On Professor Jason Arday
A non-consensus view and some specific adverse life lessons.
In the past 48 hours I’ve had a series of online exchanges about the late Cambridge University sociology of education Professor Jason Arday, who died on 14th August 2026. It’s a very tragic outcome. I’m a suicide attempt survivor so I’m rather numb about it for different reasons.
On 21st July 2026, the “race realist” hereditarian scholar Nathan Cofnas published a Substack article which examined plagiarism claims about Professor Arday’s PhD dissertation (conferred in 2015) and 10 of his research publications. Cofnas used the playbook that Christopher Rufo had successfully used to investigate then Harvard University president Claudine Gay - who then had to step down from this leadership role. I am familiar with Cofnas, Rufo, and others like Greg Johnson and Edward Dutton who are ideologically motivated. I’ve not yet published this research because I see a mixture of analytical insight and ideological hyperfocus that I am still thinking about how to best handle.
The Cofnas Substack article set off a firestorm of polarised debate in the United Kingdom media. All of the ingredients for Fleet Street tabloid style flak and attack PR were there. Journalists framed Cofnas as a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) hire at an elite university. They began to investigate both his body of work and claims about his life which formed the basis of Professor Arday’s memoir Great and Unfortunate Things published in the United States by the trade press Simon & Schuster, and co-written with co-writer Eve Claxton. Arday faced a formal investigation at Cambridge and resigned on 5th August.
Professor Arday’s death is deeply shocking for many people, and it is tragic. Public responses are polarised: some emphasise his academic fraud; others focus on his race, autism, and history of mental illness; and still others have focused on institutional responses, the media’s hunt for blood in the streets, and what this episode conveys about contemporary universities.
I was not surprised. Here is a summary of my arguments to others.
Why are the claims of Professor Arday’s serial academic fraud important?
Truth is at the core of academia and the social contract which universities have.
If you betray that, then don’t be surprised if your clients turn to more affordable substitute products and services. Serial academic fraud results in demand destruction and the erosion in a still very fact based world of a distinctive rationale to exist.
A. The PhD Dissertation
Liverpool John Moores University conferred Professor Arday’s PhD in 2015. At the time, the CWRU exercise ranked the University as 53rd nationally in the United Kingdom and 696th overall. Only part of a PhD is the final PhD dissertation. PhD training covers developing a research program, area / field norms, methodology, and, hopefully, publications and career planning. Its criteria for conferral involves making an “original contribution” to an area / field.
Professor Arday conducted a small-n study on peer mentoring intervention using 24 recruited participants (153) that resulted in 4 for the final study (158). This involved workshops and focus groups (160-161). The 4 participants attended the 12 workshops (162-166). The subsequent discussion of data analysis issues (180-187) does not adequately address how the small sample limits generalisability, nor inter-rater reliability of qualitative coding. Much of this and the prior section is descriptive / summative rather than being deeply analytical. The post-intervention analysis (189-191) is largely self-reporting by the 4 participants on their subsequent trajectories.
The study’s Chapter 5 research findings chapter (200-286) is very large. It mostly consists also of self-reporting by the 4 participants. Whilst this fits a reflective, narrative-driven, community of practice based approach, the chapter could have been further strengthened via more analysis than self reporting description. This is also significant when Chapter 2 (35-81) and Chapter 3 (82-136) are included: both are literature review chapters with the second summarising theoretical and mentor oriented constructs in a descriptive way. The analytical core of Arday’s PhD dissertation is thus Chapter 6 discussion (287-329) and the Chapter 7 conclusions (330-355) which follows the usual format. The original contribution section (351-352) would benefit from being edited with tighter clarity. The lengthy section on study limitations (343-346) - which again is usual for PhD dissertations and peer refereed journal articles to have - does acknowledge the small sample size (346). The study’s conceptual framework (356) notes a significant body of historical work on reflective and social learning theories - but this is not developed as analytically as it might have been. The Bibliography (357-401) is substantive - but again is often dealt with in a descriptive / summative rather than in a more analytical / critique based sense.
Cofnas has argued that Professor Arday’s conferred PhD dissertation has significant plagiarism from other sources. Professor Arday denied this - and claimed the issue was minor editing and his PhD supervision (usually a PhD dissertation is sent to an editor before being finalised for conferral as part of the examination process). What I find are other issues. This PhD dissertation is a very limited study - which Arday acknowledges - and which many PhDs actually are (including in the sociology of education in which large-n data collection is a challenge), including my own. Part of developing and internalising effective research skills is to be able to acknowledge this as a self-check.
