Academic scandals are boring affairs compared to political scandals. Most of the time, academic tomfoolery involves not properly crediting a source (or 10) or making stuff up and fabricating citations.
Then there are those occasional academic scandals that reveal more about the academic culture and the respected institutions that violate fundamental tenets of academic freedom.
Recently, a Cambridge University scholar, Jason Arday, much celebrated for his work, was exposed as a shocking fraud. Instead of launching an investigation, Cambridge fully backed Arday, calling early scrutiny of his work a racially motivated campaign by right-wing activists.
Arday took the extraordinary step of reporting academics and journalists who questioned his work to the police for criminal harassment. After David Harris of Plymouth Marjon University emailed Arday in 2023, pointing out copied passages, Arday reported him to the police. He similarly reported reporter Jack Grove to the Metropolitan Police, leading officers to request that Grove cease contacting Arday.
When Liverpool John Moores University investigated Arday’s PhD thesis — which contained over 100 passages virtually identical to passages in an earlier thesis — a panel cleared him of deliberate misconduct. The panel attributed the identical passages to "honest and reasonable error" linked to inadequate supervision and his neurodivergence, effectively shielding him from academic sanction.
His biography was riddled with lies and exaggerations. Arday hired a high-powered law firm to threaten lawsuits. The firm served a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) letter, threatening costly libel litigation that led the Times Higher Education outlet to spike a story on a 63-page report detailing Arday’s plagiarism.
Still, leftist academics, media outlets, and prominent politicians continued to defend Arday. Finally, the defense began to break down in late July 2026 after independent researchers and reporting outlets, including Retraction Watch, published detailed breakdowns of plagiarism in his PhD thesis and journal articles.
In early August, after Cambridge University announced new formal investigations into his career and credentials, Arday officially resigned from his professorship. He committed suicide a few days later.
For two years, Arday escaped serious scrutiny, partly because of the aggressive defense mounted by Arday himself and powerful academics on his behalf. In the U.S., we have a similar case unraveling in recent days.
The city of Boston decided in 2022 to set up a committee to examine the question of reparations. The city council tasked two academic committees with examining slavery and discrimination from the 17th century to the mid-20th century, and discrimination after 1940. The latter team finished their work earlier this year.
Historian Kerri K. Greenidge, author of The Grimkes, one of the top ten books of 2022, was asked to sit on the committee looking at the period in Boston from the 17th century to 1940. The work of that committee has been halted after serious allegations of plagiarism and other irregularities were uncovered in The Grimkes.
Myra C. Glenn, a retired professor of American history at Elmira College and the author of several books on U.S. history, said in an interview on Thursday with The New York Times, "Where is she getting this? Boy, it became a major problem.”
In Reviews in American History, a scholarly journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press, Glenn raised concerns about the book’s credibility.
“Although well-written, The Grimkes is also a deeply flawed book,” she wrote. “All too often Greenidge lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims. Her work is also riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes.”
Some of those factual errors were doozies.
Glenn also disputed Greenidge’s account of an 1838 attack on Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia by an anti-abolitionist mob, which indicated that the Grimke sisters “led thousands of antislavery women through prayer” and helped them escape the “flaming building.”
“But as numerous sources have documented, no one was in the building when it was torched since antislavery activists cancelled a scheduled meeting, fearing impending violence,” Glenn wrote.
In an interview on Friday, Greenidge, who is Black, said that her life’s work had been torn down by white scholars who disagreed with her conclusions about racism, slavery and white supremacy.
“I am heartbroken that a field I have given my life to can treat me this way,” Greenidge said. “The attack on Black women academics is real.”
“I have never plagiarized anything in my life,” Greenidge said. “I have never fabricated anything.”
She told the Times that there were citations in her book that “probably” were “misattributed.” So, she's just incompetent and sloppy, not a cheat.
Using race as a springboard to advancement seems to work a lot better in academia than anywhere else except perhaps getting ahead in the Democratic Party. Greenidge appears to be at the end of the road. Both Tufts University and the Boston City Council have fired her, and several prizes she received for her books have either been rescinded or are in the process of being rescinded.
A spokesman for Tufts University, Patrick Collins, said in an email that "the university became aware of the complaints that Greenidge’s book 'contained multiple errors of fact and failed to give appropriate credit to the work of another' in December 2022, more than a year before Glenn published her critical review of the book." Incredible. The university sat on the news that Greenidge was a cheat for more than a year before being forced to reveal it.
“The university initiated a thorough peer review involving a panel of external scholars of American history which identified multiple errors of fact and citation,” Collins said. “In keeping with its commitment to ethical conduct in research, the university proactively moved to correct the public record by informing publisher W.W. Norton of the peer review findings.”
A full year after Tufts confirmed the academic misconduct, it finally decided to own up to its error.
Greenidge declined to discuss details about her departure from Tufts or the status of her books or prizes.
She criticized the university’s peer review panel, which she said included two senior historians whom she described as hostile toward Black women in academia. She did not name them. She said that the university’s review was prompted by the complaints from a white woman scholar, whom she also declined to name. She said that she had sought a restraining order against that scholar.
Greenidge also raised questions about why The Times was writing about the accusations against her and the developments surrounding her book, suggesting that her race had played a part.
“The independent review by outside experts in the field was fair, fact-based, thorough, and objective,” Collins, the university spokesman, said in a follow-up message on Friday. “We stand by the review and strongly deny any allegations of bias.”
If her only defense is the New York Times and Tufts University's "racism," she won't get very far.