As anger grows among the left over the apparent suicide last week of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, an influential band of activists within Great Britain’s largest academics’ union is moving to fuel that raw sentiment into action. These academics—from the University and College Union—want to shield other black academics from scrutiny from what they view as a racist, right-wing conspiracy.
The effort comes amid widespread outrage among liberals at what they claim was the media’s harassing coverage of Arday and at the critics of universities’ diversity practices who made Arday a symbol of academic rot. Many of these journalists and critics are being outright blamed for Arday’s death.
The youngest black professor in Cambridge’s 800-year history, Arday resigned from Cambridge earlier this month after he was accused of widespread plagiarism and fabulism regarding his inspiring life story. He was found dead on Friday.
No one has been more in the crosshairs following Arday’s death than the American-born academic Nathan Cofnas, whose incendiary Substack exposé last month first publicly accused Arday of plagiarism. On Thursday, the walls began closing in on Cofnas at the Belgian university where he’s a post-doctoral researcher.
“I was just suspended by Ghent University,” Cofnas tweeted. “They will almost certainly fire me. The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.” A university spokesperson confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon that a “preliminary disciplinary investigation” had been launched into Cofnas.
The day prior, Ghent had announced it was taking “appropriate action” regarding a postdoctoral researcher—now confirmed to be Cofnas—while denouncing racism and asserting that academic freedom “is not unlimited.”
Cofnas has for years advocated the taboo position that race is associated with intelligence. In 2024, when he was on a fellowship at Cambridge, Cofnas published a Substack essay in which he wrote that in “a meritocracy” the number of black Harvard professors “would approach 0%.” In the ensuing firestorm, including “calls for violence,” he was “forced to resign” from his teaching role, he has written. He left Cambridge when his fellowship expired in 2025.
On Tuesday evening, the UCU Solidarity Movement, an activist caucus within the academics’ union, held a virtual organizing meeting. The Free Beacon obtained a recording of the raw and emotional gathering of several dozen members, during which the angry scholars repeatedly denounced the attacks on Arday as the product of a racist, right-wing mob seeking to drive blacks out of the academy.
The meeting’s organizer, Sean Wallis, a principal research fellow in English at University College London, or UCL, suggested time was of the essence. He already knew, he said, of one black British academic facing scrutiny for alleged plagiarism.
The central purposes of the meeting were to draft a public statement on the Arday tragedy and develop a toolkit to help the union respond if black academics are targeted with attacks on their credibility. Wallis further proposed a UCU hotline for members “who have been threatened.”
The meeting’s members expressed dismay that the initial plagiarism accusations against Arday became public thanks to Cofnas’s July 21 report.
With some mild dissension, the UCU group generally characterized the subsequent avalanche of press coverage over Arday, who stood accused of academic misconduct and faking his life story, as a broader extension of Cofnas’s controversial views on what the Columbia University graduate has called “race realism” and “group differences in intelligence.”
A draft statement from the group, which the Free Beacon obtained, asserted that both liberal and right-wing media outlets were culpable of amplifying the “agenda of far-right ideologues” who were “openly boasting” their quest to “create a ‘meritocracy.’”
Wallis and one other academic attendee downplayed the notion that Arday had committed academic misconduct, because, they insisted, lifting text verbatim from another scholar’s work and using it without attribution did not itself constitute plagiarism. They said that the stealing of someone else’s ideas was required to merit such a charge—a narrow definition contradicted by their own universities.
During the three weeks of feverish media attention of Arday preceding his death, the British coverage came predominantly from the right-leaning Telegraph and Times, which is more centrist. But it was the liberal Guardian that published some of the most devastating takedowns of Arday’s evidently false claims, including of his assertion that severe autism left him mute until he was 11. In the United States, the left-leaning New York Times reported that Arday’s mutism claim was false in a blunt article published Saturday, the day after his death, that offered a scathing portrait of Cambridge’s failure to properly vet him.
