I think that the narratives around his suicide are also a bit too sympathetic. Jason Arday chose to kill himself. He wasn't forced into it, nobody held a gun to his head. I'm certain the media would've leapt on genuine instances of hate crime, but there weren't any, so I think it's safe to assume the guy wasn't afraid for his or his family's life.
He lied, then he got caught. He chose to tell those lies, he chose to accept a position at Cambridge, he chose to threaten people who were trying to expose him with lawyers. Then he got caught. Sure, you can claim that the reaction was disproportionate, it probably was. But implying that a disproportionate reaction and a social media shitstorm is *tantamount to killing someone* is absurd. It's a bit of a sad story, but it's sad because of the actions of one person.
It's also sad because it harshly damages the DEI movement for people who counted on it as part of the mission to solve the problems of inequality, when it, and affirmative action, quite often makes things worse for everyone it purports to help.
Today Vaclev Havel would’ve set his play “The Garden Party” at a university like Cambridge. The lies they live by and institutional numbing are something to behold. Excellent piece.
If Arday was never meant to be taken seriously as a scholar….then neither is the Cambridge sociology department….nor Cambridge generally.
The Arday apologists can’t have it both ways. And if they contest that Arday was only exposed because of his race, and that such bullcrap “scholarship” is in fact pervasive, they are welcome to unearth similar bases that undermine the academic credentials of non-black academics.
It's quite possible for a university to have high standards in some fields (usually including math/physics/chemistry) & disgracefully low standards in others. (Note that I haven't been to Cambridge & don't know for sure if that's what's happening there, but it does seem more likely to me.)
I agree. I’m not impugning the Cambridge math department (for example) per se. I’m just invoking the principle that Cambridge is accountable for what happens there, including the apparent BS at their sociology dept.
“Schools of education” are fake. The research is bad. Like, Stanford’s ed school popped out the finding that algebra is racist, and partly because it came from an arm of Stanford(TM) people took it seriously, like with SF banning middle school algebra. More generally, ed schools’ haven’t reformed post reproducibility crisis and a lot of their work is “pedogogy of the oppressed” level. So, even setting aside the DEI angle, we shouldn’t be surprised that Ardy emerged at a School of education.
Patrick B is spot on with this. A few days ago I saw the phrase “Action Research” had popped up related to Mr. Arday’s work. Action Research isn’t scientific inquiry. It retains a mere pretense of retaining an hypothesis that the research proves or disproves. You can read about it at the Wikipedia link below and be intrigued (as I am) at the lack of the expected “criticism” section that commonly accompanies Wikipedia articles.
This reminds of an interaction I had as an engineering grad student in the late 2000s. I ended up digging through a bunch of papers in my field that had been written in the 60s and reviewing some insights with my supervisor. I observed that it was interesting how many journal articles at that time had multiple reply comments published afterwards, often quite brief, pointing out small errors or an additional idea that built upon the original article. This was in the period when peer review was still becoming more formalized. Sometimes the commentators were profs at the same university as the author.
My supervisor made a face and said that this was sort of “embarrassing”. That this “wasn’t done anymore”. She then proceeded to tell me a story of how our research group had once discovered a meaningful error in a published paper. Rather than directly call the other group out, she and a few others published a paper in a different journal (she emphasized that this was important) and referenced the offending paper in a convoluted way. If you read carefully you would understand that they had shown this other paper was mistaken, but they never directly said that. It seemed rather bizarre to me at the time (likely why I remember it), but it was clear that she wanted me to know that this was now the right way to address this issue.
The field I was studying in was not a hot area where you would ever expect any public interest. Available funding was modest and the number of researchers small. My sense was that people in the field had developed exactly the attitude Hanania describes above: let’s all get along and avoid attracting outside scrutiny. Unspoken was the assumption that, if we don’t aggressive challenge others work, then our work won’t be challenged directly in turn. I suspect a lot of fields in academia look like this now. On campus, I witnessed mass student engagement on matters of politics, TA pay and causes of all sorts (climate change, foreign wars, etc.). I never once witnessed mass student engagement on an intellectual question of the day. I honestly struggle to even identify what a widespread intellectual question of the day was in the period in question.
