At the end of the annual equity, diversity and belonging lecture at Oxford’s Department of Education, on October 30, 2025, Jason Arday said something self-deprecating. He said his papers do not change anybody’s life. His actions do. He had said a version of it several times that evening, and he says it in most of his talks.
The chair then closed the event by thanking him and adding that she would like to say she believes his research is really changing people’s lives, one hundred percent.
He was performing modesty, which is the required move for the guest. She was rejecting the modesty, which is the required move for the host. If she had accepted his account of his own work, the evening would have ended with a senior academic agreeing that a Cambridge professor’s research is worthless, and the wine reception would have been strange.
That thirty seconds is the whole subject of this essay, and it is funnier than anything I could invent.
I used AI today to speed through the transcripts of twelve Youtube recordings of Arday between 2020 and 2025, hosted by Oxford colleges, Cambridge departments, a national broadcaster, learned societies, a physics faculty, a research council programme, an academic publisher and two podcasts. In none of them does any host ask a checkable question about a factual claim.
In October 2021 or 2022, at a Black History Month event hosted by the University of Bath’s culture and inclusion team and chaired by a vice-president who is also a UNESCO chair, Arday said he had been part of a programme called Seven Up, and described its format: they follow you over the duration of your life, at seven, fourteen, twenty-one. He said he was pulled out at fourteen. He was born in 1985. The series began following its subjects in 1964. It is among the most famous documentaries in British television history and its participants are named on a Wikipedia page.
The check takes eight seconds. Nobody ran it. Not that day, and not in the years the recording sat online.
Consider what else was said in those rooms.
At an EDI Caucus seminar in September 2023, chaired by Arday, Professor Kate Sang argued that the central weakness of equality and diversity research is that lived experience gets substituted for method. There is a tendency in this work, she said, for non-evidence-based practices to happen, and for people to assume that being affected by something means they know everything about it. She wanted the field recognised as expertise underpinned by robust theory and real empirical work. She then named Athena SWAN as an example of people doing the work without the expertise, noted it had not moved gender representation in the sciences, and observed that a number of white men who chaired Athena SWAN panels had progressed to professorships off the back of it.
That is as sharp a critique of a field as you will find anywhere, delivered inside the field, on the record, by one of its senior figures. Arday agreed with it and extended it to race and class.
Or take Harshad Keval, interviewed by Arday for Sage in April 2025, whose book argues that universities are narcissistic structures requiring the constant reproduction of an idealised image bounced back at them: facades that make an institution look liberal and equality-based while excluding anyone who fails to reflect back what the system needs.
Or take Arday, who in April 2020 said that academia is people telling people how good they are, matched by people telling them how good they are, so that nobody ever engages in any honesty.
These are not credulous people. Their critical faculties are in excellent working order. Sang can spot an unearned expertise claim at fifty yards. Keval can describe institutional self-flattery in clinical detail. Arday can describe the validation loop he is standing inside.
The faculty was operational. It was pointed at everything in the room except the man at the front.
So the question is not why they were fooled. It is what determines where scrutiny gets spent.
David Pinsof, David Sears and Martie Haselton set out the account in their Alliance Theory paper, and the line that matters is this: motivated reasoning is less a cognitive shortcoming than an signal of loyalty. If you do not trust your friends’ side of the story, they may not consider you a true friend. If you do not trust your fellow partisans’ account, they may not count you a true ally.
The failure to check was not a lapse in the operation of the room. It was one of the room’s functions.
Checking is cheap. Believing is what costs. A vice-president who googles her guest’s claims during a Black History Month event has produced nothing of value to anybody. A vice-president who introduces him as truly inspiring, calls his journey remarkable, thanks him for his honesty and courage, and circulates the recording to students has spent something and signalled something, and everyone present can see it.
The eight-second check was not skipped because it was hard. It was skipped because running it cost.
Pinsof and colleagues name three propagandistic biases that people apply to allies.
