Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects traveling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language? Look, for example, at the following passage from Arday’s thesis:

“An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognized that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”

I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination.

Never mind the apostrophes. They, at least, are not a substantial barrier to understanding, but my quotations below are, I assure you, typical of the whole thesis. I made an attempt to translate them into English — see the brackets — but after the first two gave up.

“This process allowed the researcher to immerse themself in the data collated.” (This process allowed me to immerse myself…)

“As the researcher, there was an awareness that the legitimacy of such suggestions regarding reliability are open to critique, however, this research study adopted these principles in attempting to maintain reliability through a qualitative research design.” (I realized that such claims to reliability might be criticized, but I hoped that my qualitative research design was reliable).

The infamous passive voice is much in evidence, together with the associated shunning of the first-person pronoun. “I” is demoted to “the researcher”, and even he suffers a further demotion, as in the weird “As the researcher” construction.

“As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.”

“References were made with regards to the benefits that were gained from the peer-mentoring experience, with regards to developing pedagogically and working as part of a collegial environment to support each other during teacher training.”

If I might plagiarize Oscar Wilde, a single “with regards to” might be regarded as a typo. Two in one sentence looks like… well, let’s just say it’s not what we expect from a Cambridge professor.

Suggested reading

On plagiarism

By Terry Eagleton

And then there’s this:

“Throughout the process, at critical junctures the researcher was conscious that with regards to providing knowledge to the participants regarding reflection and mentoring, a contradictory position was being adopted, with regards to eliminating anything that may resemble a hierarchical structure.”

Forgive me if I plagiarize myself:

“Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.”

Of course, I wouldn’t normally use a public forum to lampoon a style that should have been corrected by a PhD candidate’s supervisor. I wouldn’t normally do it but — for heaven’s sake — it’s a Cambridge professor we are talking about, appointed to a presumably much-coveted chair at one of the world’s great universities, possessor of three honorary doctorates. Mightn’t you be forgiven for wondering whether, just possibly, normal standards were relaxed? Arday has now done the honorable thing and resigned, leaving the University of Cambridge with much explaining to do. A BBC news film shows Professor Hilary Cremin calling him “The best in the world”. She also said that the Board of Electors to his Cambridge professorship were “absolutely unanimous”. Really?

Fortunately, there are signs that other faculties at Cambridge are as aghast as the rest of us at what has been done to their university’s good name. May I arm them with a lovely quotation from one of science’s great stylists, Peter Medawar: “…no one who has something original or important to say will willingly run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.”

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.

Suggested reading

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.

Suggested reading

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.

When I was a university teacher in the pre-AI epoch, a student presented me with an essay which was entirely plagiarized from a celebrated critic except for the outstandingly intelligent bits, which had been deleted. With becoming modesty, the student said he knew he wasn’t up to much intellectually speaking and so dumbed down the essay he was hijacking. (“Plagiarism,” incidentally, comes from the Latin word for “kidnapping”.) I briefly considered giving him marks for humility. He’s now a fairly well-known actor, who like all actors survives by pretending that someone else’s words are his own.

Around this time there was an outfit in the United States called Intellectual Bullshit Inc, which would write you an A-worthy essay on any topic you wanted, from water imagery in the later Shakespeare to the vaginal structure of the flea, but also a B or C-level one if that seemed more suitable to your capabilities. They would even churn out a whole doctoral thesis on your behalf, at the cost of thousands of dollars. No doubt they’ve now been overtaken by AI, as one form of plagiarism yields to another.

What counts as plagiarism, however, isn’t easy to determine. The very word “research” suggests that you’re working on materials which are not your own. It’s also arguable that all uses of language are creative, even language which is stolen. You have to make sense of the stuff you’re pilfering. Language is governed by rules, but as referees and umpires are aware, applying a rule is itself a creative act, involving tact, discretion, intuition, appropriateness and so on. There are no rules for following rules. Rules have to be interpreted, which is one reason why football crowds sometimes become irascible. We also have to know when to bend the rules or throw them away altogether. We do this when we say “taught” rather than “teached”, but not these days when we say “I was sat” rather than “I was sitting”, which is ungrammatical but has become the norm. 

