Icarus in the Faculty Lounge
Even before the push alert about his resignation from the University of Cambridge this week, Jason Arday might well have been the world’s most famous living sociologist. In early 2023, Arday received a professorship at Cambridge; at 37, he was the youngest Black scholar ever to have done so, and his appointment made international headlines. A year later, he set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”
That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”
But in the past two weeks, Arday’s near-mythic (or perhaps purely mythic) tale has disintegrated. In July, a philosopher named Nathan Cofnas published a long Substack post reviewing apparent evidence of plagiarism in Arday’s academic work. Cofnas posted 36 passages from Arday’s 2015 dissertation, about student teaching, which reproduce or closely track text found in a 2009 dissertation from another scholar in the field, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Arday looks to have even copied from and rearranged Zwozdiak-Myers’s title, and in doing so to have misused an apostrophe.
