Jason Arday

[PineappleQueen19]

Weaponising racism against students who only requested a different supervisor, with good reason, says a lot about how Arday kept the grift going for so long. (Regardless who did the accusing). Imagine how many were afraid to speak up at all. What a sorry state of affairs.

 

[catsandsoup]

From an article by Boris Johnson, a very good point, how did he take study and take two gcse's before he could read and write.View attachment 4081926

When Boris thinks your lies are obvious, you know you've gone too far!

 

[Tabitha D]

Fucking hell. Strap in for Chapter 23. It’s just like that famous scene in Rocky II…

Spoiler

View attachment 4087000View attachment 4087001View attachment 4087004View attachment 4087002View attachment 4087007View attachment 4087008View attachment 4087009View attachment 4087010View attachment 4087012Poor Debs, saddled forever as a supporting character coparenting with this grandiose insufferable narcissistic cunt.

Oh come the fuck on. This is LUDICROUS.
I am starting to think that there wasn’t even an editor for this crap, because WTF. The grandiosity. The complete lack of charm or humour or self-deprecation in telling his (very tedious) story. It is just a fantasy of Jason surrounded by supporting characters whose only purpose is to declare how amazing and incredible he is.
I suspect this might possibly (?) play better in the States, but to a UK audience it’s honestly beyond parody. It’s a complete joke.

And then there’s this:
"It's only a hairline fracture, I countered. "Giving up is not an option. It's a risk I'm willing to take?"
Only a flesh wound (for those old enough to remember Monty Python). Right?
What a martyr. Give him the sainthood right now.

 

[minimaz]

Amazing, absolutely no contrition or acknowledgement of any kind of failures.

 

[PineappleQueen19]

It would never have been down to Cofnas to expose Arday in the first place, had Cambridge University listened to the academics who approached them directly with concerns - Martyn Hammersley, David Sanders, Dave Harris and I believe others. And Jack Groves at THE of course. All routinely dismissed and/or threatened by every tool available including the police.

 

[ButtonDownTheHutches]

And this, THIS, is the flip side of all the lying. The hurt and upset it causes others, who are clinging on to hope.

The same thing appeared in the documentary they did on the Salt Path couple, sufferers of the same brain condition they claimed Moth Winn had believed that they’d simply get over it by walking…

Absolutely. It's the same as 'Dr' Jessica Taylor wanging on about how psychiatric diagnoses are a patriarchal falsehood and 'there's nothing wrong with you really, everything is just trauma'.

The "I overcame extreme poverty and deprivation / debilitating disadvantage / a terminal health condition / schizophrenia and/or other mental health issues / ran 9 back-to-back marathons with a fractured leg just by being a BLOODY FANTASTIC PERSON with loads of determination, so you can do it too' shtick is horrifically damaging.

 

[nothanksbabes]

An account from one of his students at Roehampton

“Indeed, if any one of the universities Arday had taught at before being appointed to Cambridge had been prepared to point out that the emperor had no clothes, he might never have faced the humiliations of the past two weeks. Some serious soul-searching must surely follow from all the academics who enabled him to climb the academic ladder. Did they really help this young man, or were they only thinking of their own reputations? They might also spare a thought for all his students.”

Jason Arday taught me. Here’s what I learned

archived 10 Aug 2026 06:25:26 UTC

archive.is

This is the thing for me. Billy bullshitters with the potential to be if not outright dangerous (a la Dr Jessica Taylor) then detrimental to the very causes they are purported to represent (Dr Dr Jack Monroe and her supposed 'anti poverty' campaigning and this fuckwit vs the historically white male elite educational institutions) have always existed. We've all met that dickhead down the pub who'd have played for United if not for that tendon injury or who believes himself to have been very influential in the military despite having an career history that's never made it past the local job centre.

What I'm more interested in is the mechanisms by which these dickheads are elevated to positions of influence by people who seem to also nominate themselves as good and correct and compassionate and interested in merit and on the right side of history. It's fucking mind blowing to me.

Perhaps there's some debate about how political this all is, but as a left wing person, this shit on the left, the credulousness when it comes to anyone who looks or sounds "right" to them, and the way they go on the attack if you raise even the slightest suggestion that perhaps all is not what it seems, is what drove me to political homelessness.

