When I was eleven, I told my school I'd once run a mile in three minutes forty. Nobody checked, because everyone understood an eleven-year-old's boasting for what it was. It is only later in life, when the boasts migrate onto CVs, university webpages and speeches to government ministers, that anyone is meant to start checking.

Which brings me to the six hundred miles. The claim — reported, apparently uncritically, in multiple national newspapers over several years — was that Professor Jason Arday of Cambridge once ran six hundred miles on a treadmill in six days. A hundred miles a day, indoors, for a working week. Nobody at any of those newspapers picked up a phone. As far as anyone can establish, nobody at Cambridge did either.

The plagiarism was findable. The institution simply chose not to look.

Professor Arday resigned this week, "with immediate effect," in a statement issued not through Cambridge's own channels but via the Good Law Project — itself a small but telling detail about where the institution's authority actually sits these days. The resignation followed an admission that his doctoral thesis contains more than thirty passages lifted, with minimal alteration, from a 2009 dissertation by another scholar, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers of Brunel University. It followed identical quotations attributed to different named interviewees in different papers. It followed the discovery that two of his listed GCSEs would have required him to sit written examinations at an age when he has said he could not yet read. None of this required forensic genius to uncover. It required a plagiarism-detection subscription and the willingness to use it — something Cambridge, with its multi-billion-pound endowment and its army of governance committees, apparently could not muster for over a decade.

Cambridge didn't fail to notice. It failed to want to notice.

Here is the part the university would very much like you to skip past: the first person to flag the plagiarism, Nathan Cofnas, is a self-described "race realist" who was sacked from a Cambridge fellowship in 2024 for arguing publicly that a colour-blind meritocracy would produce almost no black professors. This has allowed the entire affair to be repackaged, with remarkable institutional discipline, as a story about a racist making mischief rather than a story about a professor's CV. It is a brilliant piece of misdirection, and Cambridge did not invent it — but it has leaned on it gratefully. The university's own disciplinary panel had already found Cofnas not guilty of unlawful discrimination or harassment. That inconvenient fact simply never made it into the institutional talking points, because the talking points were never really about Cofnas. They were about protecting Cambridge from having to admit that a hire it was proud of, and had used for years as evidence of its own progress, was built on foundations nobody had bothered to survey.

That is the actual story here. Not one man's exaggerations, but an institution that spent three years agonising over whether to rename a library after a long-dead slave trader, and considerably less time confirming that a serving professor actually held the "honorary appointments" listed on his own departmental page. Glasgow and Ohio State have both now denied any ongoing affiliation with him. Cambridge's statement this week referred only to "new information" having come to light — as though the university had simply never previously had access to a telephone.

When the accuser can be racialised, the accusation stops mattering.

This is what happens when an institution decides, consciously or otherwise, that a hire has become too symbolically important to audit. Once someone is cast as living proof of an institution's virtue — proof it can point to in every prospectus, every diversity report, every appearance on Radio 4 — checking their working stops looking like due diligence and starts looking, to the people who'd have to do it, like sabotage. Better to let a Belgian philosopher with a grudge do the auditing nobody in Cambridge wanted their fingerprints on, and then spend the following fortnight debating his motives instead of the findings. The self-interest is obvious once you see it: examine the CV and you might have to retract the achievement; examine the accuser and you get to keep it, at least for a few more news cycles.

None of this means Professor Arday's own account should be dismissed outright. He is autistic, and says some early errors came from mimicking others' phrasing while teaching himself to read. He has described genuinely disturbing racial abuse — threats, animals, bullets in the post — and if even a fraction of that is accurate, it is a disgrace that deserves its own reckoning, separate from the plagiarism findings. But an institution's job is to hold both facts at once: that a man may have suffered real racism, and that he may also have submitted a thesis lifted substantially from someone else's work. Cambridge chose instead to hide behind the first fact for as long as it could, hoping nobody would ask about the second.

Verify the CV before it goes on the letterhead — not after Substack does your job for you.

So here's the practical bit, addressed directly to the Vice-Chancellor's office and every HR department currently drafting a diversity strategy: verify the CV before the appointment is announced, not after a stranger on the internet embarrasses you into it. Ring the other universities. It takes four minutes. Check the JustGiving page — it's still live, and the total on it bears no relation to the five million pounds once quoted in press releases. And if a man tells you he ran six hundred miles on a treadmill in under a week, ask to see the Fitbit data before you put him on the cover of the prospectus.

— Cutting Comment