Even so, there’s a sense in which what we say is always borrowed from others. “I love you” is always a quotation, however sincerely one may intend it. All language is second-hand, reach-me-down, off-the-peg, and clichés are simply those bits of it where this is blatantly obvious. An entirely original utterance, like the message of an alien, would be incomprehensible. No writer before Shakespeare came up with the sentence “My salad days, when I was green in judgement”, but it only works because we’re already acquainted with the individual words. Much the same is true of human behavior. We become unique individuals by spontaneously imitating those around us. Identity is a matter of mimicry. We are all plagiarized versions of our parents, though we aren’t of course identical with them. Two individuals being exactly alike, such as identical twins, is spooky, raising the mind-bending paradox of how something can be both itself and something else. The truth is everything is shop-soiled, tarnished, woven out of something else.

The idea that there’s nothing new under the sun, a thought which is an instance of what it claims, can be disturbing. This is because most of us are instinctive Romantics who believe in originality, and the idea of originality is closely bound up with individualism. The idea that all individuals are incomparable is built deep into the modern psyche, even though it’s a highly dubious claim. Oscar Wilde, whose mission in life was to be that inimitable genius known as Oscar Wilde, could never be caught doing the same thing twice or filching a phrase from another author. He made himself up as he went along; and if he disliked Nature it was because it kept mindlessly repeating itself and was incapable of improvising. This is ironic, since the Irish Wilde spent most of his time imitating the British aristocracy — though one might claim that in his case imitation was the sincerest form of mockery. A later colonial writer, the novelist V.S. Naipaul, entitled one of his books The Mimic Men, as though colonies like his native Trinidad could be seen as mere replicas or simulacra of the imperial homeland. In the same spirit, James Joyce called Ireland “an afterthought of Europe”. On this view, colonies are botched imitations of the real thing. They are mistranslations, smudged offprints, faded facsimiles. 

It’s hard for us to think ourselves back into the neo-classical mindset that preceded the birth of Romanticism — a view of the world for which originality wasn’t rated at all highly. What mattered was the collective wisdom of humankind, not an idea that some bright spark happened to come up with at 3 o’clock in the morning. A belief which the great majority of men and women had held over many centuries wasn’t necessarily true, but there was bound to be something in it. God wouldn’t be so irresponsible as to allow us to get the world seriously wrong over vast tracts of time. (In fact, he allowed us to think it was flat for an embarrassingly long time.) Nor would he withhold from us the few fundamental truths essential for our salvation. What we held in common was what was truly valuable, whereas quirkiness and idiosyncrasy were morally displeasing. They were also for the most part trivial and tedious, whereas the normative and familiar could be fascinating. An imitation of Homer or Horace might be deemed far more precious than an artistic creation of one’s own. Originality was the preserve of the Almighty, who could conjure his handiwork out of nothing as no mere mortal could. To usurp his privilege in this respect was a form of blasphemy. Human beings had their own form of eternity, to be sure, but it was known as tradition. The way to live well was to plagiarize what your ancestors did, a process which stretched back interminably into the past and endlessly into the future. Only the hubristic or dim-witted could imagine that their petty individual resources could outweigh this immense store of collective knowledge. Such was the neo-classical vision of the world, one which has now almost entirely vanished. 

Suggested reading

How Salford made modern Britain

By Terry Eagleton

A number of Irish writers in the 19th century came up with some ingenious solutions to the problem of their nation being a poor reproduction of Britain. The Cork poet Jeremiah Callanan produced a number of English translations of Irish poems, but we don’t always know what Irish works they are supposed to be translations of. They are imitations without an original. His poetic colleague James Clarence Mangan writes “translations” from languages of which he had not the slightest knowledge, so that what seems to be derivative is in fact original. In any case, a translation can be as good as what it reproduces, or even better. The mellifluous “Vienna” is an improvement on the terse “Wien”. Besides, an inaccurate translation might convey the spirit of the original more fully than an exact one. Some other Irish poets indulged in what they called “anti-plagiarism”. This meant writing a poem modeled on an already published one, while maintaining that the published poem was stolen from the one you had just written. If the published work was in English and the new one was in Irish, this deftly reversed the colonial relation between the two nations, so that the larger island becomes a pathetic imitation of the smaller one.