There seems to be this idea that, since we've appointed white male dipshits to positions of influence based on little more than their family tree we should do the same for everyone, and it doesn't matter if the people on your side lie because it's a means to an end. Personally I hold the people who share my views to a higher standard of integrity because I'd rather not look like a dickhead?!

It's a fucking insult to the countless capable black academics too. Plenty of them female and overlooked no doubt. You wonder if a handful of people in positions of influence knew this guy's shtick all along and he's just a useful idiot to them.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

Arday’s Carter Ruck letter to the journalist at Times Higher Education has been published.
TL;DR how dare you question me; you’re probably racist



But what was super interesting to me is the line about how Arday financially supports not only his family but his friends. There are a lot of people invested in the grift.

 

[FourSeasonSoupObsessive]

There are two things that jump out at me from the Wail article.

Nothing says “something to hide” like hiring Carter Ruck, and nothing says “culture war grift” like the Good Law Project weighing in on your side

innocent people don’t need Carter Ruck and honest people run a mile from Jo Maugham.

Am I wrong??

 

[Winthropp Tuesday]

Seen a few people on here in various other threads commenting on Jason Arday and saying he needs his own thread.

So here it is. In brief, he’s a Cambridge Academic who’s recently been accused of plagiarism - but rumours about his back story and origins being less than true have been circulating for years.

https://unherd.com/2026/07/jason-arday-cambridges-dei-darling/

This piece explains a bit more about him…

What do we think? I’ve got Jack Monroe and Jess Taylor vibes coming in strongly here…

 

[Witchfinder Sargeant]

It's remarkable, isn't it, how based on what I know about two specific things in his story, the rest falls apart.

When I had a stress fracture, I could barely walk to the end of the street. If you'd said I had to run a marathon on it, I'd have told you to go and boil your head.

I've done a fair bit of fundraising over the years, individually and as part of a group. I have never experienced a charity requiring NDAs for fundraising. "We want you to raise lots of money but you're not allowed to talk about it" makes no sense at all.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

Spoiler: A load of old wank: random selection

“When I was very young, my dad Joseph worked as the head chef of a cafeteria in a supermarket and later in the same role at a manufacturing company…After James Brown, he was certainly the hardest-working man in show business- or at least the catering industry.”

His older brother was diagnosed with ‘differently presenting’ autism a year before he was (his brother loved playing with Lego, he didn’t like playing with Lego).

His younger brother was “a bit of a prodigy, able to read and write fluently from the age of four”

When he was ‘about five’ it was discovered he was ‘profoundly deaf in his left ear’.

In his school (which he started at age four) because of his constant rocking, humming and banging his head against the wall in the corner, (including a time he did it and split his head open), he was subsequently put into a classroom on his own with a single teacher to teach him. A few chapters later we learn this was in a special needs primary school; at the insistence of his mother he went into ‘mainstream primary school’ from the age of seven.

He started smearing his shit all over the walls at home because he was ‘fascinated by the texture of things that were squishy’. Giff solved this problem by giving him a tube of toothpaste to play with.

Fucking hell, it’s so Jack Monroe coded it’s not even funny. They’re NOT LIKE THE OTHER POVS, okaaay?! They’re MIDDLE CLASS.

There is genuinely not a single thing too mundane (and too completely invented) to have made it into this effing book.

Giff is 100% the Chocco Dave to Arday’s Cack Monroe. Dad Arday’s in there somewhere but mostly irrelevant to the entire ‘legend’, just like poor Ol’ Oirsh Mammy Ev.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

A lot of weaseling and implied accusations and just general complaining about being questioned and not much actual legal defence or straightforward responses to anything, from what I can see.

Several points seem to be: "How dare you ask an employer questions about their employee????"

And it’s heavily implied that because he has ASD and couldn’t read or write until he was an adult that he shouldn’t be expected to deliver a PhD to the same standard as other PhD students. No, that’s just wrong. Reasonable adjustments doesn’t mean lowering standards, it means putting strategies in place to enable students to achieve the same standards.

 

[CariettaWhite]

Why does he feel the need to explain everything in excruciating detail? We all know what sewing is.
“My mum was a brilliant cook. She was really good at buying ingredients, reading recipes (a recipe is instructions about how to cook something), measuring out flour and butter and other things, mixing them together, putting them in an appropriate receptacle and heating them up at the right temperature and for the right amount of time”.