As a document the PhD dissertation is however closer to being a Professional Doctorate. What I read as the analytical core (Chapters 6 and 7) is 67 pages out of 401 (16.7%). Two literature review / theory construct discussions (Chapters 2 and 3) are 100 pages out of 401 (24.94%). The research findings chapter is 86 pages out of 401 (21.45%) which is mainly participant self reporting and has minimal analysis (which instead are in Chapters 6 and 7). If you add the Bibliography, Chapter 1, and the opening material then the analytical core is only 16.7% of the total - or at best 38.15% if you add the research discussion chapter. This is really for me the core issue: a lot of analytic literature (such as the reflective and social learning theories noted above) are mentioned yet are under-developed. It’s essentially cherry-picking the literature to look persuasive. It looks convincing - unless you know the actual, original literature.
B. Evaluating The 10 Most Important Publications
Cofnas then turns to Professor Arday’s 10 most important publications. These are comparable for example to the research track record “relative to opportunity” that is included in Australian Research Council national competitive grants for the Discovery Early Career Academic (DECRA) and Future Fellowship (mid-career). Such lists can fluctuate and change over time, so we should treat Professor Arday’s list as a snapshot.
The first (Management In Education, 2018) is a small-n (n=3) biographical interview study in a ScimagoJR Q2 ranked journal. It extends aspects of Professor Arday’s PhD methodology to look at senior leadership experiences. It is thus partly a career repositioning paper.
The second (Whiteness and Education, 2018) is an autoethnographic paper that updates the reflexivity construct in Professor Arday’s PhD dissertation. ScimagoJR goes back only to 2023 for this journal so it could be Q2 ranked or possibly lower at the time of publication. The autoethnographic method means that it is self-reported.
The third paper (Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2021) is in a ScimagoJR Q2 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. Professor Arday’s co-author Dave Thomas (University of Kent) flagged it for plagiarism and Routledge lists it as being under investigation. It’s a construct development paper (normatively to decolonise the curricula) and a small-n study (3 academics of colour and 15 students recruited). The small-n aspect reflects aspects of Professor Arday’s PhD dissertation study. The authorship suggests that Professor Arday was the lead / corresponding author on this study.
The fourth paper (Higher Education, 2022) is in a ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. As the first ScimagoJR Q1 paper it should likely have been listed first on the top 10 list rather than fourth. It is a larger-n study (n=40) on an important administrative issue for a vulnerable, at risk student population. Despite the data issues that Cofnas reports Dave Hughes has raised, it is the strongest paper yet by Professor Arday.
The fifth paper (Social Policy and Society, 2022) is in a ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. Cofnas describes it as an op-ed piece; I instead read it as an issues analysis for a policymaker (education and public health) audience. Along with the first and the fourth paper above it positions Professor Arday in terms of demonstrating impact and translational research potential.
The sixth paper (BMJ Open, 2022) is a study protocol that as Cofnas notes Professor Arday is not the lead / corresponding author - and nor is he listed in the final authorship position as being the research team supervisor or laboratory senior academic. Rather on page 6 he is listed as having “contributed to the final manuscript.” This usually means that Professor Arday was not involved in the planning, data collection, or data analysis of the study. He rather provided writing (and perhaps editorial) expertise for publication. This is in a ScimagoJR A1 ranked journal. But given that Professor Arday was not involved primarily in either the study and his supervisory role remains unclear, this paper’s inclusion could be read as either vague or, at worst, opportunistic (i.e. building your research track record as a signalling based stratagem from others’ work). The usual way that this would be dealt with would be to ask Professor Arday for further clarification on his specific role and contribution. Sadly, this is now not possible.
The seventh paper (British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2022) is in a ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. It uses Critical Race Theory as a theoretical framework, it is a small-n study (n=18), it has little data analysis beyond participant self-reporting, and, importantly, Professor Arday would use its posited constructs (systemic racism, job insecurity, and lack of career progression) to defend both his own work and to shutdown any potential investigation. The second and third themes (525-527) are part of the adjunct population experience, as are two of the sub-themes (exploitation, dehumanisation of the first theme (521-523), meaning that the entire study really hinges on claims of gendered racism (523-524) as a differentiator. Professor Arday acknowledges in his Limitations of Research section that the study’s research findings are not readily generalisable (528). I’m more charitable than Cofnas here - this is essentially what parts of Professor Arday’s PhD dissertation might have looked like had he conducted it at an elite institution.
