Both sides of the Jason Arday affair are making the same error.
One camp holds that Arday was selected for destruction because he is Black and autistic, and treats that as an answer to whether he plagiarized. The other holds that his thesis contains dozens of unattributed near-verbatim passages, and treats that as an answer to whether he was selected. Neither follows. A man can be singled out and guilty. The selection question and the truth question are separate, they have separate evidence, and every participant in this story has been using one to avoid the other.
Sort them and the useful questions appear. Some of them are for Simon Baron-Cohen (b. 1958), whose intervention was the strangest thing in the case. Some are for Cambridge, which investigated one academic for eighteen months over an essay and declined for two years to look at documented plagiarism in another. Some are for the people who turned out to be right about the facts, and who have not yet been asked to defend their explanation of them.
Start with the autism claim, because everything Baron-Cohen said rests on it.
On X he wrote: “In 2014 we published the first large-scale study of suicidality in autism, subsequently widely replicated, revealing that 1 in 4 autistic people have planned or attempted suicide. That’s why I’m very concerned about the impact of the media coverage on Professor Jason Arday who is autistic. He has been accused of plagiarism and he was cleared of any academic misconduct following a rigorous investigation by Liverpool John Moores University. And yet he continues to be systematically discredited over every detail of his life, daily. We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards. However, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues. This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues. It’s time to stop.”
Baron-Cohen stated Arday was autistic, without qualification, as a fact. He is the director of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, knighted for services to people with autism, and this year’s Grawemeyer laureate in psychology. When that man asserts a diagnosis, the assertion carries evidentiary weight that no journalist’s assertion carries, and it is understood by every reader to be more than a report of what the subject says about himself.
So the question is what it rests on. If Baron-Cohen has clinically assessed Arday, he has a professional relationship with the man he publicly defended, and he should have disclosed it, and he cannot discuss the findings without consent. If he has not assessed him, he is repeating a self-report, and that says something about his judgment and credibility.
I have sent two emails to Baron-Cohen. So far, no response.
The stakes are higher than they look, because the diagnosis is not separable from the biography in dispute. Arday’s public story runs that he was diagnosed with autism at three, could not speak until eleven, and could not read or write until eighteen. They are the claims that made the appointment a story in the first place, and they are among the claims that fell apart. A defense mounted on the autism cannot bracket the parts of the autism narrative that are contested. Which parts does Baron-Cohen vouch for, and on what basis?
The second question concerns the structure of his argument.
He cited his 2014 finding that one in four autistic people have planned or attempted suicide, said he could not stand by while an autistic man on the ground continued to be kicked, and called it a safeguarding matter.
Now ask what the argument licenses. If publicising documented misconduct by an autistic person creates a safeguarding risk that should stop the publication, the principle applies to every autistic student accused of plagiarism, every autistic defendant, every autistic employee under investigation. Baron-Cohen has spent forty years arguing that autistic people possess full moral agency, that they are systematizers rather than incompetents, and that treating them as fragile is its own form of contempt. The defense he mounted implies the opposite of his own position. Where is the line, and does he hold that an autistic academic bears the same accountability for plagiarism as anyone else?
Yuan Yi Zhu made the practical version of the point. If the concern was a vulnerable man’s mental state, the letter circulated under the heading urging colleagues to sign an anti-racism letter for Jason Arday, warning of a coming public attack, was calculated to raise the temperature rather than lower it. A man is safest when the questions get answered quickly. Accusing the questioners of racism guarantees that they will not be.
Baron-Cohen signed the Good Law Project petition:
Stand in solidarity with Jason Arday
Jason is the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history. Rightwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of plagiarism. We can’t let them. Stand up to their hate and division by adding your name.
We, the undersigned, are appalled by the sustained and malicious attacks on the academic integrity of Professor Jason Arday.
Entirely false allegations of plagiarism were made against Professor Arday and referred to two universities. Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing. The relevant academic journals also found no basis for the claims.