The question of originality applies to politics in another sense too. Whatever revolution may mean, it can’t mean that everything we know stops and something entirely different starts. On the day after the revolution we would still need to pull up our jeans. Total social change would be inconceivable, since how would we identify it unless we retained some sense of what came before? We would simply confront an abyss between what we have now and a wholly different future, with no criteria to assess how the latter differed from the former. Besides, an alternative future has to be worked for, and it’s that process of recreation which bridges the gap between what’s present and what’s to come. We couldn’t speak of progress if there was simply one thing and then something completely different. The Boeing only represents progress over the Tiger Moth because both are aircraft. You can see Billy Connolly as an advance on Harold Lloyd because both are comedians, whereas the National Portrait Gallery isn’t an advance on a prosthetic limb. In this sense, all change involves continuity. At the beginning of the 17th century in Britain, people still burned witches, whereas by the end of the century they had established the Bank of England and the Royal Society; but what intervened between the two was a civil war, not a void.

All the same, the fact that there must be continuity in order to measure change doesn’t mean that all change must be incremental. It’s surely clear that modern capitalist nations aren’t able to participate in the global market while at the same time guaranteeing a decent standard of living for their citizens. They can’t, in short, sufficiently control the domestic effects of their own international operations, let alone adequately protect their people from the most devastating consequences of these forces. This is why they’re peculiarly vulnerable to the challenge of Right-wing populism, which like all proto-fascist movements denounces the global dimension of capitalism while supporting those who reap profit from it. Purely incremental change is unlikely to change this situation. The nation-state, which served the ruling classes of capitalism extremely well in its day, has now entered into conflict with the international interests of those classes, and is seeking to grab back some power for itself. If Starmerism lacked direction, as everyone from Blair to Burnham seems to believe, it’s because, given this contradiction, there’s ultimately nowhere for it to go. What we have instead is self-plagiarism, as the system carries on reproducing itself on the very brink of an alarmingly steep cliff. 

***

Terry Eagleton’s A Death of One’s Own will be published by Yale in September.

It seems likely to be an incredible read. In various interviews, Arday has claimed to have completed his PhD with a brain tumor; to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, and 600 miles in six days; to have raised millions for charity; to have played both snooker and football at professional levels. And now there is a new chapter in this gripping life story: outright allegations of plagiarism in his academic writing and muttered suspicions of fraud. There are magical-sounding transformations here, arduous journeys, and noble heroes battling it out with dastardly villains. But who exactly are we supposed to root for, and what is the moral of the story?

For some, the obvious baddie is Arday’s recent accuser, Nathan Cofnas, who has alleged several instances of plagiarism on his Substack. Cofnas, a philosopher at the University of Ghent, is best known for his controversial research on racially based IQ differences, and for taking a Cambridge college to court, claiming it had discriminated against him on the grounds of his “anti-woke” beliefs. It is as if the most stereotypically problematic of academics had escaped from a university HR manager’s cheese dream and taken fleshly shape. Predictably, then, commentators who have based their careers on divining institutional racism have been quick to take advantage of the caricatural optics. Cambridge itself says that Arday has been cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications”, and is a “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”.

But serious concerns about Arday’s work have been circulating for at least three years, voiced by scholars who have no interest in hereditarianism; and it is hard to see how Cambridge could have dismissed them so lightly. In 2023, Professor Dave Harris, an emeritus sociologist, started documenting concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and some other journal articles on his own website. Along with another sociologist, Professor Martyn Hammersley, Harris also tried doggedly to raise the matter with journal editors, university authorities, and Arday himself.

