Today, Explained - The tragedy of Jason Arday

Episode Date: August 20, 2026

What the death of a star Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism tells us about race, culture, and who we are. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. A memorial for former Cambridge professor Jason Arday was set up by students and staff outside The Senate House in Cambridge, England. Photo by Nordin Catic/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The biggest story in Britain today is Harry and Megan are coming back. Were you silent or were you silence? The biggest story in Britain a few weeks ago was the new prime minister. We may be a small country, but we're a great one too. But in between those two big stories, the biggest story in Britain was Cambridge professor Jason Arde. You've either no idea who he is or you've been inundated. with takes and vitriol. His story went from a curiosity to a tragedy

within the space of just a few weeks, and how you might feel about it will likely depend on how you see the world and things like DEI and affirmative action and systemic racism, but no matter what your vantage or worldview, we could all learn something from what happened to Jason Arde.

So we're going to spend some time with his story on Today Explained. Support for today comes for Apple News Plus, Apple News Plus has everything you're into all in one place. Over 500 top publications covering local and national news, food, sports, plus daily puzzles, audio, and more. News subscribers try it free for one month at news.comple slash learn terms apply. Today is going to be explained. See you.

I'm Sean Ramos from, joined by Richard Adams, who's the education editor at The Guardian, which means he covers Cambridge. Well, Cambridge is one of the world's elite universities, and it has. has been for approximately several hundred years. And then in 2023, it appointed Jason Nadei as professor of sociology of education. And when they made the announcement, they made a great deal of the facts, quite rightly, that he was very young, he was 37, and that he was Black British. and he was the youngest black person to be appointed as a professor in Cambridge's history.

And indeed, given the relatively small number of black British professors in the British higher education system, that in itself was pretty unusual. But the fact that it was that Cambridge made it even more newsworthy because Cambridge and Oxford University are regarded as two sort of centres of excellence in the British education system, and indeed in university education around the world. I guess before we talk about how his story unravels, we should talk about his backstory and what made his hiring an appointment so exceptional. His life story is even more exceptional.

He was said to be nonverbal up until the age of 11 and then functionally illiterate until the age of 18. I always felt it was a privilege to have a period of 11 years where maybe I couldn't speak and I couldn't converse in a way that everyone else could because it allowed me to see things in a different way. And despite that, went on to further study. And eventually by 2015, he gained a PhD from a university in Liverpool.

You said to me, like, you know, it would be the greatest story in the world if the kid who didn't know how to read and write was managed to get a PhD. And you said, I think, you know, we can take on the world or you can take on the world and you can win. And then he goes on a succession of jobs in academia

in the UK. And he works his way up, the sort of hierarchy of British academia. And then he gets the job in 2023. at the University of Cambridge. History is being made at the University of Cambridge. The British institution has appointed its youngest black professor ever.

The 37-year-old has achieved what was once seemingly impossible. And so in the space of seven to eight years since getting his PhD, he has risen very rapidly through the academic hierarchy and ends up at its pinnacle. So when does Professor Ardae's story start to unravel. Is it immediate or does it happen over time? Well, in terms of what we know publicly, it starts to unravel pretty recently,

but in terms of what we know now was going on behind the scenes, people raised concerns with the University of Cambridge soon after his appointment. And those concerns were firstly that his body of work was, relatively insubstantial. And then people began to look more closely at some of the papers he had published. And then allegations of plagiarism began to appear and that the Cambridge University of being privately warned or questioned about this. This sociology professor, now 41, has been accused of plagiarism.

A string of allegations regarding plagiarism and tall tales raised questions about himself, Cambridge University, and higher learning in general. These were raised both with the University of Cambridge and with the university that awarded his thesis. And they were investigated. At the same time, Ardei was preparing to publish a memoir, which was being published. It's been published in the US already by an imprint of Simon Schuster. And so then in the last few weeks, a number of stories came out about Jason Arde's

academic past, but also a number of the claims he had made himself about his own life. Now today, the memoir version of all of his tall tales comes out, including new claims about a suicide attempt, a new form of cancer to add to his existing list of cancers that he's apparently overcome and much, much more. He claims that he had a brain tumor when he was writing his PhD, and lost his memory just before his visa and had to relearn his thesis. And those began to be examined

in greater details than they had previously. What does the media actually find in its reporting of Jason Arde? Does his entire story fall apart? We can make a division between the academic side, plagiarism and the relatively slim amount of research that he, produced. And the claims he made in his life story also made a number of really eye-opening claims

about long distance running, for example. He claimed it's at one point to have run 600 miles in the space of six days. And when this was queried and pointed out that this would be, you know, amongst some of the most extraordinary feats of endurance by anyone, he then changed that claim to be over 12 days. And there was an earlier claim that he had run 30 marathons and 35 days. And then people would come back to him and say, well, you know, can you prove this?

And in most cases, he wasn't able to. He also made a number of claims that he had been targeted. And I'm sure that that was true to some extent that since he'd been appointed at Cambridge, he'd been the target of racist abuse. So he claimed, for example, that he was confronted by a masked intruder in his Cambridge office.

