Tag: plagiarism

They’re Getting Revenge, Starting Today…

I absolutely insist to you: I really am trying to stop writing about this topic. But too much insanity keeps breaking out, and I have no choice but to comment on it.

You know the story: a Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, was found to have plagiarized his dissertation, borrowed heavily from others in his published articles, produced essentially worthless research, called the police on a reporter and on a professor who asked questions about his resume, invented wild tales of athletic and academic achievement as well as philanthropic work, and (of course) accused his critics of “racism.” And then, late last week, he was found dead at his home in an apparent suicide.

That would have been it, but the left – instead of the embarrassment it should feel at having promoted the greatest academic charlatan of the past ten years (and that’s saying something) – is trying to play the victim here: mean right-wingers in the media shouldn’t have pushed so hard on the Arday story.

This is coming from people who call their enemies Nazis 24 hours a day without thinking there might be a problem with that.

Anyway, here’s the latest: the university that employs Nathan Cofnas, the academic who first broke the story about Jason Arday’s plagiarism and worthless “research,” is now being investigated by his own university for breaking the story.

Just when you think academia can’t be a bigger joke, it always finds some way to outdo itself.

Ghent University rector Petra de Sutter, former leader of the Green Party, issued a statement to the effect that while Ghent attaches “great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial,” it wants the world to know that of course it doesn’t really mean that:

“That freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.

“For this reason, the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”

Well, we just found out what that means.

They just suspended Nathan Cofnas, and he will almost surely be fired.

Cofnas wrote the original report on Jason Arday that forced academia to take notice. What he found was too embarrassing not to elicit a response. And his point is: Arday is not an isolated case. For that he cannot be forgiven.

As Cofnas put it on August 11:

In 2023, the Guardian itself (!) published a breathless article titled “Jason Arday: he learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 – then became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor.”

More than a dozen academic journals gave the imprimatur of “peer review” to Arday’s plagiarized wokebabble.

The prestigious New York publisher Simon & Schuster is still going ahead with his memoirs.

Now the Guardian wants us to think this is just about “one academic and his bosses at Cambridge”?

There are thousands of Jason Ardays in universities all over the Western world. The only thing special about Arday is that he took the plagiarism and lies about his personal life too far, so there was a hook for a news story. But even that wasn’t enough to get him removed from academia. Until last Wednesday Cambridge was still smearing his critics as waging a “vile campaign.” He crossed the line not by being an incompetent fraud, but by claiming prestigious affiliations that he didn’t have, creating conflict between Cambridge and other universities.

“DEI” means achieving representation by doing away with elementary standards for certain people based on race. Just take a look at the content of “peer-reviewed” journals like Whiteness in Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory. The other papers in these journals are just like those written by Arday—someone who is now widely recognized to be mentally disabled.

The people trying to write this off as a fluke or an isolated case of “research misconduct” are at best delusional. The ideology of elite institutions is DEI, and DEI is Jason Arday.

This was the most embarrassing academic episode of my lifetime. Everyone just witnessed a clear-cut case of academic fraud, a man who literally called the police on people who questioned his resume, and the overwhelming response from academia was to scream “racism” and sign a petition in his defense.

After they did that, the really embarrassing stuff came out, and they persisted.

So the mask is off, in case there’s still anyone out there who didn’t know what was behind it. The whole edifice of academia nowadays is held together with Scotch tape and piano wire, and slogans.

The institutions will survive as shells of their former selves, but what was once inside will disappear. Adrian Vermeule, the one sane person at Harvard Law School, just wrote: “The elite universities are of course going to survive. They’ve been around forever and will continue on in some form. What will not survive, however, is a certain idea of the scholarly mission and life. It died of its own weakness, an inability to resist invading barbarians.”

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US Academic Who Exposed Plagiarist Jason Arday Is Suspended After Arday Commits Suicide

American academic Nathan Cofnas has been suspended by Belgium’s Ghent University after he helped expose explosive plagiarism allegations involving the late Cambridge professor Jason Arday.

Cofnas announced the suspension on X on Thursday.

“I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me,” Cofnas wrote.

“The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.”

Hours earlier, Cofnas said the university was investigating him for allegedly “discriminating against Arday.”