Harris sent me his correspondence. To his polite inquiries, Arday insisted he would consider future contact from Harris as bullying and harassment. Cambridge’s Head of Policy told Harris that, since the alleged issues preceded Arday’s time at Cambridge, it was not within the university’s remit to investigate — a bizarrely relaxed attitude to the possibility that a star academic had committed research malpractice. Last year, Times Higher staff reporter Jack Grove looked into the case in great depth, drawing in part upon evidence from Harris and Hammersley, but his editors spiked the piece after legal letters from Carter-Ruck.

It is clear, then, that more reputations are at stake here than Arday’s own. When he was first appointed as a Professorial Chair, Cambridge made huge capital out of the moment, stressing the significance not just of their new hire’s ethnicity but his “neurodiversity” too. The well-known theory of intersectionality has it that a black or brown ethnicity, plus a disability, equals the likelihood of exponential discrimination. Alongside this dogma runs a shadow logic for progressive employers, whispering that two protected characteristics in a prominent employee are even better than one; three, if you count Arday’s origins on a deprived council estate. Or as the University press release put it at the time: “parts of [Arday’s] story… epitomize the significant barriers that neurodivergent individuals, those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people face when trying to build careers in the sector”. But not at Cambridge, they might as well have smugly added.

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By Kathleen Stock

Throughout his career, Arday himself has highlighted his disabilities just as much as his race. He has said he only learned to eat for himself aged seven, and that he spent “thousands of hours in speech therapy… six days a week” from the age of three. He has claimed that the aforementioned brain tumor was surgically removed only two weeks before his PhD viva. Last year, he co-authored a book with Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis entitled We See Things They’ll Never See: Love, Hope, and Neurodiversity, published by the elite Princeton University Press. Its subject is how “neurotypical hegemony reproduces a culture of exclusion”. The authors wax lyrical to their presumed neurodiverse readers: “Not only do you still deserve love, you deserve for your creativity to flourish and be nurtured. You still deserve ordinariness, even if you struggle to communicate your passions.”

As this suggests, the book is an extremely weird mix of academic jargon and chatty informality. Each chapter starts with a song lyric. Chapter Seven, for instance, begins with the Blur lyric “hold on for tomorrow”, then explains: “For neurodivergent people, who are often holding on to the coattails of neurotypicals, there is a need for the neuromajority population to be more accommodating and understanding in this process… and hold on for tomorrow.” There is also a lot of breathless metacommentary, as if the authors were fascinated with their own creative process — a feature often found in student essays, but not so much in work by senior academics. In Chapter Three, for instance, you get: “it will come as no surprise to many of our sociologist peers that this third chapter was one of the last we put together”; and “[a]s we returned to Durkheim’s analysis when writing this book, a sense of sadness and frustration often entered our conversations about neurotypical hegemony”. In Chapter Seven: “As we began to round up our reflections and the rationale of the book, we spoke a lot about the concept of time and our general sense of getting through the day.”

Irrespective of the outcome of the plagiarism allegations, it seems to me there is an even more fundamental problem here. Having waded through some of Arday’s books, articles, and talks, it is my strong impression his published outputs would be judged unambiguously mediocre, bordering on comically terrible, were it not for the heroic DEI-friendly backstory. As Cofnas has pointed out, his journal articles are full of typos and solecisms, and there is even a rogue apostrophe in his PhD title. His 2019 monograph, Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova, is also strikingly garbled, as he uses autoethnography about Britpop in order to pursue “an uncomfortable discourse for melancholic Britain to digest”: that the cool Britannia of the Nineties was actually cruel, racist Britannia instead.

Here, Arday relates how he fell in love with bands like Oasis at a young age, “or at least so it seemed until the veil of innocence and naivete was stripped away through the most pernicious and insidious of discriminatory instruments… racism”. The dramatic pause is his. Other phrases tend to collapse under their own weight: “Significant periods in most individuals’ lives prove to be a point of discovery which can often lead to a sense of belonging that is hard to quantify”; “There are periods historically which capture the mood of a generation and become the soundtrack to a particular type of lived experience”. The book was nominated for a British Sociological Association prize in 2020.