The eighth paper (Educational Review, 2022) is in a ScimagoJR Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. As Cofnas notes, it’s an introduction to a special issue, and not an academic publication with original research. The special issue of Educational Review is volume 74, issue 3 (2022) called World In Motion: Reflections on the Impact of Covid-19 on Higher Education. Professor Arday does not contribute to the special issue’s articles. The authors (several whom I have worked with) all appear to have been recruited for the special issue (as per normal editorial and publisher practices). So this is again a CV and research track record “relative to opportunity” building strategy - having at least several Q1 journal articles and editing a special issue are considered advantageous when applying to elite institutions for jobs. In terms of his career progression, Professor Arday timed this for 2022, before the University of Cambridge appointed him in 2023.
The ninth paper (Higher Education, 2022) is in a Scimago Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. So far, Professor Arday’s publication strategy has peaked with multiple Q1 publications in 2022 - this would have created a potentially favourable anchoring bias for the University of Cambridge selection panel who appointed Professor Arday in 2023. That is because he shows collaboration, multiple Q1 publications, and this suggests an upward career trajectory which would also be favourable to attracting national and international competitive grants as a named Chief Investigator. This is a small-n study (n=43) of staff and students recruited from United States and United Kingdom universities (thus hedging against home country bias) (59). We see here in terms of research program development and publications strategy that Professor Arday is focusing on what at the time were sentiment-based themes: Critical Race Theory; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Black academics, and disadvantaged ethnic minorities (54-59). The findings and discussion section (61-67) uses very similar thematic material to several of Professor Arday’s other papers - so this could be viewed as potential salami-slicing (and the innovative aspects in this section on socio-economic stratification probably come mainly from Professor Arday’s co-author Christopher Jones as this is his specific area of expertise). Nevertheless, Professor Arday and his co-author acknowledge that the small-n study design makes generalisability difficult (68).
The tenth paper (The Sociological Review, 2023) is in a Scimago Q1 ranked journal for education at the time of publication. The lead / corresponding author is Dr Chantelle Jessica Lewis (University of Oxford). This paper is the seed of a 2026 co-authored book by Dr Lewis and Professor Arday called We See Things They Never See: Love, Hope and Neurodiversity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2026). Like Professor Arday, I am autistic (late-in-life diagnosis) and have a trauma history, so this is both a personally relevant paper / book, and it has been very sadly ignored in comparison to Professor Arday’s memoir. Princeton University Press is very good at reaching broader audiences that include non-academic readers.
My conclusions thus differ from Cofnas.
These 10 publications are a snapshot of Professor Arday’s career in the transition from his Early Career period (first 5 years after PhD conferral = 2020) up to his University of Cambridge appointment. When you combine it with academic bio extracts (e.g. Academic Libraries North, British Sociological Association) you begin to see other strategies that Professor Arday used - accelerating his promotions via changing institutions, becoming a trust representative, engaging with media, co-editing a book series, and announcing books with mid-tier academic presses like Routledge and Palgrave Macmillan (of which Dismantling Race In Higher Education as an edited collection from 2018 and the solo-authored Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain from 2020 appear to have emerged from pre-publication development).
However, both of these books are not included on the 10 Most Important Publications - the Routledge book monograph from 2020 would normally be expected to be included on this list. Professor Arday’s cumulative research program has both enduring themes that build on his 2015 conferred PhD dissertation, as well as being more opportunistic in terms of adopting themes (Covid-19, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and autism / neurodivergence) that arose and that were prominent during this sample time period. Some people view this favourably; it is however often questioned in the reviews of national and international competitive grant applications.
C. Career Trajectory and Research Program Development Issues
Professor Arday’s defenders have often focused on identity / stratification based barriers (race, mental health, and autism / neurodivergence), flak-driven predatory media coverage, and institutional failure as the major contributing factors to his tragic death. All of these are factors (necessary) yet in their single cause form they are not fully explanatory (sufficient).
I’ve worked for two universities who are leaders in education (being responsible for research administration / management). My own conferred MSc (2002), MA (2006) and PhD (2020) all draw on sociology, although my primary area / field of qualification is political science. I’ve worked with and mentored hundreds of researchers from ECA and Mid-Career to supporting world class Professoriate that include Centre / Institute directors and senior research managers. The kind of analysis you see above is normal for rigorous processes in Faculty based and central Research Offices.
