Doing his best Jussie Smollett impression, Arday claimed that a masked man twice confronted him on campus and demanded that he resign. The second time, he said, the man threatend him with a knife. Yet the intruder was not picked up by CCTV (in Great Britain almost everything is caught by CCTV) either time. No one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday didn’t report either confrontation, nor did he inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.

Are you detecting a pattern here? Arday’s fantastic stories led another academic to check his scholarly output. A postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium published dozens of excerpts from Arday’s 2015 Ph.D. dissertation that had been flagged by plagiarism detection software, presenting them side by side with passages from a 2009 dissertation by another scholar. The passages from Arday’s dissertation appeared to copy verbatim, or only lightly paraphrase, the other scholar’s work. Retraction Watch, an online publication covering academic misconduct and research ethics, ran an article describing criticisms of Arday’s scholarship that scholars were raising privately in 2023. The corrections subsequently appended to some of Arday’s published work, the article argued, did not fully acknowledge the extent of the changes made.

In response, Arday blamed the flaws in his dissertation on negligent faculty oversight, and also accused his critics of racism. Of course he did. Arday said there is a “playbook” used by conservatives to discredit black academics (like Claudine Gay) and called on his non-racist colleagues to rise up in his defense and eradicate this “cancer” from academia. So they did! A petition in support of Arday was organized by the progressive nonprofit, Good Law Project and drew more than 14,000 signatures. The petition called the allegations of plagiarism against Arday “entirely false,” and part of a broader “attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.” None of the signatories had checked the evidence; since Arday is black, he had to be the victim of racism, like George Floyd.

Finally, as with Gay, Arday resigned from his position in the university, and also like Gay, did so while claiming victim status and refusing to apologize or come clean. Before that, however, he reported a reporter for “harassment” who sent emails questioning him about the controversy to the police, and an investigation into the reporter was begun by Scotland Yard.

Here is Arday’s letter:

Dear colleagues,

It is with profound sadness that I write to resign, with immediate effect, from my position at the University of Cambridge and Jesus College.

When I accepted the extraordinary honour of becoming Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, it was, without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life. To become the youngest Black professor in the University’s history was something I could scarcely have imagined as a child growing up with a diagnosis of autism, unable to speak until I was eleven years old…

Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack. While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.

I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope.

But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great.

I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement…

I need time to heal. I need time to simply be  myself again.

And when that time comes, I will return…

For now, however, I ask only for understanding, for compassion, and for the space to begin again.

With gratitude,

Professor Jason Arday

The Ethics Alarms Apology Scale rates this as a non-apology. A whiny non-apology.

David Strom writes in part regarding Cambridge and Arday,

“…It’s not that minorities of any kind are by virtue of their being minorities unable to do the jobs; some can, some can’t. It’s that the reason they get elevated has little correlation to their qualifications or lack thereof. And when that is how choices are made, a large number of people will wind up being disasters waiting to happen. The only way to avoid discussing this obvious fact is to lie—to pretend that unqualified people deserve to be where they are.  We see this all the time, especially in academia, where DEI is absolutely foundational to the modern university’s ideology….

“[W]orking backward—looking at [Arday’s] story and comparing it to an even barely plausible reality—it’s clear that he is a fabulist, and that everybody around him is eager to affirm his lies because they help them justify DEI policies that are on their face unjustifiable…How much is true and how much false? I don’t know. And Arday isn’t going to tell us the real truth, which is already getting revised. And if Arday is simply a con man, the lesson isn’t to disbelieve incredible stories without proof; we should already know that.  It’s that we can’t trust the DEI-obsessed who desperately want them to be true. “

Bingo.

Kathleen Stock, a philosopher and former professor at Sussex University, opined that Arday’s hire was motivated by Cambridge being “desperate for good press.” “The elite universities like Cambridge and Oxford had a particular problem because they are perceived to be quite harsh places, quite unkind places and very white places. And they wanted to change that impression,” she told the BBC. She says universities “pretended not to see the gaps, or maybe just didn’t see the gaps because they’re hopelessly naive or desperate for good publicity in a way which obscures every other thought.” In other words, they elevate woke virtue-signaling above education.