Arday’s academic talks, meanwhile, are rambling and banal, in no way consonant with his elevated rank. In his 2024 British Academy lecture at the University of Bristol, for instance — about “cultural appropriation” in Paul Simon’s album Graceland — he sounds like an enthusiastic sixth-former regurgitating talking points from a rockumentary. At one point he suggests that part of Simon’s “insecurity” and “arrogance” stems from the fact Simon is physically shorter than Art Garfunkel. At another point, he digresses and starts talking about the lack of indigenous actors in Neighbours and Home and Away, observing that “you become a sociologist and start looking at it through a different lens; you start thinking ‘well Australia had an indigenous population… how come none of them are present in the utopia of Summer Bay?’”. And his interest in these two TV soap operas is not merely in passing; in a podcast interview last year, the Professor said he sleeps “probably two hours a night… then in that two hours in between, I fill it with Home and Away and Neighbours”.

There is currently some bafflement on social media about why Cambridge authorities are disclaiming the accusations about Arday with such aggressive, self-satisfied certainty. I have a possible explanation that is only secondarily connected to skin color. Namely: at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well.

Lecturers are now routinely expected to make adjustments to their ordinary critical approach as soon as someone has a diagnosis: to ignore spelling mistakes; mentally rearrange sentences without critical comment; try not to mind paragraphs that go on for days, or seem utterly arbitrary in their shape. I speak from experience. As a marker, you are supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within. Most often, this nonsensical strategy is applied at the level of students; but once the principle was conceded, it was only a matter of time before such accommodations were extended to staff too.

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Primed by his amazing personal history, Cambridge bosses seem to have taken this patronizing approach to the quality of Arday’s outputs, just as other august bodies presumably did before them: Glasgow University, where Arday was also a Professor; the British Sociological Association, where he is a trustee; Routledge and Princeton University Press, the publishers of his books. According to the unspoken norms of these institutions, it doesn’t matter how silly Arday sounds in interviews, or how bad his writing is. It is already priced in. To point out the fact wouldn’t just be rude, it would also be positively discriminatory in a vague sort of way; whereas to ignore the issue is virtuous and noble. Many people have noticed marked inadequacies in Arday’s work over the years, I assume, but very few have said anything. And I also assume that the pressure to stay silent has increased, the higher he has climbed. What’s this? You are pointing out Professor Jason Arday of Cambridge University — a man who has been through so much to get where he is — can’t write coherent sentences, or stay on-topic in his talks? Are you some kind of Nazi?

Cambridge’s stubborn defense of its employee in the light of the plagiarism accusations looks to me like just more of the same. Managers there don’t seem to see the deliberate repetition of other people’s phrases as any kind of vice, in his particular case — it can only be inadvertent and excusable, given his known disabilities, and so perhaps doesn’t count as plagiarism at all. And it seems his race might be being treated as an additional mitigating factor, based on the assumption he routinely undergoes racist treatment which causes him psychological distress.

For instance, in correspondence between Harris and Head of the Cambridge Faculty of Education, Dr Hilary Cremin, Cremin said that when she had asked Arday about Harris’s plagiarism allegations, the former had “spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the… article was being prepared”. She also stressed that her faculty remained “immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking here that Cremin was trying to offer mitigating circumstances for a troubled but promising undergraduate — except that she was talking about someone holding a Professorial Chair. Once a narrative of mental disability is firmly in place, it seems that a presumed experience of racism can just be added to the list, as yet another unfair impediment to intellectual achievement. Minority ethnicity plus disability now equals the suspension of critical judgment.

Ultimately, there are likely to be many losers in this embarrassing debacle: deserving young scholars who were overlooked as Arday was appointed, now lost to the profession; fee-paying students who came to Cambridge or Glasgow to bask in the intellectual glow of world-class academics, and got some waffle about Australian soap operas instead; accomplished black or brown researchers smeared by association, now facing abuse online from hereditarian idiots who assume that Arday’s case is the norm. And ultimately, Cambridge University will be a massive loser, deservedly so. It is a necessary condition of the place’s continuing glamour and prestige that it enforces rigorous academic standards. To be shown not to care about this, in such a public way, is an act of catastrophic institutional self-harm.