 

[CrackingOwlSanctuary]

I saw a post on the Green Party subreddit saying 'what stance do we left leaning people take on this?' Which about sums up how the whole situation has been allowed to get this far, JA is 'a goody' on paper so has been given unlimited leeway in some quarters.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

You don’t have to read particularly far between the lines to get the clear sense he was a fucking nightmare as an employee and for his students in every academic institution at which he was employed. He didn’t live full time in any city in which he was employed and didn’t last at any of those institutions for very long. You get the sense Liverpool JM, Leeds Beckett, Glasgow etc were just thrilled to see the back of him, particularly as it’s evident that all he gave a fuck about was himself and his own self-promotion.

It’s also particularly telling that in 260 pages he spends the first 220+ of them going into great and no-detail-too-mundane detail about his Ma, including her taste in laundry detergent (Dreft) and umbrellas (cheap ones from the corner shop), his own impeccable yet quirky tastes in music, cinema, television and clothing as a teen, his expertise in singing karaoke, football, snooker etc as a teen, the sartorial elegance of Savile Row he visited as a teen, humbling visits to the less fortunate as a teen, meetings with great sages who hand down their personal wisdoms to him or evil trolls who tell him he’ll never amount to anything (the race/ethnicities of all these people are always noted), what he wore everywhere he went, all the Strong Black Women who basically did fucking everything for him (Ma, long-suffering Deb, his mate Angela at college who it’s pretty clear he glommed onto and who carried him through that degree he scraped) his multitude of diabolical ailments as a child and teen, all his various diagnoses and great sufferings throughout his life, that his ‘university lectureships’ are all flown through and glossed over in about the last 40 pages.

And that 40 pages includes LUDICROUS levels of detail about the events surrounding his viva (which it’s clear when from his own telling was not initially going well for him), as well as a whole host of other utterly nonsensical bollox about his life outside academia. His job at Liverpool JM warrants three pages (and you’ve all seen that), Leeds even less. Thankfully tho, he ‘had a hunch that he thought like a sociologist’ which ultimately led him to Cambridge.

Spoiler: 🙄

Will try and copy as much of this shite as I can because as amusing as the rest of his snooker playing karaoke nonsense it, this ‘academic’ stuff is staggering.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

Insufferable. There was so much to question after reading his book, but yet James O'Brien jumps to say only if he was racist would he of questioned him.

JOB has a long history of supporting people like him.

James O’Brien is a twat who gave Jack Monroe a platform to spout her unbridled complete and utter bullshit multiple times and failed to question her on any of it. It’s thanks to him she got to tell her delightful (imaginary) tale of all her brother’s RAF mates “jacking off” to her picture in the newspaper, much to said brother’s (imaginary) consternation.

To be fair to Arday, we haven’t (yet) heard tell of any branch of the armed forces rubbing themselves ragged while gazing upon the images accompanying his hagiographic complete bullshit-strewn fantasist Guardian articles.

 

[HotesTilaire]

I just read that JA has cancelled book promotion events. Probably as good choice, but had he gone ahead the entertainment value would have been priceless. Especially if there was a Q&A

Gutted I was hoping he’d lean in to it and come out to EMF’s “Unbelievable”

 

[Tabitha D]

“People fascinated me”.
Well on the evidence of this book, that’s a load of crap isn’t it. No one fascinates him except for himself.

 

[ButtonDownTheHutches]

This whole story and shenanigans have been the grift gift that just keeps on giving (and giving and giving).

The Atlantic article is a wild ride

Jason Arday's Fairy Tale Is Over - The Atlantic

archived 7 Aug 2026 04:10:34 UTC

archive.is

Indeed it is!:

"By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter. Still, he pressed onward. Still, somehow, he got a teaching job.

His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30.

The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style."


So, he was working 8 hours between 11pm-7:30 am, had been accepted onto a master's programme despite having the same reading age as his 3-yr-old, and yet still managed to acquire a teaching post at the other end of the country, and wrote his master's thesis on the train whilst commuting between London and Liverpool (and why, exactly, was he living in London but commuting to a teaching job in Liverpool?)