In a nutshell it involves a Cambridge professor called Jason Arday.
He was the youngest full prof @ 37 ever for the university. A meteoric career rise through 4-5 other prestigious universities. Hired for his dissertation on critical race theory. According to his backstory – non verbal till 11, illiterate @ 18, phd @ 31. Ran 600 miles in 6 days through will power. There is also the epilepsy due to a race attack & magnanimity in forgiving his attackers.
These are just the highlights, there is so much more. Sounds too good to be true? It really is a crazy story and most parts are quite unverifiable or inconsistent.
What was provable was his rampant plagiarism in his papers and dissertation. The people who pointed it out (on substack) – Nathan Cofnas, got fired from Cambridge. David Harris, the original whistle blower, got dropped from his college in plymouth. A journalist who reported it, got investigated by the met police on a complaint by Arday.
Arday has now resigned, the met police has apologised, Cofnas is crowing on substack and David Harris has been reinstated.
Questions are now being asked as to why Arday’s ludicrous claims were never challenged by the various universities, he was given uk govt work, for race related curriculum matters, a book deal (claimed million $ + advances).
This scandal, though far more explosive, mirrors the ousting of Harvard president Claudine Gay for plagiarism.
Are people progressive abroad and conservative at home? Do Indians and Pakistanis identify with progressive movements abroad, to make common causes amongst people of colour, then make a hard right turn on the plane back home? Statistically I would say, this seems to be the case. Indians being to the Right of Pakistanis abroad (due to higher income & religion?). But is this sensible, internally consistent, and should people abide by it?
Where do brown people feature in critical race theory?
Addendum: There are some errors, many thx to A for pointing them out.
- Arday was not the youngest full professor at Cambridge, only the youngest Black professor. For instance, Isaac Newton was younger when appointed a professor at Cambridge.
- Cofnas was not fired for his (in) famous substack post commenting on Arday’s alleged plagiarism. That came recently. He was fired a couple of years ago for an article on differential academic abilities among different groups (sometimes called “ races”).
- Ditto for Harris. He was dismissed for his critique of Critical Race Theory. He was then reinstated by Plymouth after a public backlash from various quarters.
it does seem a very vicious takedown of JA.
this is circulating in the University:
7 August 2026
Dear Vice-Chancellor
We note with concern the extraordinary series of events which culminated in the University’s public statement on 5 August that it would launch an investigation into the conduct of Professor Jason Arday.
Professor Arday’s announcement of his resignation just minutes later might seem to remove the pretext for any further action by the University, but we strongly believe that a thorough and transparent investigation into the wider circumstances of this damaging episode is essential.
We condemn the toxic and frequently racist commentary online and in parts of the media over the past week, and the tendency of some commentators to present Professor Arday as evidence of a “hardline pursuit of diversity” (as a former head of house described it in the Times) which has infected scholarship and denied opportunity to white people at Cambridge. These manifestly false claims have the potential to destroy the modest progress Cambridge has made in addressing historical underrepresentation, and to deter any Black academic from applying to or accepting a position at the University in the future.
Finally we seek a root-and-branch reform of the University’s policies for handling allegations of academic misconduct, with a view to owning fully the process of reviewing these allegations (rather than outsourcing them to other institutions) and to ensuring that cases are resolved within months rather than years.
We ask that you appoint an independent body comprising senior academics from within and beyond Cambridge to address these issues, with a clear timeline for completing its work and a commitment to share its findings with the University and the public. We ask that the investigation address the following:
1. The circumstances of Professor Arday’s appointment, and the decisions and risk assessments made by the Faculty of Education and the University comms team when crafting a media narrative focusing on his youth, his race, and his transformative potential.
2. The handling of allegations of misconduct against Professor Arday, including a clear timeline for when these concerns were received, how they were treated within and beyond the Faculty of Education, and whether the University was involved in efforts to deter journalists from reporting on the allegations.
3. The deficiencies and inconsistencies in the University’s handling of academic misconduct cases more broadly, as evidenced not only by the allegations against Professor Arday but by other cases in the public domain.
4. The enormous damage this episode has done to people of colour within and beyond the Cambridge academic community, and what can be done immediately to reassure them (and the wider public) that anti-racism and academic integrity at Cambridge are both essential and mutually reinforcing.
Sincerely,
There is no doubt that his resignation has energised the trolls online. One of Cofnas’s contentions is that there would be zero black professors in Havard/Cambridge if it were not for DEI.
You can imagine how exciting this is for a certain part of the internet.