I don’t disagree (the guy even guest edited the Today programme) but I struggle to get too mad about it.
A decent chunk of education academics churn out borderline nonsense, I’m not sure society is losing that much by having him rather than ‘real’ academic in his place. If having a few nonsense fields (which no one takes particularly seriously) is the price to be paid for allowing real work in other areas then it’s not the worst thing in the world.
Find it much more frustrating when it seeps into traditionally more serious subjects - e.g. Alzheimer’s research fraud or the pressure Nigel Biggar came under for his more positive portrayal of the history of the British Empire.
Would also note the surprisingly anti Arday positions taken by the media. A guardian article seemed to be what led to his resignation - you get the sense after looking into it they couldn’t bring themselves to back him, even if in some ways sympathetic. Nice to feel facts still matter.
Richard, you've done a lot of work thinking through how to combat and defang wokeness. It would be interesting to hear similar policy prescriptions for how Universities could be reformed in order to 1) restore academic rigour and 2) address ideological bias. Can these problems be addressed by legislation? Could the government ban/defund certain subjects and turf out far left professors and administrators?
Many would bulk at intruding on academic freedom, but in my view, giving Universities a defacto monopoly over issuing the certificates necessary to access societies most prestigious and well paying jobs means they perform such a broad and important public role that ensuring institutional rigour and neutrality must come ahead of such issues.
No yearning for legislation on my part - hence asking a question rather than making a statement. I do however have a yearning to see the issue addressed and legislation could be a tool to achieve this. Clearly something that needs exploring further.
“ Thanks in part to the uselessness of the so-called scholarship he produced, in death Arday might make a contribution to the advancement of human knowledge after all.”
A much-needed response to all the accusations of 'mobbing'. Indeed, academia, the media and publishing industry all elevated Arday's profile and called out attention to him. Now they can't accuse us of paying too much attention to him.
I know I'm showing my age here, but I can't help but think of the death of Ken Lay. He died of a heart attack after a tremendous fraud he had been involved in was revealed, before he could suffer the appropriate consequences.
He left behind a family, and he was a person, so his death was tragic. But I don't remember people being this upset at the people who uncovered the Enron fraud, or this uninterested in chasing down the people who enabled it.
It has been amazing how many people within academia have said something to the effect of "well, it's not really plagiarism" or "it's been corrected" or "why does his biography matter?" Others have made comments like "he was investigated, but he was cleared!"
I think this reflective of some bigger issues in academic culture.
#1. Lying should not be part of academic culture, but somehow it is:
Podcaster and former Cambridge prof David Runciman (politics and history) has an interesting perspective on Cambridge -- he writes that from a funding and research perspective, the medical and engineering parts of the university are really in the driver's seat, and those people don't have much interest or respect in what the "soft" subjects are doing in any case, whether good, bad, or indifferent.
I get the impression that Stanford, Harvard, etc. are very similar. Whether world-class or awful, the humanities faculty are seen as anachronistic curiosities by the biotech and engineering types.
At the Ivy League and other old universities in the US, the humanities subjects have all the best central office locations, due to their seniority, but a small fraction of the funding. A few years ago, Harvard reported that the university employed 83 faculty assistants in its science division, compared to three (3) for the 195 faculty in arts and humanities.
Runciman does note that a mere few decades ago, when CP Snow wrote "The Two Cultures," science still felt itself to be on the outside, but not any more.
The Vanderbilt reports on the state of scholarship have a chance of being taken seriously, because they are being written not by angry conservatives, but from within the heart of academia itself, by prestigious, high-status faculty members.
In a sociology PhD, research usually starts with finding a sharp question about how society works—things like inequality, culture, institutions, or social change.