Yet despite these unequivocal findings, rightwing media have attempted to smear Professor Arday’s reputation and undermine his career. That should concern everyone who believes in academic freedom, fairness and due process.
It is difficult to ignore the question of motivation. When a distinguished Black academic is repeatedly subjected to baseless allegations after being fully exonerated, it signals there is an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.
Professor Arday, a working class Black man, became the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His remarkable journey, scholarship and leadership should be celebrated, not overshadowed by campaigns built on allegations that have been comprehensively rejected.
Professor Arday has contributed to public life for many years, building a distinguished record of charitable and community service. This latest smear campaign and the spread of misinformation are deeply alarming – not only because of the impact on one individual, but because of the message they send to aspiring Black and Brown young people who seek to attain positions of leadership.
The demonisation of Professor Arday, and recently on Misan Harriman, risks creating a chilling effect, signalling that success and public service may be met with hostility, misrepresentation, and disproportionate scrutiny.
We stand in unwavering solidarity with Professor Arday. We call on universities not only to defend academic freedom and robust scholarship, but also to confront racism wherever it manifests itself, whether overtly or through persistent attempts to discredit exceptional Black academics.
There can be no place in higher education for campaigns that weaponise baseless accusations to damage reputations and careers. Universities must ensure that excellence is protected and that every scholar is judged on the merit of their work, not the colour of their skin.
The third question belongs to Liverpool John Moores University.
Baron-Cohen told the public that Arday was cleared of academic misconduct following a rigorous investigation by LJMU. He used that clearance as the ground for saying the plagiarism accusations had been dealt with. The thesis in question was awarded there in 2015.
Nobody outside LJMU knows what that investigation covered, when it ran, who conducted it, what software it used, or whether it examined the passages later identified. Baron-Cohen characterised it in public. LJMU can say whether the characterisation is accurate. Until it does, an institution holds the single document that would settle whether one of Britain’s most decorated scientists was passing on a finding or passing on a claim.
So the question to LJMU: publish the scope. And to Baron-Cohen: what did he know about that investigation before he cited it, and did he read the report or take the conclusion?
The fourth question is for Cambridge.
Cambridge placed Nathan Cofnas under investigation for eighteen months over a Substack essay. During roughly the same period, an academic named Dave Harris brought documented concerns about Arday’s work to Cambridge administrators and to journals, and was brushed aside. A journalist at Times Higher Education pursuing the plagiarism received a letter from a defamation firm. A university spokesman described the questioning of Arday as a vile campaign to undermine his credibility. Cambridge opened an investigation in August 2026, and it did so after other universities publicly denied the affiliations Arday claimed with them.
Set aside every view anyone holds about Cofnas’s opinions. The comparison is about process, and the process ran fast against one man over an argument and slow against another over documents. So: what is Cambridge’s threshold for opening an investigation, stated as a rule rather than as an outcome? Why did Harris’s complaint not meet it? What did the appointing committee read in 2023, given that the candidate had moved from senior lecturer in 2018 to a Cambridge chair in five years, and did anyone on that committee read the thesis? Who authorised the vile campaign statement, on what evidence, and does the university stand by it now?
Jesus College has opened its own inquiry. It should say whether the inquiry covers the fellowship decision as well as the fellow.
The fifth question is Arday’s.
He told the Times that the reason it was him is aligned to ableism and racism. The reflexive answer is that the documents are the documents. That answer is a category mistake. The documents establish what he did. They establish nothing about why he, among all the people who have done comparable things, became the subject of a global story.
Test the claim. Look for cases with similar documentary substance and dissimilar consequences. Neri Oxman (b. 1976), whose MIT dissertation was found in 2023 to contain unattributed passages, apologised and the story died within days. Claudine Gay (b. 1970) resigned the Harvard presidency over allegations of comparable technical seriousness. Both investigations came from the political right. One subject is white, one is Black, and the outcomes ran opposite ways. That is one data point in each direction and it is not a study, which is the point: nobody has assembled the comparison class, and everyone is arguing as though the answer is obvious.