Whether we like it or not, all brown people are under fire from the same corner. The amount of racist abuse against Indians has skyrocketed, in no small part helped by PRC Chinese with their online info war.
I liked Calvin’s assertion that desis are liberal abroad and conservative at home. We can see that in the commentariat.
Cofnas seems very problematic.
Professorships aren’t necessarily on merit but networks.
That is a great letter. Someone spent a lot of time over it, getting it just right. Jason Arday on the other hand used an AI resignation letter. His actions at every turn have been cancerous.
because academia is a “black box” it is far more vulnerable to manipulation. there aren’t objective metrics.
True. Though the plagiarism accusation if it stands should be judged. There should be no room for unethical professional conduct, DEI or not. It’s about upholding an academic to high standards as behooves an old institution like Cambridge.
Frankly, the rot in academia is real. Mediocre climbers reach positions of influence and bring it down. It’s been happening in the US and definitely in India. The gravy train rewards those who work the system. To the detriment of everyone in a University ecosystem from faculty to students to other staff.
Affirmative hiring in west is now a “bhiksha” of the system. When it becomes a constitutional provision as in india, it becomes a right . so nobody sneers. There are no expectations of any high performance from these hires. Competencies of this group is not measured with general category.
The system somehow survives on the Pareto principle.
Modi knowing fully well that he cannot remove reservations, has opened the gates for private universities, even white foreign ones.
Hope they will not bring their woke environment here. We already have it in abundance.
Too much wokeness in private universities is managed by arm twisting (eg. Azeem premji, Ashoka).
In public universities it is done by diluting the hold of the humanities departments by adding science and technology courses (eg JNU).
Excellent comment. Agree with you.
is affirmative action more problematic than legacies?
indefinite and unending affirmative action as in india is problematic. in mysore kingdom, miller committee was set up in 1918 and implemented in 1921, for quotas for non brahmins, which benefited mostly vokkaligas ( the landed gentry).
ironically, another recent commission recommended increasing their quota from 4% to 8%, after 100 years of affirmative action.
so legacy fades away, affirmative action stays.
however, the people’s perception changes. in karnataka, lingayats and vokkaligas are not considered obc by the people while discussing politics, where as these communities still figure in the reservation list.
in most south indian states 95 – 98% of the population is under reservation. this includes all of muslims and christians.
Affirmative action is simply to change the complexion of the elite to make them slightly more representative.
so true..
Even pre-DEI, women of colour were given preference over others; independent of ability, for TA’s or RA’s. But this was informal though not discreet. This I’ve seen in grad school, a public Ivy no less, a couple of decades back.
Once it became policy, things did spiral a bit out of control not unlike our own reservation issue.
So yes, imo it isn’t as black and white as it might appear to be. Of course now things have spiraled the other way which is very unfortunate.
It seems incorrect to say that Cofnas contends that there would be zero Black professors at Harvard/Cambridge if it wasn’t for DEI. When questioned about this prediction he says he is only reporting a statement of fact made by Harvard in the course of the lawsuit brought against them by Students For Fair Admissions. Looking at their past admissions record when asked how many Black students would have qualified absent the weightage for “social” factors apparently they said “ none”. (or so Cofnas has reported in a recent interview).
I am expressing no opinion here, merely trying to reduce the noise introduced by the “Chinese telephones” effect introduced in public discourse about these issues. If we must dislike ( or like) people let us do it for the right reasons.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/07/the-guardian-view-on-jason-arday-diversity-advocates-must-stand-firm
Thus spake Guardian :
Serious failings by one academic, and his bosses at the University of Cambridge, should not be allowed to undermine wider progressive goals
The media bias and the number of articles glazing Arday in high trust MSM sites with zero verification is shocking.
The guardian and the BBC are fully complicit in undermining the progressive movement and trust in MSM by invalidating their own editorial standards when it came to him.
I like the guardian, they have often reported on important scandals against the grain. For instance the Delcy Rodrigo betrayal of Maduro. No other paper carried it. Likewise the uk phone hacking scandal.
In other instances they have been horribly biased. I can’t work it out.
Delcy Rodríguez is a follower of Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delcy_Rodríguez#Personal_life
So was Nicholas Maduro. Didnt stop her betraying him. I have an article on it somewhere, but the guardian covered it later in excellent detail.
How exotic:
Maduro was raised Catholic. In 2012, it was reported by The New York Times that he was a follower of Indian Hindu guru Sathya Sai Baba and previously visited the guru in India in 2005.[55] In a 2013 interview, Maduro stated that his grandparents were Jewish, from a Sephardic background, and converted to Catholicism in Venezuela.[56]
I think we all know where Indians belong — as dogsbodies to be used and discarded when the Archons of the West see fit. As the Hindi saying goes: “Dhobī kā kuttā, nā ghar kā, nā ghāṭ kā.”
