The Big Scholarly Lie

T he Byline Times reports that the academic publisher Taylor and Francis concluded a second probe into Jason Arday that did not substantiate the plagiarism accusations made against him, marking the fourth institutional inquiry to reach the same exculpating conclusion. Thus far, the inquiries have cleared Arday by assessing that he copied text accidentally without malicious intent; the duplicative passages were in portions like the introduction or literature review rather than the central body of the work; he was “autistic,” and therefore something like replication was part of his learning process; and/or he lacked proper supervision from his respective institution. Taylor and Francis reaffirmed its previous findings that Arday’s publication simply required corrections to insert missing citations and quotation marks where relevant, rather than a full retraction.

It is true that there is a spectrum of plagiarism offenses. There’s a big difference between insufficiently paraphrasing another scholar and lifting, verbatim, an entire chapter from another writer. I also think that plagiarism can be a forgivable offense in certain cases: An academic working on a dissertation-length work will have hundreds, if not thousands, of source materials, so it is an understandable human error if one particular citation doesn’t make it into the final version. Maybe a citation is in the bibliography, but just mistakenly didn’t end up in the footnote on the particular page where the specific claim is made. The appropriate remedy, in cases like these, is to issue a correction without banishing the person from academia for eternity. Indeed, a full retraction is not always necessary.

But Arday was a serial plagiarist who routinely lifted material, including research data, from others without proper attribution. In fact, the title of his doctoral dissertation borrows from that of another student. Arday was so incompetent that he managed to introduce a punctuation error in the title, possibly as a result of copying and pasting. His doctoral submission was titled, “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ [sic] to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” And, even if Arday hadn’t lifted a single word from someone else, his scholarship would still be ideological rubbish to advance pro-DEI outcomes. Consider, for instance, how he interviewed just three people to advance the conclusion that universities need affirmative action in hiring. (For National Review’s lengthier treatment of Arday’s research misconduct and fictitious biography, see here.)

It is ridiculous that previous inquiry teams contrived elaborate explanations to excuse Arday’s academic offenses, because he frequently committed textbook plagiarism. Honestly, it is somewhat ridiculous to even convene a review panel of any kind because Arday’s misconduct is so flagrant; to probe whether Arday committed plagiarism is as silly as initiating a systematic review to examine whether water is wet. Despite the fact that we can all see the damning evidence for ourselves, academia is going with The Big Scholarly Lie.

But why would academics circle around Arday to maintain such an obvious and incriminating lie? They do not actually care about Arday. Rather, they want to avoid confessing to their own wrongdoings. The people who granted degrees to him, hired him, promoted him, and published him are also guilty of academic misconduct, or at least professional negligence. Cambridge had previously announced that it would review its appointment of Arday, but since he was found dead after he resigned from his position, the university pivoted. Cambridge will instead examine whether it offered him sufficient support when the media were exposing his sham publications and fabricated personal achievements. In other words, Cambridge is seizing on the tragedy as an opportunity to avoid discovery of a real institutional failure; we can reasonably anticipate that the school will conclude it didn’t do enough to support Arday during the weeks of media heat, and the findings will then be contorted into a justification for more DEI-style initiatives and bureaucracy.

Thankfully, the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) has launched its own independent review into the professorship of Jason Arday, which will hopefully reveal how Cambridge University justified the appointment of someone who was very clearly unfit for the position. Inside Higher Ed reports that CAF seeks to examine the “material change in the language and emphasis of Cambridge’s own review following Arday’s death, which risks prejudging the legitimacy of the scrutiny he faced and displacing questions Cambridge had itself initially identified for investigation.” (Some outlets are already trying to suggest the outcome of this inquiry will be illegitimate because the Committee for Academic Freedom receives at least some funding from Ben Delo, a billionaire who has donated to the right-wing party Reform UK.)

And so academics, universities, and publishers will continue asserting the obvious falsehood that Arday did not plagiarize because to admit anything to the contrary would, in their view, somehow be more embarrassing than maintaining The Big Scholarly Lie. Now, the relevant line of questioning is who enabled and legitimized Arday. The answer, I fear, will be everyone around him in academia.