Let’s consider Professor Arday’s career trajectory and research program development from an institutional perspective. Much of the work I have done is to convey this to Early Career and Mid-Career researchers. It is the kind of discussion and estimative assessment that occurs in a research grants ranking session or in the corridor chats of a selection panel for a competitive job interview.
Professor Arday received his PhD in 2015. The University of Cambridge appointed him as Professor in 2023. That’s a period of only 8 years. Comparatively, most academics would have reached a career stage of Senior Lecturer in Australia (Assistant Professor in the United States), or, maybe, Associate Professor. The initial media and public narrative around Professor Arday was that he was an iconic exemplar, a once-in-a-generation wunderkind. To people who know how to read research career trajectories from an institutional vantage point, that’s actually a huge red flag - unless you can substantiate it with a significant body of work.
If you revisit the above sections (noting both that what Cofnas cites is only a sample of Professor Arday’s work and that Cofnas had his own “race realist” / hereditarian motivations for his Substack article) then you may begin to see why this claim is problematic - and is more an example of contemporary marketing PR.
PhD dissertation quality is an important marker of subsequent research career trajectory. I’ve noted some specific issues above - which most PhDs (including my own) have. Professor Arday did not seek to publish a book monograph from his conferred PhD dissertation. He instead chose (and the PhD dissertation itself) reflected a more practice-based route. Within three years (2018), Professor Arday had shifted his focus to both student and senior leadership sub-populations in universities - a very savvy positioning strategy. He was then able to leverage his research career thematically. This is a sentiment-based populist-driven strategy. In university research offices, we refer to it as chasing the ‘hot topics’ of the moment. It used to be very dominant around 2005-2010. Then, as the Australian Research Council introduced initiatives like Excellence for Research in Australia (modelled in part on the UK’s Research Excellence Framework), institutions reacted both in terms of the gamesmanship of strategic hires, and in putting significant investment into research development as a separate career pathway to research grants and contracts. The goal was to help Early and Mid-Career academics to develop viable, cumulative research programs.
Professor Arday appears to have rushed through this - using every stratagem that he could to short-cut the system. It’s like finding the cheat codes on a video-game to ‘level up’ prematurely. You are eventually going to run into the Peter Principle of being promoted to your level of incompetence. Specific areas and fields have known problems here also in terms of comparative maturity or immaturity of career trajectory and research program development. The sociology of education is no exception: many of the issues noted above in Professor Arday’s work are limitations of research in the dominant chosen research designs. Autoethnography, small-n studies, and critical theory-building all have their place - and will also be bounded. That is why it is helpful to examine how career trajectory and research program development occurs in more stratified, mature areas and fields - for example, Michael Weisbach’s The Economist’s Craft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021) or Peter Feibelman’s A PhD Is Not Enough! (New York: Hachette, 2011) for economics and for the hard sciences, respectively.
This time is not different. Things work - until they don’t.
D. The Expectations Curse of “You’re The Best In The World.”
Much has been made of a 2023 video in which the University of Cambridge’s Professor Hilary Cremin enthusiastically endorses the newly hired Professor Arday as being the “best in the world” at what he researches. My view on that specific video is a little different to most people. This kind of positive self-talk goes on all of the time in academia. Part of managing an Early Career or Mid-Career researcher lies in applying the psychological insights of attachment theory (John Bowlby), the Object Relations school (including Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney), and the Tavistock school (Wilfred Bion) to address concerns about imposter syndrome and self-sabotage. The video again illustrates marketing PR - in a morale-building role within universities as part of managing human capital. Academia is thus very performance-based.
The problem is if you actually believe and internalise Professor Cremin’s “best in the world” comment as reality. To really be this, you have to be an edge case, an outlier. Your upward career trajectory has to be incredible: the PhD conferral and the Early Career Academic period (the first 5 years) as a first stage rocket, which then sets the stage for your research career trajectory as the second stage rocket to ignite. It’s one of the hardest things to do (and not one that even in knowing these unwritten rules I have personally been successful at). You have to get everything right. To often get an ARC DECRA competitive grant for example, some of the key decisions must actually be made in the second and third year of your PhD studies, even before conferral.
This is where the Nathan Cofnas plagiarism analysis is devastating. It’s also why Professor Arday’s supporters have often minimised his decisions and instead attempted to “shift the blame” to the University of Cambridge and the flak-driven media (which are both not blameless). It’s also why identity-based, single cause explanations are so persuasive to so many people. To be fair, most people (including many academics) don’t fully know the institutional rules around career trajectory and research program development. The “race realist” / hereditarian agenda of Cofnas and others also uses Professor Arday’s background (and his mistakes) to advance their own ideological agendas and interpretations. It’s part of a reactionary, dissident right playbook—and so due to Cofnas, many people have interpreted Professor Arday’s demise as being racist-motivated. However, finding ways to take down potential competitors (or revenge motivated stratagems) can be found throughout academia, such as also in competitive grant reviews.