Arday can be right about selection and wrong about substance at the same time, and that his critics can be right about substance while having no account of selection. Cofnas found the story because a whistleblower brought it to a man with a public grievance against Cambridge and a platform. That is a fact about how the story surfaced, and it is compatible with everything in the story being true.
The sixth question is for the people who were right.
Cofnas argues that Arday is what DEI produces. The claim needs a control. In the same interview he said there are thousands of academics across the Western world publishing in the same journals, doing work just as useless, who receive tenure and teach students. If that is true, then the audit method that caught Arday would catch a great many people who were not diversity appointments, and the DEI explanation loses most of its force. It would then be an explanation of why nobody checked rather than of why he was hired, which is a different and smaller claim.
That smaller claim may be the right one. It also implicates a chain of institutions with no interest in race: a doctoral supervisor who did not run plagiarism software available to any academic for a decade, examiners who passed the thesis, peer reviewers at multiple journals, four universities that promoted him, and a hiring committee at Cambridge. Every one of those failures is a failure of ordinary diligence. So the question is: what proportion of the failure survives if you remove race from the account, and how would anyone tell?
The second question for the critics concerns their own standard. Cofnas called this the most extreme case of plagiarism in the history of academia. The superlative is unfalsifiable, unnecessary to his case, and exactly the kind of unsupported magnitude claim he spends his career attacking in others. A man who demands that opponents distinguish the existence of an effect from its size should not reach for the largest available adjective when the documents are strong enough without it.
The last question is for the signatories and the publisher.
A reported fourteen thousand people signed a letter defending Arday’s academic integrity. Almost none of them read the thesis. The question to each is what evidence they reviewed before lending their name, and what finding would cause them to withdraw it. An answer of none to the first and nothing to the second describes a coalition signal rather than a judgment, and there is no shame in saying so, but it should be said.
Simon and Schuster’s 37 Ink still has Arday’s memoir scheduled. A memoir is sold to readers as an account of what happened. The claims now in dispute are the claims the book is built on. What verification did the publisher perform, what does it intend to do now, and if the answer is nothing on both counts, does it hold that a memoir carries no factual warranty at all?
None of these questions has an answer anyone can predict, which is the test. The ones being asked instead have answers everybody knew a month ago. Whether Arday plagiarised is settled by documents anyone can read. Whether DEI is bad is a question people arrived with. What remains unknown is what LJMU’s investigation actually examined, what Cambridge’s appointing committee actually read, what Baron-Cohen’s assertion of a diagnosis actually rests on, and whether the failure that produced a Cambridge chair in 2023 is a failure of racial ideology or a failure of the ordinary checks that were supposed to run and did not. Those are answerable. Somebody with the standing to demand answers should demand them, and the institutions holding the documents should stop waiting for the attention to move on.
Gordon Rayner writes for the Daily Telegraph July 24, 2026:
Supporters of Prof Arday became aware last year of questions about his academic legitimacy, and responded with furious accusations of racism.
Prof Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of Cambridge’s autism research centre, and cousin of the comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen, and Ricardo Sabates, professor of education, circulated an open letter under the heading: “URGENT PLEASE SIGN ANTI-RACISM LETTER FOR JASON ARDAY.”
It referred to an earlier letter that “was sent to the Minister of State and to which there has been progress in terms of how to tackle these issues” and warned of a “potential public attack on Jason”.
Parliamentary records show that on Sept 15 last year, Jacqui Smith, the women and equalities minister, met a “range of academics to discuss the harassment of black academics”.
A spokesman for the University of Cambridge said: “Professor Arday has been the victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility, which must stop. Allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications have been thoroughly investigated by the relevant institution and the journals in question. Professor Arday has been cleared by those investigations of any wrongdoing.”
Liverpool John Moores University said in a statement: “In September 2025, the university received allegations of academic misconduct against its former PhD student, Professor Jason Arday. A confidential procedure was conducted in response to those allegations and Professor Arday’s PhD still stands. We will not comment further on a private matter between the university and a former student.”
