After a meteoric rise to the top ranks of British academia, scholar Jason Arday was found dead at his London home on August 14. Arday had spent weeks fighting plagiarism accusations. The way they took on a life of their own in the media ecosystem is a stark reminder of the steep price people can pay in a culture that has made originality a kind of moral virtue.
In 2023, at age 38, he had been appointed to a professorship in sociology of education at the University of Cambridge, becoming the youngest Black professor in the institution’s 800-year history.
Nine days before his death, Arday had resigned from his faculty position. He was facing growing criticism about improbable and inconsistent details appearing in his memoir, scheduled to be released in the coming weeks by Simon & Schuster. Arday’s publisher had stood by him, lauding the academic’s “professionalism and integrity.”
But the originality of Arday’s dissertation and his other academic work was also coming under scrutiny, leading to multiple allegations of plagiarism.
Arday vehemently denied the accusations, suggesting that any mistakes were the result of his autism. He also claimed that his accusers were motivated by racism.
The controversy over Arday’s work reflects an ongoing trend of ideological opponents levying plagiarism accusations to undermine one another. I think it’s also worth exploring why such attacks continue to be so enticing – and so effective.
Plagiarism can be defined as the appropriation of someone else’s words or ideas without acknowledgment or compensation. In the ancient world, plagiarism was viewed quite negatively: The word “plagiarism” actually means “kidnapper” in Latin.
But in my 2026 book, “Strikingly Similar,” I explore how, throughout the medieval period, the Renaissance and into the early modern era, an ethos of “imitatio” prevailed. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton are examples of authors who hewed closely to writers who had come before them. These writers freely borrowed plots, characters and rhetorical devices in the service of their own work.
True originality came to be viewed in a positive light only gradually, and it eventually developed into the modern concept of intellectual property, in which the creative products of human ingenuity are viewed as tangible assets.
Today, accusations of plagiarism have become a potent way to undermine someone’s credibility. Partisans of the political left and right routinely use allegations of plagiarism to vilify their ideological adversaries. This serves their goals of undercutting both their target’s work and the institutions they represent.
The accusations against Arday did not emerge in a political vacuum. They were shaped by the culture wars over race, academia and diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
On July 21, Nathan Cofnas, an American philosopher working at Ghent University in Belgium, wrote a Substack post detailing how he submitted Arday’s 2015 dissertation to Copyleaks, a plagiarism detection platform. He found “substantial overlap” with a thesis written by another scholar in 2009. Cofnas added that “Many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source,” and found similar issues in other papers written by Arday.
In the past, Cofnas has expressed doubts about the intellectual abilities of Blacks in comparison to whites. By discrediting the work of a Black professor, he explained, he could also discredit the university that had hired Arday for promoting “the ideology of DEI.”
Ghent University suspended Cofnas on August 20, while it conducted an investigation into his actions.
The rise of generative artificial intelligence has arguably made the public’s desire for original human works even more pronounced.
When a student submits a paper written by a chatbot instead of their own work, should this be considered plagiarism? I’ve argued that this is more akin to ghostwriting, since the student isn’t copying from an original source. Instead, generative AI is stringing words together in a probabilistic way that closely resembles human writing. That said, using a chatbot to write without disclosing its use can still be a form of cheating. And most people contend that plagiarism, cheating and ghostwriting are all cut from the same cloth because they all lack the spark that we ascribe to truly original thinking and writing.
The public ultimately expects journalists, scholars and elected officials to behave ethically. In academia, there is no greater sin than passing off another’s work as one’s own. And violations of public trust are typically judged quite harshly.