Plagiarism and a pig’s head: the rise and fall of Jason Arday

0:00Lanre Bakare:This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, the rise and fall of Cambridge University's youngest ever black professor.

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1:18When Cambridge University appoints a new professor, it doesn't usually make headlines around the world. And now to an inspiring story out of the UK. As a child, Jason Arday had the odds... But Jason Arday was different. We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of... He was just 37 when he became Cambridge's youngest ever black professor in 2023, specialising in the sociology of race and education. The reaction has been amazing, and I'm truly grateful to everyone for their kind sentiment. The achievement seemed all the more remarkable because of his incredible backstory.

1:56Born to Ghanaian parents who moved to the UK in the early 1980s, Arday was diagnosed with global development delay and autism spectrum disorder, aged just three. I always had that sense that, OK, there was something different about me. And what my mum was brilliant at was making sure that I understood that that difference is a thing of beauty. He said he hadn't learned to speak until he was 11 and that he couldn't really read or write until he was 18. The period of kind of living non-verbally, to be quite honest, was a privilege. I got to observe and absorb the world in a really unique way that most people don't get to.

2:37So I got to observe. But he defied all expectations. And as his star rose, he received honours usually reserved for celebrities. If someone asked me what has been the highlight of this year, I would say being the guest editor of the Today programme is probably about as good as it gets. But with the publicity came scrutiny. And almost as soon as he began his professorship at Cambridge's Jesus College, the whispers began. Initially, the focus was all on his academic scholarship, with questions over the originality of his PhD and other papers. He was ultimately cleared of plagiarism by his university, with a Cambridge spokesperson last month saying Arday had been, quote, the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.

3:19His critics were racist, said his defendant. A baseless smear campaign against a distinguished black academic isn't just a personal attack. It's an attempt to shut down a black person who has a platform. But the allegations snowballed, and soon every aspect of his remarkable life story was put under the microscope.

3:41On Wednesday night, it all became too much. A prominent Cambridge professor who denies claims of plagiarism has quit his role at the university. Arday resigned, hours after Cambridge said it was investigating his academic qualifications and honorary appointments. But how did this happen? And what does this tell us about how black scholars are treated by academia and the media? Wouldn't it be the most ridiculous story ever told if the boy who couldn't read and write at 18 gets a PhD before he's 30? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus, the downfall of Jason Arday.

4:22Lanre Bakery, you're an arts and culture correspondent for The Guardian, a regular voice on today in Focus. Thanks for coming back to talk to us. Thanks for having me. So I know that you've been looking into the life and times of Jason Arday for some time now, but tell me, when did he first come on your radar? I think the first time I heard about him was in 2023, when he became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge. Like a lot of people, there was a lot of glowing coverage at the time, some big profiles, including in The Guardian. And yes, I started to take in this incredible story.

4:53Yeah. But with that rise came scrutiny and claims really that our day has, I don't know, shall we say a loose relationship with the truth. And there's so much to get through. But let's start with these allegations of plagiarism that were laid against him, which are a big deal for any academic, but particularly somebody from an Oxbridge University. Yeah, they're a massive deal. I mean, if you're a professor and you're accused of plagiarism, and that stood up, then that's one of the only kind of fences that'll get you moved out of that position. It's absolutely massive and the stakes in this story are really, really, really high.

5:27The first place to report these allegations were the Telegraph. So they'd gone back through Professor Arday's PhD, which he completed at Liverpool John Moores University before he started at Cambridge, and found 100 passages which were similar to another PhD which had been completed six years previously. So that's a big story. Presavade and Cambridge came back and said well there's already been an investigation into this through Liverpool John Morse because that's where he conducted the PhD and they found that he didn't commit plagiarism but that explanation did not satisfy a lot of people because when you look at the side-by-side comparison I think to the to a lay person immediately like you look at the passages think well they are remarkably similar yeah I mean his defenders would say listen the person he's accused of plagiarising which is a woman called Paula Zvodziak Myers who's who was a student at Brunel University in London that he cited her multiple multiple times in this PhD so it wasn't like he was stealing without acknowledgement but would you say that the level of similarity suggested it had gone beyond just being influenced by somebody?

