By Not long ago, universities and academics were revered (perhaps naively) for their unflinching pursuit of facts. The scientific method, tenure, academic freedom, and peer review are all set up to encourage innovative minds to follow the truth “wherever it may lead.” The Latin “veritas” is etched on their marble arches and woven into their seals. Truth is valuable. Mechanisms that help us tell what is true, that push us to correct our errors, are an essential part of the feedback loop.
The dust has largely settled on the story of Cambridge professor Jason Arday, but it provides an instructive example of what’s gone wrong in higher education and why people no longer trust or value the academy.
To occupy a named and endowed research chair is the peak of achievement for academics. To secure one at the University of Cambridge, among the oldest and consistently highest-ranked institutions in the English-speaking world, is a height only the most elite, erudite, highly qualified humans achieve.
Until sociologist Jason Arday.
Arday was not only the youngest black academic appointed to a professorship at Cambridge, but also a serial plagiarist and known fabulist, whose story of his own extraordinary achievements was so outlandish that reasonable people probably ought to have put the pieces together sooner — at least before offering him a permanent appointment. When detailed reporting and subsequent analysis demonstrated his academic misconduct and raised questions about his personal history, Cambridge opened an investigation, and Arday resigned. Days later, he was found unresponsive at home. No official finding has been made, but remarks from his family and colleagues strongly imply Arday ended his own life.
Nothing in my description should be interpreted as celebrating the death of a man, about my own age, who found himself at the center of an academic scandal and media maelstrom. Arday’s death is a tragedy. Yet his rise and fall is also instructive: many people who should have recognized Arday’s exaggerations had strong personal, social, and even financial reasons to ignore, deny, or conceal them. When people have incentives not to speak up, errors go uncorrected.
The Incentive Problem: Academia Punishes Unpopular Truths
In August, Times Higher Education in London revealed it intended to publish the plagiarism allegations against Arday in September 2025, until a threatening letter from a law firm called standard reporting “racially motivated” and “a campaign of harassment.”
Revealingly, the scholar who finally brought the revelations into public view was someone who had been pushed out of Cambridge years earlier, when his research ran afoul of diversity initiatives. Multiple people with first-hand knowledge tried to correct Cambridge, but the willingness to be public — and publicly hated — came from someone who’d already lost the protection silence would’ve given him.
Early warnings about Arday sent years earlier (Retraction Watch cites a May 2023 email from an emeritus professor) were ignored, and any voices of objection in the hiring decisions were evidently overruled. Arday himself called the police on and accused his critics of harassment. Cambridge called the plagiarism accusations “a vile campaign to undermine his credibility” and cleared him of wrongdoing. The commitment to the lie extended the damage, and discredited more scholars, because no one would take responsibility for the institutional failure. Correction had to come from the outside.
Markets have such a feedback mechanism. There may be no clear “right way” to run a business, but there are certainly wrong ones: customers speak, and profit and loss punish wrong claims about what customers want and what they’re willing to spend. Much of academia, shielded from consequences and rewarded for conformity, has lost that crucial corrective balance.
Telling the truth, especially unpopular ones, is not a high-status activity in academia. The pressure to impress and be liked by tenure committees and administrators pushes the incentives of money and status toward repeating consensus, and makes telling truth to power a professional and financial liability. Repeating consensus is safe and high-status: professionals compare and adjust their behavior and even their thoughts to match the standard set by the “reference groups” they hope to join, including departmental faculty, prestigious journals and publishers, and professional societies. Because publication, tenure, and promotion decisions rely heavily on committee votes rather than any objective metric, groupthink can easily take over.
Truth-telling, where it deviates from popular consensus, is a career liability in these echo-chamber settings. Reporting either faculty academic misconduct or student cheating measurably penalizes the whistleblower professor with lower evaluations, professional isolation, lower chances of promotion, and sometimes separation from the university. And that’s just the handful that are tenure-eligible: three-quarters of faculty are now “contingent,” with their contracts up for review every year. Renewal depends on their peers’ approval and their students’ evaluations: textbook groupthink. The incentives send a clear message: those interested in advancing, or even staying employed, should not challenge progressive dogmas or attempt to enforce integrity. Money and status reward conformity — and silence.
As a result, academics default to what Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran calls preference falsification: expressing agreement with mainstream or official positions even when it conflicts with what they privately believe “in the absence of social pressures.”
Some 88 percent of university students admit they have “pretended to hold more progressive views than [they] truly endorse to succeed socially or academically,” including conforming their classwork to the perceived ideologies of their professors. Researchers called it “integrity fatigue,” because in the campus environment where “grades, leadership, and peer belonging often hinge on fluency in performative morality, young adults quickly learn to rehearse what is safe.”
The performance of the popular opinion, in other words, is much more important on campus than truth or virtue.