Ghent University confirmed that Cofnas had been suspended “as a precautionary measure” while officials conduct a preliminary disciplinary investigation.

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After Cambridge Academic Commits Suicide Over Being Exposed as Fraud, Activists Call for ‘Arday’s Law’ to Limit Free Speech and Honest Reporting

The passing of Jason Arday is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of his own making.

This is true in both a literal sense, in that his death was apparently a suicide, and figuratively, in that the events that drove the former Cambridge sociology professor to suicide were fabulism and fabrication in the service of a career of academic stardom.

He made a Faustian bargain with the truth to achieve academic stardom — one that was so absurd that anyone who bothered to fact-check it would discover it to be a farrago of lies — and could not bring himself to face the consequences of his prevarications when they were brought to light, quite belatedly.

Now that he has killed himself because someone finally reported on his misdoings, some in the United Kingdom want to change the law so that you can’t tell the truth about someone who isn’t telling the truth, or who is doing other things they shouldn’t be doing.

In other words, your free speech should end where a famous person’s feelings might theoretically begin.

A petition on Change.org to enact something called “Arday’s Law” — which would limit the amount of coverage the media could devote to a person over a certain period of time in the United Kingdom — had garnered over 4,300 verified signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

This comes amid a similar petition from the Good Law Project, which calls for an inquiry into Arday’s death, albeit without proposing concrete limits on speech. However, it does call his death “the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” which leads to obvious conclusions about what they might want that inquiry to recommend. That petition had 121,649 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

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The Cruelty Of DEI

This past week ended with shock and sadness at the news that Jason Arday ended his own life in the midst of an investigation over his intellectual credibility. He was the vaunted education sociologist at Cambridge University, media darling and beneficiary of a big book contract, the toast of the town, and the subject of countless hagiographic profiles in media venues.

Plenty of people had whispered for years that he nowhere near qualified for all this celebration. He was not a genius. He was a fabulist. Saying it, however, was dangerous to one’s career. As a result, he kept getting away with it. His luck ran out when a U.S. academic pressed the issue. The tissue of lies collapsed.

The circumstances surrounding his absurd appointment to a full professorship with a named chair – the youngest black professor to enjoy such privilege – are hardly unique to him. When the full truth coming out about his plagiarism and autobiographical embellishments hit the international news, despair overwhelmed him in tragic ways.

It goes without saying that this young man had benefitted from what’s called DEI, which is the new term for what used to be called “affirmative action” but mutated into rampant privilege based on raw identity politics. Reverse racism doesn’t describe it fully. It is institutionalized discrimination that breeds deep resentment from those passed over and cultivates hidden contempt for those who ride this wave to unearned prestige and plaudits.

Something else has always bugged me about these systems that confer high titles and salaries on people solely on grounds of their race. It is deeply condescending and cruel to the point of being abusive of our fellow human beings. While it is easy to resent people who benefit from unearned exaltation, the plight of those who are its seeming beneficiaries also deserves some attention.

Years ago I had the opportunity to get to know a university administrator and his wife who occupied such a role. We met at a dinner party. He was the only black gentleman in the upper echelon of a major state university. His title was vice president for civil rights or some such made-up badge. It was a position invented to create the appearance of diversity. The position fell to him because he ticked all the boxes.

He was proud of his new position. But the more we spoke, the more he had doubts that he would express under his breath. He said that he has a large budget and staff but is rarely included as part of any serious planning team. He told me that he is mostly sent out on fundraising efforts to tell his story about how he grew up poor, overcame racism, and now has a prestigious position in university administration. But, he told me with frankness, he is tired of that story of himself.

We met up a few weeks later because I was curious to know more. He laid it all out to me. He came of age in an educational environment that was especially seeking blacks who performed above expectations which he always did. But instead of moving up a notch based on merit, he said he became aware early on that he was being accelerated and escalated beyond a level that was justified.

It became obvious in his college admissions, which pushed him into an institution far above that for which he was prepared. He found himself lost in a sea of high achievers. His privilege became a burden. He could not keep up in his classes and began to cut corners. It became obvious to him early that he was going to get away with this.

It seemed like the entire system was on his side. He tried to justify this to himself on grounds that every university has white kids on trust funds with legacy connections. They work less hard than a working-class kid who made it on his own so perhaps this is not unusual.