6:33I get to the to the lay person yes I mean I think if it was an academic there's a slightly different um a different bar maybe or it's judged in a slightly different way but I think to people coming to this complete ecology will look at it and say well hang on what's happened here and it's important to point out I think as well that there've been other accusations of of plagiarism leveled at Professor Arde earlier in his career and corrections have been made to journal articles where he'd not cited people in the correct way so there was some there was some precedent there but yeah his his work was intensely scrutinized.

7:04And how did he respond to these allegations of plagiarism?

7:07Lanre Bakare:well he said he hadn't been properly supervised so the implication there was that perhaps he hadn't conducted the phd in the way he might have wanted to if he was if he was supervised better but it wasn't necessarily his fault he also explained the the issues by saying that it was caused by in part by his his autism and as part of that condition he used mimicry a lot so that was one of the reasons he used to explain what happened with the phd right okay so as you say both cambridge University and Liverpool John Moores carried out an investigation. They cleared him. But they actually went further than clearing him, didn't they?

7:43There was a statement that a spokesperson from Cambridge made to an online outfit last month, sort of suggesting that he'd been the victim of vicious smears. And his defenders were saying, listen, this is all motivated by racism. And I think when we discuss that, it's probably worth us talking about where some of these plagiarism claims were coming from and who they were coming from. So who was the main person who

8:06Lanre Bakare:was raising these concerns so before the telegraph piece there was a substack post by an academic called nathan kofnus who used to be at cambridge but in 2024 he became embroiled in a freedom of speech row at the university because he'd written a blog post in which he claimed that in a true meritocracy there would be no black professors at harvard um and that black people would be almost exclusively represented in sports and entertainment um he defines himself as a race realist i think I think a lot of people would look at his views and describe them as racist. And he's since left Cambridge. After the blog post, there was an investigation into Nathan Kofnus, but he was not found guilty of discrimination.

8:49Yeah, and I think the university concluded that his views, quote, well, were seen by many as offensive, didn't breach the law and didn't contravene university regulations designed to uphold free speech. And he then moved to a Belgian university. was he the only one who was gunning for Arde at the time? There was another professor down in Plymouth, a man called David Harris, who'd, before Coughness and separately, completely independently of Coughness, had been going through Professor Arde's work. He'd sent FOIs, he'd been emailed in Cambridge, he'd also emailed and asked questions to journals who'd published Professor Arde.

9:24He'd raised issues with his work about citation and potential plagiarism. Do you think that the claims against him, when it simply comes to the academic plagiarism, are reasonable? Because I know that you have spoken to a number of other prominent academics who've looked into it as well, those who have not been obsessed with the idea that black people, you know, in a meritocracy would not be able to rise to the top of academia. Yeah, yeah, professors who don't have an agenda for sure. Yeah, so I spoke to quite a few academics and people who focus on the same areas that Professor Arde does, so sociology, and they did say that there looks like there's a case to answer you.

10:07These claims do look legitimate. It is not just a racist campaign to bring down Professor Arde. Someone in his position, which is such a prominent academic position within the country, his work should be able to be scrutinised. And actually, when people are saying, you know, the level of scrutiny is completely out of control. Is it for a professor of sociology at Cambridge, the chair of that in that position? You know, these academics argue that, no, that wasn't the case and that actually the work should be looked at. Right. OK. And when these allegations sort of hit the mainstream a couple of weeks ago, they were on the front page of the Telegraph.

10:44And I just wonder what you make of the tone and the prominence that were given to those allegations initially. Yeah, I think it's interesting to kind of, it's important to look out and zoom out and look at the context. I think Kofnus, obviously, you could look at his background and say there's an agenda here. I think with the Telegraph putting this on the front page and turn it into a massive story very early on. I mean, Jason Arday did make headlines around the world when he was appointed, but he's not really a household name. He's not a superstar academic. Yeah, he's not Professor Brian Cox, is he?

11:17Exactly. He's nowhere near that level. And I mean, The Telegraph over the last kind of six months have gone after several prominent black figures with criticisms about their behaviour, especially if they're in publicly funded bodies. And I think this kind of reporting and the level of enthusiasm for this story from not just The Telegraph, but also GB News and the Daily Mail, I think is part of a pattern of behaviour by those papers.

