Jason Arday found dead today.

'All this Cofnas stuff', not sure to what you are objecting, fancythat?

Are you suggesting Primrose, that it is wrong to stand up against racism?

Whitewavemark2

eazybee can I have the reference please - thanks in advance

It’s OK I’ve founded it

The Telegraph - the bastion of truth and balance.

Message deleted by Gransnet. Quotes a deleted post.

eazybee can I have the reference please - thanks in advance

Jason Arday is the author of his own misfortune.

May 2023, David Harris, an Emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University, emailed Arday to enquire about similarities between sentences in Arday's 2018 Social Sciences article and an earlier BMJ Open article by Anjum Memon. Arday responded: Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism, you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment. Arday reported Harris for harassment to Devon and Cornwall Police, who concluded there was no case to pursue. Social Sciences published a correction to his article, with revised citations, in December 2023.

Jack Grove, Times Higher Education reporter subsequently investigated Arday's alleged plagiarism, assembling a 63-page report and contacted Arday in September 2025for his response. Arday responded with a legal letter from the firm Carter-Ruck, after which the Times Higher Education chose not to publish the story so as to avoid expensive litigation. Arday also made a complaint about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, who contacted the reporter requesting that he not communicate with Arday again and investigated him for four months, finding no case to answer. Mark Rowley, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, later acknowledged that the complaint about Grove should not have been taken forward.

Two examples of Arday using accusations of racism to prevent investigation into his work. It is being used to deflect criticism of Arday's appointment and failure to deliver, in contrast to comments from different notable academics that his work was seriously substandard.

More importantly, students at Roehampton University complained about Arday's poor performance as lecturer, tutor and supervisor, including his lack of substantive feedback. A senior tutor, who heard a recording of one of his lectures, told the student not to make a fuss, he will be leaving soon, which he did.
MA students at Cambridge similarly complained about his poor performance, his lack of contact, his cutting tutorial time and missing lectures; they were accused of racism. One student insisted on a replacement despite being called racist; one who was told his work was excellent and required no supervision received a much poorer result than predicted.
The senior tutor initially refused to act, but suddenly changed her mind following the intensive public scrutiny, which has been vindicated

Nothing to do with racism but much evidence of a deliberate denial of Arday's lack of ability and failure to put in sufficient time for his work and responsibilities.

Jason Arday received enormous help and support during his career in academia, but failed to extend the same level of support to his students, which is the most serious fault of all.

Both men were black, the ancestors of slaves.



Do you want to think about that again, Iam?

Were they time travellers?

All this Cofnas stuff.

When there are about, or at least 9 other strands to it all, as well.

If wanting journalists to look into claims made by people who called the police on journalists then I am more than happy to be called far right or duped by the right wing press or whatever.

Primrose53,

George Floyd was murdered by a police officer who was found guilty of murder after a trial.
The state paid Floyd’s family millions in compensation.

Jason Arden took his own life.

*post edited by GNHQ to remove a quote from a deleted post*

Both men were black, the ancestors of slaves.

It is all so very sad; but hopefully very much a wake-up call to those who subscribe to the racism of the far right and are duped by the right wing press.

Maremia

Apparently the investigation has been paused, but only temporarily, out of respect.

I agree with that. Sensible idea.

petra

MaizieD

petra

Listening to an academic this morning who pointed out that, Cambridge were racist in their decision to give jayson a professorship by lowering their criteria for a pass.
He also pointed out that what other professions have done the same? The Law society, Doctors, pilots, all for diversity.

What academic was that, Petra?

That contentious figure, Rafe Haydel-Mankoo.
What he said struck a cord because his reference to lowering standards was said to me some years ago by a young Nigerian I knew.

Aaaaah.

Never heard of him so I've looked him up... hmm....

Some balance to the right wing media- I have copied it in full, feel free to zip past If you so wish - I can’t do links which it really needs.

To a certain breed of British journalist, the Jason Arday story was irresistible catnip. He seemed to be the living, breathing proof that wokery was destroying our most august universities. Time for a pile-on. And now Professor Arday is no longer living or breathing. Death by a thousand headlines. Time to move on.

It was, in Fleet Street terms, exhilarating fun while it lasted. Torrents of verbiage cascaded from the pens of those who couldn’t believe their luck. A young academic who’d been given a prestigious Cambridge professorship turned out to be a probable plagiarist and something of a fabulist. And he was black!