The attributional bias holds that we assign our allies’ advantages to internal causes and their disadvantages to external ones. Watch it operate. Arday’s achievements are attributed to will, determination, refusal to accept limits, an indomitable will. His obstacles are attributed to structural racism, institutional whiteness, a system built to exclude. Nobody in eleven recordings suggests that any part of his rise involved luck, though he says it himself on Channel 4, or that any part of any difficulty involved him.
Now run the same bias on a rival and you get the mirror. When Nathan Cofnas produced textual comparisons, the response was not to examine the comparisons but to attribute them: a race realist, a man with motives, part of a playbook. His finding was assigned to an external cause, which is his bad character, and Arday’s career was assigned to an internal one, which is his merit. Same operation, opposite signs, one coalition.
Pinsof lists the components of the perpetrator bias and the list reads like a summary of the defence mounted in 2026. People rationalise their allies’ transgressions by downplaying personal responsibility, emphasising mitigating circumstances, embellishing good intentions and minimising the severity of harm.
The Liverpool John Moores panel of March 2026 found that the citation problems amounted to honest and reasonable error, that the overlap fell within the accepted standards of the time, and that the supervisory team had been depleted. That is responsibility downplayed, circumstances mitigated, and harm minimised, in a single document. Arday told the Times he was accountable for his mistakes and that he had not murdered anybody, which is good intentions embellished and harm minimised in one sentence. Thirteen thousand people signed a letter saying the allegations were entirely false, which upgrades a finding of excusable error into a finding of no error at all.
I am on the other side of Arday’s coalition. I am a tribalist, a nationalist and a traditionalist, and I have disliked the crowd in these videos for years, and the theory I have just used to explain them applies to me.
I do not follow anybody on social media who consistently causes me pain, however much merit they have. When I engage with the other side’s arguments, I do it deliberately, for a limited period, with the psychic armour strapped on, and then I stop. My capacity to consider things fairly is finite, degrades under distress, and has to be rationed like any other scarce good.
The difference between me and the room at Oxford is smaller than I would like. They spent their scrutiny where it was cheap and withheld it where it hurt. So do I.
Pinsof’s paper is symmetrical on purpose. Both sides claim to be motivated by honesty, altruism and love, and both sides claim their opponents are motivated by selfishness, dishonesty and hate, and since both cannot be right, the parsimonious reading is that both are propaganda.
The reason my side noticed the Seven Up claim and Rajani Naidoo did not is not that we are smarter than a UNESCO chair. It is that we are outside the coalition, and outsiders audit while insiders vouch.
What is at stake here is certification.
Watch what these events are for. A UNESCO chair and a vice-president confer standing. An Oxford college confers standing. Channel 4 confers standing. The British Sociological Association confers standing. A Sage book series and a Princeton imprint confer standing. And certified claims then travel: the Leading Routes work that Arday cites and contributed to went to the research councils and produced an eight-million-pound funding competition. Parliamentary records show a minister meeting academics about the harassment of Black academics on September 15, 2025. He advised parliamentarians for years. He sat, as he put it, in committee room 14 of the House of Commons explaining why research should influence policy.
That is the coercive power, and runs through certification. A claim becomes policy-eligible when institutions with standing have vouched for it, and vouching is a coalitional act performed by people with coalitional interests, using a scrutiny budget allocated coalitionally.
This is why the Cofnas material could not travel until the Guardian ran it, and why the Guardian could only run it once Paula Zwozdiak-Myers gave the story a wronged party the register was permitted to pity. The finding had been available for a year. It could not be certified.
A coalition holds the certifying institutions. Certification is the route from claim to policy. People outside the coalition have no route.
Arday’s coalition accepted his story because it was convenient, and they will discard him when that option becomes more convenient.
Now the comedy.
The Oxford EDI Caucus seminar of September 2023 opens with the convener acknowledging the lack of racial diversity on the panel and noting that other forms of diversity are present but not immediately visible. It is an accessibility seminar. Two minutes later she explains that they were unable to secure a BSL interpreter.
At Kellogg College in October 2021, Shreya Atrey introduces Arday by announcing that she is not going to introduce him, then introduces him, then hands to Yasmin Khan who introduces him again. Somewhere in there she observes that change is not a word which is very popular in Oxford, but it is nice to say it sometimes.