But, he said, he always felt burdened in multiple directions. It was sad enough that he grew up poor and black in the Deep South and was not expected to achieve. But it was far worse that he was given advancements beyond what he deserved when everyone knew it and considered him to be little more than a token of a compensatory system.

He described to me that choice he had to make. He could refuse the high grades, the advanced placements, the awards and attention that he knew were unmerited. But he was never sure what the point of that would be. Instead, he accepted them all as part of a game. He lost trust and respect in the system that he joined precisely because the system never really expected a high degree of performance from him.

He continued in this vein to tell me about graduate school and PhD studies which were more of the same. There was no point in this where he knew when to refuse, when to say no, when to call out the condescension and fakery of which he was presumably benefiting. In fact, he never saw himself as much of a beneficiary at all. He felt burdened by it all, and even robbed of what all the white kids faced: high expectations and the satisfaction of knowing that one climbed the ladder by virtue of his own efforts.

The story ends with his then appointment, which he knew to be fake at least on some level, though he believed that he truly did have something to contribute to university culture. It was that tag of having been marked by DEI that prevented it. He said he knew from childhood that in any endeavor in life, a title is easy but genuine respect from colleagues must be earned. He simply did not have that and did not know how to get it.

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UK Left Blames Death of Ex-Cambridge Professor Arday on ‘Racism’, Media Scrutiny of Plagiarism Claims

British leftists have attempted to blame racism and media scrutiny for the untimely death of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who sensationally resigned last week amid plagiarism allegations and accusations of fabricating his backstory.

On Friday afternoon, Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor, Jason Arday, was found dead at a London address at the age of 41, just days after resigning from his post as professor of sociology of education amid swirling controversy and claims that he had engaged in plagiarism.

According to a Substack article last month from University of Ghent philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who was fired from Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after expressing race-realist views on IQ differences, Arday’s thesis had been flagged by plagiarism-detection software.

It then emerged that Cambridge had been alerted to potential plagiarism in his thesis and in other papers by Plymouth Marjon University Emeritus Professor Dave Harris in 2023, yet the university only launched an investigation into the matter earlier this month.

London’s Daily Telegraph reported that it had “identified more than 100 passages that are identical or nearly identical to a 2009 PhD thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student.”

On top of allegations of plagiarism, questions were also raised over Arday’s supposedly remarkable early life, as he claimed to have risen to the top of academia despite allegedly being unable to talk until the age of 11 and being unable to read or write until he was 18 as a supposed result of autism. Arday also previously boasted of having run 30 marathons in 35 days, partly while suffering from a leg fracture.

Amid the controversy, the previous media darling resigned on August 5th, claiming that the “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love.”

Less than ten days later, he was found dead. A spokesman for London’s Metropolitan Police said on Friday that his “death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.” The left-wing Guardian newspaper reported that the force is “understood not to believe anyone else was involved in the death.”

Despite limited information about the circumstances of his death, prominent left-wing figures were quick to blame the media scrutiny and “racism” for Arday’s death. For example, far-left Labour MP Nadia Whittome said that Arday was “hounded by the British press in a way that went far beyond scrutiny, was disproportionate, and simply would not have happened to a white, middle class person in the same position.”

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Who Killed Jason Arday?

The strange and fascinating tale of the greatest con-man and fantasist of the twenty-first century has come to a macabre and shocking end. On Friday, Jason Arday was found dead in his London home. Police said that while his death was “unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious,” which, whatever else it may mean, indicates that he wasn’t murdered, and apparently that he committed suicide. Yet the question of who really killed him, in a moral if not in a criminal sense, is still very much on the table.

Arday’s family immediately went into aggrieved victimhood mode, issuing a statement that clearly put the onus on those who had ridiculed and mocked Arday in the wake of the exposure of his truly breathtaking web of lies: “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse” the family claimed, referring not simply to when his lies and plagiarism were exposed, but to his becoming the youngest black professor ever at Cambridge University four years ago. “The campaign of misinformation,” they added, “was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.”

Wait a minute. Whose “campaign of misinformation”? Jason Arday was in no conceivable sense a victim of any “campaign of misinformation.” The only “campaign of misinformation” in the entire bizarre story of Jason Arday was the one he waged himself, in spinning what The Atlantic dubbed “a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.”