The roots of institutional failure lie in part in why Professor Cremin’s “best in the world” comment is well-meaning yet flawed advice. Universities drive Early Career and Mid-Career Academics to hyperfocus on a specific research problem that can be readily explained to government policymakers, industry employers, community and philanthropic leaders, and to the general public. This is also stressed in the highly confidential (and often very critical) feedback that applicants receive in Postdoc and grant applications. It underpins book deals with Tier 1 university presses (until 2026, Professor Arday published with Tier 2 academic publishers who are broader). It even affects which PhD students you choose to supervise, and what research projects or topics they take on.
What researchers are doing here is building the corporate strategy equivalent of a competitive moat. That is not the strategy that Professor Arday implemented. He didn’t have studies with significant generalisability (an issue with specific sub-fields in the social sciences). He wasn’t really making new methodological advances. What he was able to do was to see a range of populist driven issues - and to write papers that reflected this in the 2018-25 time period in particular. This builds what looks like a highly competitive research career trajectory on paper. Professor Arday to his credit filled much of this out with university, industry, philanthropic, and media engagement. But the problem is that the specific areas that Professor Arday chose to focus on in being populist were also what drove rational herding (behavioural economics) of other researchers as well. Speculative bubble dynamics fueled critics and backlashes. What is on paper does not necessarily translate long-term.
You do not want to be the “best in the world” at a narrow and niche topic unless you have truly outsized performance. Rather, you want a focused and cumulative research program which makes (and tests for) an original contribution, with methodological skills, collaborations, and that can attract a range of potential funding opportunities. You also want to know who the four or five other research teams are in the world who are working on similar issues - perhaps from a different paradigm, school of thought, or methodological perspective. This is why academia is a kind of entrepreneurship that attempts to work in an institutional bureaucracy, and which uses optionality-based stage gates and resource-based strategy. The Early and Mid-Career stages are in part time-based. You are building core competencies, over time.
What Professor Arday did instead was a high risk strategy that had a high payoff (the University of Cambridge hiring him at Professor level after only 8 years after his PhD conferral). The maturity of research program skills and being able to handle the volatility of scaling up must be there. You may initially persuade the media, the public, and even some of the people who hire you: this is the halo effect, positive illusions, and wishful thinking.
Professor Arday’s problems did not start with Nathan Cofnas and his Substack post in July 2026. They had in fact been there all along since his PhD conferral in 2015: what in financial services is called iceberg risk (and behavioural / counterparty risk as well). Sooner or later, most fraud usually gets found out. Had Professor Arday simply plagiarised parts of his conferred PhD dissertation and some of his academic publications then this could likely have been contained. Yet he further damaged himself via a series of misleading claims that simply don’t stand up to fact-checking, reality-testing, or to common sense. Cofnas triggered a crisis, the flak-driven media took the bait, the University of Cambridge went into crisis management, and the cascade got worse for Professor Arday until he faced existential ‘risk of ruin’. It’s like an overleveraged hedge fund manager “blowing up” their fund. People have said you don’t know what was on Professor Arday’s mind when he passed away. Actually, for suicide attempt survivors, we have a pretty good idea of the stochastic shocks and the psychological undertow involved. It’s very tragic for Professor Arday’s family.
E. Machiavellian Academia, the Superstar System, and Universities Babylon
Many people are deeply shocked at Professor Arday’s death, and the savagery around it. Again, I am not surprised. I have seen aspects of it happen to many people over almost 30 years. I’ve experienced adverse facets myself. That’s partly why I’m not going to likely give you the kind of response on Professor Arday’s regrettable death that you might like: it’s very non-consensus.
