[Since this has been misunderstood - this is not a blank check for academic wrongdoing in this case or any other case. In particular, the forging of research data is a very serious academic offense. Academia operates on the honor system, and intentional violations of this system are very serious as they tear at the fabric of this system. My points in the following are limited - Arday’s published work was impactful, the media coverage was not informed by this, and focused on irrelevancies. If however the published work was based on research fraud, that is another matter entirely, not covered by this piece]
I have been in Europe this month during the time that the media targeted the Cambridge Sociology professor Jason Arday. My two children are with me, and I am giving talks and interviews. So, I haven’t had the time to concentrate on the details of the unfolding situation that has ended in such horror. But from the beginning, as an academic, the media narrative has not made much sense to me. To be clear: I don’t believe that Arday ran 30 marathons in 35 days [it looks like he actually may have done this, so I was wrong to doubt him on this]]. But neither have I ever believed the incredibly distinguished, highly impactful and unquestionably brilliant and accomplished leading academic friend of mine who has always insisted to me to that he could already converse decently in English with adults by the time he was three months old.
Other concerns that have been raised in leading newspapers have also seemed off to me as regards Arday’s academic qualifications for his job. According to the Guardian:
“The new investigations may have been triggered by Arday’s claims that he held a string of prestigious visiting fellowships and professorships at other universities, including statements in published biographies dating back to 2018 that he was a visiting fellow or visiting professor at Ohio State University in the US. Ohio State has denied that Arday was ever employed in any role.
Biographies linked to Arday have also claimed he had visiting professorships at Durham, Glasgow, Coventry and London Metropolitan universities as well as Nelson Mandela University in South Africa.”
This struck me as odd. I have taught at several peer institutions to Cambridge. I can’t imagine anyone at the institutions at which I have taught caring about whether someone held a visiting position at any of these places in considering them for a senior job. In fact, in 32 years as a professor at Cornell, Michigan, Rutgers, Yale, and Toronto, I have never heard anyone give as a reason to hire someone that they had a visiting position at Ohio State. Or, really, anywhere. If you are hiring a senior person at, say, Cornell, you don’t care at all about their previous visiting positions. And to describe a visiting fellowship or even a visiting professorship at Ohio State or Durham as “prestigious” – well, it’s a description only someone totally ignorant of academia would provide.
Furthermore, academics get all sorts of invitations to speak at universities. If someone invites you to give (say) five lectures in a department, you are not officially “employed” by that university in a role. The department invited you to give some lectures. Sometimes, people list such things as visiting fellowships. And anyway, as I said, in the upper echelons of academia, no one cares about this kind of thing.
Running 30 marathons in 35 days will not help you get a leading academic job. Nor will a visiting position at Ohio State. The thing that helps you get a leading academic job is the novelty and impact of your ideas, and the promise of producing more novel ideas that will also have similar impact (some lip service is occasionally given to teaching as well). The only accusation that bears on the claim that wrongdoing helped Arday achieve his position of success is plagiarism, in the original sense of stealing another person’s ideas. If Arday’s work is plagiarized, then his academic success is undeserved.
Plagiarism is the stealing of ideas or research programs. But in recent years, AI has enabled malignant actors to target people in academia for overlap of sentences, even when the overlapping of sentences has no bearing whatsoever on the stealing of ideas or research programs. The original meaning of plagiarism does not cover mere overlap of sentences. If you simply copy someone else’s standard descriptions of scientific set ups, you are guilty of laziness, but not of stealing their ideas.
Our original concept of plagiarism is being stretched beyond all recognition by AI. Where there is an overlap of sentences, but no theft of ideas, most of us do not regard it as a serious charge. Even if it’s wrong, it’s certainly not an instance of the original charge of plagiarism. And as far as I can tell from the media coverage, Arday has been targeted by this kind of novel AI “overlap of sentences” method and has not been accused of stealing of ideas and research programs (which are of course serious charges).
[Since this has been misunderstood - this is not a blank check for academic wrong doing in this case - for example, the forging of research data is a very serious academic offense. Academia operates on the honor system, and intentional violations of this system are very serious as they tear at the fabric of this system]
I suppose I don’t believe many aspects of Arday’s personal history, and he may have needlessly burnished parts of his CV for what I regard as mysterious reasons. Nevertheless, the problem I have had in reading the media coverage of his case is that I saw no evidence in any article that Arday’s obtaining of his position at Cambridge was based on these issues. Copying someone else’s sentences as a background to setting up your own novel ideas and research programs won’t help you get a job – it’s the novel ideas that do that (as long as they have impact!). Nor will running lots of marathons. Or even having a visiting position of some kind at Ohio State (or even Durham).
In fact, in the articles I read, I saw no evidence of any understanding of the factors that go into academic success. Most obviously, not a single newspaper discussion of Arday I read commented on the impact of Arday’s academic work. This is very odd. After all, there are basic quantitative metrics – citations - that can help you quickly assess impact. And not a single reporter seems to have even checked the citations that have been made to Arday’s work.
If I were a journalist tasked with figuring out whether Arday deserved his academic position, the first thing I would do is the following. I would open up Google Scholar, and make a list of Arday’s most cited publications, and the years in which they were published. Citations are field relative – a lot of citations in one field (e.g. philosophy) are not a lot of citations in another field (e.g. psychology, medicine, or AI). I would then take note of Arday’s academic area (sociology of education). Then I would go to peer institutions of Cambridge and look up scholars in sociology of education. I would then compare the relative citations of their publications in the same years as Arday’s publications. In 2026, are Arday’s 2018 publications, for example, cited at the same level as the 2018 publications of sociologists of educations at other leading universities? In other words, have they had the same or similar impact in the same stretch of time? If so, that provides strong prima facie evidence of Arday’s academic success.