Hard to believe is an understatement. The Atlantic provides a helpful summary: “He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days.”

Interestingly, The Atlantic then continues this list with examples of how rapturously the academic world received Arday, as if these were more examples of his “hard-to-believe” life story, when actually these are examples of how supposedly rational, evidence-based academics react when they encounter an obvious mountebank who just happens to confirm everything they want to believe about the world: “Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was ‘the best in the world,’ according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.”

Yes, and it was a meteoric rise, and a spectacular fall, not because of Arday’s talents, or lack thereof, or because of the skillfulness of his lies and plagiarism. In fact, he wasn’t actually very good at either. His purloining of other people’s work was clumsy and obvious, and his autobiographical claims strained credulity well beyond the breaking point for anyone who dared to ponder them rationally, but clearly, no one around him was willing to do so. He was more powerful than a locomotive? Okay. He could leap tall buildings in a single bound? Sure.

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Family of dead ex-Cambridge professor Jason Arday says he was victim of ‘misinformation’ campaign despite plagiarism allegations

The family of ex-Cambridge University professor Jason Arday, accused of plagiarism, blamed his unexpected death Friday on a “campaign of misinformation” that “was too much for Jason.”

Arday, 41, was found dead in his south London home just over a week after quitting his job over the allegations — as Cambridge announced it had launched an investigation.

“Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him,” Arday’s family said in a statement Friday, according to the UK Guardian.

“The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason, who was a gentle man and who always wanted to see the best in everyone,” they said. “We are in shock to have lost this amazing father, partner, brother, uncle and son.

They added, “We won’t comment further at this point beyond asking the press to leave us alone now, and to stop the campaign of harassment which has been waged against Jason and his family for too long.”

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Jason Arday, ex-Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism, found dead in UK week after investigation launched

Embattled ex-Cambridge University professor Jason Arday was found dead Friday after quitting his job at the school over allegations that he plagiarized and lied about past jobs, according to a report.

Arday, 41 — the youngest ever black professor at the lauded university— was found “unresponsive”  in his south London home and later pronounced dead at the scene, according to the UK Telegraph.

“Sadly, a 41-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. His next-of-kin have been informed and are being supported by officers,” a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police told the paper.

“At this time his death is being treated as unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious. The case is being investigated by officers from the Met’s Central South Command Unit. A file will be prepared for the coroner.”

University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor Professor Deborah Prentice expressed sympathy over his death Friday.

“We are desperately saddened to hear this tragic news. Our heartfelt sympathies go to Jason Arday’s family and friends at this incredibly difficult time,” Prentice said in a statement.

The sociology professor, who became a poster boy for diversity,  resigned from the job on Aug. 5 as the school launched an investigation into accusations that he plagiarized parts of his Ph.D dissertation and lied about positions he held at other schools.

He cited an “unrelenting level of public scrutiny” as his reason for resigning.

“[It’s] simply the decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure,” he said at the time.

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Trump White House plagiarized Iran war manifesto from Israel-aligned think tank

The Trump White House plagiarized its justification for attacking Iran from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the main DC outfit promoting war with Tehran. The think tank was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image,” and partners closely with the Israeli government.

The Trump Administration appeared to plagiarize its official justification for its war on Iran, copying almost word-for-word a document originally produced by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), a pro-war think tank with close ties to Israeli intelligence which was originally founded to “enhance Israel’s image.”

The FDD document was authored by Tzvi Kahn, the former assistant director for policy and government affairs at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

A March 2, 2026 statement issued by the White House accusing Tehran of 44 instances of terrorism against American citizens is “virtually identical” to the list published by FDD in June 2025, analyst Stephen McIntyre noted Thursday.

While the White House did make superficial alterations to the text, they largely consisted of appending the label “Iran-backed” to every mention of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. In the few instances where Trump administration officials bothered to make significant changes to the original FDD list, the edits were almost always made in service of “ratcheting up the underlying allegation,” McIntyre concluded.

