Jason Arday #3

[FourSeasonSoupObsessive]

A journalist of my acquaintance is absolutely beside herself with how damaging the narrative around Arday’s suicide is, and I have to agree.

The key points when talking publicly about suicide are that you never glamourise it, you never suggest that it’s a realistic solution to someone’s problems, you avoid dramatic headlines (like “lynching” and “being hounded to death”), you always make it clear that people contemplating suicide should seek help and that help is available and, well, helpful. And most of all, most of fucking all, you never presume that you know what caused someone to take their own life, and you never suggest that there was a single trigger.

I am very sensitive to how we talk about suicide, as I have lost someone to it. The way it’s being talked about now in this case absolutely sickens me, and the more so because it’s by people who genuinely think they are empathetic, progressive, on the right side etc etc.

When you say things like “this black academic was lynched by racists who hated his success”, what message are you sending? You’re telling young black people that they are unwelcome in academia, and that if they are successful, they’ll be hated so much they’ll end up being hounded out and taking their own lives. Vulnerable people are seeing this right now and thinking “well, he’s escaped his critics, hasn’t he?”, and what are they doing with that information??

But because I called him out for being a fabulist, I’m the racist and his suicide can be laid at my door? No.

Guidelines here: https://media.samaritans.org/documents/Media_Guidelines_2026_DIGITAL.pdf

And hugs here for anyone who is struggling with this foul narrative 🫂 You matter, the people you lost to suicide mattered and all of this two dimensional sanctimony online is not how normal, compassionate people in the real world behave.

 

[goldenrodshortbread]

This is such a depressing and predictable turn. I know Nathan Cofnas. Although we are in different fields, Oxbridge is a small world and it’s relatively easy to cross paths among the ranks of the early career. Whatever you may think of his political views, his scholarly work is unplagiarised, original, interesting, challenging, and provokes debate. He has been prepared to discuss the uncomfortable. Sometimes, research findings, data, and ideas can be extremely difficult to work with. Most scholars now self-censor. He has not. Should we be shutting people down for talking about unpalatable things? Or should we take up debate with them, conduct further research, find out more, be curious? Cofnas is a highly intelligent man, and also autistic. In exposing Arday as an unqualified fantasist (again! He was not the first to do this!) he was performing an act of academic service. That he should lose his job at an entirely unrelated University, at the hands of transgender gynaecologist Petra de Sutter, is just the next rung on the ladder of insanity. I wish him well. We do not agree on many matters but I respect his integrity and the sense of injustice that spurred him to act.
Quillette article again for those interested in Cofnas: https://quillette.com/2026/08/14/cambridge-and-the-stigmatisation-of-intelligence-research/

 

[nothanksbabes]

I'm still absolutely baffled by that autobiography. I was thinking about it in the context of interviewing someone for a role, and how I might ask about a time someone encountered X, and they respond something like, 'We had a difficult project. My manager said we'd never deliver it, but my colleague believed in me. I was determined not to give up. Eventually we delivered it successfully and everyone was delighted.' It has the shape of a nice story but you're left with no useful information about what they actually did. And that's his whole book.

Spoiler: Continued...

He starts at Point A, reaches Obstacle B, Obstacle C, then Triumphant Point D.

It looks like a narrative and has the signals telling the reader how to feel. Bully doubted me. Friend/stranger believed in me. Villain told me I'd amount to nothing. Nobody had ever seen someone like me try something like this before. They laughed at me. I nearly gave up. Nobody thought a person like me could do it. But I persevered. And now look at me. Aren't I amazing?

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED AT POINTS B AND C? That's the interesting part, which he omits every. Single. Time.

'Giff had me moved to a mainstream school. She 'campaigned''. Did she? How? With whom? What did she do? What worked? What didn't? Why was that the right thing to do? Why was it better than the alternative?

'Debs taught me to read and write.'
Did she? And how did she do that? What techniques did she use? How did she know about them? Why, specifically, did she succeed where Giff and at least three schools, presumably staffed with teachers, had failed? What was it like, after a lifetime of being unable to read to suddenly have a world of incredible literature and information available to you?

