Cambridge Professor Jason Arday is facing fresh scrutiny after The Telegraph reported that analysis found more than 100 passages in his PhD similar to an earlier thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. The reporting has pulled into view his April warning that academic integrity tools are being weaponised, while his own doctoral work is now under that same scrutiny.
Arday spoke at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference in April and called for his peers to defend him. He said: “The instruments that are designed to protect academic integrity, designed to protect our wellbeing and our intellectual property, are weaponised” and added: “There isn’t any room to sit there and watch your fellows suffer for no reason. It’s abhorrent, it’s a disgrace and, quite frankly, evil.”
British Sociological Association conference
At that conference, Arday also described himself as the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history. He said: “That’s the cancer that we need to eradicate from academia.” The remarks now sit alongside the plagiarism analysis reported last week, creating a direct clash between his warning about how black academics are treated and the questions raised about his own work.
The comparison centres on Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s thesis, which was published six years before the reported comparison and came from work completed as a student at Brunel University in London. The reported overlap is not a passing resemblance: The Telegraph said the analysis found more than 100 passages in Arday’s PhD similar to that earlier thesis.
Nathan Cofnas and Emmanuel College
Nathan Cofnas said he had put Arday’s PhD through plagiarism detection software. He said the software found that many passages were lifted with minimal editing and that some retained copy-editing mistakes from the original source. Cofnas was sacked by Cambridge’s Emmanuel College in 2024 after a disciplinary investigation concluded that he was not guilty of discrimination or harassment, and that his views did not breach the law or university regulations designed to uphold free speech.
Simon Woolley described Cofnas’s blogpost as “abhorrent racism, masquerading as pseudo-intellect”. The scrutiny around Arday has therefore become more than a narrow academic dispute: it now sits at the intersection of plagiarism claims, arguments over racism in academia and the record of a critic who has already faced disciplinary action.
Jason Arday in April
Arday’s April remarks framed plagiarism and integrity tools as mechanisms that can be turned against black academics. The reported findings against his PhD complicate that argument because the same vocabulary of academic integrity is now being applied to his own doctoral work. The remaining question is what specific evidence The Telegraph’s analysis used to conclude that more than 100 passages were similar.