On the Next Pivot Point podcast in September 2025, after Arday has described the exhaustion of doing this work, the host says she feels she needs to send him a Groupon for a spa day.
At Oxford Physics in March 2021, a question comes in reading, in its entirety, “what about physics?” The host, Alex Ramadan, says she is not entirely sure what is being asked but is going to interpret it how she wants to interpret it, delivers a short speech about her department, and concludes that even though the questioner asked a question she does not understand, she thinks she has answered it. This is the most honest thing anyone says in eleven recordings.
The Neurodivergent Show, in March 2023, is where it stops being funny. The host, a mother of autistic children, plays a clip of Arday’s TEDx talk, weeps, says “there is hope” eight times in ninety seconds, and then, describing his childhood, says: we knew what we were dealing with, so we got him into therapy, we got him into everything. She has never met him. She learned about him from a friend who sent a video on Instagram. Within a month of the Cambridge announcement, a life story had travelled from a keynote to a broadcast to a mother deciding what to do about her own child, through four hops, with no verification point anywhere along the chain, and she is now telling parents who do not follow her advice that she is sorry for the future of their kids.
That is what the certification chain looks like at the far end, and it is why the eight-second check was not a trivial thing to skip.
The experts worth following on any contested question are the ones with low coalitional exposure, and they are rare in every camp and unpopular in all of them. David Sanders at Purdue, who read a dossier and reported what was in it. Kate Sang, telling a room full of allies that their field substitutes lived experience for method. John Preston at Essex, saying the evidence lines up into a case to answer. Benjamin Ryan, going through the Internet Archive on his own time. James Richards, who responded to his son’s autism diagnosis by finding the literature under-evidenced and going and doing a postgraduate certificate and publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, which is the road not taken in this entire story.
Notes
The certification chain
The Leading Routes research on Black British students and research council funding, and the figure of roughly thirty studentships out of thirty thousand going to Black Caribbean students, is described by Arday at roughly 4:45 in the Oxford Physics talk, where he credits Paulette Williams, Chantelle Lewis and Sukhi Bath and says he was part of the work. The Telegraph, July 25, 2026, reports the parliamentary record of Jacqui Smith meeting academics about the harassment of Black academics on September 15, 2025: https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/cambridge-diversity-poster-boy-plagiarism-134658961.html
The 2026 findings
The March 2026 panel conclusions on honest and reasonable error, the accepted standards of the time, and the depleted supervisory team are reported by Fiona Hamilton and Emma Yeomans, The Times, July 31, 2026: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/jason-arday-university-cambridge-plagiarism-kwfk6sm6c The solidarity letter stating that the allegations were entirely false: https://goodlawproject.org/petition/stand-in-solidarity-with-jason-arday/ The sixty-three page dossier and David Sanders’s independent review: https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/
The Youtube videos
In order of recording: “Decolonising HE: Doing the ‘work’ as a person of colour,” MA Education Consultancy, April 2020. “Challenges & Changes: Dr Jason Arday,” Department of Physics, University of Oxford, March 2021. “BAME Awarding Gap Keynote Lecture,” UCL Outreach, March 2021. “Black History Month Lecture: Academia is a Crossfire Hurricane,” Kellogg College, Oxford, October 2021. “Inspiration and Courage: Jason Arday in Conversation with Rajani Naidoo,” University of Bath Race Equality Taskforce. “Jason Arday – Things Can Only Get Better,” Society for Experimental Biology, recorded December 2022. “Ep 14 – The Life of Dr. Jason Arday,” The Neurodivergent Show, March 3, 2023. “EDICa Seminar: In Conversation With Workstream Leads,” EDI Caucus, recorded September 19, 2023. “Social Science for Social Justice?,” Surviving Society, February 2024. “Whiteness, Racial Trauma, and the University,” Sage, April 2025. “Pushing back Against the Zeitgeist,” Next Pivot Point, September 2025. “EDB Lecture: This Is A Low,” Department of Education, University of Oxford, October 30, 2025. The Channel 4 interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy, September 2023, is a twelfth.