This is because the West doesn’t engage with Indians on a mutual respect basis, most think less of us. This is worsened by the desi tendency to ingratiate into their world by becoming more white adjacent and sticking on there even in the face of humiliation and discrimination.
Im not a fan of Brahma Chellamey, there too much of a globalist tilt in his commentary, and yet, he advocates an activist solution for Indians, similar to the jews in America.
It does seem preferable than the current doormat position.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2026/07/28/world/missing-india-washington-lobby/
I think the Jewish case is Sui generis; there is a ton of “inherited” Jewish wealth that’s built multi-generationally.
Also Jewish people (especially Reform etc) are essentially WASPs who are favourably more incline to Israel than the average WASP ..
what has been astonishing, in my lifetime, to see a sea change of views about Israel especially after the Gaza “genocide.”
why is “genocide” in quotations? Not trying to be inflammatory. I’m not too knowledgeable about this topic
Leave that aside, everyone wants to litigate the quotation marks on genocide. What did you feel about my question in the article – what is your view on DEI?
Which side do brown people take on this issue? There are very few responses on the original question.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the dichotomy of DEI abroad vs conservative at home is the prevailing mood and therefore makes it difficult to voice.
Right vs Left abroad and in India are not overlapping categories.
You can be politically right yet socially liberal in India unlike in the US. The de facto bucket of politically and socially liberal is Democrats in the States.
The bifurcation there is far more clean cut to the situation in India.
I saw a good tweet on this.
If i were to hazard a guess, genocide is defined term in international law that requires certain conditions be met. I am not sure if those are entirely satisfied in Gaza.
The ICJ has found that a genocide is occurring in Gaza. XTM’s choice to put that word in quotes is frankly quite strange.
On BP, “genocide” has been thrown around loosely many many times. So why are we now insisting on the highest legal standards?
On Indo’s original question: Affirmative Action is necessary to increase equality of opportunity in a society. Otherwise, African Americans (and other under-represented minority groups) are not going to get admission in selective colleges. The US has a particular legacy of race-based chattel slavery that it needs to deal with.
Indians (and other people of color) benefit from Affirmative Action/DEI. So why would anyone be against a policy that is actually operating in their interests?
In the US, it is really only the right-wing that is anti Affirmative Action.
That isn’t even true. South Asians are the most discriminated against group in Affirmative Action.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-55119-0
DEI for college admission works heavily against Indians. Indian males in STEM the most.
You could argue most discriminated category.
Are you talking about Indian citizens applying to the US or Indian-Americans?
I am pro Affirmative Action in principle. Diversity is a goal in itself. Especially in a society which has a legacy of race-based chattel slavery.
Affirmative Action is necessary to promote equality of opportunity.
Personally, I’m sure I’ve benefited from checking “Asian American”, etc whenever I apply for jobs.
Perhaps the feeling is that Indians are overrepresented in STEM. I didn’t study STEM so I don’t know.
I think he meant Indian citizens.
Definitely Indians are overrepresented in STEM especially Engg. Not so much in the pure sciences. Kind of makes sense given that Engineering is the default choice for a Bachelors degree in India.
The US doesn’t owe anything to foreign citizens.
Affirmative Action is meant to address domestic imbalances. African-Americans are still dealing with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Slavery is the original sin of American society.
Oh I agree 100% with that.
My point was simply that DEI is usurped by lateral entry Indians in the STEM space (speaking from what I have seen happen, thougn what I saw was pre-DEI and over 2 decades back.)
The African Americans who deserve a fair chance and affirmative action don’t even figure anywhere in high school, let alone grad school.
Good comment.
Minority women of colour (including Indians) have benefitted from DEI. This also could be due to the fact that there are very few white / black women in STEM at a grad level. Therefore, their only competition is with Indian / SA males who definitely lose out due to DEI despite non-equivalence of ability. My observation was in the Engineering streams (which obv attract the max Indian / SA crowd).
However, in the pure Sciences space, the Chinese get preference over anyone and everyone.
For now, this will can change very soon. Indian women will outperform in the US.
The discrimination is for both Indian-Americans and Indians in STEM.
Do not count on the benefits of DEI for your progeny.
Personally I do not ascribe to this idea of supporting a policy when it is for you and then turning around immediately when you are excluded.