But I can’t help thinking another loser is Arday himself, wandering like a modern-day Forrest Gump through various prestigious institutions, treated like a sage for every strange or incomprehensible thing he says. To be radically unsuited to an Oxbridge professorship is scarcely something to be ashamed of. Indeed, these days, in my book, it is practically a badge of honor. There are plenty of decent jobs Arday might have found earlier on, more suited to his skill set, which would not have set him up for such public humiliation later. Yet — whatever pieties university managers spouted at the time of his appointments — ultimately, the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves. Irrespective of the truth about his research techniques, it is obvious Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot. His fairy tale is not yet over; but I think we can already identify some clear villains.

For Matt Goodwin — the failed Reform candidate whose new book is widely judged to contain several machine-generated hallucinations and other inaccuracies, though he denies it — there was widespread mockery and condemnation. But for critic Alex Preston, dumped by the New York Times for using an AI tool to help write a book review, objections were more muted. There were even attempts at sympathy and understanding — including from gleefully vituperative Goodwin-bashers. One might reasonably wonder how much the British commentariat really loathe AI writing, as opposed to how much they loathe Goodwin in particular.

In fact, both cases are equally unforgivable. Each goes much further than simply using AI as a research tool among others, cross-referring and checking sources as you go. To use an LLM to write text for you effectively turns your computer into a ventriloquist. And it turns you into the ventriloquist’s dummy.

This is not a good look. Up until five minutes ago, Goodwin was an academic. In the eyes of some, this makes him part of a despised elite, a fact which must be somewhat inconvenient to a would-be populist. But equally, it’s also a crucial part of his origin story, giving a valuable impression of epistemic authority to those that care. Otherwise he’d be just another bloke in a gilet muttering darkly about cousin marriage. At a minimum, academics are supposed to do their own research, double check their own inferences, and then write it all down in their own words. What else could society possibly want them for? Certainly not for the innate charisma or the bantz.

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In his blustering Spectator rebuttal, Goodwin insists that he did not use chatbots to write any part of the book. The invented quotes and other misunderstandings were all his, he says, a claim which is apparently supposed to reassure us. He even cites the negative opinion of AI detection software on the matter “just for fun”. But either way, he seems to have been using AI tools for his Substack for some time. Or perhaps he sometimes writes exactly like a robot because he has unconsciously ingested the deadening format (“this is not x, it’s y”, compressed rhetorical questions, and all the rest of it). Crafting beautiful sentences is not your average academic’s strongest suit, after all.

Literary critics have no such excuse. Preston — book reviewer as well as gentleman novelist, amateur cricketer, birdwatcher, and BBC arts show stalwart — is said to have confessed immediately to his mistake when asked about it by the Spectator literary editor. The apology came as if delivered by Hugh Grant — you could practically hear the stammerings and goshes. “Oh god it’s awful and I’m so ashamed. Such a total car crash.”

Preston’s explanation was that he had been pressed for time, and asked a bot to help “expand and smooth” a draft book review, as well as adjust for in-house style requirements. The AI-enhanced result included phrases written by someone else, which he did not spot. “I looked at how it had tidied up the end of the review but didn’t realize that it had also dropped in language from Christobel Kent’s Guardian review. I was rushed and stupid and I’m so sorry.”

Despite the apparent willingness of fellow literary luminaries to accept this with “there but for the grace of God … ” style mumbling, I’m not buying it. A loose reading of Preston’s explanation implies he didn’t notice the alien phrases at all. He used the tool without understanding its capacity for invention, looked only at the second half of the AI-adjusted text but not the first, then immediately sent the result off to the New York Times. But surely no writer is ever that stupid, or indeed that rushed.