You got a PhD? How? Why? What did it entail, what did you research and how, what parts of the subject did you find challenging, what did you get wrong, how did you course correct, what exactly did you learn, what surprised you?

But every story is just... nobody believed in me, Giff battled for me to go to a mainstream school so that's what happened, aren't we amazing? Debs taught me to read somehow, but more importantly she's thin and beautiful and other men are jealous of me, aren't I interesting? I did a PhD on a Thinkpad branded laptop. Nobody thought I could do it but I knew I was like the character Rocky played by Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky films and I thought about Rocky and succeeded! Like Rocky!

All the supposedly verbatim dialogue and beige detail acts as a stand in for this juvenile superficiality, but there's not a second of agency or self reflection.

Everyone is childishly divided into the goodies, the baddies and the hero and his triumph over evil. We know literally nothing about him by the end of the book except for the externally imposed dramatic events through which he demonstrates he is special.

Perhaps that's why people create these wild stories? If you have no internal sense of yourself or why you're doing anything, then I suppose a dramatic external narrative is one way to anchor yourself to... something. Create the idea of a person and construct the narrative around that. But you can't reverse engineer a life.

 

[VielleFemme]

Reflecting on the terrible memoir - considering he had chosen an academic career, it’s remarkable how he doesn’t really share any deep thoughts or any sense of purpose in choosing this career. Has he ever thought deeply about education, or sociology, or racism for that matter? Did he feel fired up by the subject matter at all? If so, you’d never guess. It reads that the only reason he wanted a PhD and then to be a Professor was because it would be an “achievement” for himself.

This is exactly what I was going to comment on. Everyone I know, including me, who has done a PhD, even those people who got it over and done with as quickly as possible,* were absolutely consumed by and obsessed with their thesis topic. It's impossible to do a half-decent job without becoming somewhat obsessive.

*which, by the way, is nothing like 2.5 years. My husband I think completed his more quickly than anyone else I know, and that was still over three years full-time, and he wasn't commuting across the UK daily, working night shifts, and looking after newborn babies and needy parents.

Even now, 20 years later and having long ago abandoned academia, I'm still hypersensitive to anything vaguely related to my thesis, and still mentally file away new books, articles, discoveries, etc. that would be relevant. My husband is still something like the 5th most informed person in the world when it comes to the life and works of his PhD subject.

Arday's bizarre ghostwritten 'memoir' (bizarre not least because why get a ghostwriter to do such a BAD job?) makes it explicit that the PhD is just an ego trip. Nothing that @Valiofthedolls has posted (and I've read all the extracts here) indicates any interest at all in his purported subject. I mean we know why that is - it's because he didn't write it, he didn't do any research, he just patched together a mess of other people's work and slapped his name on it - but it is genuinely insane that it's just in plain view.

i've read memoirs, biographies and autobiographies of academics, and while they might include their life stories and personal histories, those are always interwoven with the actual subject that they fell in love with (or happened to end up focusing on). The putative subject of his PhD is invisible, because he really knew absolutely nothing about it.

What is really mind-boggling is, given that, how he got the PhD at all. It should have been picked up at the viva, and it obviously was to an extent - the two versions of the viva (from the draft and the published version) indicate that it was not an easy ride. But how and why was it awarded at all?

It is not unknown for people to fail their vivas. I knew someone who did (he ended up clearing his stuff out in the middle of the night and was never heard from again, at least not by me). It is common to pass with corrections - usually minor corrections (this is what I had), but sometimes more substantial revisions are needed.

There is no question that Arday should have failed at that point. I know all of the focus is on Cambridge, understandably, but for my money, Liverpool John Moore's have a lot of questions to answer. Possibly even more than Cambridge. They awarded him the PhD, and then they said that the plagiarism allegations were false.

The whole thing STINKS.

 

[Wu Tien]

Lots of thought-provoking posts – I’ve quoted only some of them.

If you’re not a fan of long-winded posts, this one may not be for you!

@Valiofthedolls: “He starts his PhD and ‘life as a university lecturer’ on page 204.”

He was clearly setting the stage for Volume #2 of They are lucky to have me: The most extraordinary life and times of Cambridge University's most extraordinary professor ever.