And he told, he formed a university of this, so they installed security cameras and a panic button and extra security apparatus. And he then claimed that masked man had reappeared with a knife, telling him to resign his position or that he would be killed. But none of this was captured on any of the security cameras or there were no witnesses. And Cambridge has his back until they don't.

What happens to change its mind? His original university did look at the plagiarism accusations, and they did confirm his PhD. So from Cambridge's point of view, he still had a PhD, and they did defend him, and then something changed, and they put out a statement saying they would go to conduct an internal investigation. into his appointment. And they said that they received new information,

the phrase that they used, around his CV, his resume. They didn't reveal what that was, and we still don't know. And very shortly after, in fact, in minutes after the public announcement of that investigation, Jason Aday announced that he was resigning

from his post at Cambridge because he said the pressure was getting too much and it was too much of his family and for himself. And so he was stepping away. This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me

to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me. It is simply a decision of someone who has reached the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure. And in some respects,

that should have been the end of it. But of course, for some parts of the media that just encouraged, well, obviously, it sort of justified a lot of the earlier coverage that they're given. I spoke to many academics at Cambridge who are very angry at the way the university handled it. They felt that they had exposed Jason Aday to a torrent of racist abuse, that they'd put him in a position and they hadn't really supported him sufficiently. The university denies this, says that they'd given him support all the way along. And then, On Friday, a few days later, he's found in his home dead.

Jason Ardey, who was Cambridge University's youngest black professor ever, has been found dead a week after he resigned amid plagiarism allegations. Investigators say the circumstances of the 41-year-old's death do not appear to be suspicious. Arde's family said they were in shock and awe to have lost him, that a, quote, campaign of misinformation was too much for someone they described as a gentleman. man who wanted to see the best in everyone. We contacted all sorts of outlets in the UK, and it was amazing. A lot of people said, you know, we're not talking about this story anymore.

We don't want to talk about it. We're going to take a break from this story. Do you think, I mean, did the British press learn something from the way they jumped on this story, do you think? Is it too early to say still? I've just said, I've been a journalist for a long time. And the history of the British media is from time to time, I don't mean to be flippin.

I mean, someone died, and that's really incredibly sad. But there have been similar cases of people who, for one reason or another, have been pursued by the media and where the pressure gets too much for them. And in my role as a journalist, I've attended a number of inquests. And one of the things I would say is one of the things you learn from that is that there's never a clear reason. Even when it looks like there's a clear reason, there's never a clear reason. It's always the minutiae of individual lives are messy and uncertain and unclear. So it's, although it's very tempting to sit outside it and say,

well, that's the reason. It's never that straightforward. It's an incredibly sad story. It's not a story anybody wants to write or be involved in. It's one thing to write about, you know, someone who's embellished their CV and made exaggerations and so on. It's another thing to write about their death. And, you know, that moves it from an interesting story to a tragedy.

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Time to say goodbye. For the Atlantic, you wrote that everyone following this. story would do well to engage in some reflection. I don't think everyone following the story necessarily feels like they should be engaging in some reflection. So I wanted to ask you why you wanted to convey that thought. Yeah, I would say blame is not a finite resource. And I think there's plenty of it to go around in this case in particular. I think blame that belongs to conservatives and that belongs to Republicans and that belongs to various kinds of institutions. And that, of course, belongs to Jason Ardeh, the man. Right. I think this is a person.

who was clearly a serial fabulous, and I think one could fairly say a con artist, who was able to, through an increasingly implausible array of stories about his background, that he was mute until age 11, that he was illiterate till age 18, that he ran 600 miles and six days, a feat, which is just 50 miles shy of a world record, right, was able to flatter the vanities of people at Cambridge University who were very desperate to get a magical minority in the door, right? and they were so hell-bent on their desire to engage in diversity politics that they overlooked

what should have been very obvious flaws, right? I think it's also true simultaneously, though, that you cannot just blame RDA or liberal institutions for this, and particularly for how this ended, right? This was, it's worth noting, an academic scandal that on the order of academic scandals is not one that perhaps should be international news, but that's very much what it became and no small part because the British press turbocharged it. If you look at any major British outlet, there were many, many, many, many articles written each one chronicling every minute of this entire affair, right? And I think it's worth noting that it's hard to imagine that this degree of scrutiny would be applied to an academic scandal if Jason Ardei had been white.

It's also hard to imagine that Jason Arde would have been hired if he was white. I think people would have asked more questions about his implausible claims if they were not. so predisposed to just try to get him in the door. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a brief list of those directions that you just laid out there was Ardei himself, the institutions that hired him, that published him, and certainly the media. Let's just go through him. I mean, start with Ardae. Like, what was it that compelled this individual to make up so much of his backstory?

Yeah, I think that's a good question. It's hard to know what's inside his mind, but one imagined. that he correctly understood that a certain kind of elite liberal would be very willing to overlook quite a lot, and that would be willing to swallow a whole lot of implausibilities to get him in the door. And I think he understood how the system works. One of my frustrations with the way discourse of the story has unfolded, particularly after his tragic death, is he is being treated as somebody with no agency. And I think Arde, if you look at what he did, was clearly relatively savvy, right?