Wallis, who is an influential branch secretary of the UCU and sits on its national executive committee, harshly criticized the Telegraph and the Times in particular, denouncing their work as “pompous.” And yet he disclosed he did not actually read either of those publications.
As media coverage was surging in the weeks before Arday’s death, Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen, a leading autism expert, issued an explicit warning on social media that Arday was under great strain and at risk of suicide.
Baron-Cohen’s Cassandra-like prophecy may have helped prime Britain for its own George Floyd-style racial reckoning. A vigil for Arday, held Monday evening in London’s Trafalgar Square, drew an estimated 30,000 people, according to organizers. In anguished and infuriated speeches by politicians and other public figures, many characterized Arday as the victim of an unfettered racist campaign.
The following evening, the UCU activists’ meeting was attended by an array of branch officers and representatives from universities across the United Kingdom. Only a few attendees said they had been acquainted with Arday. And only a few identified themselves as black.
Wallis helped set the tone at the UCU activists’ meeting, saying, “I think there is a campaign going on” against black academics in Britain. He said there is a conspiracy to “target black colleagues because politically that is what they want to do. They want to hound out our black brothers and sisters.” He further said, “I am convinced that’s already happening”—in Britain—”because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“Jason is not the only person who is being targeted right now,” Wallis said, claiming that a purported Substacker had put an unnamed academic’s thesis through plagiarism-detection software. This, Wallis said, evidently “found some overlap with some other PhD’s, which had been written a few years previously.”
Multiple British academics told the Free Beacon that Wallis is known for his sharp knowledge of employment law and, his own far-left politics notwithstanding, for eagerly going to bat for all union members without fear or favor.
Elsewhere, Jolyon Maugham, the pugnacious head of the left-wing British legal advocacy nonprofit the Good Law Project, has all but blamed the media for Arday’s death.
Suicide-prevention experts advise against attributing such death to a single cause.
The Good Law Project, which dismissed the plagiarism charges against Arday as unfounded and motivated by racism during the final weeks of his life, has circulated a sign-on letter, which to date has over 130,000 signatures, calling for a crackdown on the media.
Zack Polanski, England’s Green Party leader, himself called for greater regulation of the press.
Various Amnesty International subgroups on Tuesday asserted that Arday “was a victim of a brutal, racist witch hunt.”
At the union meeting, Wallis said in reference to any additional members facing accusations of academic misconduct: “We will support them, oppose any kind of trial by media, trial by social media.” And he said that “we will defend their right to a due process within the university, and we will distinguish between genuine plagiarism and accidental textual overlap.”
But attendees appeared primed to regard scrutiny of black academics as illegitimate almost by default. Wallis said the group challenges racism “even when it’s disguised as concern for standards.”
Wallis appeared to defend Arday by offering a narrow definition of plagiarism. He brought up plagiarism-detection software (which Cofnas used to identify similarities between Arday’s thesis and the work of another scholar) and noted that such programs detect “textual overlap.” But, he said, “textual overlap is not necessarily plagiarism. Plagiarism is the theft of ideas, theoretical research ideas. It’s the theft of intellectual work.”
A number of attendees then nodded their heads. Eva Hartmann, a university associate professor in Cambridge’s education department, where Arday served until resigning August 5, smiled and gave a thumbs up in response.
“Plagiarism is not using the same phrase that somebody else has used in a previous article,” Wallis continued. He cited Galileo (who was prosecuted for heresy), saying the Renaissance scholar had his students copy his texts to teach them to craft scientific prose. “And actually, that’s been a long-standing way of teaching for quite a long time,” Wallis said. “So it’s not surprising that people will do more textual overlap than they realize.”
Plagiarism-detection software, Wallis said, has “substituted a proper understanding of what plagiarism is—that is, the passing off of other people’s research ideas as your own, stealing them and publishing them for something else—which is, like I say, textual repetition or paraphrasing, failing to cite adequately. They’re not the same sin. Deliberate stealing of ideas is not the same.”
