from disadvantage and appointed him to a position he should rightly never have been appointed to. What gets me about this whole case is Cambridge wanted to be seen as diverse so they hired someone primarily on the colour of his skin and maybe with the input of other academic race-grifters within or connected to the university.
Cambridge basically wanted a token. They felt that they just had to have a Black professor so when along comes Mr Arday with his seemingly impressive background and backstory and they hired him. He wasn’t there because he could contribute something wonderful to the sum of human knowledge, he was there to tick a box, to be a token so that the university authorities could crow about how diverse they were. I don’t know about you but it’s damned horrible to be the ‘token’ and to know that or find that out later. I’ve been the token working class person on the committee of an organisation dominated by the middle class Left and it ain’t nice. You end up realising that are not there because of your skills or achievements instead you are there only to tick a box to make the entity look good and by extension be a tool to get grants or provide positive publicity. Maybe at the end, with all his partly self-created status collapsing around him Mr Arday had the realisation that he was just a token to make Cambridge University look good to the Diversity Establishment and he couldn’t cope with being that token.
If Mr Arday had indeed bullshitted himself and others and manipulated people, sometimes allegedly by crying ‘racism’ when he was challenged, to get to the position where he was being interviewed for a professorship then then it was even more important that his background should have been investigated before his appointment. Even after his appointment when questions started to be asked in academic circles about Mr Arday’s suitability for his post, the response of Cambridge University was not to investigate Mr Arday’s claims but to go to great lengths to cover up the deficiencies in Mr Arday’s qualifications and backstory. They didn’t do the sort of due diligence that an appointment to a position as professor required and it clearly showed. They appointed a token and cleaved to him even though the University must have understood that this story could not have been kept under wraps forever. It should not have taken academics from outside the University establishment to expose this DEI created wound in Cambridge’s administration, this farce could and should have been stopped before it even started and stopped either by the university authorities or some other organisation pointing out that Emperor Arday had no clothes.
Muncii92’s comment on Harry’s Place also commented on the exposure of Mr Arday’s mendacious record and its necessity and said:
I agree there. The social media pile on was both justified and also highly predictable. One of Britain’s greatest universities has been caught out in a massive scandal and of course it’s going to elicit a great deal of sometimes vicious public comment. I also agree that on this occasion the academics and the Press did the jobs they were supposed to do in this case and exposed both Arday and the University academic culture that enabled Arday to rise to the level that he did. The academics who put their heads above the parapet and exposed what had gone on regarding him and his appointment would not have known and could not have known that this case would have such a tragic ending for Mr Arday and should share no blame for Mr Arday’s death. They did the correct and proper thing which is to expose a charlatan and those who colluded with him.
I noticed this morning that the blogger Longrider had commented on the death of Mr Arday and I agree with him in that we should point the finger not just at Mr Arday but his enablers. Longrider said:
“I am sorry the man is dead, but right now everyone who enabled his fantasies and everyone who filled his head with the CRT bollocks should be taking a good hard look at their consciences, for they, as much as he, were guilty of peddling this outrageous nonsense. “
There is no doubt that there will be an Inquest into the death of Mr Arday carried out under the supervision of a Coroner, but there needs to be another sort of inquest, a political, academic and investigative journalism one into the actions of Cambridge University and the wider higher education sector.
Mr Arday’s death may be seen by some as something advantageous for Cambridge. The main character in this story is dead maybe, Cambridge may hope, the adverse publicity can die down as the focus shifts onto the person of Jason Arday. However it’s my belief that this should not happen. There needs to be much more attention paid to what is going on in Britain’s university sector with regards to hiring practises and the influence on these hiring practises of ideologies such as DEI/Trans/Islamism/Identity Politics. We need to have an answer to the question: ‘How many other Jason Ardays are there in Britain’s academic sector?’ Jason Arday might be a ‘one off’ but then again there might be hundreds more like him in academia, people who have been hired for reasons other than academic excellence such as race, sex, gender identity or an ideology shared by hirers and hired and who are not teaching or researching to the level that their positions demand of them. At best the hiring of such people is a waste of time and resources and the tacit acceptance of poor teaching and research skills, but at worst we might be looking at a situation where academics who have been hired for ideological reasons use their positions to push for policies that may damage our society.
The Arday Affair started in the shadows of university administration and academia and it concluded in a blaze of publicity and the death of the affair’s central character. This should not happen again. There needs to be much more transparency regarding university hiring practises with the public knowing more about who has been hired, what their verified record as an academic is, why they have been hired and who takes the ultimate decision to hire them. The Arday Affair has exposed much that some might have preferred to have been hidden and what has been exposed already is morally, academically and politically rancid. Cambridge academics hung onto Arday to possibly try and save their own skins and reputation and have achieved neither. More soberly, whilst Mr Arday has probably taken his life by his own hands, he might not have been put in the position where his grift came crashing down around him if Cambridge had not given him the opportunity to grift in the first place. Mr Arday is dead by his own actions but Cambridge played its own part in his downfall and the Cambridge should not be allowed to wriggle off of the hook of public opprobrium that has arisen because of this scandal.
We should mourn the fact that Jason Arday is dead whilst at the same time not letting Cambridge University hide from the very necessary scrutiny that this furore has shown that it needs.
Links
Longrider on Jason Arday
https://longrider.co.uk/blog/2026/08/15/the-ultimate-consquence/
Harry’s place where the Muncii92 comment came from
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