11:53And after the initial plagiarism allegations were on the front page of The Telegraph, followed up by many other media outlets, Arday claims that he was the victim of a smear campaign. And he said in an interview, we're talking about academia here. I didn't murder somebody. I think the cruelty I've experienced and the positioning of me as some kind of liar and fantasist is totally unacceptable. And he did find some pretty high profile support, didn't he, initially.

12:20Lanre Bakare:Yeah, there was an open letter that was put together by the Good Law Project and that I think at the current time has had 16 ,000 signatures to it, including some very, very prominent names, Professor Cain de Andrews who focuses on black studies, also John McDonnell and Zach Polanski are obviously very prominent politicians. Yeah, and the letter said that this was, quote, an orchestrated and grim effort to delegitimize a brilliant young working class academic for the sin of being successful while black. But the questions surrounding him go way beyond simply plagiarism and academia, don't they?

12:56And you're not an education correspondent. How did you get involved in this story? Yeah, I was approached by an academic, someone who isn't Professor Arday, who said, look, there's this story involving this professor. And this person outlined what Professor Arday had told them. I then got in touch with Professor Arde and we had a series of interviews in which he told me about what he alleged was happening to him. Hi, Henry. How's it going? You all right?

13:25Lanre Bakare:Hey, Jason. I'm fine. Yeah. How are you? All right. All right. Busy. Busy. But all right. All right. How's things going? You all right? And he broke that down into two parts, really. The first part was a campaign of kind of academic harassment or intimidation. people going through his work asking questions about many many details and seemingly just trying to find something that they could that they could kind of blow up and turn into an issue for him the second part of it which was more dramatic and probably well definitely more concerning was a campaign of physical intimidation that he said he'd been um suffering so he said that a bullet had been sent through the post to his cambridge address he said banana had been sent to his post at his Cambridge address that a substance marked as poisonous had been sent to him.

14:11He also said that there'd been two breakings into his faculty building in the university in which a masked man had managed to get into his office and threaten him twice, the second time with a knife. And he also said that a severed pig's head had been sent to his parents' house in South London. Yeah, goodness. I mean, these are really quite startling claims. At that point, those claims had not been published anywhere else in the media. So he's telling you this, and what are you thinking at the time? I mean, when he initially told me, I thought this is an absolutely massive story. Easily the biggest thing that I will have worked on up to that point.

14:44But first and foremost, we needed to obviously figure out, you know, could we stand up some of these allegations? Yeah. And so how did you go up trying to stand up what Arday had told you? So through the interviews, I gradually got more and more details about what Professor Arday was saying. So the stuff about the academic intimidation, there was a paper trail for that, which was pretty well established. and I think whether or not you describe it as academic harassment or fair scrutiny, that's a debate, but there was definitely something solid there that we could have worked with. The second side of it, the pig's head, the bullet in the post, I started to go through these things one by one and talk to Professor Rade about them.

15:19The first thing to say was that Professor Rade didn't have any pictures of any of this stuff. So he didn't have a picture of the bullet, he didn't have a picture of the poisonous substance, he didn't have a picture of the banana, he didn't have a picture of the severed pig's head, which was slightly worrying but he explained that away by saying he didn't want these things on his phone and they were deeply disturbing and that's why he'd never taken the images of those things but then I started to probe at the details that he had told me so he told me that the first break-in had happened fairly shortly after he'd started in the department So back in 2023?

15:51Yeah and that obviously it caused a stir internally senior management were informed the security team were informed and he'd had a panic alarm installed in his room and an advanced CCTV had been put in place. And he told me this person managed to get in and get out without being seen by anybody else on the first occasion. Then on the second occasion, a person managed to get in again, and it's worth pointing out, he thinks it was the same man. It was a man about six foot tall, and he wore a snood to cover his face. And he managed to get into his office again on the second occasion, this time produced a knife and threatened Professor Arde with this knife, saying if he didn't back away from his position in Cambridge, that he'd come back.

16:30So they asked him what happened after that. He said he pressed a panic alarm in his room. And then I said, well, what happened? And he said, nothing. Nothing happened. No one came in. The police didn't come in. The security team didn't come in. No one came in. So what did you do then? And he said, well, I carried on with my working day. I went and conducted a PhD fiver a couple of hours after this incident. So I said, so you're telling me that this person broke in with a knife, got into your office, threatened you, You carried on working and more shockingly, you didn't tell anyone else in the faculty that there's a mass man walking around with a knife in your department.

