Walter Mitty is an American gift to the English language. And with the rise of social media, which has enabled talentless grifters to rise in public life, its use as an eponym has rarely been in greater demand.
Take, for example, the leader of the Green Party in Britain, Zack Polanski, who saw a brief surge in popularity as a hard-Left, eco communist backed by Islamists. Until his many lies and confabulations received a merest hint of scrutiny. After claiming that his powers of hypnosis could enlarge a woman’s breasts, the merciless Right-wing press dubbed him “Walter Titty” (and yes, he was a theatre kid).
Now it is the turn of the star Cambridge University Professor, Jason Arday, to be exposed. Until this week, Arday’s story was irresistible to the statist establishment in Britain. A Ghanaian immigrant raised in social housing in south London, Arday claimed to be autistic and unable to speak until he was 11, or to read and write until 18. And yet at 37 he became the youngest black tenured professor in Cambridge’s 800-year history. He was heralded as a genius, carried the Olympic torch, and sold a memoir for a reported $2 million. Why?
Because he combined being black with a host of other neurological and socio-economic challenges, and was supposed to represent the triumph of diversity over adversity. No one bothered to check whether his academic output was of any quality. Indeed, it was considered unseemly and faintly racist even to ask.
As Professor Arday’s memoir launch loomed, some scrutiny was finally applied. Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher himself sacked by Cambridge in 2024 for his heterodox views on race, published claims of plagiarism across Arday’s work. Passages of his doctoral thesis were found to be identical to another researcher’s earlier work. Even the thesis title has been copied (with just enough words moved around so as to create a grammatical typo in it!).
Retraction Watch reported that in one article the borrowed text allegedly appeared inside quotes from interviewees Arday claimed to have spoken to personally; subjects who answer in the exact published words of somebody else’s research are a rare breed.
Then came the real Walter Mitty material, and it is glorious. Arday claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, suffering an epileptic fit and a fractured leg on the 21st before completing the remaining nine. He claimed 600 miles from Edinburgh to London in six days, elite ultramarathon territory. He claimed to have raised £5.5 million for charity; pressed by The Guardian, he said it was raised with others whom he cannot name.
He claimed to have installed water points in South America and Africa for WaterAid, which does not send volunteers abroad. He claimed visiting professorships at Ohio State, Glasgow, and Nelson Mandela University in South Africa; all three deny it. And he claimed a book with Palgrave Macmillan that never existed beyond a proposal. His current publisher must be envious.
Speaking of, The Atlantic even got hold of his memoir proposal, where the brain tumor he claims to have had was originally testicular cancer. He is a hilarious combination of Jussie Smollett’s fake hate crime, former Harvard President Claudine Gay, and Frank Abagnale, rolled into one. When he actually wrote “scholarly” works of his own, it was the usual racial grievance: British universities are hostile, racist environments. Those institutions responded by showering him with chairs and honorary doctorates. His work recalls the put-down attributed to Dr. Johnson: the parts that were good were not original, and the parts that were original were not good.
As amusing as this farcical trot through Alice-In-Wonderland-esque fantasyland is, the more interesting and depressing issue was the reaction of the establishment. When Times Higher Education prepared a 63-page dossier on the plagiarism last September, Arday hired Carter-Ruck, the most feared libel firm in a country whose defamation laws have no First Amendment to contend with, and the story was spiked. A journalist who asked questions was even reported to the police; Scotland Yard investigated him for months before warning him off contacting Arday.
Cambridge, supposedly one of the top universities in the world, called the obvious plagiarism of one of its star academics “a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” An open letter was signed by heads of colleges, famous authors, and a who’s-who of media luvvies. As more revelations emerged, those names were quietly erased from that letter. Because Arday represented everything the modern Left loves, namely identity over merit, it tried to circle the wagons to protect their creation.
Melissa Chen has made an excellent comparison with Roland Fryer’s treatment by the American academic establishment. It exposes how morally bankrupt academia is and how uninterested it is in the truth. Raised poor in Texas, Fryer became, at 30, the youngest black scholar ever tenured at Harvard, winning a MacArthur genius grant. In 2016 he set out to document racial bias in police shootings, fully expecting to find it.
The data said otherwise, refuting a premise repeated on the Left and in the media, so he hired eight fresh research assistants and ran the study again. Same result. He published those findings, and spent the next month under armed guard, buying diapers for his newborn with a bodyguard in tow because his academic rigor ran counter to the narrative.
Three years later, Harvard suspended him for two years without pay over harassment allegations he denies to this day, and closed his lab. The dean who announced that punishment was one Claudine Gay, who went on to become Harvard’s president and then to resign in disgrace over, of all things, plagiarism.
Fryer produced world-class, replicated research and was ruined. Arday produced borrowed prose and fabricated glories and was defended until the last possible hour.
And the sheer brass neck on Arday, the stench of his lies, and the desperate fawning over someone who was clearly either a Walter Mitty or a ruthless con man has seriously wounded academia. Perhaps in time, we will come to call unscrupulous grifters “Jason Ardays.” We should also refer to those willing to seek truth, damn the consequences, as Roland Fryers.
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James Price is a former Chief of Staff to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
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