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His claims of harassment also turned out to be lies, FWIW. He made a lot of false claims, like saying someone had delivered bullets and a severed pigs head to his parent's home that he had "intercepted" and that the police had identified the specific butchers it came from. The Guardian somewhat surprisingly double checked and uncovered that he was making that stuff up too. When they challenged him he said "I thought you'd just believe me".

Worse.

Arday tried to ruin a journalist's life with police complaints that the police pursued without following proper protocols. The police issued a public apology [0].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo

Harassment is not permissible. But if he had been a black researcher in, say, microbiology, it wouldn’t have materialized to that extent. His research tried to shame a very large chunk of the society for being racist. And it turns out people react in unpredictable and unpleasant ways to accusations towards their core identity that are based on lies.

There’s a difference between normalizing harassment and understanding where it comes from. I’d also like to be more forgiving about people talking bs about me. But I’m not.

Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story. The vitriol _they_ will receive, the scrutiny of _their_ work.

Also, imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story.

Indeed. It's a disaster for any minority or outsider trying to build a pathway for themselves, as well as people working in the 'soft' sciences; no matter how rigorous the qualitative methods a researcher uses, the additional effort involved in explaining/understanding them vs quantitative methods leads to reflexive dismissal from many.

> imagine being a black person trying to build a career in academia after such a story

Honestly, I hope nothing like that happens. It would be outrageously racist to say "There was that one fabulist black person in academia, here's a different black person applying for a job in academica, therefore they must also be a fabulist". How on earth could you justify that thought?

I think any applicant's work should speak for itself, it should be based on their papers published, their impact and reach, and if they're teaching staff, the aggregate reviews left by their students.

I'm not sure I'd be a fair judge in a sociology department, because I'm on Sokal's side in the Sokal hoax and think appointments in humanities departments run on bullshit and social networking, not hard data.

I think there are a lot more white bullshitters in UK sociology departments right now, and they think the equitable thing to do is to try to skew that social networking to admit more black people. I think the right thing to do is to put a hard ban on the social networking aspect of academic recruitment and promotion, and run the all the bullshitters out of town.

> therefore they must also be a fabulist"

"must" is over-stating the parent's point.

If the bar was provably lowered for him due to an attribute [0], then doesn't that invite scrutiny on others with the same attribute? To your critique, the attribute could be political affiliation, familial relationships, academic lineage, social circles, nationality, <your choice>.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/15/world/europe/jason-arday-...

The claims of harassment came from him, and began long before this became sensationalized. Certainly the claimed harassment before the public scrutiny is highly suspect, and in some cases already shown to be utter fabrications, such as the pig head that he claimed he was sent. And reading between the lines, the harassment that Cambridge and his family has claimed seems to be them simply parroting claims he made privately to them, i.e. highly suspect.

This psychologically impaired, pathological liar deftly leveraged DEI narratives and caricatures of racism to simultaneously aggrandize and shield himself from scrutiny. There are many people like him in this world. The reality of pathological liars is far more complicated than what people expect; these people are rarely malicious, and can seem (and legitimately be, until challenged) nice people. And the emotional pain they feel is no less real, and often more intense, than normal people. This guy happened to be black and figured out how to use white guilt to almost comical ends, but this type of person is usually quietly shown the door before things blow up so spectacularly. (Often the public ire ends up being about why authorities quietly showed these people the door, especially when they find new people and groups to dupe. Often part of the reasoning is concern about psychological fragility and being responsible for creating an even bigger mess.) The credulity exhibited by Cambridge is, IMO, patently racist. Whatever racial harassment he experienced after things became public pales in comparison to Cambridge and his supporters elevating this psychologically ill man into the position he reached. He was treated as a black avatar rather than a human being.

Why should someone not be shamed if they do things shameful ? Trying to understand your logic here.

By harrassment do you mean public exposure of his lies that earned him his fame ?

What is the alternative you propose ? Cover up ? Look the other way ? Become an enabler of such behavior ?

Shaming is one of society's feedback mechanisms to discourage dishonest behavior. It has its place.

Granted that the standards used by a society at any point in time may not be a universal standard. Case in point Turing. In that case, it is the society that gets shamed later.

Arday was no Turing.

>Why should someone not be shamed if they do things shameful ? Trying to understand your logic here.