@VeniVidiVicki: “I’ve been watching videos of him speaking this evening and there is very clearly something ‘off‘.”

Yes! I am so glad that someone else has noticed that. I have spent most of my life observing other people in an attempt to understand other people and to improve my social skills. Arday’s demeanour always gave me the creeps as there was something that was, as you put it, ‘off’.

In the excerpts I’ve read of his autobiography – there are no names of childhood friends and no attempt to have any romantic relationships outside of the one he had with his ex-wife, Debs.

After he and Debs divorced, he moved back into his parents’ home. That isn’t that uncommon, but it’s often when the partner doesn’t have money to rent a flat. That wouldn’t have been the case with Arday as he was making good money. It does seem that home was a refuge where nothing was demanded of him: his sainted mum (and the way he talked about her is unsettlingly obsessive) would have taken care of all of his needs.

This meshes with what (I believe it was) @PurvyPenguin noted in another thread about his time at Glasgow and the social aspect of life in Cambridge. If he had commuted daily to Glasgow (which I doubt) and stayed living in his childhood bedroom in south London, rather than live in university accommodation, he would have avoided the need to interact with other people.

And, no, I don’t believe that that could be explained away his alleged autism. Just like neurotypicals, some of us like to socialise! Our condition just means that we aren’t always very good at it.

@InkHeart: "You can even see his eyes look so... haunted? dead? after he says he has no skill. Then he puts the mask on again and starts being animated once again."

I have seen numerous mentions (maybe here; maybe elsewhere) about his eyes. They are flat and emotionless. It’s like there’s nothing behind them.

@Valiofthedolls: "Based on, like, well, like, everything, how anyone could believe this was a serious academic (who can barely talk about anything other than himself even when meant to be giving a keynote or talk on Academia is a Crossfire Hurricane*) is mystifying."

@nothanksbabes: "I keep reading that he was charismatic. Was he?"

I am always surprised when people describe him as charismatic. Arday’s delivery never varied – he spoke in the same monotone, he didn’t use any kind of body language, he showed no interest in other people and never spoke or wrote about anything other than himself.

I was struck in videos I watched that he rarely (if ever) described a conceptual framework, research approach, methodology, theories or theorists. He just regurgitated navel-gazing pap about himself. There is no attempt to engage the audience or to share information about anything that the watcher / student can use to apply what he shared to a wider context. It’s not a one-off; this is his modus operandi.

"A good looking guy (at least before the eyeliner and perpetual shine), he absolutely was. But listening to him speak... I'm not charmed so much as I want to crawl up my own hoop to escape the sensation of watching someone humiliate themselves."

There is a principle in psychology called the Halo Effect. From the link: “Studies show that when someone is attractive, we’re more likely to assume they have other positive attributes, too — everything from confidence and trustworthiness to intelligence and emotional stability.”

I am sure that if Arday had been a cross-eyed, leprous hunchback (and no shade to cross-eyed, leprous hunchbacks – I’m sure that many of you are delightful) he would have been received less rapturously.

(As always, apologies for any typos or grammatical errors.)

 

[FourSeasonSoupObsessive]

Jo Maugham is a shameless grifter and him popping up to scold a black person for being “racist” does not surprise me in the least. He’s spent the last half decade scolding women for not being “feminist” enough for his tastes. Why anyone gives the fox battering Jeffrey Epstein looking twat any attention at all is beyond me.

 

[moldwarp]

I've been following the Jason Arday story and the posts on here are a wonderful example of consideration, experience, empathy and sanity compared to the guff from both sides elsewhere.

I was interested in his story because I find fabulists fascinating. Jack Monroe brought me to Tattle after all. I've met a few IRL, none that actually parlayed a lucrative career out of it as Arday (and to a more limited extent Monroe) did.

I well remember the story of Rachel Dolezal, who was globally condemned, castigated and mocked for YEARS for choosing to present herself as Black. That story intrigued me in particular because she didn't seem to have done it to cheat, get rich or grift off people - she seemed to really feel quite sincere about her Black identity, her adopted sons were Black and she raised a lot of money for her local branch of NCAAP - so the money went to actual Black people. Then I watched the NF docu about her and she was talking about the pain and trauma of her childhood and how the Black identity became a way of escaping from that. It was her safe space, where she felt she really belonged.

