Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday

NRO ^ | 29 July 2026 | Jeffrey Blehar

[Rummyfan]

Readers, a hilariously obvious fraud is in the news once again, which in my part of the world is a bit like turning on the Bat-Signal. Remember that Steven Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as real-life scammer Frank Abagnale? As played by DiCaprio, it’s an eminently winning role: Spielberg tells a tale of how, before the age of 19, young Frank pulled off millions of dollars in cons by convincingly impersonating everyone from an airline pilot to a doctor to a lawyer, only finally being caught by a rumpled Tom Hanks.

....

Arday is one of the U.K.’s newest academic superstars, a true success story as the youngest black scholar ever to become full professor at the University of Cambridge, Britain’s second-best institution of higher learning. His life story is truly impressive, an inspiring tale of a man rising to a prestigious position from severe disadvantages in life — Arday claims to suffer from an autism so severe that he was entirely nonverbal until the age of eleven, and wholly illiterate until learning to read at the age of 18. Now, not only is he a national pseudo-celebrity, as a “high-functioning neurodivergent,” he’s at the top of the academic hierarchy.

.....

But by gum, it gets even more inspiring than that. Arday also claims that before becoming a full professor at Cambridge, he raised over £5 million for charity. And built clean-drinking-water facilities for South American and African peasants. While becoming an ultra-marathoner who ran 600 miles in six days (only 50 miles short of the world record) — all without any formal documentation of said feat. He has a heartwarming memoir about his triumph over adversity, with the glurgy, quotidian title of Great and Unfortunate Things, due to be released on August 11. Is there anything this heroic autist can’t do?

As it turns out, the answer is scholarship. If something seems a little too good to be true about Arday’s life story — from nonverbal illiteracy to the halls of Cambridge — then perhaps that’s because it was. Arday may be a fabulist. But according to Cofnas, Arday quite clearly is a serial plagiarist, having stolen enormous chunks of others’ scholarly work — pages upon pages of it, usually almost verbatim — for his Ph.D. thesis. In academia, one’s thesis is essentially one’s professional calling card as a budding academic. Plagiarizing it was once a death penalty offense; just ask Claudine Gay.

And much like Gay, he apparently has kept on plagiarizing well into his (remarkably thin) academic career, up to and including seemingly stealing clinical data (in other words, interview responses) from others for his own pieces. He didn’t do the work himself — he simply rewrote someone else’s work; the approach leaves more time for marathoning, one supposes. Needless to say, the sort of academic work he is vulturing from others is itself largely worthless, which is its own irony — the inevitable decay of “remix culture,” imported into scholarship.

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TOPICS: News/Current Events
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[Rummyfan]

I find it hilarious.

[Rummyfan]

Arday...

[Jan_Sobieski]

We had Obama. This is Britain’s Magic Negro.

[FreedomPoster]

I once skimmed thru Moochelle’s thesis. It was sad business.

[Celtic Conservative]

And he lives happily with his wife...Morgan Fairchild! Yeah, that’s the ticket!

CC

[JohnnyP]

OMG, thanks for the John Lovitz memory!

[Jan_Sobieski]

I’ve heard that from multiple people!

[Opinionated Blowhard]

I don’t want Cambridge to catch Jason Arday. I want the West’s university system to be seen for what it is - a freak show. A lunatic asylum. A cesspool of Leftism that has gone so radical that has no connection with reality or useful purpose. The freak show has the bearded lady, the geek, the world’s tallest man and the wolf boy. Cambridge has Jason Arday.