Fantasists of a feather flock together.
Sadly that is only one of the lessons of the sad story of bogus academic Jason Arday.
Arday was the feted young black academic at Cambridge University (UK) who took his own life on August 14 this year after media and academic focus on the veracity of his work and outlandish claims.
Some of those claims include:
At the age of three diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay.
Unable to speak until he was 11.
Could not read or write until 18.
Suffered epilepsy (sometimes linked to a severe gang beating at 18 that caused lifelong seizures), locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, a brain tumour, and other conditions.
Ran 30 marathons in 35 days (partly with a hairline fracture/broken leg after an epileptic seizure mid-run) and, separately, 600 miles in six days (or 300 miles in three days) for charity.
Installed water points in South America and West Africa,
Played semi-professional football
Earned a £1.4 million (currency unspecified) advance for his memoir.
Given the absurdity of these claims, it was only a matter of time before he would be undone. Indeed, it’s hard to believe Arday was ever appointed Professor of Sociology of Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge in March 2023 at the age of 37 and that he escaped scrutiny for so long.
Well it’s not so hard to believe once you read what happened to anyone who dared look under the bonnet of Planet Arday.
In 2023 emeritus professor David Harris at Plymouth Marjon University contacted Arday, Cambridge, and Liverpool John Moores University (where Arday did his PhD) about substantial overlap/plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper and other work. He later described Arday’s PhD and subsequent articles as showing “serious plagiarism.”
What happened to him? Arday warned that further communication would be treated as “bullying and harassment.” Harris’s emeritus title was temporarily stripped (apparently linked to separate comments critical of critical race theory), though it was later restored. Cambridge largely brushed aside his concerns, saying the earlier research was “not within our remit.”
In September 2025 a reporter at Times Higher Education (THE), Jack Grove, conducted a detailed investigation into Arday’s PhD thesis and papers. Grove contacted Arday and Cambridge for comment.
What happened to him? Arday hired a high-profile defamation firm which sent THE a legal letter. THE spiked the story. Grove later received a police warning not to contact Arday again after a harassment complaint. The investigation was effectively suppressed for nearly nine months until another academic went public with his doubts about Arday.
That academic was Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas is an American philosopher specializing in the philosophy of biology and ethics. While there had been critical rumblings from other academics over the years, the entry of Cofnas into the fracas must have scared the bejesus out of Arday.
Cofnas is an academic outlier who has never shied away from controversy. His work on group differences in intelligence, hereditarianism (which he terms “race realism”), and critiques of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies are controversial to say the least.
He’s been fending off criticisms of his work for years now from academics and students alike. In 2024 a Substack he wrote arguing for the acceptance of hereditarianism as a path to defeating progressive ideology triggered student petitions, formal complaints and protests. He was even removed from his unpaid College Research Associate role at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
That reputation followed him when he joined Ghent University in Belgium in 2026. Staff and students noisily expressed their disapproval. Undeterred, in July this year Cofnas published a detailed Substack post alleging extensive plagiarism in Arday’s thesis and papers.
Cofnas’ essay was the spark that led to wider media scrutiny of Arday’s academic record and claims. On 5 August the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge (and one of the youngest people appointed to a professorial chair in Oxbridge history) resigned from Cambridge University. On 14 August he was found dead.
What happened to Cofnas? A week after Arday’s death, Ghent Rector Petra De Sutter suspended Cofnas as a precautionary measure pending a disciplinary investigation related to his public statements. Cofnas has said he expects to be fired. He views it as retaliation.
Who is Ghent Rector Petra de Sutter? He is a man pretending to be a woman (performance began in 2004). That’s right - another fantasist.
De Sutter is a former Belgian politician (Deputy Prime Minister 2020–2025 for the Green party Groen), and previously a Member of the European Parliament. Plus this man cosplaying as a woman is also a gynaecologist and professor of reproductive medicine.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there are still Arday defenders who believe he was unfairly persecuted. A GoFundMe page set up for his family has garnered over $NZ500k so far.
If reading all this makes you feel like you’ve entered Madville or just been on an epic bender, you are not alone. But with any luck it might embolden you to speak out when someone or something sounds a bit iffy, even if they come with impeccable cred and dazzling social status. Verily, dear readers, we live in deranged times.
There's a massive ick factor involved with a tranny who is a gynaecologist. Was his choice of career part of his fetish?
Listening to Ardy speak, he certainly doesn't sound like someone who was mute until he was 11. He's very articulate and though he has a certain oddness about his facial expression, which does suggest Aspergers level autism, he is/was very articulate and doesn't/didn't have that flat monotonous speech (a la Elon Musk) which I would expect from someone who had significant language delay as a child. People who went to school with him remember him as a chatter box/class clown, who used to entertain them on the school bus by singing jingles from TV commercials.
It seems likely to me that he did have Aspergers level autism, which did not become a diagnosis until 1994 (when it entered the DSM) in English language speaking countries. (Hans Asperger was a nazi era German researcher whose work was not translated into English until 1992). Back in the 1980's and 90's, to meet the criteria for autism, you had to have what today we would call severe autism and mental retardation. He obviously isn't mentally retarded. All of which is to say that Ardy simply wouldn't have met the criteria for any kind of autism diagnosis until 1994, when he was 9 years old.
My father had Aspergers level/mild autism, as does one of my cousins. They are/were both also fantasists. My father, an engineer (and yes, he actually was an engineer), ran around telling everyone he met fantastical tales which made him look very silly and which I found embarrassing to be associated with. He was a brilliant engineer, and he didn't attempt to advance his perfectly respectable career with these ridiculous stories (none of which pertained to engineering or science) though, so it was harmless, if irritating. My cousin, on the other hand, (pronouns ai/she/they), claims to be Māori (which she is not, possessing not a drop of Māori ancestry and having been raised by pakeha squarely in the pakeha culture), and milks her bogus queer and "indigenous" status for all its worth careerwise. Her lived experience of being "indigenous" in academia makes her an expert on educating "indigenous peoples" you see. She lives and works overseas (as a university lecturer in Ardy's very own field) where people presumably lack the cultural knowledge to be able to tell whether or not she really does belong to the tribe and culture she claims as her own. As tear your hair out irritating as I find this, it also worries me a great deal, because all it will take to ruin her career a la Jason Ardy (and Rachel Dolezel and Elizabeth Warren) is a colleague who wants her job or has a grudge against her doing a little digging and I don't think she will cope with the humiliation and loss of status very well.
I wish for Jason Ardy's sake (and for his family's sake) that he had taken the L, changed his name, cut his hair, sold his house, and gone to live and work as a PE teacher (the thing he actually was) in some other less desirable part of England. Yes, being publicly disgraced because you did something very very dumb is humiliating, but he didn't need to kill himself. It seems a tragic waste of a perfectly good (if embarrassing to be associated with) life. My heart goes out to his family.
Also, I worked in obs and gyne for 6 months, and some of those male gynecologists were really really creepy men (as you might expect with a man who chose to make a career out of looking at women's vaginas).