You dig deep into the existing literature, then design a study using methods like interviews, surveys, ethnography, or statistical analysis of large datasets. After that comes collecting and analysing the data, and writing it all up as a dissertation under your supervisor’s guidance.
Most of the real work happens in those middle years once the topic is locked in.
Did Jason Arday do all of this?
Yes. Jason Arday completed a PhD in education in 2015. His thesis looked at peer-mentoring among student teachers and how it supports reflective practice, using action research methods.
He ran a small qualitative study with interviews, workshops, reflective exercises and questionnaires, analysed the data, and wrote it all up as a dissertation—the standard research steps.
How small?
Just four student teachers in the main peer-mentoring part of the study.
There was some wider early data—questionnaires from about two dozen people and a couple of interviews with teacher educators—but the core intervention and findings rested on those four participants.
Isn’t this a poor standard even for sociology?
Small samples are normal in qualitative work, especially action research or in-depth studies of a specific process. The goal is depth, not statistical generalisation, so four people can be acceptable if the analysis is rigorous and the insights are strong.
That said, four is on the very low end even for that approach. Critics have argued the study’s design, limited scope, and the way findings were presented made the overall contribution thin for a doctoral thesis. The later plagiarism allegations only strengthened the view that the standard was poor.
I think that the narratives around his suicide are also a bit too sympathetic. Jason Arday chose to kill himself. He wasn't forced into it, nobody held a gun to his head. I'm certain the media would've leapt on genuine instances of hate crime, but there weren't any, so I think it's safe to assume the guy wasn't afraid for his or his family's life.
He lied, then he got caught. He chose to tell those lies, he chose to accept a position at Cambridge, he chose to threaten people who were trying to expose him with lawyers. Then he got caught. Sure, you can claim that the reaction was disproportionate, it probably was. But implying that a disproportionate reaction and a social media shitstorm is *tantamount to killing someone* is absurd. It's a bit of a sad story, but it's sad because of the actions of one person.
I don’t consider the reaction disproportionate, for all the reasons articulated in OP
It's also sad because it harshly damages the DEI movement for people who counted on it as part of the mission to solve the problems of inequality, when it, and affirmative action, quite often makes things worse for everyone it purports to help.
Today Vaclev Havel would’ve set his play “The Garden Party” at a university like Cambridge. The lies they live by and institutional numbing are something to behold. Excellent piece.
If Arday was never meant to be taken seriously as a scholar….then neither is the Cambridge sociology department….nor Cambridge generally.
The Arday apologists can’t have it both ways. And if they contest that Arday was only exposed because of his race, and that such bullcrap “scholarship” is in fact pervasive, they are welcome to unearth similar bases that undermine the academic credentials of non-black academics.
It's quite possible for a university to have high standards in some fields (usually including math/physics/chemistry) & disgracefully low standards in others. (Note that I haven't been to Cambridge & don't know for sure if that's what's happening there, but it does seem more likely to me.)
I agree. I’m not impugning the Cambridge math department (for example) per se. I’m just invoking the principle that Cambridge is accountable for what happens there, including the apparent BS at their sociology dept.
Cambridge is mostly a bunch of colleges with not necessarily much in the way of centralised authority. A bit like a federation of states.
“Schools of education” are fake. The research is bad. Like, Stanford’s ed school popped out the finding that algebra is racist, and partly because it came from an arm of Stanford(TM) people took it seriously, like with SF banning middle school algebra. More generally, ed schools’ haven’t reformed post reproducibility crisis and a lot of their work is “pedogogy of the oppressed” level. So, even setting aside the DEI angle, we shouldn’t be surprised that Ardy emerged at a School of education.