He understood that there was a market that he was being branded as the youngest black professor in the 800-year history of Cambridge. And he fabricated a story that told people what they wanted to hear. Not only was he black coming from rough circumstances, but he was disabled, who was severely autistic. He had this miraculous recovery, also all sorts of medical elements. He survived a brain tumor, testicular cancer, epilepsy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? So he clearly knew how the game was played. He knew that he could leverage these various identity claims and service of advancement, which is what happened. And so, yeah, clearly a savvy guy who was more than capable of pressing his advantage as he understood it.

The story was not nearly as big in the United States as it was in the UK, understandably. But as you said earlier, a lot of people want to place blame for our day's death on the British press, including American Ibram ex-Kendi, who said he was, quote, lynched by the media. Yeah. Do you think that's going too far? I think it's going way too far. I think, first of all, there are few things I find more grotesque, at least in terms of everyday discourse, than treating lynching as a metaphor, which is something I think you see quite a lot. I think anyone who has seen a hanging tree knows that throwing the term around lynching for mere journalistic scrutiny, I think, is vile beyond measure.

I also think, look, was the British press, was the scrutiny far too intense? Yes. Do I think it was racist in the sense of, I have a hard time imagining there would be this much scrutiny on a white academic who did the same thing? Yes, I think you can absolutely say that. But to me, there is a question about, okay, what is that? the line between appropriate journalistic scrutiny and obsession. But I also think it's worth noting to be fair to the British press, right? They're responding to the way in which he was

marketed to them nationally. He was marketed by Cambridge as the youngest black professor in the 800-year history of this very venerable institution, right? And so to some extent, When you brand someone that way, when you film BBC specials with, you know, a close-up on his black hands nestled in the white ones of the head of the Faculty of Education, right? I think some degree of scrutiny is warranted. Hey. Hey. I'm so good to see you. Here's his new boss at Cambridge.

We do have a lot of work to do, but I feel really optimistic. There will be those I think this is a tokenistic appointment. What are your thoughts on this? The Board of Electors on your interview day were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do. I think it was excessive. But at the same time, Jason Ardei was a public figure.

I think it is fair to say. His memoir is well poised to make a splash, right? And he took this position that made him a minor academic celebrity. And again, I think it's very fair to ask whether the degree of attention on what is ultimately an academic scandal in which no one was hurt was far too much. But the idea that we would place the blame on the media rather than on Simon and Schuster, who clearly overlooked obvious inconsistencies in his story. And Cambridge, I find that, I find that absurd. I think we need to blame the people who put him on the mountaintop rather than the people who ripped him down it, even as I think some of those people putting attention to him were unscrupulous. In your piece of the Atlantic, I thought you kind of bravely related your own experience to that of Jason Arde. Did that come naturally to you or did you have to hold your breath? Well, look, I am a black guy who has been the beneficiary of various kinds of DEI and affirmative action initiatives. And I certainly have encountered a certain kind of white liberal who is very eager to metaphorically grasp my black hands and their white ones and stare lovingly into my eyes.

like the Cambridge Faculty of Education person did, right? So I had some degree of sympathy with him. Look, I find those kinds of encounters revolting. But I also can understand, from RDA's point of view, coming from a relatively disadvantaged background, he's a children of immigrants, then you have all of these people paying attention to you, showering you in accolades, right?

And I think fetishizing you, but it probably didn't seem that way to him, right? And you tell a small lie. And maybe that small lie then becomes a bigger lie, and then a bigger lie and a bigger lie and a bigger lie, right? And so, look, what he did was wrong, but I can imagine the kind of incentive structure he saw laid out before him. And it's not hard to see that he made a decision that could in some sense be understood as, yes, self-serving, but also giving people what they wanted, right? Do you think we'll learn anything from it?

No. I think people have retreated into their camps. I think progressives are blaming the media for doing what I've seen thrown around as a digital lynching. I think conservatives are blaming academic institutions or Jason Ardeh or just gleefully basking in the glow of having torn this guy down a peg. I haven't seen a single lesson really learned. I think I've seen a lot of blame being apportioned. I don't think there's much reflection about whether or not these policies are good or bad, right? The kind of policies or the kinds of extremist versions of affirmative action, I think that go well, beyond the spirit of what most people understand as affirmative action being about, whether those kinds of initiatives are good, whether the press scrutiny was fair. I just, I don't see a lot

of self-reflection. I see a lot of blame. And even as I'm wanting to say, there's lots of people to blame, I also think we should be a little more self-critical, right? Like, my first impulse on learning the Jason Ardei affair was to find it somewhat amusing. I will be honest, right? Here was this guy who managed to tell all of these obvious lies. And these very, very smart people believe the hookline and sinker. It was objectively funny, right? But it became unfunny very quickly. And so I think, like I said in the piece,

we could all stand to do some reflection about how we ended up in this situation, how Jason Ardei ended up in this situation. But will that reflection happen? I highly doubt it. We can always hope. Dustin DeSoto produced today's show, Miranda Kennedy edited Patrick Boyd and David Tadishore mixed and Gabriel Dunatav told the truth for today explained.