Remembering Professor Jason Arday

Jason Arday, who has died at 41, was a sociologist whose remarkable rise from impoverished beginnings led to his appointment as the youngest black professor at the University of Cambridge. But his success precipitated his downfall when he resigned after an investigation into his academic qualifications and allegations of plagiarism.

Arday’s appointment four years ago as Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge was seen as the ultimate achievement in an incredible academic career, which began after he overcame illiteracy in his late teens.

It was not the least of many personal challenges which had begun when he was diagnosed, at age three, with a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder which meant he was unable to speak until he was 11, or to read or write until he was 18.

Other parts of his story were said to epitomise the significant barriers that neurodivergent people and those from working class and minority backgrounds faced when trying to build careers in higher education.

Jason Atta Kwei Arday was born and raised in Clapham, South London, the third of four sons of Ghanaian émigrés Joseph Arday, a supermarket chef, and Gifty Attoh, a mental health nurse.

According to Arday’s biography, his parents were told by therapists and career advisers that he would spend his adult life in assisted living and require lifelong support. Instead, he went to college, trained as a teacher and then launched a career in academia.

At 27, while studying for his PhD, he wrote a set of personal goals on a bedroom wall at his parents’ home. One of these read: “One day I will work at Oxford or Cambridge”.

He began to read and write in his late teens, supported by his friend and mentor, Sandro Sandri. He then studied Physical Education and Education Studies at the University of Surrey before training as a PE teacher. During this time, he became aware of the possibility of postgraduate study, and at 22 told Sandri that he was considering a PhD.

Learning to become an academic, however, was difficult because he had little practical training or guidance about how to do it. By day, he worked as a PE lecturer, while dedicating his evenings to drafting academic papers, watching videos of lectures and attempting to master his discipline and recite content verbatim.

He eventually published his first paper in 2018. The same year, he secured a senior lectureship at Roehampton University before moving on to Durham University, where he was an Associate Professor of Sociology. In 2021, Arday became a Professor of Sociology of Education at Glasgow University, making him one of the youngest professors in the UK. He also reportedly taught at Leeds Beckett University.

Of his work, he said he wanted to “open doors to more people from disadvantaged backgrounds and truly democratise higher education”, adding that “being in a place like Cambridge” would provide him with the leverage to lead that agenda nationally and globally.

But a series of media reports alleged he plagiarised his PhD thesis and other research.

Further questions were asked about the truth of his claims to have run 600 miles in six days and to have raised £5.5m for charity.

In his resignation letter to Cambridge, drafted after he delivered a speech claiming his critics were conservative activists trawling through the work of black academics looking for the slightest error or inconsistency, Arday said he needed “time to heal”. He cancelled a tour to publicise memoir, Great And Unfortunate Things, which is due to be published by Simon & Schuster this month.

His wife, since 2014, was Debbie McKenzie, a teacher he had known since his teens and whom he credited with helping him to read and write. They had two children.