![\"RANDOM](\"https:\/\/static.toiimg.com\/thumb\/msid-133004351,imgsize-684218,width-400,height-225,resizemode-4\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg\" "\\"\u00a0Jason")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nA few years ago, at the height of the RRR craze, Wimbledon put up a poster showing Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz in the now-infamous Naatu Naatu pose. The innocuous post left a rather odd impression because SS Rajamouli\u2019s magnum opus is a mockery of everything British. The Brits can\u2019t dance, they can\u2019t fight, they are comically evil and they can\u2019t even handle a guy shooting arrows at them. The movie literally climaxes with the EBITDA-obsessed Governor Scott\u2019s blood literally splattered on the Crown.If one were a Britisher, one would have been rather dismayed that a very British event that venerates Rudyard Kipling<\/a> would use a meme from a movie that flagellates and mocks Britain\u2019s greatest achievement: colonialism. Or perhaps it is the nature of modern British culture, where the apple has fallen so far from Kipling-Forsyth-Le Carr\u00e9 Albion nostalgia that it has become too apologetic about its past, when the nation\u2019s great spirit was represented by scurrilous rogues who would sail the Seven Seas to sell opium.Modern Britain is the antithesis of the can-do hustle culture and largely consists of apologising for its past and giving too much leeway to those its ancestors ostensibly oppressed. It worships at the altar of DEI (they call it EDI) and puts multicultural harmony above all things.White kid stabbed by a Sikh man after a dispute? Believe the Sikh man who stabbed him and accused the white kid of racism, even as the kid channels George Floyd and says, \u201cI can\u2019t breathe\u201d before dying of the stab wound.Young girls being groomed by Pakistani grooming gangs? Brush it under the rug, or else people could deem us racist.Muslim woman saying she is being hounded by relatives? Treat her account as fantasy until she is murdered by said relatives.Teacher shows a Charlie Hebdo cartoon in class? Suspend the teacher.JK Rowling<\/a> says sex is real? Hound her because chromosomes don\u2019t decide sex, a DEI committee does.But even by modern Britain\u2019s standards of culturally appropriating Gandhian ahimsa and turning the other cheek when it comes to those ostensibly oppressed in the past, Professor Jason Arday\u2019s tenure as \u201cCambridge\u2019s youngest black professor\u201d belies belief.For those who haven\u2019t followed the case here\u2019s a short recap.Professor Jason Arday, Cambridge\u2019s youngest black professor, recently resigned amid accusations of plagiarism and a host of other claims. In his resignation letter, he complained about the \u201cunrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack\u201d while saying his appointment represented \u201ctalent, perseverance and hope\u201d triumphing over adversity. It was the perfect swansong after a life of bull.<\/p>\n Empire’s Guilt<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Arday\u2019s resignation is not just an indictment of the British education system or the hallowed halls of Cambridge, but of British society as a whole, including the Fourth Estate, which appears to have suspended disbelief and fact-checking filters when dealing with him.Each of Arday\u2019s claims are more ridiculous than the previous one.He claimed he was non-verbal until 11 and could not read or write until 18. Despite that, he became Cambridge\u2019s youngest Black professor, feted by interviewers on both sides of the Pond without so much as a fact-check. His story was promoted by BBC Breakfast, ITV\u2019s This Morning, Channel 4 News, CBS News and ABC\u2019s Good Morning America. WNYC interviewed him, BBC Radio 4\u2019s Today made him a guest editor and Radio 4 later gave him a five-part series, Beyond Lonely. All of them breathlessly promoted the illiterate boy who conquered Cambridge despite being the son of immigrants.He appeared on numerous interviews that did little to challenge his claims even if they were temporally impossible. Like the fact that he claimed to have appeared in a documentary called Seven Up!, a series that began in 1964 while Arday was born in 1985. He claimed a recurring brain tumour was removed two weeks before his PhD and that he suffered a stroke afterwards.He claimed to have raised millions by running 30 marathons in 35 days and 600 miles in six days, some of them with a fractured fibula and a leg swollen to twice its normal size. When questioned, the six days became 12, while the \u00a35 million he supposedly raised became the work of a fundraising syndicate whose members he could not identify because of non-disclosure agreements. The surviving JustGiving page for the 30-marathon feat records him raising \u00a36,285, not millions.The fantasia soon entered Rowling territory if Rowling wrote oppression fantasy about masked intruders, mutilated pig heads, corrosive substances and other threats none of which could be backed by any physical evidence beyond the testimonies of close family members. There were no photos, no CCTV footage, no colleagues who saw any of these things claimed, and the Metropolitan Police found that the pig\u2019s head claim was \u201ccategorically\u201d incorrect.He said he had worked overseas for WaterAid. WaterAid pointed out it didn\u2019t send volunteers overseas. Biographies claimed he had held visiting positions at important universities; they had no record of those appointments. His academic work had similar holes, claims that had been circulating in British academia for a while. More than 100 passages in his PhD were from another student\u2019s thesis. A Times review found one study that had a sample of 78% female and 32% male.When finally challenged after years of gravy-train chicanery, Arday told The Guardian: \u201cTo be honest with you, I thought you\u2019d just believe me.\u201d He lamented to The Times that it was \u201cjust academia\u201d, that he \u201cdidn\u2019t murder anybody\u201d, and that positioning him as some kind of \u201cliar and fantasist\u201d was totally unacceptable.And even that is not the most scandalous part.Scotland Yard spent four months investigating Jack Grove, a Times Higher Education journalist who approached Arday with questions about his record. Grove says he sent three polite emails and offered Arday a formal right of reply. The Met closed the case without action but told Grove not to contact Arday again because the questions were affecting the \u201cprofessor\u2019s mental health\u201d.