Patrick B is spot on with this. A few days ago I saw the phrase “Action Research” had popped up related to Mr. Arday’s work. Action Research isn’t scientific inquiry. It retains a mere pretense of retaining an hypothesis that the research proves or disproves. You can read about it at the Wikipedia link below and be intrigued (as I am) at the lack of the expected “criticism” section that commonly accompanies Wikipedia articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_research?wprov=sfti1
This reminds of an interaction I had as an engineering grad student in the late 2000s. I ended up digging through a bunch of papers in my field that had been written in the 60s and reviewing some insights with my supervisor. I observed that it was interesting how many journal articles at that time had multiple reply comments published afterwards, often quite brief, pointing out small errors or an additional idea that built upon the original article. This was in the period when peer review was still becoming more formalized. Sometimes the commentators were profs at the same university as the author.
My supervisor made a face and said that this was sort of “embarrassing”. That this “wasn’t done anymore”. She then proceeded to tell me a story of how our research group had once discovered a meaningful error in a published paper. Rather than directly call the other group out, she and a few others published a paper in a different journal (she emphasized that this was important) and referenced the offending paper in a convoluted way. If you read carefully you would understand that they had shown this other paper was mistaken, but they never directly said that. It seemed rather bizarre to me at the time (likely why I remember it), but it was clear that she wanted me to know that this was now the right way to address this issue.
The field I was studying in was not a hot area where you would ever expect any public interest. Available funding was modest and the number of researchers small. My sense was that people in the field had developed exactly the attitude Hanania describes above: let’s all get along and avoid attracting outside scrutiny. Unspoken was the assumption that, if we don’t aggressive challenge others work, then our work won’t be challenged directly in turn. I suspect a lot of fields in academia look like this now. On campus, I witnessed mass student engagement on matters of politics, TA pay and causes of all sorts (climate change, foreign wars, etc.). I never once witnessed mass student engagement on an intellectual question of the day. I honestly struggle to even identify what a widespread intellectual question of the day was in the period in question.
I don’t disagree (the guy even guest edited the Today programme) but I struggle to get too mad about it.
A decent chunk of education academics churn out borderline nonsense, I’m not sure society is losing that much by having him rather than ‘real’ academic in his place. If having a few nonsense fields (which no one takes particularly seriously) is the price to be paid for allowing real work in other areas then it’s not the worst thing in the world.
Find it much more frustrating when it seeps into traditionally more serious subjects - e.g. Alzheimer’s research fraud or the pressure Nigel Biggar came under for his more positive portrayal of the history of the British Empire.
Would also note the surprisingly anti Arday positions taken by the media. A guardian article seemed to be what led to his resignation - you get the sense after looking into it they couldn’t bring themselves to back him, even if in some ways sympathetic. Nice to feel facts still matter.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2026/aug/01/playbooks-plagiarism-pigs-head-new-claims-surrounding-cambridge-professor-jason-arday
Richard, you've done a lot of work thinking through how to combat and defang wokeness. It would be interesting to hear similar policy prescriptions for how Universities could be reformed in order to 1) restore academic rigour and 2) address ideological bias. Can these problems be addressed by legislation? Could the government ban/defund certain subjects and turf out far left professors and administrators?
Many would bulk at intruding on academic freedom, but in my view, giving Universities a defacto monopoly over issuing the certificates necessary to access societies most prestigious and well paying jobs means they perform such a broad and important public role that ensuring institutional rigour and neutrality must come ahead of such issues.
Why do you year for legislation?
Yearn.
No yearning for legislation on my part - hence asking a question rather than making a statement. I do however have a yearning to see the issue addressed and legislation could be a tool to achieve this. Clearly something that needs exploring further.
“ Thanks in part to the uselessness of the so-called scholarship he produced, in death Arday might make a contribution to the advancement of human knowledge after all.”
Shot! No chaser
A much-needed response to all the accusations of 'mobbing'. Indeed, academia, the media and publishing industry all elevated Arday's profile and called out attention to him. Now they can't accuse us of paying too much attention to him.
Owen Jones is using ChatGPT to write his tweets for him. Pathetic.
Owen Jones has been pathetic since long before ChatGPT was ever invented.
Yeah I thought that. Can hardly believe it, has he no shame .
Tough article. But correct.