His logic is probably, "arguments are soldiers": the enemy is trying to make my side look bad; neutralizing that enemy action takes priority over everything else.

In the wake of Arday's death, Nathan Cofnas (who led the X mob against him) states his motivation. Beyond whistleblowing, he states that after a 'revolution' removes professors like Arday, it will open opportunities for him to become 'head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard'.

https://bsky.app/profile/kohngregory.bsky.social/post/3mt3ci...

I can't read this post, but you need to go to the source it's quoting: https://youtu.be/9ZDTBqb8Juo?t=1611 -- Cofnas is joking with the interviewer. He doesn't think such a position exists or would ever exist, it's a joke and/or outrage bait for clipping up. His actual views, the ones that got him fired, are ugly enough.

His actual motivation is completely straightforward: R E V E N G E

He got sacked from Emmanuel College (part of University of Cambridge) in 2024 due to the public uproar against his published blog posts, and in particular the college's reasoning was that his blogpost was a "rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion". That's right, Emmanuel College explicitly requires you accept DEI or they'll sack you. So Cofnas's motivation is to:

1) get back at the University of Cambridge for sacking him

2) bring DEI into disrepute and get everyone to reject it

You then have to ask the more pertinent question. Why did Cofnas know to look for plagiarism in Arday's work? SOMEONE AT CAMBRIDGE TOLD HIM TO.

The anonymous member of faculty did so because they knew all about Arday's dubious academic output and did not like that the university had brushed it under the carpet.

Both Arday and his employer had numerous opportunities to be honest and open about it, but they suppressed it and called the police and lawyers on good-faith academics and journalists.

So what's Cambridge University's motivation for doing that? Simple: they wanted to protect their "star professor" who appears so often on TV, radio and in the press, to hide the fact that only 75 out of the 6180 academics at Cambridge are black, and they are actually a bastion of white upper-class privilege. Even though they know he's a plagiarist and a fabulist, and if everyone learned that truth, it'd bring all academics and universities into disrepute.

This tragedy was entirely of their own making. I look forward to seeing Cambridge University properly investigated over this.

> He got sacked from Emmanuel College

This sounds worse than reality.

That was an unpaid research affiliation, while he was holding a separate, paid research fellow position at Cambridge.

Cambridge didn't fire him from his paid job, which was a terminal, three-year fellowship. [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Cofnas#Academic_career

Cofnas is completely justified in wanting to get back at the University of Cambridge for (de-facto) sacking him, and for wanting to bring DEI into disrepute, including by naming and shaming specific black people who are incompetent or fraudulent DEI hires. Of course Cofnas is not the only person who wants to do this, nor the only person who has some kind of personal grievance related to affirmative action hiring.

> Emmanuel College explicitly requires you accept DEI or they'll sack you

I don't really see anything wrong with that. But then I'm not an nazi, so what do I know.

> I look forward to seeing Cambridge University properly investigated over this.

Of course that won't happen, once an institution is rotten there is no saving it. But also we shouldn't allow nazis hunting people they don't like for whatever reason.

I'm not a Nazi either, but you should not accept EDI/DEI unconditionally, nor accept that what your employer is doing in pursuit of those aims is legal. For example, the RAF unlawfully discriminated against white male candidates: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66060490

Imagine a world where anyone who made a criticism of this illegal discrimination was sacked instead of being listened to, and the illegal discrimination just continued.

Nonetheless, I'm very much against what Cofnas has to say, and I don't believe there is a genetic basis for success at university. There is IQ variation no matter how you group people, but to me it seems much more the case that cultures which value education have parents that push their children to succeed, and those that don't, don't. Sometimes you get children who enter academia despite their parents' views, but you get more people from families where their parents encourage that type of career. You also get more people entering academia if they can afford to, and aren't sidetracked into having to get a unskilled job immediately, or enter into caring for family immediately, because the family is poor. To fix this, we not only need to change the attitudes of children and their families and encourage them towards a career in higher education, and also fund those whose families can't afford higher education (grants not loans!), so they're on an equal footing with affluent families, and we also need to break the gatekeeping of academic incumbents who prefer to select people who look like them, have a similar cultural background to them, and/or agree with them.

That sounds suspiciously close to DEI :)