Cambridge Had Plagiarism and Sexual Misconduct Cases Before Jason Arday. Where Were the 249 Articles for Them?

In the weeks before his death, Jason Arday became one of the most scrutinised academics in British history. The media questioned and, in many cases, publicly ridiculed almost every aspect of his life, including his PhD, memoir, teaching, athletic claims, charitable fundraising, personal biography and even the wording of his resignation letter.

The sheer volume of coverage was extraordinary. A NewsCord analysis counted 249 distinct UK national-media articles about Arday in roughly 22 days, with The Times and The Sunday Times alone accounting for 44 pieces.

But how unusual was his alleged misconduct compared with cases the public barely heard about?

The argument is not that Arday should never have faced scrutiny. He was a prominent academic whose biography formed a central part of his public profile, and journalists had every right to investigate credible allegations. But the scrutiny led to a media pile-on that has not ended with his resignation or even his death. Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy has since criticised journalists for gathering outside the grieving family’s home, raising critical questions about how journalistic coverage should go.  

The question now is why the media investigation turned into a rolling audit of almost every claim Arday had ever made about himself, while other academics facing serious findings remained largely confined to specialist, local or education coverage.

The Cambridge Plagiarism Cases You Probably Never Heard About

In 2018, Dr William O’Reilly, an associate professor of early modern history at Cambridge, submitted a paper to the Journal of Austrian-American History that copied material from an undergraduate’s essays. Investigators later found that more than 12 pages closely reproduced two of the student’s essays almost word for word. The student discovered the copying three years after the journal published the article.

Cambridge upheld the plagiarism complaint, but the tribunal reportedly found the conduct negligent rather than deliberate. O’Reilly remained in his job.

The story received some coverage, including from the Financial Times and Varsity, the Cambridge student newspaper. But significantly, neither outlet placed O’Reilly’s name in the headline; the coverage was about the case, not the person. The Financial Times article was also behind a paywall, further reducing its reach. The story did not generate weeks of national headlines. There was no sustained media campaign. No scrutiny of his entire life story. He kept his position.

The question is: why did this plagiarism finding involving a Cambridge academic not develop into the same prolonged national dismantling of his professional legitimacy?

Other Plagiarism Findings That Never Became National Spectacles

In 2010, Dr Nicola Morrison, a senior lecturer at Cambridge, published an article containing unattributed material from a final-year undergraduate’s work. She later apologised, but the story never developed into a prolonged national campaign, and Cambridge kept her in post. At Oxford, Professor Anna Lora‑Wainwright committed a “serious instance of research misconduct” when she failed to properly acknowledge the work of Chinese collaborators in her award‑winning book, though an investigation found she “did not intend to deceive,” and she remained in post.

Similarly, an investigation at the University of Arizona found that Susannah Dickinson had copied material from a former student’s thesis into two paragraphs of a teaching proposal without proper attribution. She received a formal admonishment and later gained tenure. In all three cases, the misconduct prompted reporting but did not escalate into the kind of sustained national spectacle that surrounded Jason Arday.

Cambridge Had More Serious Problems Than Plagiarism

In June 2026, Professor Simon Goldhill, an internationally renowned classicist at Cambridge, resigned after an external investigation upheld serious complaints of sexual and professional misconduct involving a female student, including an unwanted kiss, putting his tongue in her ear, touching her chest and touching the zip of her trousers. The student said she felt frightened and panicked. Goldhill resigned while a disciplinary tribunal was considering what sanctions to impose, and restrictions were placed on his access to department spaces and events. Yet this upheld sexual-misconduct case involving a prominent Cambridge professor did not generate months of wall-to-wall national coverage or a forensic examination of every aspect of his life.

Similarly, in 2015, ten female Trinity Hall students complained about sexualised and sexist comments by Cambridge academic Dr Peter Hutchinson. An agreed resolution restricted his teaching and contact with students. After he later breached those restrictions, the college excluded him before controversially allowing him back as an emeritus fellow under restrictions. He also published an erotic fiction novel centred on sexual themes involving students at a fictional Oxbridge college. He resigned in 2019 following renewed outrage.

In both cases, the coverage existed but did not become a sustained national obsession. The comparison is about intensity. The question is no longer whether journalists were entitled to investigate Jason Arday. They were. The question is why the investigation expanded into a rolling audit of almost every claim he had ever made about himself. Yet Professor Kehinde Andrews, a Black academic in the UK, said Arday told him that from day one of his Cambridge post, people were already digging into his life.

Liverpool John Moores University reportedly reviewed the original PhD plagiarism allegation and cleared him. The story continued even after the awarding institution had reached that conclusion.

The cases we have discussed differ a lot, so we should not treat them as identical. We can, however, compare how the media covered them: the volume and duration of reporting, how personal the scrutiny became, and whether journalists stayed focused on the original misconduct.

Perhaps most strikingly, NewsCord counted 188 articles after Arday had already resigned. Leaving Cambridge did not end the scrutiny; the coverage accelerated.

Was Race Part of the Story?

We cannot simply dismiss the racial dimension. Arday was not just another Cambridge professor accused of misconduct. The university promoted him publicly as its youngest Black professor, and his appointment symbolised progress within an institution where Black academics remain dramatically underrepresented.

That symbolism worked both ways. When his career rose, institutions and newspapers frequently foregrounded his race and extraordinary personal history. When the allegations emerged, racist commentators such as Nathan Cofnas, a former Emmanuel College research associate whose writings have argued for racial differences in intelligence and predicted that Black academics would be dramatically underrepresented under a purely meritocratic system, seized on Arday’s conduct to attack diversity hiring, “wokeness” and the promotion of Black academics.

That is precisely why comparisons matter. The question is not whether white academics have ever been criticised. They obviously have. The question is whether comparable misconduct routinely produces the same mixture of front-page treatment, personal ridicule, ideological commentary and scrutiny of almost every aspect of a scholar’s biography.