I know I'm showing my age here, but I can't help but think of the death of Ken Lay. He died of a heart attack after a tremendous fraud he had been involved in was revealed, before he could suffer the appropriate consequences.
He left behind a family, and he was a person, so his death was tragic. But I don't remember people being this upset at the people who uncovered the Enron fraud, or this uninterested in chasing down the people who enabled it.
I think y'all will be interested in another excellent take on the Arday affair, by Lisa Selin Davis:
The Tragic Affirmation of Jason Arday
Woke 1 wasn't just crazy; it was dangerous.
https://www.broadview.news/p/the-tragic-affirmation-of-jason-arday
It has been amazing how many people within academia have said something to the effect of "well, it's not really plagiarism" or "it's been corrected" or "why does his biography matter?" Others have made comments like "he was investigated, but he was cleared!"
I think this reflective of some bigger issues in academic culture.
#1. Lying should not be part of academic culture, but somehow it is:
https://academiclife.substack.com/p/why-is-lying-acceptable-in-academia
#2. Confidentiality in academic investigations can cover up institutional dysfunction:
https://academiclife.substack.com/p/confidential-investigations-in-academia
Podcaster and former Cambridge prof David Runciman (politics and history) has an interesting perspective on Cambridge -- he writes that from a funding and research perspective, the medical and engineering parts of the university are really in the driver's seat, and those people don't have much interest or respect in what the "soft" subjects are doing in any case, whether good, bad, or indifferent.
https://unwall.app/www.newstatesman.com/cover-story/2026/08/a-dream-of-cambridge
I get the impression that Stanford, Harvard, etc. are very similar. Whether world-class or awful, the humanities faculty are seen as anachronistic curiosities by the biotech and engineering types.
At the Ivy League and other old universities in the US, the humanities subjects have all the best central office locations, due to their seniority, but a small fraction of the funding. A few years ago, Harvard reported that the university employed 83 faculty assistants in its science division, compared to three (3) for the 195 faculty in arts and humanities.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/11/harvard-faculty-arts-sciences-rebounds-pandemic
Runciman does note that a mere few decades ago, when CP Snow wrote "The Two Cultures," science still felt itself to be on the outside, but not any more.
The Vanderbilt reports on the state of scholarship have a chance of being taken seriously, because they are being written not by angry conservatives, but from within the heart of academia itself, by prestigious, high-status faculty members.
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/principles/state-of-scholarship-report/history/fleming-wilentz/
https://www.vanderbilt.edu/principles/state-of-scholarship-report/sociology/ashley-rubin/
How do you research a sociology phd?
In a sociology PhD, research usually starts with finding a sharp question about how society works—things like inequality, culture, institutions, or social change.
You dig deep into the existing literature, then design a study using methods like interviews, surveys, ethnography, or statistical analysis of large datasets. After that comes collecting and analysing the data, and writing it all up as a dissertation under your supervisor’s guidance.
Most of the real work happens in those middle years once the topic is locked in.
Did Jason Arday do all of this?
Yes. Jason Arday completed a PhD in education in 2015. His thesis looked at peer-mentoring among student teachers and how it supports reflective practice, using action research methods.
He ran a small qualitative study with interviews, workshops, reflective exercises and questionnaires, analysed the data, and wrote it all up as a dissertation—the standard research steps.
How small?
Just four student teachers in the main peer-mentoring part of the study.
There was some wider early data—questionnaires from about two dozen people and a couple of interviews with teacher educators—but the core intervention and findings rested on those four participants.
Isn’t this a poor standard even for sociology?
Small samples are normal in qualitative work, especially action research or in-depth studies of a specific process. The goal is depth, not statistical generalisation, so four people can be acceptable if the analysis is rigorous and the insights are strong.
That said, four is on the very low end even for that approach. Critics have argued the study’s design, limited scope, and the way findings were presented made the overall contribution thin for a doctoral thesis. The later plagiarism allegations only strengthened the view that the standard was poor.