By Ann Rodgers
Embattled Cambridge University sociology professor Jason Arday filed a police report for harassment against a fellow academic who documented his plagiarism.
The subject of the police report was Doctor David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University — one of the first people to raise questions about the validity of Arday’s writing. Harris had previously evaluated other works on critical race theory and has done further reseach on how those ideas impact higher education research, according to the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF).
In May 2023, Harris was reading portions of Arday’s Ph.D. dissertation and several academic papers when he noticed “puzzling similarities” in data and passages. He emailed Arday, very politely, alerting him of the possible mistakes, reported CAF.
When he received no response, he followed up a week later to make sure his feedback was heard, and Arday replied, claiming that all of the concerns were minimal and that Harris was “bullying” him.
“As a Black, autistic man with global developmental delay and severe dyslexia, the odds are even less likely; my hope has always been that people like me feel inspired to pursue academia, and that people like you can make space for this,” Arday wrote in his email according to CAF.
Arday went on to say that Harris was “a monument to the fact we live in a society where grammar is valued above equity.” (RELATED: Brown Professor Warns AI Is Making Students Dumber After Cheating Scandal)
Despite the hostile response, Harris replied and tried to emphasize that Arday’s hardships were not his main concern, explaining he wanted to bring attention to possible inaccuracies that could damage his reputation, according to the outlet.
Instead of reviewing his work for possible errors, CAF states that Arday filed a complaint of harassment against Harris with the Metropolitan Police. They declined to pursue it.
Harris then recruited a fellow sociologist from Open University, Martyn Hammersley, who emailed the Head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge directly and explained that “there is substantial plagiarism,” according to Retraction Weekly. “The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history, Jason Arday, is at the centre of a plagiarism row after academics came forward claiming large parts of his work are copied almost verbatim from others,” noted Toby Young.
The university responded by saying that Arday would take down the article to make corrections but emphasized that he “had the department’s full support,” Retraction Weekly reported.
According to the outlet, in 2025 there was a story in the works that examined these allegations. However, Times Higher Education decided not to publish the story after Arday hired a defamation lawyer and sent the outlet a letter.
These allegations finally led to an inquiry on July 21 when a Substack post from Belgian philosopher Nathan Cofnas distinctly outlined “dozens of passages in Arday’s 2015 dissertation that were taken nearly verbatim from the 2009 dissertation of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers,” Retraction Weekly reported. (RELATED: Professor Testifies Against Taxpayer-Funded Smithsonian’s Alleged Anti-America Agenda)
Throughout Cofnas’ post he explains that Arday’s research attributed quotes to interviews he alleges to have participated in himself, when in reality the interviews were done by someone else. Along with that, Arday altered or removed many quotations attributed to interview subjects, revising 12 of 31 quotes and deleting six entirely.
Arday has taken no accountability for these accusations, instead blaming the plagiarism on his autism and “insufficient support from academic advisers,” according to the New York Times.
He has also made several other audacious claims that have been proved false.
The New York Times reported that in a 2022 interview, Arday said that he was part of a British documentary series, “Seven Up,” which followed the same 14 children since 1964. He was born in 1985. A “clip shows Jason Arday claiming he was part of ‘Seven Up’. But the series began in 1964 and followed the same original 14 children. Arday was born roughly two decades later.”
In his Cambridge biography, Arday claims that he is a visiting professor at Ohio State University’s office of Diversity and Inclusion. However, that office closed in 2025, and spokesman Benjamin Johnson told the National Review that they “have no record of an employee by that name.”
Arday also made several claims that he was the author of a book called “Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Domestic Discourse.” It was supposed to examine stereotypes surrounding black masculinity, but it never made it to the shelves. The publisher abandoned it, according to The Telegraph.
He is not the only black academic to be accused and face the consequences of plagiarism.
Claudine Gay, who was the first black woman to become president of Harvard, had only been in her position for seven months when she was removed because of her pervasive plagiarism.
“Bloody awful work creeps in when standards are relaxed,” Harris told Retraction Weekly.
A black university president in Maryland discriminated against white people and plagiarized large portions of her doctoral dissertation. The president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, she recycled other people’s papers without even citing them in her 1986 doctoral dissertation. Much of the “plagiarism comes from a paper published two years earlier by Donna E. Larson, a nursing professor.” Her paper used “large swaths of Larson’s work.”
