be Jason Arday
get diagnosed autistic at 3
claim non-verbal until 11
claim partial deafness in one ear & being taught to sign
claim you couldn’t read until 18, but still leave school w/ two GCSEs
claim joining pro snooker tour at 10, one year before you could speak
claim you came out of a football academy & played professionally
claim you were on Seven Up, a series that tracked a group of seven year olds as they grew up, airing first 21 years before you were born
have the BBC confirm you weren’t on the show because not time traveller
claim 30 marathons in 35 days, the last 9 on a broken leg swollen to twice its size
claim to have run 600 miles in six days, when the men’s record is 650
have no recorded race time anywhere because why bother
have nobody in the ultra community ever hear of you
say £5.5m raised for 70+ charities by 2024
tell a funeral directors’ convention in New Orleans the ultras (no record again) raised £5m
submit a 401-page PhD on reflective practice w/ 100+ passages matching another student’s 2009 thesis
have 188 sentences come back identical or near identical, odds
carry over her copy-editing errors
get the PhD anyway
lift quotes into papers & present them as interviews you conducted yourself
get a full chair at Glasgow by 2021
get Cambridge at 37, youngest black professor in 900 years
guest edit the Today programme
collect honorary degrees from Solent, Anglia Ruskin & St Mary’s
have a Cambridge autism professor circulate “URGENT PLEASE SIGN ANTI RACISM LETTER”
write to a minister claiming knife threats, assault, spitting, rape & death l threats, bananas, bullets in the post, corrosive substances & mutilated animals
photograph none of it
claim a masked man w/ a knife cornered you in the faculty twice
appear on no CCTV either time
tell nobody AT THE TIME
claim a severed pig’s head arrived at your parents’ house
claim police traced it to a butcher who sold a “whole hog” that morning
have the butcher say no officer ever came in
have the Met say the whole account is categorically incorrect
call it “a modern day lynching” on a podcast in Sept 2025
give a keynote in April 2026 about a playbook conservatives use to hunt black academics
get cleared in March 2026 by a panel you asked to weigh the “war on critical race theory”
blame the copied text on autistic mimicry & on a supervisor who left & one you never even met
turn 600 miles in six days into twelve days
get Solent to delete the running claims
get 13,000 signatures & three Cambridge college heads to vouch for text they never read
have Cambridge call it a “vile smear campaign”
have a ghostwritten memoir to be released August 27…

While Cambridge clearly intends to shrug this off with rationalizations like “Everybody makes mistakes” (#9), Clemson Professor C. Bradley Thompson writes in part (in a substack that does a superb job of covering both the details and the aftermath),

This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years….

…[T]he Jason Arday scandal is one of the best possible things to happen to higher education in my lifetime.

But let’s make this clear: the Arday scandal is not primarily about Jason Arday; it’s about the corruption of Cambridge University and indeed of all higher education. Arday is, to be sure, a fraudster and a grifter, but his crime is to have exploited a totally corrupt system. The “system”—the system of DEI welfarism—is the greater crime. The faculty and administrators who hired and promoted him are intellectual and moral malefactors who have stolen something important from us. They deserve to be fired. They do not belong in the hallowed halls of academia.

I’m not at all confident that Cambridge will fix the problem. They will appoint a “committee” or a “commission” to investigate and two-years later the committee will bury the report and do nothing. It’s all a charade.

Let’s be clear: there is NO systemic racism in higher education, at least not the kind that they want you to think exists. Quite the opposite. There is, instead, a kind of fawning, sycophantic but ultimately demeaning treatment of black scholars that is, as black scholar John McWhorter put it, “a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.” Just so! So yes, there is racism at Cambridge, just not the kind they want you to think exists. It’s the racism of low expectations, the racism of guilt, and the racism of revenge.

But the new, systemic racism is more than about the pursuit of some form of perverted virtue as McWhorter suggests. Hilary Cremin, the Chair of the Education School at Cambridge and Arday’s chief promoter (she’s the fawning woman in the BBC documentary above who said Arday “was the best in the world”), was clearly looking for redemption—the kind of redemption that relieves one of an overwhelming sense of guilt. You can see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice when she tells Arday that he is the “best in the world.” Jason Arday was hired and sanctified by racists, who are morally responsible for his rise, decline, and fall. They nailed him to the cross.

Arday’s career is ruined. He should sue Cambridge for having hired him!

And so, I think we should all say “thank you” to Jason Arday. We owe him a debt of gratitude for exposing the intellectual and moral rot not only at Cambridge University, but in all higher education in the English-speaking world.

Bingo.