I’m not so sure. Seen so many mediocre Indian women and men (including those on probation) misuse the system to wriggle out of a clearly challenging situation and are now at good positions in industry in the US!! Indian Americans benefit since many opportunities for fellowships are for Americans only, who aren’t the majority in a grad class in STEM.
The US used to reward merit and out-of-the-box thinking till the Asians showed up on the scene and upended it all. Reflects in the drop in quality of teaching even at top tier Universities.
I’m personally against DEI as a policy, it ends up penalizing genuinely smart people at the altar of political correctness.
strangely, this aspect of diversity is being applied in indian campuses of multinational companies, to the determinant of males.
I had a friend working at the World Bank in Singapore as a lawyer, he was the only man in an all woman team. His boss (a white man) was so obsessed with diversity that he kept encouraging this chap to retire/quit so he could hire another woman. Frustrated, he relocated out.
Out, out damn spot.
Perfect example of overcompensating for historical wrongs. Bad precedent, doesn’t help the cause of feminism at all.
Indeed, very unhealthy imo. It’s one thing to encourage higher female participation, quite another to penalize the other gender just for getting DEI brownie points 🙄
“The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is reviewing the case South Africa v. Israel, which accuses Israel of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention during its military operations in Gaza. While the court has ordered provisional measures for Israel to prevent genocidal acts, a final ruling on whether genocide occurred is expected to take several years.Case OverviewThe Applicant: South Africa filed the lawsuit in December 2023, alleging that Israel’s military campaign, blockade, and restrictions on humanitarian aid in Gaza show genocidal intent.The Defense: Israel strongly rejects the accusations as baseless, stating it acts in self-defense against Hamas following the October 7, 2023 attacks and complies with international law.Provisional Orders: The ICJ issued legally binding interim orders directing Israel to take all necessary steps to prevent acts of genocide, allow basic services and aid, and report back on compliance.Current Proceedings and TimelineInternational Interventions: Nearly 20 nations, including the Netherlands, Iceland, Palestine, and Spain, have filed declarations to intervene in the proceedings regarding the interpretation of the Genocide Convention.Extended Deadlines: The court has set long-term filing schedules for the core arguments, requiring South Africa to submit its reply by November 2027 and Israel to submit its rejoinder by May 2029. Track official documents directly via the International Court of Justice.”
That’s fine. Although it is generally understood that what is happening in Gaza meets the criteria of genocide.
If we are going to demand ICJ rulings for everything, then in future “Bangladesh genocide” etc must also be in quotes.
I am in favor of all steps to assist the disadvantaged but there are harsh truths of the affirmative action policy globally that cannot be avoided:
It disproportionately rewards more privileged, middle- and upper-class members of targeted minority/caste groups rather than assisting low-income or genuinely disadvantaged individuals.
penalizes qualified individuals who bear no personal responsibility for historical grievances.
end to become permanent, expand over time, and foster deeper ethnic and racial friction rather than social harmony.
India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia – all spectacular failures in this regard. India the absolute worst. America too will see this eventually fail.
Real solutions will take time and dedication of a kind that nation states simply lack.
So how do you think the US should make up for centuries of race-based chattel slavery?
Affirmative Action is the settled center-left position in the US. So I’m not going to argue against it.
I dont have a solution and I am not arguing for or against it. It is what it is. I also know it wont help in the US or anywhere else. It needs a patient, dedicated ground up effort to correct for made-made inequities but large nation states no longer have that capacity – that was my limited point.
Just make all childhood free. Free health, free food stamps, massive funding into schools in black neighbourhoods, no child left behind policy, free day care if needed for low income single parent homes.
America is rich enough to do it.
anything free is immediately devalued; our breath is the most precious thing on the planet but we take it for granted.
it’s interesting Farsi has so many words for “breath.”
This is pretty much the system in Japan. It works very well IMHO.
It needs a lot of buy in from the populace and with Japan as a racially homogenous nation, this is far more palatable.
“No Child Left Behind” didn’t work out all that well. I’m not sure of all the details but I don’t think it was a success.
Healthcare is never going to be free in the US. That’s a total non-starter.
On an unrelated note but still about America, recently three of my friends (2 guys and one girl ) were caught directly in the middle of a shooting at a food festival in Seattle. They were just visiting on work for a few days. They had to hide inside a toilet for 2 hours while they waited for help. They made some very interesting observations about that incident:
a. Indian newspapers reported the incident before they got a shooter alert on their phones from the Seattle local authorities. The ground response was super slow and lethargic.
b. When the shooting started, it was strange to see everyone around act in an almost “here we go again” kind of manner. No one was surprised and had the attitude of just do what needs to be done to save one’s life and then carry on.
