From Retraction Watch:

In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thesis and several journal articles. In one of the articles, the borrowed text appeared in quotes from subjects the professor, Jason Arday, claimed to have interviewed himself.

But after Arday enlisted Carter-Ruck, one of the United Kingdom’s leading defamation law firms, to send Times Higher Education a letter, the publication spiked the story, according to three sources who spoke to Retraction Watch.

One of the sources was David Sanders, a biochemist at Purdue University in Indiana, and a sleuth who contributes to the Times Higher Educationon topics related to academic misconduct. He reviewed a 63-page dossier of text comparisons prepared by the publication last year and came back with his own findings. “There is no question that there is extensive plagiarism,” Sanders told us.…

Harris wanted to know if Arday could explain some “puzzling similarities” between sentences in that article and a BMJ Open study from epidemiologist Anjum Memon about mental health services in Black and minority communities. Arday ignored his first email, but when Harris followed up several days later, Arday was blunt. “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,” he wrote. Arday told Harris not to contact him again: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

Harris soon recruited a colleague, Martyn Hammersley, a sociologist at Open University, to review the Social Sciences article himself, and he, too, was concerned. On May 19, 2023, Hammersley sent an email to Hilary Cremin, the Head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, and to Rhys Morgan, the university’s Head of Policy, Governance, and Integrity:

> There is substantial plagiarism from one source, and some from another. It is also the case that a considerable portion of the article follows the structure of the paper by Memon et al: even where their words are not used exactly, these are paraphrased (though also elaborated). It even looks as if a couple of the quotations from informants may have been derived from Memon et al. Both of these articles are cited by Arday, but the quotes from them are unattributed.

https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/

Also sharing articles from the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and National Post, for those of few who want to look beyond the Guardian/NYT/WaPo/Al Jazeera echochamber.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/31/cambridge-bosses-face-staff-revolt-diversity-poster-boy/

https://spectator.com/article/professor-arday-is-the-gift-that-keeps-on-giving/

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/dei-meltdown-at-a-british-university-shows-why-we-need-more-skepticism

And let’s be blunt: a BA from Surrey, MA from St Mary’s and PhD from Liverpool John Moores? Are others with degree from such low-ranked universities hired by them? And being fast-tracked to professorship at such a young age and with much fewer publications than his peers?

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