Why are delusions so contagious? This is a question I have been asking myself since the terrible news of Jason Arday’s death. Some people seem intent on sustaining the fictional worlds he created for himself, even now.

Journalist Peter Jukes is still claiming the former professor really did run “all those marathons”; and that the plagiarism charges relate only to “a couple of citation errors” in his PhD. To maintain this, Jukes is apparently inspecting wafer-thin slices of evidence — an old press report here, a potentially partisan internal university investigation there — while carefully bypassing reams of more relevant material.

Others are maintaining Arday’s own accusation that his minority ethnicity was the only plausible reason for all the press interest. They are obsessing over the fact that a disgruntled race scientist first exposed the scandal, ignoring the detailed findings of more neutral journalists since. They also disregard a blindingly obvious alternative explanation: Arday was presented as a national treasure by the establishment, entirely because of his astonishing backstory and publication record. This meant that the unraveling of that story, and those publications, were always going to be big news.

It’s true that we can’t know for sure whether a white Oxbridge professorial chair who boasted of incredible feats, advised governments, hosted BBC series, and acted as a judge on the Pride of Britain Awards would get identical amounts of coverage, were serious cracks in his career edifice then revealed. It seems likely, though, if only because of intense public fascination with the mad shit that goes down at universities. Millions of young people are, or recently have been, students, acquiring huge debts along with all those fancy long words. Most of them have financially implicated parents. Oxford and Cambridge are supposed to be an intellectual pinnacle. Why wouldn’t the country be gripped by the strange tale of a dreaming professor among the dreaming spires?

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Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling

By Kathleen Stock

To avoid such conclusions, you would have to retcon Arday’s earlier life, omitting all the plaudits and depicting him as a minor boffin whom no one ever heard of before Nathan Cofnas wrote about him. Equally, to keep believing that the press attention was a “racist feeding frenzy” — recent words of Cambridge University Chancellor, Chris Smith — you have to forget that blackness was constantly brought into the conversation by Arday and his various backers in happier times, as a defining feature of his inspiring ascent (“world’s youngest ever black Cambridge professor” and all that). Once you acknowledge that context, it becomes reasonable to wonder whether the later mentions of Arday’s race by critics simply parrot the earlier mentions by fans. Or perhaps commentators are illustrating a wider thesis: that it is a bad idea to let impressions of a person’s abilities be swayed by facts about their skin color, black or white. Admittedly, this is a Right-wing position now, to the great shame of the Left; but it only counts as viciously racist if you are nuts.

In death as in life, then, misleading narratives are being built around Jason Arday. There is a sense of people staring doggedly at small sections of the picture, while averting their eyes from the complicated whole. Some of them are presumably sticking with his version of things out of grief or loyalty; but others seem determined to keep him in the symbolic realm for murkier reasons, erasing huge chunks of actual biography in the process.

From those on the other side, there have also been gleeful distortions of the truth. One is a tendency to depict the man as a deeply cynical fraudster. There is a boringly predictable urge here to demonize the ideological enemy to the max. Yet according to posthumous testimonies from acquaintances, Arday was kind, friendly, enthusiastic, and a bit eccentric; not someone sociopathic at all. His heroic anecdotes about overcoming difficulty — by now amply described elsewhere — were so silly and easily disprovable, the details wandering so wildly from one interview to the next, it beggars belief there was any kind of devious masterplan at work. Indeed, it is this version of Arday that indicts his employers and publishers. Had he been a smooth and accomplished conman, undetectably working the system, they would be more easily excused now.

Before Arday’s resignation, I wrote a piece charging university managers and others with having ignored his unfitness for an academic role, and so using him in a way that was not ultimately in his interests, though it was in theirs. I still believe this; but now concede that it, too, is part of a bigger picture. Bending the truth was a habit of mind that probably made him horribly vulnerable to the destruction of his imaginary worlds. He told stories about himself like his life depended on it — in research, in interviews, in motivational speeches — and there are hints of shame in the desperate way he tried to suppress the discovery of his plagiarism using lawyers and the police. Perhaps colleagues of Arday suspected that a dose of reality would hurt him, and found it too hard to point the self-deceptions out.

Most of us have met an adult who can’t stop inventing. It is rude and humiliating to confront someone like this about it, and especially when you sense that they require the fantasies — and your pretend belief in them — to carry on. I’ve done it once in my life, and it was very uncomfortable. On another occasion, I have smiled and nodded along. In some jobs or friendships, you can ignore the fact a person can’t stop spinning incredible yarns, because there are no obvious downsides to doing so; it doesn’t interfere with anything else that matters. Part of Arday’s tragedy was that his incredible yarns were not only humored by colleagues (one assumes); some of them were treated as central to his professional biography, and he kept rising higher and higher on the strength of the remarkable impression being conveyed. In a profession whose main mission requires epistemic reliability, it was only a matter of time before disaster would strike.

