In 2023, Jason Arday was celebrated as the youngest black professor ever hired by England’s Cambridge University. Three years later, he stood accused of plagiarism, shoddy scholarship, incomprehensible writing, and poor teaching. Sadly, between the time this article was written and its publication, Arday died, apparently at his own hand. No one wished this end.
Arday’s life story was a mix of Pinocchio and Forest Gump, ending in tragedy. He claimed to have raised millions for charity while overcoming autism, dyslexia, epilepsy, a brain tumor, broken limbs, and more.
Arday progressed despite glaring signs of instability and delusion because academics, publishers, and the leftist British media were so desperate to champion a young, black academic that they were naively credulous and professionally negligent. They skipped rational skepticism, verification, and even basic proofreading.
Arday was not unique. His story is a glimpse of a bigger picture in Britain and America: people hired because of their race or sex rather than objective qualifications — DEI hires — are held to a lower standard than those hired via a competitive process.
In the conventional academic world, scholars are expected to publish original research and meet professional standards. Yet DEI hires aren’t expected to produce as much. Claudine Gay rose to the pinnacle of American academia — president of Harvard University — despite a record of publication “about half the average rate for a political science professor, even at a middling university.”
But at least Gay wrote something. In 2020, “antiracism” scholar Ibram Kendi raised $55 million to run a new Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Three years later, his center fired half its staff, and in 2025 it closed, having produced almost nothing. Kendi nonetheless found a soft landing at Howard University.
Harvard is generous to ex-Democrat political appointees. Biden’s “Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice,” Desireé Cormier Smith, “Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI+) Persons,” Jessica Stern, and “Special Representative for International Labor Affairs,” Kelly Fay Rodriguez, all landed fellowships in 2025 that seemed to mirror their previous jobs at the State Department. They have no teaching load, and a cursory internet search shows a total of six articles or papers written by them all since they started. (I’ve written about 200 in the same period).
In addition to low expectations of productivity, DEI hires regularly get away with plagiarism.
Plagiarism means taking other people’s work as your own. It is theft of intellectual property and therefore the cardinal sin of academia. The most glaring form is using another person’s exact words without quotation marks and attribution. Almost as bad is taking another’s ideas without crediting them. Arday reportedly did both.
Once the accusations were out there, Arday and his defenders followed a common playbook on both sides of the Atlantic: First, deny. The Good Law Project called the accusations of plagiarism “entirely false.”
Second, accuse critics of racism. Arday reportedly called the police when a reporter asked him questions. Incredibly, the police investigated, then told the journalist to desist because he was exacerbating Arday’s mental health issues. Britain’s top cop later apologized, saying they “dropped the ball” — a ball in a game they should not have been playing in the first place.
A third tactic, if the evidence is mounting and incontrovertible, is to excuse the plagiarism. Arday said that he memorized things to mitigate his autism.
A fourth line of defense is to say that it wasn’t plagiarism; it was just “poor attribution,” or it was unintentional, or the pure sophistry of claiming that “all text is a composite of previous works.”
The final line of defense is the whitewash — the institution does a quick, feckless investigation and implausibly finds no evidence of plagiarism. Case closed! Amazingly, this sometimes works.
It almost did for Claudine Gay. Despite ample evidence of her using other people’s words without quotation or citation, Harvard bent over backward to avoid saying she plagiarized. Their investigation used euphemisms like “inadequate citation,” and they allowed her to retroactively correct — a luxury not afforded their students. However, Harvard quietly moved Gay out of the president’s office and back into her full professorship — at a mere $800,000 salary.
The full whitewash worked for Jerlando Jackson, dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, when he was accused of plagiarizing in many papers and in his PhD thesis. He took entire passages “liberally and without citation,” according to reporters, from a professor from whom Jackson copied. MSU exonerated Jackson, and for good measure claimed he was “the target of racist, vile, and despicable attacks.” He appears to remain a dean at MSU.
Northwestern University law professor Myriam Gilles was accused of plagiarism in a lawsuit alleging that Northwestern was hiring based on DEI, not objective criteria. The side-by-side comparisons in this complaint of Gilles’ work with those of other scholars are pretty damning.
Yet, the plaintiffs predicted that the “university will not take any corrective or disciplinary action against Gilles for any of these transgressions — even though the university would suspend or expel a Northwestern student who engaged in this type of behavior.” Indeed, Gilles appears to remain a professor in full standing at Northwestern Law School.
America’s ultimate DEI hire was Kamala Harris, who Joe Biden chose as his vice president. According to Chris Rufo, she co-authored a book using whole passages from Wikipedia, a report by the Urban Institute, and a press release from John Jay College. Even in its attempt to debunk Rufo’s assertions, the website Snopes admitted: “the words [Harris] used were not properly attributed to their sources.” The author of Plagiarism Today excused it as “sloppy writing habits.”
As for Arday, when the outcry became too much for Cambridge to ignore, he saw the writing on the wall and resigned from his professorship. Shortly afterward, he took his own life. By facilitating and even applauding his delusions, the credulous, obsequious DEI machine did Arday no favors.
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Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center and author of “The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey)” from Academica Books.
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