One of the problems of the “best in the world” narrative above is that it is a well-meaning attempt by Professoriate and university senior managers to create a reality distortion field around high-profile, status-driven, new strategic hires. I mean a reality distortion field like that around Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal), Peter Thiel (Palantir, PayPal, Facebook), or Steve Jobs (Apple, NeXT). To work it requires a suspension of both individual and collective belief. For that to work it requires social messaging and reinforcement around specific beliefs, norms, values and worldviews. If you have taken a craft-based approach to developing your career trajectory and your cumulative research program, then this is not really such a problem. Public fads, fetishes, and ‘hot topics’ that are sentiment-based will all come and go. Your response to this is not to chase them, or to attempt to arbitrage them as Professor Arday did in the hope of rapid career advancement. Rather, your question might simply be: What is the Work that I have to Do today, and who can I potentially collaborate with? And: How can I do this in the most effective, efficient, and self-sufficient way possible without ending up in a dependency relationship? This is also the exact opposite of conducting a populist-driven and media-focused charm offensive.
The shock about Professor Arday’s death is a disintoxification for some about what contemporary universities are actually like. It’s not the romanticised myth that some people have had in an idealised past. Nor is it the conservative weaponised misinterpretation of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School’s march through the institutions: academics are explicitly told not to indoctrinate students, and Marxist books sit ageing and unborrowed in university libraries. The reality is that there are two nested, parallel sub-systems. The first is what most academic and professional staff spend their lives in: a student-focused world of high-pressure service delivery. The second only really becomes apparent with sustained engagement at the senior managerial level: the “commanding heights” of real estate / property development, the financial engineering and leverage of structured products like bonds, and the design of Centres and Institutes as mission-driven vehicles for donor-based tax minimisation strategies.
This is where the critics of Cofnas and the flak-driven media who focus on institutional failures have a point. Professor Arday was hired to facilitate the first sub-system (student engagement and public-facing outreach), for the more covert purposes of the second sub-system (harnessing mass psychology for forecastable, predictable, and sustained revenue generation or free cash flow). This is elite theory redux: the masses or the populists (the first sub-system) versus the managerial elite (the second sub-system). That is also why Postdocs and entry level Lecturers or Assistant Professors face the behavioural economics dynamic of the winner’s curse: the second sub-system ensures artificial scarcity and intensified competition in order to hire / select employees whose career trajectory and cumulative research program will be often well beyond the minimum standards in a job advertisement or contract.
This issue came up recently with my tax accountant. I have since 2007 largely worked on administrative / management contracts that do not have the scope to fund academic research, so I have had to self-fund it. Therefore, it is also largely not tax deductible. My tax accountant likened this to their CPA license studies. Yes, I noted, that’s like needing to have a conferred PhD and a Graduate Certificate in Learning and Teaching (Higher Education), but beyond this, there is plenty of vagueness in job advertisements about the research track record that is required to be internationally significant in a field or area, and labour oversupply means that universities have an oligopolistic role. These well known labour conditions (which continue to shift more to adjunct-like, casual and sessional hiring that is institutionally flexible yet that personally involves taking on risk transfer and stressors) are what understandably drove Professor Arday’s strategy to accelerate his career progression as time and opportunity-based arbitrage.
The contemporary university thus comes to resemble the Classical Hollywood studio system of the Hays Production Code era (1934-1968). Its senior managers usually come from corporate industry with its focus on quarterly driven shareholder returns and cost reduction. Those who make it like Professor Arday are treated as academic superstars (illustrated by Professor Cremin’s “best in the world” comment) and get preferential access to internal resources. As a former boss told me, their job was to back winners, and so there were often gambits, side-bets, and a whole game-theoretic ecology of optionality-base risk-taking that in particular Early and Mid-Career researchers were usually not aware of (or who were slowly introduced to by their mentors). It is thus an institutional climate in which a Machiavellian ethos reigns - which is why I advise Early and Mid-Career researchers to watch financialisation and halogencore oriented films like Moneyball, The Big Short, Michael Clayton, and Margin Call. Backgammon and poker are also well worth learning - including position sizing and the interpersonal psychology or the observable cues of ‘tells’.
To navigate this world you have to look carefully at what people actually do (realism) versus what specific other normative ideology they might espouse. This is one of the traps that Professor Arday fell into. OK great - people are promoting Black Lives Matters, Critical Race Theory, Covid-19 responses, or whatever the ‘hot topic’ of the moment is. There is general reform needed (this attracts the first sub-system oriented people). Who gains the overarching power? (This is what the second sub-system people are often more focused on.) Professor Arday made a series of stratagems with cumulatively growing payoffs. He did not appear either to have considered what the potential “blow up” conditions of these payoffs would be; or who might turn on him in betrayal. He was a (captured) idealist, not a Machiavellian.