I then ended up watching a lot of YouTube docus about the clinical psychology of fabulism. That's YT of course, not proper academic psychology, so I admit my relative ignorance but what struck me was many psychologists talking about how pathological fabulism often originates in childhood trauma. The fabulist constructs a new identity to escape the pain of their old one (which I can't lie, got me thinking about FtM trans identities too). Also fabulism apparently can function like an addiction (addiction also being linked with childhood trauma ofc) - when the lie is believed, the fabulist gets a massive dopamine hit. But over time, they get used to that level of dopamine and so have to keep inventing bigger and bigger lies to get the same dopamine hit. I wonder if any of the above applied to Arday.

It's a matter of public interest too because Cambridge is meant to represent UK academic excellence on a global stage. So anything that damages that, as Cambridge's approach to and irresponsible elevation of the unqualified and vulnerable Arday did (not to mention the unforgivable lapse in academic standards which have been the pride of British academia since the Enlightenment) needs to be looked at closely.

I appreciate none of the above may add anything useful but I find it interesting.

Oh yeah, and Jolyon Maugham is clearly officially losing it. What an epic twunt.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

One of my friends is an associate professor at a Russell Group uni. Some of her students (both undergraduate and postgraduate) can barely speak English. They write their essays using AI. Supervision sessions happen via google translate.

We have a huge huge problem in HE in the UK. Arday is just the tip of the Iceberg

 

[Catsexyfeline]

Does anyone else feel like they woke up in an alternate universe? The world has gone mad. Common sense and critical thinking have been abandoned it seems.

Meanwhile I’m still trying to understand how anyone can believe such an infantile style of writing is the product ot a Cambridge professor? Can someone make it make sense?

 

[TheStrawberryThief]

Something which is bothering me the more I think about it. I am seeing left activists attempt to start hate campaigns about journalists for writing articles about Jason as if they were the only people to ever speak about him.

I personally only saw a handful of articles from traditional media. The rest came from people discussing on forums and social media. Sharing clips and extracts they had found and making their own minds up from reading his own words rather than having them filtered through a journalist.

First, I hate that certain people have decided that they want to target journalists to destroy carriers and destroy their mental health in retaliation. It is the behaviour of a hypocrite.

Second, I find it really patronising as it implies that normal people can't think for themselves and need someone at the telegraph to tell them what opinions to have.

 

[ScouseGossip]

I don't want to sound dramatic, but the way he spoke about Liverpool has really pissed me off.
This is a city that has one of the oldest black communities in the country, had the first British mosque, has the oldest Chinese community in Europe FFS.
Yet he speaks of us as though we've never had any experience of a well educated black man. I'm not denying that black people are woefully unrepresented in education, but I had at least a handful of black teachers when I was in school and college here.
His book smacks of someone who thinks the North is one large homogeneous mass, possibly all racists, flat cap wearing, Brexit voting, slightly unsophisticated people.
If he'd actually bothered to immerse himself in the culture of the city he lived in, he'd have realised we're massively, proudly, multicultural.

 

[goldenrodshortbread]

Just out of interest, would you say this self-censorship happens mostly in Humanities and Human Sciences, or do you think / suspect it's happening in the 'hard sciences' too?

Obviously we now know from the Fauci subpoena that the Wuhan lab leak evidence was censored and self-censored by biologists but that was under massive pressure from the US government amid a global pandemic, so I can understand scientists being afraid to voice their findings. I suppose I'm more thinking about scientific research in universities.

Also when you say 'self censorship', do you mean for political reasons, or for careerism?

Apols if OT but I think it's probably pretty important in the larger picture

I absolutely think it’s relevant - central to the debate in fact. Equivalent to the enormous Government pressure on the lab leak biologists is the culture of Do Not Offend for social scientists and humanities scholars. The problem is, all (ok, a majority) of science observes real-world phenomena. So we all see the same stuff. How and what gets reported (ie published) is a totally different matter. Massaging of data is not uncommon in hard science. The interest in the truth has waned. The interest in growing citations and gaining more funding, from funders who only want confirmation of their specific agendas, has increased. The issue of censorship specifically - I’d need to defer to someone in STEM (hello, colleagues, please chime in!).

