… writes one of the best Jason Arday considerations.
The story … raised questions … about academic standards in the humanities, regarding both Arday’s education (Liverpool John Moores, which awarded his doctorate, confirmed that he had received just one in-person supervision while writing his PhD, which was later found to have substantial signs of plagiarism) and the education he provided to his own students.
…. Arday’s self-mythologising was not harmless. He hurt the academics whose work he plagiarised. He hurt the discipline he belonged to. He hurt the early career lecturers who were competing with him for jobs, but couldn’t match his fantastical legend. He hurt the families of non-verbal children who believed the story of his unprecedented late acquisition of language, and either blamed themselves for lacking the patience and love of Arday’s mother, or blamed their children for their failure to blossom.
… Being at the centre of a media storm is isolating and horrible. Arday had lost his job, lost his credibility, and even those he might have banked on as supporters were abandoning him: The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch wrote a column that was probably more brutal than anything from The Telegraph or The Spectator, which accused Arday of gulling his defenders and exploiting his autism as a cover for his actions. Ostracism is deeply destructive. I don’t think that Arday’s life was beyond redemption (if the Winns could survive The Salt Path, he could survive this), but I can understand why he might have believed it was.
… I do not regret writing about Arday, but I am sorry for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about. If the plagiarism in his PhD had been dealt with at the time; if Cambridge had vetted his work; if his publisher had factchecked his manuscript and done him the kindness of rejecting it; if the allegations of his academic malpractice had been dealt with openly in the specialist press, rather than hushed up until they became a legitimate scandal — then maybe Arday would have been spared the punishing glare of a public life.
August 20th, 2026 at 3:19PM
Isn’t it bizarre that everyone is treating this guy as some kind of sui generis event, like there isn’t a grand tradition of academic frauds and fabulists in which Arday is not even the most spectacular example? The English in particular seem absolutely incapable of believing that they could have been duped at all. At least his American partisans seem to concede that he was a fraud, and see the problem as the evil, racist media hounding him too much.
August 20th, 2026 at 4:01PM
The range of responses has brought to my mind the Tea Party of a few years ago. I remember how shocked and disbelieving I was that a political movement could be powered by hysterical emotion exclusively. In their self-presentation there wasn’t the slightest element of argumentation or analysis —- it was naked raging resentment.
Arday’s Brit defenders – the Cambridge education faculty that brought him on – hired him emotionally, defended him emotionally, and now rage at his detractors emotionally. It is a form of bullying, as it was with the Tea Party.
Maybe it will work. The Tea Party had a good deal of success with it.
August 21st, 2026 at 9:07AM
Huh, not an analogy that makes much sense to me. This doesn’t look like any sort of political movement; it’s just academics reacting in a hysterical way to being exposed as fools. The Tea Party wanted some concrete things – lower taxes, balanced budget – however emotional its rhetoric was. His supporters don’t have a program of any kind; they’re just outraged that the unwashed masses would doubt their sophisticated and unerring professional judgment.
August 21st, 2026 at 10:07AM
Or outraged that the unwashed would doubt the validity of their deep and true emotionality?
And like the Tea Party they do have a social/political agenda. They want – for example – education (a word for white supremacist indoctrination) radically overhauled –
https://www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/magazine/issue-108/this-idea-must-die-%E2%80%98the-school-system-is-broken-beyond-repair%E2%80%99
– in the direction of inspiration (Arday was inspirational) rather than thought. Feeling rather than so-called intellectuality.
For me, it’s the same brainlessness – the same actual hostility to thinking/reason/analytic method that was expressed by the Tea Party, for whom the term ‘professor’ had the same valence as …. I dunno….stinking Jew?
To be sure, it’s not a left/right thing, given the presence of Farah Ahmed on the faculty. She’s a fundamentalist Islamist of the far right who wants girl babies veiled until prepared for marriage to a polygamist at nine years of age, etc. But the mindless acidic anti-liberalism, anti-Enlightenment, is just as much on her side as on theirs.
Remember:
https://slate.com/culture/2016/11/slavoj-zizek-endorses-trump-why-am-i-not-surprised.html
Zizek endorsed Trump.