Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:00 PM | August 09, 2026
meme

I had hoped that I was done with the Jason Arday/Cambridge story, but it seems that fate has something else in store for me. 

I am something of a YouTube addict, with exactly the sort of content you would expect of me. Lots of podcasts, of course, with more than a bit of military-related analysis and educational material, some pet-related videos (there is this girl who does dog and cat grooming videos that are oddly fascinating and soothing, believe it or not), and, weirdly, my wife likes this series of videos on idiots who get into trouble while caving. 

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Well, the Jason Arday scandal is all over my podcast content, not coincidentally because a large proportion of the podcasts I subscribe to are from the UK. Both the Times podcasts and The Telegraph have done multiple shows on the scandal, and as you would imagine, Cambridge, academia in general, and the excesses of DEI have all been major topics of discussion. 

And it keeps getting worse and worse. Apparently, the university from which he got his PhD had been informed about his plagiarism, and after an "investigation," determined it was totally hunky dory. Cambridge had every reason to have known for years. Each university that hired him had every reason to know that Arday was a fabulist, if for no other reason than he had listed a book that didn't exist as a publication and claimed professorships at universities that he never held. 

But, in an odd way, the most compelling piece of evidence that they were in on the fraud was this:

This is going to be in my third article - but I am too outraged to wait to tell you. 😡

Jason Arday was never trained as a sociologist.

Jason Arday has no degree, no Master’s and no PhD in Sociology. None. Zero.

His entire formal academic training is in Education and Physical Education:

BA in Education Studies and Physical Education

MA in Education and Pedagogy

A second Master’s in Education

PhD in Education — specifically on peer-mentoring among student teachers training to become PE teachers

That is a doctorate in physical-education teacher training. 

It is not sociology.

 It contains no sociological theory, no sociological methods, and no sustained engagement with the core literature of the discipline.

Yet within a few years the same man was:

Appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham

Put in front of students teaching modules called Sociology of Education and Societies in Transition

Then made Professor of the Sociology of Education at Glasgow

Then made Professor of the Sociology of Education at Cambridge

Students were paying close to ten thousand pounds a year. Some of that money was buying teaching and supervision from a man whose highest qualification in the subject he was employed to profess was nothing. 

He had never studied sociology as an undergraduate, never taken a Master’s in it, and never written a doctoral thesis in it. 

The word “Sociology” appeared only in the job title.

Institutions simply accepted the re-description. A PE-and-education academic was re-labelled a sociologist and students were charged elite university fees to be taught by him.

That is not an academic career progression. That is a category error that successive universities chose not to notice.  My mind has been blown by this revelation. No wonder his students report him leaning on desks talking about celebrities and inequality! He appears to have known absolutely nothing about the subject he was teaching!

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Now, to be clear, sociology itself is a BS academic field. Not because there couldn't be a discipline called "Sociology" that studies how people interact in society, or essentially a version of psychology applied to societies as a whole. 

But because Sociology as it exists is complete BS. Total junk. 

But even in Sociology, taking a PE teacher and trying to fit him into the category "Sociologist" should be a bit beyond their ability to redefine the word; only because Jason Arday could be the black square peg to put into the academic round hole, they did it anyway. 

Students had apparently been complaining about him for quite a while. He was supposed to guide them in their studies, but failed to do so. He gave them bad advice, led them to believe they were doing exceptionally well when in fact they wound up doing badly in other classes, and basically blew off all his duties because, well, why do them?

Students who were running up a lifetime of debt for the privilege of a Cambridge education began complaining that he was failing to carry out even the most basic supervision of their work, but they too were ignored – or worse.

One former MA student told The Telegraph: “Apart from one meeting throughout my whole course, he made a number of excuses not to meet with me or provide any substantive feedback on my work. As a supervisor, he was terrible.

“Any feedback that he did give was that my work was outstanding and that I didn’t need [supervision].”

The student got a lower grade than they had expected and appealed to the university on the grounds of poor supervision. The appeal was rejected.

Another of Mr Arday’s students was so dissatisfied with his supervision that they asked to change supervisor. For their trouble, they were accused of racism (though there is no suggestion the accusation came from Mr Arday) but stuck to their guns and were given a new supervisor.

A third student, an undergraduate, complained to their director of studies about the standard of Mr Arday’s teaching in 2023, saying that scheduled hour-long sessions with him only lasted 20 minutes. An alternative supervisor was arranged for the student.

A fourth student said Mr Arday told them they did not need supervision, only to get a lower grade than they had expected.

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Cambridge is, to say the least, getting beaten up in the media, and deserves every bit of criticism and then some. 

Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, could not stop smiling as she welcomed Jason Arday to her department as a professor. “We are so lucky to have you,” she beamed. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

Those words have come back to haunt Prof Cremin after Mr Arday resigned on Wednesday night following weeks of damaging revelations by The Telegraph about his apparent plagiarism and partially fabricated CV.

Now Prof Cremin is among the senior Cambridge staff facing serious questions about the appointment of Mr Arday, their defence of him in the face of mounting evidence of academic fakery, and their high-minded dismissal of questions about his record.

As I have argued, Arday as a person doesn't matter, except perhaps someday as the subject of a biopic along the lines of "Catch Me If You Can." He's a fabulist, and such people are not especially rare, although you have to admit he is exceptionally good at reading the desires of his marks. 

Anybody who has spent even the most modest amount of time looking at DEI knows that cases like Jason Arday's are anything but rare. The evidence is everywhere. Ask Claudine Gay about that; she's still enjoying a multimillion-dollar salary despite having to resign from her position as the president of Harvard, and is still on the faculty. On Sabbatical, at that. 

Nice gig. 

Still, advocates of DEI are arguing that minority applicants are being held to higher standards than others, and the people desperate to believe them still claim to. Every example that is irrefutable is portrayed as an outlier, and accusations of racism are fired out at a rate that would make a Gatling gun blush in admiration. 

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As with alphabet ideology, DEI will not go quietly into that good night. There is too much riding on its success. Too much money. Too much power. Too much prestige. They cannot give it up. 

So they won't. We will have to drive a stake into its heart, burn the coffin, and spread the ashes in a hurricane. 






















































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