We are all under the same conditions whereby we need to censor ourselves in committees and interactions with students (especially Undergraduates), for example. The marketisation of HE has influenced this. A colleague in Physics can no more say that they don’t want to share toilet facilities with men than a colleague in Comparative Literature. A Materials Engineer could not raise concern about their Lab being occupied by pro-Palestinian student mobs, any more than I could when my offices were taken over by protests for weeks. I couldn’t have asked politely for them to step aside so that I might access my place of work. What would the customers have said?! I had to just turn around and find somewhere else to work. We are required to be Allies. But only to the right people! Saying otherwise costs you your job. I can’t afford to lose my job; I’m a woman with children. Cofnas has less to lose as a man - he has spoken out. Good for him, but there’s no way I could ever issue a genuine opinion on anything at work, lest someone be Upset. Look how Upset everyone has become by a literal conman being exposed, as if he was the sole sacred black academic in the entire sector… So Much Upset! It’s INSANE. And so insulting to black colleagues. **bursts into flame once more**

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

This is long so if you’re not interesting in education for kids with additional needs, please feels free to skip.

One thing I keep forgetting to say but which pisses me off (because my autistic child has really struggled at times in mainstream (MS) education) is his assertion that Giff’s insistence on him and JJ being in MS education was Central in his achievements. That said, he never states exactly how and in fact that extract above where he says he was pretty much ignored completely contradicts that.

Anyway, the point is that for many kids with additional needs, specialist settings with smaller class sizes and tailored programmes are essential to helping those kids flourish. Many of them simply flounder in MS education. The rate of school refusal is stratospheric. Getting an EHCP (used to be called a statement of special educational needs and is the only way of accessing specialist education) is becoming increasingly difficult with many authorities saying no to every initial application in the hope that families will simply give up at the first hurdle. It’s a fight to access and working class parents often fail to get their children in because they don’t have the confidence or education to challenge the system. So there are thousands of kids who aren’t in specialist settings who should be.

Local authorities are doing everything they can to slash specialist education still further because it’s so fucking expensive but long term in the sense of helping kids with additional needs become functioning and contributing members of society, it pays huge dividends. But of course those are different pots of cash so there is fuck all impetus to support children with additional needs to thrive long term.

So in summary, his POV is absolutely a Reform wet dream. A non verbal and illiterate kid can do just fine in cheap as chips MS education so why do we need special schools for the ones who can talk? It infuriates me that he’s never been challenged on this but then he’s never challenged on anything really is he? Moral Maze just once and then he never went back because he can’t defend his arguments.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

 

[didisaythatoutloudoops]

My daughter has two Master's degrees, one acquired pre-COVID, and pre-ChatGPT, and one post-COVID and post-ChatGPT (online). Each from two of the UK and world's best ranked universities for teaching and research.

She was absolutely gobsmacked at the difference in her experiences. Her first university was fantastic and a great experience, tough, but academically rigorous and she felt she'd received a quality education and earned her award. At her second, she often told me that she felt like a cash cow, and that the university quite frankly didn't care how you got your answers as long as you submitted them on time, passed the paltry plagiarism software, and most importantly paid your fees.

Students openly admitted in group chats to using AI to write their work, to panicking over having used an AI that would then hallucinate references or needing to rewrite sections due to plagiarism detection software. The university didn't care one jot. As long as their image is protected and you're filling their bank account with tuition fees, whatever. The professors saw meetings as obligations and her supervisor made it clear he simply didn't care: he turned up to meetings having not read her thesis. There were zero academic standards beyond the screening software. Even the marked feedback was AI-generated.

She left with a really sour taste in her mouth and the case of Arday has brought it back. She has no doubt that had she chosen to plagiarise her research - and I'm relieved to say she did not - that it would have been very, very easy to get away with, and the university would have benefitted from her tooting her own horn about it because it sells them as success makers to other fee payers. Reputation is now only a tool for earning more money. Speaking out about her experience directly devalues her degree - and the universities know it. They have to make the choice between calling out the situation in a very fraught job market, and devaluing extortionately priced education, or keeping quiet and letting the cycle continue.