There you are. In a single person you had the proof that our higher education system is biased towards minorities. His chequered life and writings conclusively exposed a two-tier system of promotion in higher education. Arday had been the poster boy for DEI… and now he was proof that academia is a conspiracy against the public. To one Telegraph columnist, he was “a symptom of Labour’s war on academic excellence” (though his questionable appointment happened under Rishi Sunak). Arday was, as the headline on a Spectator column by Toby Young—a Conservative peer—sniggered, “the gift that keeps giving.”
Among those apparently enjoying a good laugh was Dr Nathan Cofnas, the sleuth who claimed the credit for unmasking Arday. Five days ago, he shared an at times gleeful YouTube conversation with David Starkey, the TV historian whose own Cambridge career had come to a shuddering halt six years ago when he pronounced that slavery was not genocide because of the survival of “so many damn blacks”.

It was a meeting of discarded souls. Cofnas related at some length how he had himself lost his role at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, earlier this year after publishing a long, rambling blog post in which he opined that Harvard would have virtually no Black professors if they were appointed purely on merit. Black people are, genetically speaking, too stupid, apparently.

The reason we are both grinning is that we are enjoying vengeance,” chortled Starkey at the top of the programme. “Good. honest, straightforward, and Christian vengeance … we can rejoice together.” Cofnas pronounced that “Sophocles himself could not have come up with a more appropriate person to break this story than me.”

You may think that Dr Cofnas’s own troubled history is every bit as intriguing as Professor Arday’s. How on earth did Cambridge give this oddball “racial realist”—whose own work had been comprehensively trashed by more senior colleagues two years previously—a plum role as a junior research fellow?

But no one was very interested in that question. Fleet Street in full pursuit can only manage one narrative at a time. And this one was surely about woke professors so blinded by an academic’s blackness that they didn’t spot the warning signs. It could only be because DEI policies (promoting diversity, equality and inclusion) were rampantly out of control.

This was certainly Cofnas’s own take on Arday’s appointment—“just another DEI hire,” he told Starkey dismissively.

“In a meritocracy,” he wrote in February 2024, “Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.” He went further: without wokeism “[b]lacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” Quite the statement.

Cofnas had his association with Emmanuel College terminated—“they kicked me out!” he protested. A few people tried to turn it into a free speech on campus issue. Virtually no one defended his work or his views. But Cofnas, unlike Arday, was not used as a case history to illustrate broader questions about the calibre of academics who are offered juicy roles at this most prestigious of universities.

Cofnas had been banging on about what he calls “racial realism” for a few years, and questions had certainly been raised about the quality of his own thinking. In 2019, he had published a long paper in the journal Philosophical Psychology which was roundly denounced by nine tenured professors, who compared his ideas to anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate change deniers. It was “lamentable when these ideas seep into academic journals, where they certainly do not belong”, they wrote.

The academics added: “Although we cannot know for a fact whether Cofnas’s contribution was inspired by ulterior ideological motives, it is undeniable that his article can reasonably be read as pandering to proponents of scientific racism. These strands of society obviously enjoy it when scholarly forums publish work that in some way legitimises their harmful ideas.”

If these academics are to be believed, then, Cambridge recruited someone who, two years earlier, had been accused of promoting “unintelligible, wrong-headed …nonsensical ideas”.

But, anyway, it seems that no one cared very much about that and there were no calls for an independent inquiry into whether the Cofnas appointment tells us disturbing truths about Cambridge’s hiring processes.

Different story with Arday. The cases are, of course, not directly comparable. Cofnas’s role was much more junior, and there is no claim that he plagiarised or fabricated material. But it is striking how many commentators immediately leapt on the Arday “scandal” which Cofnas claimed to expose as symbolic of so much that is wrong with woke institutions that sign up to DEI policies.

The question is whether there is any evidence to support the proposition. If Cambridge is, indeed, now a citadel of wokery, you’d expect the appointments and admissions data to show a pattern. But it’s hard to find.

Last year, just 75 of Cambridge’s 6,180 academics identified as black, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. Apart from Arday, there were just five black professors, or 0.4 per cent of Cambridge’s rank of professors. You could almost say that Cambridge is just the sort of university that Dr Cofnas admires: one which employs virtually zero per cent of black professors. So, not very woke at all.