Lyes Kahouadji, a chemical engineering researcher at Imperial College London, who is non-white and whom Wallis appointed to chair the meeting, later replied to Wallis that “it’s really important what you mentioned about textual overlap and plagiarism.” Kahouadji insisted that plagiarism is “completely different, and academics are supposed to come forward and say, ‘No, this is not plagiarism.’” Regarding Arday, he continued: “It’s really a shame that people who are supposed to protect from this plagiarism fantasy didn’t speak up.”
All of the academic institutions where Wallis, Kahouadji, and Hartmann work, as well as Liverpool John Moores University, from which Arday received his Ph.D., clearly and explicitly define plagiarism as including the lifting of text without clear attribution.
Cambridge defines plagiarism as “using someone else’s ideas, words, data, or other material produced by them without acknowledgement.” UCL’s guidance states: “Plagiarism is the presentation of another person’s thoughts or words or artefacts or software as though they were your own.”
In a statement to the Free Beacon, a representative for UCL—the only institution other than Ghent named in this report to return a request for comment—said, “Academic misconduct, including plagiarism, is taken seriously and is addressed through established university procedures. Alongside these policies, UCL provides research integrity training for research staff and students across all disciplines.”
Kahouadji expressed a view, apparently widely held by the meeting’s members, that Arday had “been cleared of all plagiarism.” And yet, Kahouadji lamented, “the campaign continued” against Arday, including through excessive media coverage he considered to be “harassment.”
“Frankly, he has been killed,” Kahouadji said.
Hartmann similarly decried that Arday “was cleared from the plagiarism by his degree-awarding institution.” And yet, she said, “there was nothing from the academic profession saying, ‘Stop there. This is an academic judgment, and this is what needs to stand.’”
Hartmann was the only academic named in this report who responded to a request for comment. She said the quotes of her from the meeting that the Free Beacon ran by her via email were “inaccurate and completely taken out of context.” The union group, she said, “discussed the methods” that plagiarism-detection software “uses when we talked about text comparison.” She added, “I encourage you to look for facts, not opinions.”
One member of the chat, identified as “Donna RHUL”—likely Donna Brown, a senior lecturer in managerial economics at Royal Holloway University of London—said that, given the clearance Arday received, he was “hounded for nothing.”
Liverpool John Moores launched an investigation over potential plagiarism in Arday’s thesis in September 2025. According to the Times, the investigation concluded in March and indeed cleared him of the charges, finding the textual overlaps were the product of “honest and reasonable error.” Arday himself did not dispute that he had lifted text, blaming his autism, but attributed the plagiarism accusations to a cynical racist plot against black academics, the Times reported.
Regardless of that investigation’s outcome, the meeting’s attendees appeared to overlook the fact that Arday has more recently been credibly accused of plagiarism and academic fraud involving multiple academic papers—written at multiple institutions—in addition to his thesis. This is according to a damning investigation of a five-year period of Arday’s output by the Times, published August 5, which alleged he stole another academic’s research and fabricated data.
That same day, Cambridge stated that it was probing Arday’s “academic qualifications and honorary appointments” and that there were “a number of ongoing complaints regarding academic misconduct” on his part. Arday resigned hours later, but admitted no wrongdoing.
In the meeting’s only acknowledgment of this new investigation, Hartmann lamented that Cambridge “threw first Jason and then the faculty under the bus” by saying in its statement that “new information” had arisen about Arday. But, Hartmann said, “no one knew what it was, and it completely muted allies who could have come in.”
Arday also stood credibly accused of fabricating multiple aspects of his uncanny life story, including his claims of having raised £5.5 million for charity and having completed elite long-distance running feats. The charity work was explicitly referenced as a contributing factor by at least one of the several universities that bestowed upon him honorary degrees in recent years. Arday had also gotten a book deal, which he claimed to the Guardian involved a seven-figure advance, to write his ostensibly inspiring memoir for Simon & Schuster. The book was published in the United States after he resigned and three days before his death.