17:07And he said, no, I didn't. So I had serious concerns about that story, which didn't seem to add up. I checked with Cambridge about what should happen when the alarm was pressed. They said there would be a signal would be triggered that would go to a room that was manned 24 hours a day and should have been manned at that time. and then when it comes to the bullet, the poisonous substance and the severed pig's head, I kind of probed a little bit on that and Jason had told me that the police had been able to track this bullet that had been sent to him but he'd also told me it had been thrown away.

17:40So I asked him how he'd done that and he said, oh, well, the police tracked the post and figured out that something had been sent to me which didn't really make sense and then I started asking more questions about the severed pig's head which had been sent to his parents' house. And Jason had told me that the police had investigated this. And what they'd been able to do is go round to the local butchers in South London and ask them if they'd sold a pig in the intervening weeks. And he said that one had told the police officer that they had on the morning that this pig's head was discovered. So I had the name of the officer.

18:13I knew what the name of the butchers were. And I just went and asked them. And what did they say? um the butchers as you might expect were pretty confused as to why a journalist was asking him

18:24Lanre Bakare:about this stuff so specific details on that were that jason said that the officer had told him that they'd sold a whole pig so it wasn't just it wasn't just a pig said it was a whole pig and the butcher that i spoke to he was like do you know how much a pig weighs and i said no it was like between about 70 and 85 kilograms so you need three people to get it out of the shop you need a spit you need a specially designed van to kind of hang it off. It's like a big production. They also cost about 300 quid. So yeah, they were sceptical as to whether or not someone would do that. And yeah, they confirmed that they'd never spoke to a police officer about a whole pig or a severed pig's head or anything like that.

19:04And the police came back and confirmed that categorically that story did not happen. The officer didn't investigate the severed pig's head because technically Jason had never reported it to them. Even though I had my doubts, it was a complete gobsmacking moment. I remember speaking to the officer on the phone and just there with my mouth open thinking,

19:26Lanre Bakare:I cannot believe he's told me this and it doesn't stack up at all. So at that point, I think I was pretty stunned and obviously came back, spoke to my editor at the Guardian and we sat down and had a chat about it and what we were going to do with the story. And we realised it was a completely different story that we were involved in.

19:57Let's talk about some of the other things that Arde has claimed over the years. Claims that, again, just don't seem to stack up. And there are so many, we actually can't, we don't have time to go through them all. But one of the most remarkable ones is to do with his claim to have run marathons and raised a huge amount of money for charity. Tell us about that.

20:20Lanre Bakare:Yeah, so in various interviews and live events that Professor Ades has done over the years, he's made various claims about his fundraising, which started way before he became a name in academia. He started fundraising when he was 17, so he was still at college. but he said in interviews before that he's raised between well the number oscillates between 5 million and 5.5 million for around 70 charities over a 20 year period so a serious amount of money, I mean that is a vast amount of money for someone who's not famous to raise, it must be pointed out and in 2012 when he was interviewed he said by the time he was 50 he hoped to raise about 250 grand which would still be a really really impressive feat so yeah, Professor Rade said that he'd ran 30 marathons in 35 days which is impressive not impossible obviously but very very impressive but the thing that made that story stand out was that he'd he'd met Andy Murray in 2012 right tennis player yeah as part of the surprise surprise uh tv show they'd arranged this meeting because Jason had been a torchbearer for the 2012 Olympics in part because of his charity work and And he told Andy Murray, who repeated this story to a journalist, that he'd had an epileptic seizure during one of his marathon runs and suffered a hairline fracture of his leg, of his fibula.

21:42Right, so broken his leg basically.

21:44Lanre Bakare:Well, yeah. I mean, it's like a stress fracture, very, very serious. But he hadn't stopped running. He still had nine more marathons to complete. So he said that he completed these marathons despite having a hairline fracture in his leg. and he said that he used painkillers and variously he said he also used ice baths as well. And Andy Murray repeated that story and actually said it inspired him ahead of some of his tennis matches. Right, okay. And at the time, was anybody doing the maths and thinking, hang on a minute, there are very, very few top-level runners, endurance runners, who could complete this feat even if they weren't injured?