<\/p>\n As James Hanson wrote in The Spectator: \u201cLet\u2019s be really clear about what this means. The UK\u2019s biggest police force attempted to shut down a journalistic investigation, apparently because the man at the centre of it played the race card.\u201dAnd yet the doyens of British academia stuck their necks out even without a basic check.Cambridge employed and marketed Arday. Hilary Cremin called him a \u201cworld-class scholar\u201d, while the university later described him as the victim of a \u201cvile campaign\u201d.The Good Law Project organised a solidarity letter declaring the allegations \u201centirely false\u201d. Signatories included the who\u2019s who of academia and politics including Labour MPs.Simon and Schuster was prepared to publish is memoir tracking his journey from \u201cilliteracy to Cambridge\u201d.Perhaps all the powers-that-be doubled down because the initial claims came from Nathan Cofnas who was dismissed from Cambridge after he claimed that in a true meritocracy \u201cblack people would disappear from all high-profile positions outside sports and entertainment\u201d. The claims have been manna from haven for the vocal Global Right that has found in the Arday case every single claim they have ever made about DEI in academia.Arday isn\u2019t the first Trojan Horse in the field of sociology or cultural affairs. As far back as 1996, Alan Sokal showed how flimsy the gates of academia were when he published an article in Social Text titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity to prove that an article would be published if it flattered the \u201ceditors\u2019 ideological preconceptions\u201d and has been called by many as a death knell of post-modernism.The problem isn\u2019t the knave\u2019s chicanery but how easy the con was in post-modern Britain ridden with imperial guilt that appears to have converted into institutional theatre. All the estates that derived prestige from the Empire now derive it by showcasing their distance from what it stood for. And while the old one was held together by imagined Albion glory, the new one worships at the altar of DEI where the gravest sin \u2013 academic, moral, or otherwise \u2013 is simply admitting DEI or multiculturalism isn\u2019t great or questioning those who are seen as the epitome of those values.Cambridge championed Arday because his presence was an argument against its historic racial inequities. His dramatic life story was deigned to have been more important than his scholarly worth. The claims were repeated ad nauseam by everyone: broadcasters, politicians, academics. Anyone who challenged them was deemed a racist. It\u2019s a sad state of affairs for a country that was known for its eminent thinkers, the Britain of Hume, Mill, Orwell, Russell and Popper now happily worship at the altar of chicanery and mediocrity to fight some imaginary ghost and fete those it sees as new symbols of hope.Post-BLM, Arday became the perfect mascot of institutional absolution: living proof that Cambridge had changed, and therefore a man whose mythology could not be questioned without questioning the institution that promoted it. The old British establishment manufactured heroes to justify conquest; the new one manufactures saints to advertise repentance. In both cases, the first rule remains the same: do not look too closely.<\/div>\n \u00a0Jason Arday\/Image: St Mary’s University A few years ago, at the height of the RRR craze, Wimbledon put up a poster showing Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz in the now-infamous Naatu Naatu pose. The innocuous post left a rather odd impression because SS Rajamouli\u2019s magnum opus is a mockery of everything British. The Brits can\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-31"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","medium":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","medium_large":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","large":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","1536x1536":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","2048x2048":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","blogsy-small":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","blogsy-small-tall":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","blogsy-small-square":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","blogsy-small-masonry":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","blogsy-medium":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","blogsy-medium-masonry":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","blogsy-large":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg","blogsy-wide":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"admin","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8709732a479614e7a8aa24d3eb1b239f30dc6d90c61464ed495001e7a469d856?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"\u00a0Jason Arday\/Image: St Mary’s University A few years ago, at the height of the RRR craze, Wimbledon put up a poster showing Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz in the now-infamous Naatu Naatu pose. The innocuous post left a rather odd impression because SS Rajamouli\u2019s magnum opus is a mockery of everything British. The Brits can\u2019t […]","magazineBlocksPostCategories":["\u0b26\u0b47\u0b36 \u0b2c\u0b3f\u0b26\u0b47\u0b36"],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":1,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":8,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg",400,225,false],"medium":["https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg",300,169,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/cambridge-professor-resigns-amid-plagiarism-allegations.jpg",150,84,false]},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"admin","author_link":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/author\/admin"},"magazine_blocks_comment":0,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/8709732a479614e7a8aa24d3eb1b239f30dc6d90c61464ed495001e7a469d856?s=96&d=mm&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"\u0b26\u0b47\u0b36 \u0b2c\u0b3f\u0b26\u0b47\u0b36<\/a>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9333\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/koshalsambada.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Random](\"https:\/\/static.toiimg.com\/photo\/msid-133005529\/random-musing-by-nirmalya-dutta.jpg\" "\\"Empire's")
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