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Jason Arday: a question of academic standards

By Richard Dawkins

There is a case, then, for saying that English middle-class embarrassment contributed to Jason Arday’s downfall. Had his colleagues been the sort to call out fibs in the work canteen, perhaps he might have survived. To finally have reality pointed out so clinically by journalists from Left to Right, in full view of everyone who had ever adulated him, must have been a devastating experience. Those who had previously helped sustain him in his illusions could shuffle away from the spotlight. He could not.

There were other factors too, of course. It is daft to think that there is a simple causal or moral path that led to Arday’s untimely death; and the search for a scapegoat now unfolding on both sides of the culture war feels absurdly punitive and crass. It is one thing to ask who was responsible for Arday’s employment in an elite university, or his memoir deal; or indeed, to ask who or what caused him to resign so miserably. It is another thing to confidently assign blame for his suicide as a point-scoring exercise against characters you already hate. Those casually flinging this verdict around are not serious people. They themselves like comforting delusions too much.

Delusions are contagious, I think, because the more that people play fast and loose with facts, in a university or anywhere else, the less incentive there is for others to play by the rules. Sometimes it is easier and more profitable to float off into a world you constructed rather than stick with the real thing. Arday was an extreme case, but there is plenty of it about.

There is, though, another lesson to be drawn here, about the difficulty of delivering truth to a person who is radically self-deceived. Sometimes it is just easier to become half-deluded too. Institutions nominally dedicated to knowledge — universities, media organizations, publishing houses — are full of people captivated by second-hand fantasies, excluding coherent thought. We need to help them face reality.

Now, you might well think that Arday’s is an open and shut case. After all, the evidence that he has committed extensive plagiarism, in his PhD thesis and at least two published articles, seems overwhelming.

Nonetheless the university’s response has been not only to defend Arday to the hilt, including a blanket dismissal of any claim of wrongdoing, but also to accuse anybody raising questions about him of racism. As of writing, Cambridge seems to be standing by its earlier statement that any questions are part of a “vile smear campaign to undermine his credibility”.

Okay, this much is widely known already. But what non-academics probably don’t know is the flip side of the story. And to understand why this affair has sent British academia into various shades of doolally, it helps to know where this all came from. You need to know about Nathan Cofnas, the man whose blog broke the accusations of plagiarism, unleashing the firestorm.

Although he is now employed at the University of Ghent in Belgium, Cofnas was previously a Leverhulme postdoctoral researcher based in Cambridge. Here we need to tread carefully. Cofnas was not employed by the University of Cambridge. That was his host institution, but he was funded by Leverhulme. However, while he was based in Cambridge, Cofnas had a College Research Associate affiliation with Emmanuel College (a separate entity from the university). This is a lot less fancy than it might sound: it basically gave him the right to put the College’s name on his personal website, and volunteer to do free work for them.

However, things exploded spectacularly when undergraduate students at Emmanuel discovered Cofnas’s personal Substack. We will come back to this in a minute, but what they read, they concluded to be racist. The students campaigned for him to lose his affiliation, and in the end he did. He later tried to take the college to court, but lost. (From what I hear, his attempt to paint Emmanuel as a hotbed of woke lunacy fell a bit flat, given that the Master of the College is currently Lieutenant General Douglas Chalmers.)

So, one major problem lurking in the background of the Arday story is that the first person to publicly accuse him of plagiarism, and trigger the current shitshow, is a man who has serious beef with Cambridge, and around whom suspicions of racism already swirl. To say that this is not helpful for those who are purely (and genuinely) concerned with the plagiarism angle alone is an understatement. If you read the mainstream news reporting on this affair, you will also not see Cofnas’s name coming up very often. I suspect that this is no accident: it’s kind of awkward to deflect accusations of racism if you are drawing on information provided by somebody recently accused of… racism.

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Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling

By Kathleen Stock

But maybe we should back up a second. After all, is Cofnas a racist? Things get tricky here. He himself will tell you that he is “a race realist” who subscribes to “hereditarianism”. By this, he contends that in terms of statistical distributions across large populations, people of different races on average exhibit different characteristics. And, crucially, that this is not a product of socialization, history, or culture — but is more or less hardwired into underlying DNA.

To some extent, this claim is uncontroversial. It is true that populations distributed across East Africa for tens of thousands of years now tend to produce humans that are the best at running marathons. Something similar is true regarding Jamaicans and sprinting (although for very different historical reasons). Where it gets controversial is that “race realists” like Cofnas think that the same is true of IQ. On the one hand, they will smugly tell you, it’s just true that East Asians are better at math than European whites. But what they also want to tell you is that it’s just true that black Africans have lower IQs, on average, than everybody else. And the reasons for this, they say, are hardwired genetic differences.

