UPDATE: In case you aren’t aware, Arday committed suicide
If you want to see a shining example of a complete failure of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policy, look no further than British academic Professor Jason Arday.
Well, perhaps I should say former professor. He was a professor at the elite University of Cambridge between 2023 and 2026, and resigned following allegations of plagiarism, research falsification, and personal misrepresentation.
Weâll get to all that soon. But first, letâs take a look at the inspiring backstory of a man who became an undeniable academic darlingâuntil reality intruded.
First, letâs look back at his crowning achievement. In 2023, the media broke out in a collective swoon.
The BBC gushed: âCambridge Universityâs Jason Arday becomes youngest black professor.â Yes, his defining academic qualification at the age of 37, according to the state broadcaster, was, predictably, his race.
The Guardian, never one to be outdone, doubled down with a dose of pure inspiration porn: âJason Arday: he learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 â then became Cambridgeâs youngest Black professor.â
Because why stop at racial diversity when you can market a human marvel? Not only was he Cambridgeâs ultimate triumph of inclusion, he was a living superhero who couldnât even read until adulthood. Truly, a walking wonder-story and a DEI holy grail.
Depending on which sources you look at, the good professor was diagnosed with autism when he was three, had global developmental delay, deafness, dyscalculia, was non-verbal, diagnosed with dyslexia in his first year of university, attacked at age 18âdeveloping epilepsy as a resultâand won a bronze medal in synchronised diving at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Sorry, I made that last one up. But all the rest are trueâwell, at least according to the good professor himself.
Here are some more of his notable achievements. He was actually selected as a torchbearer for the London 2012 Olympics. Iâm not sure why, but Iâm sure it made a great bullet point on his CV. According to his bio on the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureauâat least, before they quietly scrubbed the word âWaterAidâ from the textââIn his spare time, Jason has undertaken and completed relief work in South America and West Africa with installing water points, which provide drinkable and clean water,â although it has since come out that the charity WaterAid does not send volunteers abroad. So why he was out in the bush flying solo doing freelance plumbing across two separate continents remains a deeply inspiring mystery.
But it wasnât just international plumbingâthis superstar academic was busy setting human performance records. According to an article by The Guardian titled âPlaybooks, plagiarism and a pigâs head,â he has claimed on multiple occasions to have raised ÂŁ5m for charity, a figure that sometimes gets inflated to ÂŁ5.5m. He supposedly achieved this through astronomical feats of endurance, like running â30 marathons in 35 daysâ and covering â600 miles in six daysâ. At a rate of 100 miles per day, thatâs almost four continuous marathons a day, back-to-back, with pretty much zero sleepâtruly, a man whose cardiovascular system belongs under the bonnet of a Toyota Corolla.
Unfortunately, his epilepsy came back to bite him when he was running his back-to-back marathons. The Guardian noted that in 2012, British tennis star Andy Murray met with him, with Murray later saying: âHe is an epileptic who ran 30 marathons in 35 days. He told me that on the 20th day he fell â he had a fit, a seizure â and had a hairline fracture in his leg, but he continued.â
So there you goânot only did he pull off physical feats that would break an elite Olympic athlete, he did it all on a broken leg. Cambridge wasnât just hiring an academic superstar; they were securing a real-life Marvel character.
Anyway, there are plenty more tall tales attributed to the good professor that I simply donât have time to list here. But ultimately, he committed the cardinal sin of academia: he plagiarised. And apparently, he did a fair bit of it. I wonât bore you with the granular details of every copied paragraph.
And now, the good professor has resignedâlikely because he realised stepping down is the cleanest exit before Cambridgeâs brand-new investigation into his qualifications and career history gains any more momentum.
Either way, Iâm sure heâll be fine. I mean, for a man who can build international plumbing systems, run four back-to-back marathons a day on a broken leg, and outsmart knife-wielding assassins, Iâm sure heâll succeed in whatever he turns his mind to. Whatâs next for Jason Arday? Perhaps heâll be training NASA astronauts, solving nuclear fusion in his spare time, or taking over as the lead Fact-Checker for the BBC. The possibilities are truly endless.
MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn
