News of his death comes the same week as the release of his memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” a highly anticipated work that Simon & Schuster had decided to release despite the doubts about his credibility. In a statement issued through his publisher, Arday’s family said that they were “in shock to have lost this amazing father, partner, brother, uncle and son.”
“The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone,” the family said
Not quite. He was exonerated by the vaguest of “investigations” which only considered that a complaint came from a racist, and discarded out of hand the concerns of his colleagues about his behaviour. There is growing pressure for Cambridge to mount an independent investigation into the first investigation.
Arday then hired the elite law firm Carter-Ruck, which has a reputation for SLAPP tactics against journalists, and they succeeded in getting Times Higher Education to spike their own investigatory reporting into him late last year as they prepared a story looking into his fabricating medical research subjects and plagiarising other studies.
At the time of his death, he was being investigated by Jesus College and Cambridge University in separate proceedings, and Queens University Belfast. This time they were considering the copious evidence that Arday plagiarised from his students and lied about his achievements, rather than focusing on a complainant. Even Carter-Ruck couldn’t suppress the reporting as accusations mounted.
In other words, he was exonerated, but you don’t like the conclusion.
UK’s defanation laws are unjust, but the greatest injustices are from extremely rich and powerful companies and people bullying journalists and political activists into insanely costly court cases. Arday was neither rich nor politically well-connected, so it’s hard to claim that what he was doing was SLAPP. As for Carter-Ruck, fuck them, but they exist due to flaws in the system. To get rid of termites, fix the dry rot.
Which is not evidence of guilt until the investigations are concluded, and even then, only if the investigations were conducted properly, in a transparent and accountable manner, and they actually find wrongdoing.
No, they were considering the copious allegations. Allegations are not evidence unless they are substantiated.
So for argument’s sake, let’s assume the worst case, based on what is known now: Cambridge hired Arday without exercising due diligence, and got a professor who wasn’t as qualified as Cambridge professors are expected to be. But the right-wing media then went into full witch-hunt mode, and it’s entirely plausible that as a consequence, he was receiving death threats and constant harassment. That’s disproportionate to any grift that Arday may have done, and it’s not the way that similar situations have been resolved in other academic bad hires. As can be seen with the pile-on against Arday’s successor, the most credible explanation of the difference is to do with his ethnicity (and his successor’s) than any wrong that might have been done.
And until a credible, impartial investigation takes place, I have no more reason to believe that any of the allegations are true than to believe that the whole sordid business was cooked up by the right to keep the racist outrage machine well-stoked.
The person you replied to didn’t say they’d been found guilty but that they hadn’t been exonerated, which with an open investigation, was the truth.
Sadly it’s hard to talk about a case that may be correct but which is only prominent due to racism.
https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/