Nor does it appear that these supposedly achingly liberal academics are throwing open the doors to admit black students. The latest five-year figures for the university show that 542 places went to students identifying as black—about 4.6 per cent. Private schools continue to be disproportionately successful in winning places. Last year 27.5 per cent of places went to pupils from independent schools. They had a success rate of 21 per cent compared with 15.5 per cent from comprehensives.

I stared at the tables for a long time trying to sniff out wokery, but the data defeated me.

My own experience at the other place—as the head of an Oxford college—was that, while colleagues were keen to make modest changes to allow for the context of an applicant’s background, they were overall extremely wary of anything at all that could be interpreted as “lowering standards”.

There was a particular paranoia about what one might call Marlborough Man—a name I coined after speaking to a fellow college head who had just read an irate letter in the Times protesting at the failure of his Marlborough College-educated son (fees currently £64k a year) even to get an interview at Oxford despite stellar exam grades.

“You see, we have to tread carefully,” said my cautious colleague. “It’s only a matter of time before the system is judicially reviewed. Its ability to behave sufficiently consistently across the piste will be exposed.”

The unspoken Marlborough factor will also be at work at Cambridge: the anticipation that a litigious rejectee (or his parents) might hold the system up to challenge on the grounds that Old Marlburians—and not black or working-class white pupils—are the ones being discriminated against.

Something clearly went badly wrong with the appointment of Arday. Multiple investigations have been launched into Arday’s claims, his background, his research—and into why Cambridge not only appointed him, but also defended him when doubts were raised.

But, just as the parallel story of Dr Cofnas probably tells us very little about Cambridge and its tolerance for obsessive “race realists”, it may be that there was less than meets the eye in the parable of Professor Arday.

But maybe his death can offer us lessons in not rushing to glib judgements; in not joining the unthinking pack; and—above all—in keeping a sense of proportion and plain humanity.

"Rafe Haydel-"Mmm, I've looked him up and I think he may have been on GB News. He has some interesting views on migrants and has branded "diversity" as a "the UK's greatest weakness" and posted the following on X "White privilege? Surely more evidence of black privilege today" Not exactly unbiased IMO.

Oh dear - the venom

I think it’s the page I’ve always been on Maremia.

Just truth.

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MaizieD

petra

Listening to an academic this morning who pointed out that, Cambridge were racist in their decision to give jayson a professorship by lowering their criteria for a pass.
He also pointed out that what other professions have done the same? The Law society, Doctors, pilots, all for diversity.

What academic was that, Petra?

That contentious figure, Rafe Haydel-Mankoo.
What he said struck a cord because his reference to lowering standards was said to me some years ago by a young Nigerian I knew.

I'd also be interested to know which academic made claims that pass rates for doctors, lawyers and pilots bring more black were being lowered to bring more non whites into the professions. I'd also like to see some evidence to support that view. I'm very familiar with medical pass rates and it is basically done by algorithms based on the scores candidates achieve across a spectrum of different tests. IME I doubt very much that it is biased towards any particular group of medics on the basis of colour.

Apparently the investigation has been paused, but only temporarily, out of respect.

Good, we seem to be on the same page for this.

Maremia

Yes to that Lathyrus, and should include investigation into ALL of the other Lecturers previously accused of plagiarism.
I don't know if AI makes it easier to plagiarise
or does it make it easier to detect?

Yes, of course it would have to have that as part of its remit. Accusations and proven instances and the outcomes.

Whatever the findings of an impartial enquiry are there will be people who will not accept it and will challenge its veracity.

They will not be able or will not want to step back from their own opinions and prejudices and say that they were wrong. Thats inevitable. Some people just cant admit to being wrong ever.

But hopefully those actually involved in universities and appointments will be able to take a dispassionate view and make changes.

And maybe some of the personal attacks and invective will be silenced.

That may as much as we can expect but I don't believe that stopping either of the Cambridge enquiries that have been ordered would be if benefit to anyone.

But they must be seen to be open and independent so maybe they need to be taken away from Cambridge?

Yes to that Lathyrus, and should include investigation into ALL of the other Lecturers previously accused of plagiarism.
I don't know if AI makes it easier to plagiarise
or does it make it easier to detect?