These reactions were all so strange for these guys, it felt dystopian. I haven’t been to the US in a long time but I have heard this from far too many people and believe it. I know some of my friends have really small children ( 3 years old ) who on their first day of school had to undergo active shooter training.
Really not sure such a society, no matter how rich, can fix fundamental issues such as healthcare, education etc.
Gun violence is a particularly American pathology.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees the “right to bear arms”. Obviously, the founding fathers were not thinking of people having assault weapons.
After every shooting, the Democrats call for gun control. Obviously, this is a non-starter for Republicans.
Columbine happened when I was in middle school (I feel like seventh grade?). That was one of the first big school shootings.
Black history and welfare are too complicated imo. Just increasing funding in black neighbourhoods will not solve decades old dysfunctional family dynamics that are at the core of social issues in black communities.
These issues are also present in poor white households though the proportion is less.
A sustained effort over many generations is required at a social, educational and racial level.
America is rich for the 0.001 % that run the country, not the rest. The public schooling system is among the poorest there is for a supposedly wealthy nation.
The thing with public schools is that they are funded by property taxes.
I grew up in an affluent suburb of Washington, DC. Our local high school had an amazing choir, theater program etc. I took AP courses etc.
Meanwhile, just a few miles over in DC proper the schools had very few of those resources.
Also, it’s worth noting that the suburb was very White with some South Asian doctors and World Bank families.
What is the evidence that Affirmative Action hasn’t helped in the US?
Higher education has become more diverse. There are non-White people who have had access to Harvard, Princeton and Yale who wouldn’t have had access to those institutions generations ago.
A half black half Indian woman was Vice President of the US. A half black man has served as President.
Sure, we can debate the problems with implementing this policy. But I don’t think anyone can seriously argue the US is not better for minority citizens than it was 50 years ago.
I made some points regarding the problems in a previous comment. A deeper dissection of the data does answer this question emphatically. It is not just about representation and I was also talking about affirmative action in general globally. To the larger question of specifically whether American in general is relatively better for minorities in general is of course yes but that is a much broader topic and not just limited to affirmative action.
Strange how easy it is to encode a person to believe that something is impossible. Conservative govts in UK, Japan and even far right govts in Europe dare not touch free healthcare for children but liberals in America dare not challenge the status quo.
Don’t you remember the furor over “Obamacare”?
Free healthcare is seen as “socialism” in the US. It’s not going to happen.
“Medicare for all” was something Bernie was pushing. For the record, I was a Bernie supporter both times.
Humanities departments in the West have been suffering from mission creep for several decades now. Too many stupid and useless “disciplines” have been added, wasting valuable endowment money in the process that could be channeled toward more worthwhile pursuits. Time to trim them down to subjects that value rigor and logic and have a track record of accomplishments; definitely STEM and economics, but I’d include humanities subjects like history, archaeology, linguistics, literature, languages, psychology (despite the replication crisis, this is an important field of study).
I suppose this incident will sour the reputation of academia among the lay public (which is unfortunate), but from my perspective, this guy got hired for teaching a stupid subject that ought never to have been included in academic pursuits, let alone have valuable money spent on it. So I just can’t bring myself to care. If such fraud happens in STEM hiring, then I’ll sit up and listen carefully.
india being a much diverse society ( by all counts) has become a laboratory for all fads which start in the west.
deconstruction, Feminist studies, intersectional …., now so called mental health awareness, gender studies. these gets dropped after a few years, with those studying not getting jobs for what they have studied.
this deconstruction of kalidasa if opposed, one is called a sanghi. very strange indeed.
Very interesting a topic like this ordinarily doesn’t do *well* on BP..
Thanks Indo- very very nice as you have pushed the topics and actually the Commentariat is engaging.
This is now officially a “popular post” (more than 50 comments).
Sorry had my admin hat on.
“Friday briefing: What the Jason Arday row reveals about equality in modern Britain”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/07/friday-briefing-what-the-jason-arday-row-reveals-about-equality-in-modern-britain
It’s worth getting easily verifiable details right (if only to ensure one’s righteously indignant for the right reasons). Please check the following for correctness.
Yes, thank you, I was a bit lax and did not bother with the corrections, will be even more lazy and just tag your comment inside.
Great corrections thank you
Arday is no more. Sad day even if I disagreed on his appointment. He didn’t deserve to die. Om Shanti.
Ugh. That is horrible. I’m sorry to have been part of the internet pile on. I imagine it must have been far worse around him.