Adam Zivo: Jason Arday affair exposed the moral rot of progressives 

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He also told the media that he raised £5 million (C$9.4 million) over the course of 20 years, and that he had installed water points in South America and West Africa.

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Over time, skepticism arose over Arday’s honesty and academic integrity. A respected British professor contacted Cambridge in 2023 and alleged that one of Arday’s 2018 papers was extensively plagiarized. Although Arday was forced to issue extensive corrections, Cambridge declined to investigate as the research predated his employment with them.

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Then, in 2025, Times Higher Education reporter Jack Grove meticulously documented extensive plagiarism within Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis. When Grove politely emailed Arday a list of related questions, he responded by calling the police on the reporter, baselessly alleging harassment, and retained a high-powered law firm to successfully crush the story using meritless defamation claims.

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No mainstream media outlet seemed willing to criticize Arday until Nathan Cofnas, a professor admittedly infamous for his views on race and intellect, published an in-depth Substack article last month carefully detailing the fabulist’s dishonesty. The article quickly went viral.

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Cambridge initially denounced Cofnas’ accusations against Arday as a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility,” and over 10,000 people, including prominent academics, signed an open letter defending him. But soon a deluge of media stories shredded his fabricated biography.

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Reporters belatedly acknowledged that many of Arday’s claims were fantastical and unsubstantiated. Among other things, they discovered that Arday had fundraised only around £10,000 (C$18,900) and that WaterAid did not, in fact, send volunteers abroad. They learned that a book he claimed to have published had, in fact, never been written, and that one of his masters degrees almost certainly did not exist.

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In another bizarre incident, Arday told The Guardian that masked intruders had accosted him in his faculty office on two separate occasions and threatened him with a knife, and that someone had sent a severed pig’s head to his family home, which, he said, had prompted a police investigation. Yet, the newspaper discovered that these “intruders” had somehow remained undetected by the building’s CCTV and that no colleagues had reported anyone suspicious. The police also “categorically” denied that any investigation into a severed pig head had occurred.

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Cambridge announced on Aug. 5 that it was opening an investigation into Arday. He resigned from his post that same day and then killed himself a week later.

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Many conservatives have used Arday’s story as a cudgel against radical DEI policies. Would such a charlatan have risen so high — and enjoyed so much institutional protection — had he been white? Probably not. Progressive academics and administrators evidently saw him as someone who could do no wrong. By indulging him, they made a mockery of academic and professional standards, let alone their own intelligence.

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While a minority of Arday’s critics have seemingly been animated by racism, the motives of the reasonable majority, along with their broader arguments against DEI, are still credible. The Arday affair indisputably raises questions about institutional integrity and trust amid academia’s enduring wokeness.

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Rather than engage with these issues, though, many progressives have responded by whitewashing Arday and misportraying him as the blameless victim of a harassment and “lynching” campaign. Tens of thousands of supporters gathered in London a few days after his death to pay tribute to the disgraced conman, and some British progressive leaders are now demanding an inquiry into how the press covered Arday — because exposing fraud through accurate journalism is now a bad thing, apparently.