The investigation has shifted away from how Arday was hired despite his lack of qualifications.
Cambridge University has decided against investigating how and why the late professor Jason Arday was hired despite his lack of qualifications and will instead look into whether staff offered him sufficient support after he was accused of plagiarizing large sections of his published work and fabricating a series of personal achievements.
Touted as the youngest black Cambridge professor in history when he was hired in 2022, Arday came under significant public scrutiny earlier this year after fellow academics and journalists began surfacing evidence of extensive plagiarism throughout his publication record. That scrutiny extended to Arday’s professed personal biography, which featured staggering athletic achievements and acts of philanthropy.
Arday was found dead in his south London home on August 14, nine days after resigning as a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge. Police on scene described his death as “non-suspicious,” and his family later commented that the “campaign of misinformation was too much” for him.
The day before Arday’s death, Cambridge pledged to investigate “the circumstances around his appointment” in response to evidence that he plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis and made highly dubious claims about his personal life. “That investigation must be thorough and transparent, and will be carried out independently by senior academics from within and beyond Cambridge,” Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice wrote.
In the last month and a half, the investigation has shifted. Instead of looking into how faculty vetted Arday for his prestigious teaching job and why the university downplayed concerns about the veracity of his achievements, Cambridge will investigate if the university did enough to reassure and defend Arday.
Former prosecutor Nazir Afzal, who is tasked with leading the new investigation, said recently that the probe is “not about the allegations made against Professor Arday or about his academic record” and will instead focus on “his welfare, his care, his well-being.”
A panel of experts, “including individuals with lived experience,” will conduct the second half of the investigation. They will focus on the wider context of Arday’s tenure at Cambridge and will examine the mentoring, support arrangements, and response that the university gives professors who become subject to “extraordinary public and media scrutiny.”
The investigation “cannot say why Professor Arday died,” Afzal wrote in a news release announcing the change of direction. “That question belongs to the Coroner, who can compel evidence, who sits in public, and who will reach conclusions I have no business anticipating. Anyone reading this in the hope that I will supply that answer should stop now and wait for the inquest.”
Afzal continued, “What I can do is narrower and still worth doing. I can establish what the University knew about his circumstances, when it knew it, what it did, and whether what it did was reasonable on the information in front of it at the time.”
To conclude, Afzal offered a soft defense of Arday.
“Professor Arday was autistic, he was Black, and he was under a sustained public attack that included ridicule of his personal history,” Afzal wrote. “Any competent review of how an employer supported him has to engage with all three of those facts rather than treating them as context. I have said so explicitly in the scope, because in my experience things that are not written down do not get examined.”
For this revised investigation, Arday may be included in a broader look at university hiring, but the study will not center on the process that led to Arday’s hiring specifically.
Arday claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in three days, and 600 miles in 12 days. He also claimed to have raised more than £5.5 million ($7.2 million) over a 20 year period for more than 70 charities.
As noted in Cambridge’s introductory newsletter for Arday, the professor claimed to be nonverbal until he was 11 and illiterate until he was 18. These claims have since been refuted by a former classmate and a speech professional who worked with him. Beyond their accounts, there is no medical precedent for a person progressing from being nonverbal to earning a Ph.D. within 20 years, as he claims. This oddity should have raised skepticism from a member of Cambridge’s hiring committee, a child psychiatrist who had researched autism.
When allegations of Arday’s plagiarism first surfaced in July, Cambridge described the claims as a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility.” Following his death, a Cambridge professor of developmental psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen, came to his defense, describing Arday as a “caring and generous man,” who had been “portrayed in the media as a plagiarist and a liar and a fraud.”
“He needed and deserved safeguarding and support and reasonable adjustment every step of the way,” Baron-Cohen said.
However, a handful of Cambridge professors who had raised concerns about Arday’s resumé through the year preceding his death were rebuffed by administrators.
A professor at Ghent University who was among the first academics to publicly accuse Arday of plagiarism wrote in July that “Arday and/or Cambridge’s administration are using intimidation and legal threats to squelch the story.”
With the shift of the university’s investigation, Cambridge professors are circulating a letter asking for institutional accountability and an investigation into how faculty and administrators championed Arday’s personal story.