Jason Arday is the quintessential star of progressive academia: he is not only black, but was non-verbal autistic until age 11. At age 37, he became the youngest black person to attain professorship at the University of Cambridge, where he teaches sociology of education.
As a sociologist, his main area of research is—what else—racial injustice.
However, in September 2025, the British magazine Times Higher Education started working on a story about plagiarism accusations against Professor Arday. According to information received by THE, Arday not only lifted parts of his 2015 PhD thesis from another academic’s 2009 work, but he also allegedly included quotes from himself in his dissertation.
In response to the questions sent to him by THE via email on the matter, Jason Arday retained the high-power British law firm specializing in defamation cases, Carter-Ruck. The law firm successfully intimidated the publication into not releasing the story initially. What’s more disturbing is that, according to The Telegraph, the journalist who was working to break the story was subsequently investigated by Scotland Yard for supposed harassment, and was told by officers to stop emailing the professor questions because he is harming his mental health…
However, unfortunately for him, Professor Arday could not stop the accusations against him coming out in public outside Britain. They were eventually published by Nathan Cofnas, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ghent in Belgium, in a Substack post.
Since then, the heightened public scrutiny of Arday’s work has unearthed a slew of other scandals around his person.
For example, the University of Bath posted a glowing blog post about him for ‘International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination’ in 2021. In it, they claimed that as a child, Arday played both football and snooker professionally. The post gives little detail about his supposed professional sporting career. However, if he had signed a professional contract with a football club as a teenager—in the UK, the youngest age a player can legally sign a professional contract is 17—there should be some kind of third-party record available about his footballing career.
Since then, the blog post has been changed to claim that he played football ‘semi-professionally’ and that he was ‘really good’ but ‘not good enough to be professional’ at snooker, the New York Post reports.
Jason Arday has also claimed to have completed 30 marathons in 35 days. While that statement has not been disproven yet, others about his athletic prowess have, which puts that claim into question as well.
Another claim that has attracted attention concerns Arday’s statement that he appeared in the famous Seven Up documentary series directed by Michael Apted. The series, which began in 1964, followed the same group of participants from childhood into adulthood at seven-year intervals. Since Arday was born more than two decades after the project began and the documentary never added new participants, the claim too was evidently called into question.
Arday has since clarified that when he said in 2022: ‘I was part of a program, actually, which…was called “Seven Up”…basically when they follow you over the duration of your life, so they follow you at seven, 14, 21,’ he was referring to a different supposed documentary that also carried the title Seven Up.
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