Among the most egregious examples was a 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which FDD originally said merely that Hezbollah al-Hejaz was “deemed responsible” for. In the White House version, however, the group’s responsibility was “asserted as factual,” explained McIntyre, noting that serious questions about the incident remain unanswered to this day. “Clinton’s Defense Secretary William Perry subsequently wondered (along with many others) whether Khobar Towers should have been attributed to Al Qaeda,” he wrote.

A 2009 investigation by journalist Gareth Porter based on interviews with over a dozen former CIA, FBI and Clinton administration officials demonstrated that the FBI’s inquiry into the Khobar Towers attack was precooked to blame Iran, when Al Qaeda was most likely the culprit. Porter found that Shia citizens of Saudi Arabia had been tortured into confessing to the crime by Saudi secret police.

While the White House declined to join FDD in blaming Iran for the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, it echoed the Israel-oriented organization in blaming Tehran for 603 military deaths in Iraq, which both documents attributed to “Iran-backed militias.” But there are major discrepancies with the figure, which amounts to 60% of the total US combatant deaths attributed to Iran. As McIntyre noted, such a claim is “not made in the State Department annual reports on Global Terrorism.”

At least four of the Americans the Trump administration claims were killed by Iran had served in Israel’s military. These included a US citizen who died while invading Lebanon in 2006 and two Americans in the IDF’s Golani brigade who were killed while invading Gaza in 2014. The fourth American, who was born in Israel and had also served in the Golani brigade, was killed amid violent reprisals against settlers in the West Bank in 2015.

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DEI update: black women plagiarize at ‘astronomically higher rates’ than other groups…

DEI has always been a scam, and the receipts keep piling up. For years, the academic world has pretended that DEI hires represent some amazing new standard of excellence. But thanks to the tireless work of reporters like Chris Rufo, that illusion is crumbling under the weight of plagiarized dissertations, stolen passages, and fraudulent credentials.

Yes, it’s starting to crumble, but DEI was built on decades of solid left-wing foundation. To say it’s magically gone because of one Supreme Court ruling is a fairy tale. The rot is still very much alive.

Revolver:

Further down the prestige ladder, at public colleges in Republican-controlled states, a similar shift is taking place. In these states, the push is coming from Republican lawmakers, who have belatedly recognized that DEI is a hiring program for people who hate them. In some states, lawmakers have ordered universities to abolish diversity statements, but the most on-the-ball initiatives have made sure to actually fire DEI staffers and shut down their departments. At the University of Texas-Austin, forty people lost their jobs after the school’s DEI office got the axe. At the University of Florida, officials fired 13 administrators in response to a DEI ban.

The signs are all promising, to say the least. But a crucial question remains: Will all of this work?

We can hope, of course. Harvard and MIT are both trendsetters for the schools just below them on the prestige ladder. Odds are good that, at least at America’s top schools and any public college in a red state, much-hated “diversity statements” will soon be a thing of the past.

But don’t get too thrilled just yet. Abolishing diversity statements is not the same thing as abolishing the diversity cult itself. The situation in academia is improving in some respects, but for now it remains a matter of tiny marginal improvements to a vast, utterly rotten edifice. The state of affairs in academia today is such that broad swathes of entire disciplines—not just fake DEI disciplines—have become utterly corroded by DEI.

The triumphalism over vanishing diversity statements operates on the assumption that said statements are a primary driver of anti-white and anti-male discrimination in academia. In reality, though, these statements are simply the product of a DEI-obsessed culture that exists on a deeper level. Mandatory statements during the hiring process make it easier and smoother to reject white male applicants, but the intent to reject them as often as possible was there long before. This discriminatory intent means that DEI (or woke, or race communist, pick your term of choice) priorities now pervade almost every aspect of the academic sausage-making process—to a degree that would shock most Americans. Unless this process is reformed (or, more likely, torn out at the root and replaced), universities will continue their downward spiral toward useless mediocrity.

You can read the entire piece here:

The Secret George Floyd Effect: DEI Rot in Universities Is Deeper and Darker Than You Imagine

But Rufo’s latest piece reveals a very disturbing trend.

His research shows black women in academia, particularly in DEI-related fields, are plagiarizing at rates way higher than other groups. It’s not a theory. It’s his data. And it confirms what many already suspected: the DEI machine isn’t just lowering standards; it’s erasing them completely.

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