The Psychological Layer: How Smart People Stop Thinking
Kuran’s concept of preference falsification describes the first step: people publicly express beliefs they don’t privately hold because the social cost of dissent is high. The second step is less comfortable. After years of professing a view, that skewed view becomes more comfortable. People begin to believe what they falsely professed.
To explain why, consider a scholar writing in the shadow of Nazi Germany, who asked how a modern, educated society could so thoroughly abandon its own judgment as to have allowed the Third Reich to rise. Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that such stupidity is a sociological phenomenon, not an intellectual one. Under intense social pressure, individuals abandon private convictions and begin speaking in the movement’s slogans, becoming what Bonhoeffer called “an instrument of some other force.” Intelligence is repurposed to defend the group narrative.
Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst who fled Germany in the same period, posited that freedom has a psychological cost. When people are separated from external authorities, they struggle to build meaning. Conformity is a salve to that alienation, inviting us to abandon responsibility for our own reasoning. The end point is “automaton conformity,” Fromm says, adopting the opinions and values of the group until there is no gap between “what I think” and “what one thinks.” Solomon Asch’s experiments, conducted in the 1950s at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, give this mechanism an empirical anchor: faced with a popular but obviously wrong group answer, ordinary participants echoed wrong answers to match the group.
The institutional public choice outcome is both unmistakable and unsettling: if conformity is rewarded and truthtelling is penalized, an institution will gradually select for people who have learned to stop noticing the difference.
What it means for the Arday case is that no one at Cambridge was villainously planning to overpromote a young academic with questionable credentials. But under the pressure of the racial reckoning of Woke I, many erased the gap between what they privately noticed and what institutional pressure required them to defend.
Beyond Gatekeepers: The Falling Costs of Truth-Seeking
Encouragingly, the costs of producing knowledge are falling. The price of accessing specialized expertise, relevant literature, and a publication willing to take the risk has been reduced by digital tools and the decline of institutional gatekeeping. The cost of producing both good and bad knowledge, and of persuading people with it, is falling. Scholars are using AI to search publications and datasets, plagiarism-detection software is widely available, and Substack lets findings reach an audience without passing through an editor. Substack is how Arday’s story ultimately broke, and it’s also where dozens of academics went to call his firing “digital racial terror,” a “tragically British pile-on,” “relentless bullying,” and a “lynching.”
Many of the people and publications writing after Arday’s death blamed the people who revealed his dishonesty, rather than the institutional attitudes that had unskeptically promoted him. The identity and intentions of the messenger — in this case a “racial realist” former insider who’d already been exiled and refused to be silenced — are irrelevant to the truth of the claim.
Accusations of academic misconduct against Arday were true, regardless of who presented them. The findings are checkable by anyone.
That’s the whole point of academic research — or at least it used to be.
Truth Will Out? The Stakes for Education and Civilization
My goal is not to attack any one professor, one university, or even one ideology. But the Arday case provides a test of a question facing universities around the world: are institutions built to pass hard-won truth from one generation to the next still fit for that purpose?
Arday’s appointment shows how stupidity, in Bonhoeffer’s sense, and automaton conformity, in Fromm’s sense, have outweighed the pursuit of truth within universities. Guilty white liberals were perfectly willing to sacrifice 800 years of institutional reputation, tossing out reasonable standards, in order to feel inclusive and morally superior. Reports that students leave college knowing little more about their own country’s history than when they arrived are a symptom of the same drift: an enterprise that has forgotten what it is for, and has focused on indoctrination, and embodying progressive political conformity rather than pursuing truth.
But the same story contains good news. The correction did not have to come from Cambridge, nor from some select committee. It came from an outsider, publishing evidence that anyone could verify. Ideas competed. Chokepoints were overcome by a competing publication. Evidence was verified independent of credentials. Those who made false claims paid a public cost in credibility.
The truth did not get permission — Cambridge tried repeatedly to shut it down and canceled a probe into the controversy — and truth still won.
That lesson is what universities should learn. The academy’s founding values may be in exile, but they are not irrecoverable. The push toward truth came from outside the university this time, from those still practicing its purported values: free expression, a commitment to unbiased inquiry, and the habit of letting replicable evidence settle arguments. A culture that protects the friction between its thinkers, that celebrates heterodoxy in the unproven and allegiance to the provable, gains the ability to correct itself.
The task, then, is modest and demanding at once: to pass on the legacy of civilization with gratitude and humility. Gratitude for the inherited tools of free inquiry that took centuries to build, and humility, because the first lesson of those tools is that any of us, and any institution, can be wrong.
Universities carved veritas into their walls because truth was supposed to matter more than intellectual comfort or individual agendas. When universities become more interested in pushing an ideology and punishing those who question it, they lose the public trust that gave them their standing. Universities that abandon the search for truth cannot expect the public to keep paying for it.