That's all to say that I hope this tragic situation actually sparks wider questions about how universities in the UK are profit centres above all else right now, and these dirty scenarios follow naturally from that approach.

 

[Old Harold]

Like other posters here, I just get angrier the more I dig into it. My own experience is a big part of it. I didn't have Arday's exotic array of disabilities and disadvantages (real and imaginary) but came from a manual working class background with parents who left school at fifteen. I got into a prestigious university through luck (being born at the time I was and the opportunity being there), but also exam results achieved through hard work and yeah, academic ability. It was a shock socially, but I could do the work. No-one had to dumb anything down for me or make the coursework more accessible. I had as much right to "the canon" as anyone else. I'm livid at the thought that my equivalent today could've ended up being taught by a fraud and a spoofer like Arday in the name of inclusion. Genuinely raging.

 

[nothanksbabes]

It's interesting that he (mis)quoted George Michael (Freedom '90) in the tedious me me memoir, saying 'sometimes the clothes do make the man' after prostetlysing about a Savile Row suit.

Freedom '90 is George writing about authenticity, and trying to escape his fabricated image after leaving Wham!

The lyrics Arday refers to are "I just hope you understand/Sometimes the clothes do not make the man", followed by "All we have to do now/Is to take these lies and make them true somehow"

I'd probably have picked a different song if my entire life was a lie, but what do I know.

Incidentally, George is an excellent comparator to a fantasist like Arday. He was the child of immigrants, he lost his mother to cancer, then his partner to AIDS.

He was subject to a decade and a half of intense press intrusion into his life, was closeted and, when he was outed against his will by an intensely homophobic US police force and international press, he was then was harassed and persecuted by the media for something as innocuous as being gay.

It wasn't until his death that we discovered he had been incredibly generous with his wealth during his life, because, unlike Arday and his ilk, he understood that the things you do when nobody is watching and there to give you a round of applause are the measure of you.

Anyway. Sorry for the George derail. Was just meant to be a flippant comment about Arday's truly tone deaf choice of lyrics which I'm sure he considered as deeply as he did his entire career or what he likes about poor Debs - not at all.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

@Valiofthedolls csm confirm how long it is as she has a copy

I read this earlier:

This whole story is ridiculous and sad in equal measures. It’s crazy that someone so incompetent and ill equipped was elevated to the highest levels In academia. But it’s awful too that someone so clearly mentally unwell was put in that position. I’ve been watching videos of him speaking this evening and there is very clearly something ‘off‘. All I can conclude is that everyone had something to gain from propelling him on, even if it wasn’t in Jason’s best interests. His family and friends for cash and kudos, the universities for DEI points. But no one stopped to think about the weight of his fairytales crashing down as they were bound to eventually.

Poor sod. And his poor, poor kids, growing up with a fantasising dad who is now going to be mythologised. Their truth and stories will be completely ignored.

 

[missbct]

The thing that always sets my Billy bullshitter radar off overwhelmingly is when people can remember monologues of conversation weeks and years after the fact. I consider myself to have a good memory which is backed up academically and socially, but I genuinely can’t remember everyday, nay, even important conversations much past a sentence or two or beyond the main point. Having read the excerpts of the book, Jason seems to manage to remember all and every conversation. I’ve seen this done in several memoirs and it always sets my radar off.

 

[Jelly Bean]

From the NY Times.View attachment 4094019

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To bypass paywall: https://archive.is/0lDh3

Spoiler: Screenshots in case link doesn’t work for some

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That is such a good article.
I simply cannot believe the amount of so called liberal thinkers who encourage this sleepwalking into a world where they want outside agencies to deem what is acceptable or not to say. And things declared 'hateful' aren't allowed.
It's funny that Ann Widdecombe was a free speech absolutist. Sucked up any amount of personal attacks and bile as 'it's your right to say that'. She'd have thought increased censorship was a dreadful attack on civil liberties.

 

[Winthropp Tuesday]

I think Carol has seriously lost the plot here. First, there were too many stories about Arday. Now he’s ’fallen off’ the news cycle, she wants more…then shoehorning Madame Pelicot in the same message to make the most tenuous of links between them, is just