A more likely scenario is that he read the tarted-up review in its entirety, knew full well there were sentences in it that were not his, but didn’t know they belonged to Christobel Kent in particular. Preston says that this was a “case of someone naively and clumsily using a tool they didn’t understand”; but he obviously grasped that the tool would “expand” his piece, because that’s exactly what he said he wanted it to do. What he didn’t understand, perhaps, was that the machine might plagiarize from a single source rather than synthesize hundreds of texts undetectably.

But appropriating the words of no one in particular is just as bad as plagiarism; and it is no defense to say it was only a few phrases. Like the proverbial curate’s egg, a covert robot co-production cannot be good in parts. You might as well take out all the machine-inserted words and phrases and write lorem ipsum there, or just blah blah blah instead. These passages mark the point at which the author’s mind retreated and went off for a nap.

When I taught in universities, I used to find it absurd that the official policy for plagiarism cases required us to estimate what mark the offending piece would have got, were it not plagiarized; and then to subtract some fixed percentage from that. Effectively, this seemed to force the marker onto the horns of a ludicrous dilemma. On one hand you might remove all plagiarized sections from consideration, but then you would be left with surreally disjointed statements and huge gaps, and there would be not much of an identifiable argument left to penalize further.

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Alternatively you could treat the essay in its entirety as if it represented the original thoughts of the student, then subtract a bit; in which case your mark would seem to depend heavily on the quality of the author from whom sentences had been pilfered, and how extensively they were used. It seemed weirdly arbitrary to be giving more credit to students who thoroughly stripped down Ludwig Wittgenstein for parts, than to those who lightly borrowed from, say, Alain de Botton.

When you are assessing a student’s work, it is a basic presupposition that you are engaging with a single point of view, for which the stated author can rightly claim the credit. Any contradictions in the text reflect contradictions in the author’s own mind, as do any brilliant insights. Violate that contract and you might as well chuck the whole thing away. And the same goes all the more for professional writing, whether high or lowbrow. Relying on words that aren’t yours is not just lazy, it’s cowardly. If a writer lacks the courage to expose his mind to readers in all its naked imperfection, hiding behind the smooth extrusions of LLMS instead, then I don’t see why we should bother to read him.

And it is a poor defense to say that readers often cannot tell the difference. In the world of painting, skillful forgeries can look like astonishingly powerful originals until the ruse is revealed. Then suddenly there’s a gestalt switch, and the pictures look like what they always were: cheap fakes, free-riding on viewer credulity.

A different justification urges us to think of all human communication as a kind of ventriloquizing. Aren’t we always taking half-remembered words and phrases from other people and making them our own as we speak or write? Can’t we just see the use of an LLM as a simple extension of the creative process, with some externally-derived thoughts accepted, and others rejected — just as during a more internal process of reflection? This is part of the general project of redescribing human behavior to make it sound more like that of machines. That project is just as likely to undermine the impression of any meaning or value in human behavior than it is to reduce the distrust in robots. But in any case, we must not cede the point. Ordinary thinking and speaking as we know it is not “parroting” or “plagiarizing”. If it were, there would be no sense to these terms when applied critically, since the pejorative contrast with ordinary speech would be incomprehensible.

Even if it’s largely undetected by the intended readership, I can’t help feeling that AI will turn out to be a curse to many in the writing world, both established and aspiring. Clearly, as Goodwin and Preston show us, it is a temptation even to the already successful. A semantic glow-up is available at just the click of a mouse. Lots of bloggers I am aware of seem to use LLMs habitually. Preposterously, I’ve even seen the telltale signs in comments sections.

Wherever it is found, I imagine it’s quite stressful to gain a reputation for a writing style you have done little to deserve. The more admiration and followers you get for your punchy sentences, the less you will feel able to go back to your own deathless prose and reveal to the world what is really going on behind the curtain. In years to come, I expect we will see whole branches of therapy devoted to curing writers of LLM addiction. It seems that along with photographic filters and image generators, technology has discovered yet another way for people to hide their true selves from the gaze of others — and all this in a time where personal authenticity is supposedly uniquely prized. As the saying goes: you couldn’t make it up.