An anecdote might illustrate this for you. Many years ago I got to know very superficially some senior decision-makers in a university. I was not in any way important or influential to them. One day, I came to a meeting with a copy of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532). One of the senior decision-makers asked me about it; I explained my academic background; they nodded. A few weeks later I was given a professional development task: an opportunity to observe a Professoriate meeting. I wasn’t even aware it existed. There was strict protocol: Chatham House rules, and I was in an observer capacity only. I went, I observed, I saw, I thought I kind of understood what was going on. A few weeks later I ran into the senior decision-maker again, who asked me about the Professoriate meeting, and my impressions of it. I gave my thoughts in a typically autistic, over-sharing manner. The senior decision-maker smiled. And then came the payoff - the lesson. “You saw how involved they were in the meeting debate?” I nodded. “If you ever get to be a Professor you are very successful, very important, and - from a whole-of-institution perspective you are still a specific stakeholder group to be influenced and managed.” That’s the Machiavellian view, redux.
Incentives drive behaviour and commitment escalation. People who focus on normative explanations like race or DEI grasp the ideological dimensions - and have often made an identity-based commitment to a particular set of ideas or ideology. We all do that and charismatic superstars like Professor Arday are pivotal to modelling this for broader audiences. That’s why the reflexivity and the social learning aspects of his conferred PhD dissertation were key: he shifted the target sub-population from students to include university senior leaders, first in the United Kingdom and then to also include the United States, and finally added subculture and social movement groups. For Machiavellians, that’s a strategic hire that enabled them to harness populist sentiment. Professor Arday’s self-narrative and in particular his employer disclosed health, life history, and medical condition issues were also important. Again, for Machiavellians, it was a way to engage with a broader, at risk student population as part of expanding the meritocratic appeal of higher education. That is sub-system two making a strategic hire as part of managing sub-system one: you also hire people for the latter who have made demonstrable commitment escalation to it.
When this investment strategy works you get asymmetric payoffs that in being on the efficient frontier can help to fund the rest of the university, generatively. Like the Classical Hollywood studio system it involves harnessing what economist Sherwin Rosen later called the economics of superstars: a small group of elite people dominate a particular field or area. The sociologist Robert K. Merton earlier identified the related Matthew Effect of success to the already successful. This was Professor Arday’s career trajectory from 2015 to 2023. Events like the University of Cambridge hiring in 2023 are what Rosen and Edward Lazear noted as rank-ordered tournaments in competitive job contracts. Cofnas and the flak-driven media were also driven by their own respective incentives to act in the way that they did, which increased Professor Arday’s “risk of ruin”. Yet as an unfolding process of crisis escalation it can get out of control very easily. It can tip into adverse outcomes and value destruction.
Machiavellians will often manage both institutional risk and public sentiment via hiring a specific Professor or even a research team on a particular issue. All of what Professor Arday focused on in his career trajectory and in his cumulative research program fit this mould. He was perceived to be the right person at the right time to promote a specific message in order to support students (sub-system one) and that would also drive client demand and revenues in a specific time period (sub-system two). For a financialised Wall Street hedge fund manager it would be “putting the Professor Arday trade on.” You know that the trade is going to have a half-life - there will eventually be a significant market change or a regime shift. But part of the Machiavellian arbitrage is not to convey this “risk on” based asymmetric knowledge - it’s simply to lock in from a sub-system two perspective what the sub-system one superstar thinks their arbitrage is. It’s a multi-level game.
People like Cofnas are self-selecting outsiders (whose ideological indoctrination is contrarian to the prevailing sentiment-based orthodoxy) who can start a cascade rolling. The flak-driven media plays a similar role with its audience or readership. In the tripartite framework of Orrin C. Klapp, they transmute people like Professor Arday from Heroes (the University of Cambridge stance) to either Villains or Fools. Sadly, Cofnas triggered the Villain card in revealing Professor Arday’s history of serial plagiarism; and Professor Arday locked in the Fool card via a series of demonstrably false claims. Consider the flak-driven media’s audience here. Do they care what elite institutions think? Unlikely - such people are either remote or are rarely encountered in their daily lives. Serial plagiarism? Look, you were hired to do a very expensive job, you lied, you didn’t do the work or put in the actual required effort, you found out, and so you should expect to get fired or to face some kind of adverse outcome like a formal investigation (very harrowing to go through) that at least will bring you down to Earth with the rest of us. It is thus social class in the United Kingdom that is just as important as race - and yet is often missing from highly selective DEI narratives.
