UNITED STATES: Cambridge’s Youngest Black Professor Faces Allegations Over TV Claim and PhD Thesis
Cambridge’s youngest black professor, Jason Arday, is under scrutiny after claiming he starred in a TV series that began 21 years before he was born.
Born in 1985, Arday was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge in 2023. In 2022, he told the University of Bath’s Race Equality Taskforce he “was part of a program which doesn’t really exist any more, but was called Seven Up at the time.”
He said the show followed people at ages 7, 14 and 21, and that he was “pulled out of the project when I was 14.”
The original Seven Up series began in 1964. A BBC spin-off started in 2000, when Arday was already 15. The BBC has confirmed he was never involved.
Arday has also publicly said he did not learn to read or write until he was 18.
He now faces detailed allegations that large sections of his 2015 PhD thesis from Liverpool John Moores University closely match or copy passages from a 2009 thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers without proper quotation.
Arday has admitted to “errors” but said he is “not a liar.” He attributes the issues to autism and complex learning disabilities, and claims critics are using “insidious and relentless strategies” to remove black academics under the guise of academic integrity. He also called portraying him as a “fantasist” unacceptable
Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores University say prior investigations found no misconduct.