Does this make Cofnas a racist? He would say no. He would say it makes him a realist, somebody who refuses to shy away from scientific fact.

A little while ago, before I ever heard of Jason Arday, I went away and read some of Cofnas’s published academic work. And here’s the thing: the scholarly quality is high. The first piece I read was a complex argument about our evolutionary history, and the constraints this imposes on morality. Not only was it good, I agreed with the argument. But this had absolutely nothing to do with race.

So I turned to his much more controversial philosophical defense of race realism as a legitimate scholarly inquiry. There he claims that the best explanations for variation in IQ are ultimately genetic, and that until social science accepts this fact, we will inevitably do bad social science. And the truth is, I’m not at all surprised that it passed the rigors of peer review at a proper academic journal. In this case, I had quite a lot of objections to his argument, but it was without doubt serious work. Whatever else you might say about Cofnas, the man is no intellectual fraud.

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What’s the point of the University?

By Wessie du Toit

And then I read the blog.

The careful, rigorous, circumspect scholar I had discovered was nowhere to be seen. Instead, dreary pages of sloppy ranting: edgelord ragebait of the sort that abounds in the bowels of Reddit. There, you can find claims such as “blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” if genuinely color-blind criteria were applied. That “blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students” if they had to compete on equal terms for admission. Lots of denunciations of “woke”, plus armchair fantasies about how to usher in a hereditarian utopia. You get the idea.

Was Cofnas being an outright racist in his Substack musings? No. But sometimes, that’s not enough to clear the bar.

Should Emmanuel College have ended their affiliation with him? I’m genuinely torn. On the one hand, his personal blog is what academics and lawyers refer to as “extramural speech”. He wasn’t publishing it under anybody’s name but his own. Insofar as we think (and I do) that individuals should have free speech to say pretty much whatever they want in a private capacity, then as tasteless as his blogs were, Emmanuel should’ve just ignored them.

On the other hand, there is a case for saying that Emmanuel College is basically a glorified private club. And there’s no legal or moral obligation for private clubs to tolerate as members people they deem to be assholes. I have never met Cofnas in person. But if his internet persona is anything to go by, he seems a real asshole.

The result of all this is that British academia finds itself in a summer of farce.

Yes, we have what appears to be a fraudster and plagiarist, and indeed a serial fantasist. Both he and his employer shamelessly play the race card when anybody tries to question the very obvious holes in his story. This would be bad enough because many in academia watching this, if they are being honest, can tell by now that he is obviously not up to the job. It’s not just the accusations of plagiarism, it’s that his record is so obviously paper-thin that most academics couldn’t have got that position simply based on the CV. We all know damn well (even if only some of us will admit it in public) that politics and PR were crucial in this appointment.

The problem is, the first person to publicly accuse Arday has indeed been accused of being a racist — thereby vindicating his defenders up to a point. And Cofnas also has an axe to grind with Cambridge, which has allowed Arday’s defenders to underplay his (overwhelmingly plausible) claims.

Which leads us to another uncomfortable truth. Just last week, the Telegraph was using this affair as evidence that all the universities are broken “and hence maybe it is time to pack the whole thing in”. This belief that the universities are basically a scam on the public dime is growing, and Arday, with more than a little help from Cofnas, has added fuel to the fire.

The trouble is, significant portions of the humanities and social sciences have given up on serious scholarly inquiry, coming to see themselves primarily as activists, torchbearers for moral and political revolution. I know, because I’ve heard the mutterings about my status as an evil apologist for colonialism and racism due to my insistence that it’s good for students to read some of the books by some of the dead white men (but not only books by them!).

The result is an absurd situation where people who are supposed to have dedicated their lives to the fearless pursuit of truth do not know where to turn. Those of us who genuinely believe in the pursuit of knowledge, via the rigors of scholarship, are of course appalled by the Arday fiasco. Not simply because of the facts themselves, but because we know this is going to affect more than him, and more than Cambridge.

The knives are being sharpened, and it won’t only be the bullshit merchants who’ll suffer when the backlash comes. Likewise, one can only feel sympathy for serious scholars from ethnic minorities who will now be harmed by the spillover. But it would be a bad idea for us to therefore get in bed with Cofnas (who seems to think that until they adopt hereditarianism, universities are a write-off due to “woke” takeover). Likewise, his fellow travelers on the populist Right, who already seem out to destroy us.

During this long, dry summer of ’26, British academia has found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place. But a storm is coming. And when it hits, it is unlikely to leave either the rocks or the hard places where they were.