I’m personally not an enemy of DEI. I come from an adverse, working class background. Like Professor Arday, I am (late-in-life diagnosed) autistic / neurodiverse, and have demonstrable, verifiable medical conditions (that are not actually well understood in academia). I can see the value in several of Professor Arday’s papers in building the case for institutional support and for strategic resource allocation. But what I hate is DEI as a kind of surface level identity that status-driven people actually mobilise and then often weaponise against people with real “lived experience”. It’s not an escape route to cover-up unethical behaviour that is subsequently discovered. Real DEI in its truest and deepest sense would be more multidimensional that oversimplistic narratives (usually, gender and race) that I have seen used to facilitate commitment escalation. It’s also usually also connected to prevailing economic conditions - inflation (2.8%), interest rates (3.5%), and 30-year bond yields (5.797%) in the United Kingdom - rather than being a more free-floating signifier. DEI advocates often talk about ideology (the superstructure), but they rarely in my experience talk about the actual economic life barriers faced (the base).
Superstars have a career half-life. That is why some of the best Professoriate I have worked with have cultivated the portability of being able to negotiate favourable deals, to be able to move institutions, and to develop greater self-sufficiency like multiple income streams. A crisis can derail or end your academic career: it’s very performance-based, like an elite sports athlete. That is known at the Professoriate level and is often well grasped by even the Mid-Career Academic stage. It can be a life shock for Postdocs and for Early Career Academics: a direct encounter with Universities Babylon much like Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon of the Pre-Code Hollywood (1930-34) and the Classical Hollywood (1934-68) periods. That’s why I’m not shocked by Professor Arday’s death - I’ve seen a lot of people burn out, get chewed up, or have to endure what are very adverse outcomes. The marketing PR model of contemporary universities means that much of this is never reported in the media or ever made public. It’s the realm of things like non-disclosure agreements.
Some defenders of Professor Arday who emphasise race, DEI, and other identity-based alternatives claim that this kind of outcome doesn’t happen to other people. Not exactly, but I know of many examples of both men and women that adverse outcomes have occurred to. Here, ideological beliefs act in a sub-system one way that often prevent or limit you from seeing how the entire system works from a sub-system two based perspective. One emergent defensive strategy has been to compare Professor Arday to other academics (or to publicly well known fabulists, fraudsters and rogues) who engaged in plagiarism or research misconduct, and who are not dead. This is an Elizabeth Kubler-Ross bargaining with the realities of death. Yes, there are double standards and political motivations. There are people who did this later in their careers (rather than what Professor Arday appears to have done during his PhD and Early Career Academic phase) and who had social networks / status to survive. I’m sorry. You don’t have to endorse the Machiavellian worldview. But if you want to both work in the contemporary university, and to survive at any significant level in it, you at least need to understand why it exists, how it works, and to be able to read the poker ‘tells’ or the social cues, so that you can protect yourself.
This means being coldly brutal. If you get the call that you are the Respondent in a formal investigation for example, your first steps are to find out what specific allegations you face, what the worst outcome scenario for you is (it has possibly already been decided), to organise support, and then to fight it. If you face flak-driven media, you need countermeasures for what is a form of cognitive or narrative warfare, albeit being conducted in a civilian rather than in a military context. Where Professor Arday “blew up” here (in a hedge fund manager sense) was that he engaged in what Harry G. Frankfurt popularised in On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025) as a series of deceptive misrepresentation claims (such as running multiple marathons back-to-back or being in Michael Apted’s influential 7Up documentary film series). These tend to work in periods of economic growth and speculative bubbles. They also can work if you have finesse and a savvy media personality with a Mephistophelean sense of humour. They don’t work if your response to every critic or investigator is to shut them down and tell them that they are being racist. People who understand argumentation, facts, and evidence aren’t swayed by how DEI is used here in a narrowly ideological sense.
There are many sides and perspectives to Professor Arday’s tragic death. It is understandable that many people want to decompose a complex, multidimensional case into an emotional stance or a single outcome. That will keep you in sub-system one (a specific, narrow ideological frame) rather than sub-system two (being able to see multiple stances and to understand their own articulated viewpoints on their own terms, rather than what you may psychologically split or project onto them). The latter has more cognitive-emotional flexibility and more ‘freedom to operate’. Professor Arday made a Faustian deal - trading a slower career trajectory path for a more high-risk, high-payoff outcome. Others will have far more nuanced and informed perspectives than mine. It’s a very cautionary case where overdue institutional reform - and more careful self-conduct - would be good outcomes. But I doubt anything will demonstrably change. It’s all a very stupid waste.