Musaazi NAMITI | The Founder’s Mind Space
When news of Dr Jason Arday’s death broke, I reached out to US academic Nathan Cofnas who wrote a lengthy Substack article detailing the Cambridge academic’s plagiarism. Dr Arday, who was a professor of sociology of education, was found dead at a property in Battersea, south London, days after resigning over accusations of plagiarism. He was 41.
Dr Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at Ghent University in Belgium, has previously worked at Cambridge and shared his Substack article with OJ-UGANDA. I have been reviewing it, and I am sharing with our readers what he wrote for them to draw their own conclusions.
The article, published in July, starts with Dr Arday’s outlandish claims, namely running 30 marathons in 35 days in his spare time and 300 miles in three days.
As of 2023, Dr Cofnas wrote, Dr Arday had worked with “more than 70” charities and raised more than £5 million.
Dr Cofnas says that he moved to investigate Dr Arday after being contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge he declined to name, who alleged that Dr Arday was a plagiarist and fabulist.
“My source claims that many if not most professors at Cambridge have known about this for more than a year,” he wrote.
Dr Arday and Cambridge’s administration, according to Dr Cofnas’s source, had used intimidation and legal threats to prevent the story being told.
There had been no mention of Dr Arday’s alleged plagiarism in public domain, according to Dr Cofnas, except on the personal website of retired Plymouth Marjon University professor Dave Harris.
Cambridge hired Dr Arday in 2023, but he completed his dissertation in 2015 at Liverpool John Moores University. To detect his plagiarism, Dr Cofnas used software called Copyleaks and “found substantial overlap with previously published work, particularly a dissertation submitted by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers in 2009.”
Dr Zwozdiak-Myers received her degree from Brunel University in London, where she is currently a Reader in Education.
The Substack article uses a chart comparing passages from Dr Arday (2015) and Dr Zwozdiak-Myers (2009).
Dr Cofnas started spotting problems in the introduction of Dr Arday’s dissertation. For key ideas and arguments, he wrote, Dr Arday relied on Dr Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 dissertation. He lifted whole passages with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source, Dr Cofnas wrote.
The screenshots below (only a fraction of what the article contains) show passages from the dissertations that Dr Cofnas identifies as evidence of plagiarism.
Since the Arday plagiarism saga started, Liverpool John Moores University has said little, only confirming that it stood by its former student’s dissertation.
But if the dissertation is not plagiarised, it raises questions as to why Dr Arday and Cambridge blocked questions from the media about plagiarism.
The New York Times reported that Dr Arday reported a Times Higher Education journalist, xxx, to the police after he sent him questions about plagiarism. The police ordered him to back off, according to the Times.
Dr Arday also reacted angrily when Dr David Harris, an academic at Plymouth Marjon University who had been reviewing Mr Arday’s work as part of a wider research project, raised questions about his work.
According to the Telegraph, Mr Arday wrote: “I have no problem with constructive criticism, but the tone of your emails are unkind and hostile. You are a monument to the fact we live in a society where grammar is valued above equity. If only all academics were as diligent in their fight for equality as you have been in attending to my spelling.”
He asked Dr Harris not to write to him again, saying: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”
Cambridge has ordered an investigation into how Dr Arday was hired. But its toughest job will be to establish whether the issues raised by Dr Cofnas, whose Cambridge college affiliation was terminated in 2024 following controversy over his views on race, are baseless— and why Dr Arday and Cambridge went to such lengths to keep them from being publicly scrutinised.
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🔴 Musaazi Namiti is the Founder and Editorial Director of OJ-UGANDA. He previously led the Africa Desk at Al Jazeera in Doha, Qatar, worked for Globe Media Asia in Cambodia and writes a widely read column for Uganda’s Weekend Monitor. His work has been quoted by The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Jeune Afrique, The Africa Report—not for playing it safe, but for saying what others will not.
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