If you did this task, you would quickly find that Arday’s impact is easily comparable to the leading scholars in his academic field.
Arday’s most cited work is to a book he co-edited. Some scholars take the impact of edited volumes seriously. I don’t. I don’t think citations to a book a scholar edits should count towards their impact, even if (as in this case), it was clearly a successful venture (in fact, I get quite upset when I see edited volumes listed on someone’s Google Scholar page). So, let’s set that aside and focus on the work he authored or co-authored.
Arday is a 2016 PhD, so quite recent. In 2018, he published four single authored papers, an impressive achievement. According to Google Scholar, the most cited paper of these four has 238 citations, the second most cited paper has 184 citations, the third has 177 citations, and the fourth has 47 citations. This is very impressive impact for a scholar right out of their PhD. A surprisingly large percentage of academic papers receive no citations at all. I know tenured philosophy professors at leading universities whose total citations are around the number of citations that Jason Arday’s work from that one single year has received.
As one might expect, if you do the exercise I recommended above, you will find that Arday’s 2018 papers clearly compare favorably to the impact of papers published by scholars in sociology of education in leading universities in that year or surrounding ones. I have only poked around a little bit, but it’s hard to find another sociologist of education who was clearly more productive and impactful in or around that year (I’m wandering around Europe trying to keep my kids alive, and this is a Substack post, but that at least was my quick impression).
It is not as if Arday stopped publishing in 2018. In 2021, Arday published a paper with three co-authors (he is first author) that has 373 citations, a very large amount for a 2021 paper in this field. And it’s clear that his work had growing impact – in 2022, he published a paper that already has 151 citations, and another that already has 97 citations. I do think it’s fair to say that one could have expected a little more production, but what he did publish, seems to have had real impact.
When I look at this record of achievement, a fairly robust picture emerges. Arday came into the field around the time work on race in education was flourishing. It’s reasonable to assume that Arday’s work in fact contributed to that flourishing. The so-called “citation velocity” of Arday’s papers were growing - his newer papers were acquiring citations (and impact) more quickly, as his reputation grew. Cambridge had a position in Sociology of Education. Arday had a 2016 PhD, and already a set of relatively high impact papers. If he continued with that research profile – and there was nothing in the record to suggest that he wouldn’t – then he would develop over times a similar profile to other leading sociologists of education across the field.
The decision to hire Arday is of course also a bet on the research program to which he contributed, the study of race in higher education. In hiring him, Cambridge was also betting that his topic would continue to be central to the field of Sociology of Education. It’s reasonable to see the attack on Arday as primarily an outside attack on his topic, the study of race in higher education.
It’s worth adding that there is no obvious way of “gaming” citations. You can cite yourself of course. But unless you are publishing dozens of papers a year, it’s hard to make this increase your citation count in any obvious way. Nor can you, or any institution, force anyone to cite you.
I need to end by warning that many academics will react with horror to the formalistic way in which I’ve spoken about the academy. There is a simple reason for this. Even at leading institutions, the work of most academics just isn’t that highly cited – certainly not as much as Jason Arday’s. As the years slip by, and it becomes ever more evident that someone’s work is not having the impact they think it should have, they become more and more committed to the view that the problem lies not in their work, but in the slipping of standards, the faddishness of the field, the shallowness of the present-day university, or what have you. The less one’s own work is cited, the more one tends to be committed to the view that impact is a shallow measure of academic success. Since the work of most academics is pretty much ignored, academics have developed widespread and often florid ways of disparaging the importance of impact (and its measurable face, citations). Very often, these are elaborate defense mechanisms.
Many years ago, when my marriage first started to disintegrate, I got a therapist for the first time. He was much older, with decades of experience with Yale professors. I spoke to him about my disintegrating marriage. But I was curious why others had therapists, so I asked. He responded, “many professors spend their time with me complaining about why their work doesn’t get more attention.”
It is true that fields can be faddish, and that people’s work can get attention for reasons external to its intrinsic excellence. There is bad work that gets lots of attention! (And perhaps Arday’s was among it, I would have to know more about his field). And there is work on scholarly topics that will only ever get a small amount of attention, due to its narrow scope. But I would say the biggest problem in academia is uninteresting work, wheel spinning on topics that just don’t matter to anything, and which as a result gets no attention at all. Jason Arday worked on topics that are of obvious importance to society. And his work on these topics got attention, far more than most academics, even in his fields. I suspect that this, more than anything, is what made him into such a target.
Interesting piece but I largely disagree with your claims. First, plagiarism is essentially passing off someone else’s work as your own and it’s serious. Arday was guilty of that big time as Cofnas showed (regardless of his motives). He was cleared before but the evidence is plain to see - check out the Retraction Watch site. Second, citations do not equate with scholarship. In my view, Arday largely regurgitated Critical Race Theory assumptions and used his (limited and questionable) research to back these up. I also think he knew he was a DEI hire, promoted way beyond his capability. That’s why he was so desperate to avoid scrutiny. Due diligence would have saved him from his tragic fate.
"I would have to know more about his field"
leaving aside the misconduct allegations.
would you? Other fields were represented on his board of electors for an established chair in Cambridge, more or less the most senior role in his field in the UK. For example there was a historian.
There are many reasons to cite a paper, including who the author is. Arday sought and obtained a lot of media exposure.
Please actually review his output, his funding track record (you could start with https://gtr.ukri.org/), his leadership experience for the position of a Cambridge chair. This is well within your range of expertise, you could even have been asked to be on that board if you were a UK researcher. Perhaps you might compare it to the output of another member of his department if you want to, since his position was senior to nearly all of them.
Get back to us with your honest assessment of the suitability of this record for an established chair please.