These extra-academic issues were never mentioned at the UCU meeting. Jeffrey Vernon, a principal teaching fellow in postgraduate medicine at Imperial College, was an outlier in his skepticism of Liverpool John Moores’s findings. He wrote in the meeting’s chat that it was “clear” that the university “did not supervise him properly.” He said, “They were anxious to find ‘no problem’ and move on.” No one responded to this counterpoint.
The group’s draft statement about the Arday tragedy was largely written by Anne Alexander, the director of Methods Programmes at Cambridge Digital Humanities, according to the version history of the Google document where it was crafted.
Currently, the draft statement emphasizes that the group is “appalled” by Arday’s death and asserts he “was the victim of a targeted witch hunt by far-right activists.” The “devastating consequences of this racist campaign demands a collective response across our union and by the anti-racist movement as a whole,” the statement continues. “The agenda of far-right ideologues who attacked Jason Arday while openly boasting that their goal is to create a ‘meritocracy’ in Higher Education by chasing Black scholars out of academia should be confronted, challenged and exposed, instead it was amplified by the right wing and liberal press.”
The academic-activists’ statement also points to the “common struggle against institutional racism and management failure in Cambridge and beyond.” It commits the group to defending “colleagues and students from racist harassment and victimization and building an anti-racist movement on our campuses and in the streets.”
Vernon was also among a minority who noted that not all media coverage was so deserving of fierce condemnation. Pointing to Retraction Watch, which was one of the first to publish an article on Jason Arday after Cofnas last month, Vernon wrote in the chat, “I don’t think that can be called right wing, non-academic, or unscientific.” He continued, “I don’t want us to go overboard on the ‘right wing racist’ argument.”
At least one of the meeting’s attendees envisioned a counteroffensive against James Orr, who is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge and the head of policy for Reform UK. Orr has been accused of racism, including for expressing negative attitudes toward Palestinians.
Talat Ahmed, a senior lecturer in South Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, said if she were a student at Cambridge, she would want “a mass student insurgent campaign to get rid of that racist fucker from my institution.”
Decrying those who endorse race science in particular, Wallis compared them to climate denialists and said of scholarship that validates such a theory: “Academic freedom is not the freedom to publish garbage.”
The meeting’s attendees also argued that Arday was egregiously held to a higher standard because of his race. Megan Povey, a professor of food physics at the University of Leeds, said that, by comparison, “you see these white academics getting away with murder, literally.”
Povey, who is transgender, further drew a parallel to the darkening climate surrounding trans issues in Britain. “You know the right is going for trans because it’s a wedge issue,” Povey said. “They’re trying to pull back gains that have been made over the years by Black Lives Matter and so on.”
Petra De Sutter, the Ghent rector who, according to Cofnas, suspended him, is also transgender. De Sutter was also found to have drafted an inaugural address with the aid of generative AI, which inserted multiple “hallucinated” quotes, the Brussels Times reported in January. In the speech, De Sutter had warned to “not blindly trust” AI.
The activist-academic group was especially angry at journalists. Hartmann called for academia to assert its authority and preempt reporters’ efforts to use their own “crude text comparison” to examine plagiarism accusations (as Cofnas and multiple news outlets did with Arday’s texts). Wallis noted that one member “rightly said” in the chat that journalists themselves plagiarize. “They all do,” Wallis said emphatically. “They all—yes!” Kahouadji replied. Sardonically quoting reporters, Wallis said, “It’s kind of like, ‘How dare you do plagiarism? That’s our thing!’”
The Free Beacon could find no examples of accusations, credible or otherwise, of plagiarism levied against any of 34 identified journalists who covered the story in Britain.
In an apparent reference to Cofnas, Wallis asked why “is it of anybody’s interest that one racist” alleged plagiarism in Arday’s thesis. “It’s only a news story because the news media chose to make it a news story.”
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