For Jason Arday, it has been a breathtaking climb to the top of the ivory tower.

Raised in South London by Ghanaian immigrant parents, Arday says he was diagnosed with autism at age 3, was nonverbal until he was nearly 12 and couldn’t read or write until he was 18. He went on to get his Ph.D. in education, and claims to have had to relearn the contents of his dissertation weeks before defending it after losing his memory following the removal of a benign brain tumor.

In 2023, when he was 37, Arday became the youngest Black professor at the University of Cambridge in its history. That appointment, trumpeted by Cambridge, inspired a spate of glowing media coverage on both sides of the Atlantic highlighting his dramatic life story, including his claims to have once run 30 marathons in 35 days to raise millions of British pounds for charity.

Arday has also told the press that his academic successes brought darker attention, including the delivery of a severed pig’s head to his parents’ home and repeated visits to his office by a masked intruder, once while wielding a knife.

Next week, Simon & Schuster will publish Arday’s memoir, “Great and Unfortunate Things,” under its 37 Ink imprint. In the lead-up to the book’s publication, Arday has found his academic integrity and claims about his biography increasingly under fire.

Concerns about some of Arday’s work had circulated quietly in scholarly circles since the appointment at Cambridge catapulted him to academic celebrity. But they exploded into public view late last month, after a scholar known for racist views about intelligence published a lengthy article in his newsletter questioning parts of Arday’s remarkable personal story and leveling extensive charges of plagiarism against him.

The accusations quickly drew widespread media coverage in Britain, which initially broke down along familiar culture-war lines. To the right-wing media, Arday was a “diversity poster boy.” To supporters, including prominent academics and politicians who signed a petition of support that quickly drew thousands of signatures, he was the victim of a racist smear campaign.

But over the weekend, as questions about his work and personal story continued to mount, a different debate emerged. Is Arday a victim of a campaign to discredit Black scholars? A fabulist whose tales of extreme adversity the academic establishment deemed too good to check? Or both?

So far, Arday’s publisher and university have stuck by him, even as the media has surfaced other questionable assertions — like an apparent claim in a 2022 interview that he had been part of the British documentary series that included the film “Seven Up!,” which began before he was born.

Arday has attempted to clarify or defend many of his claims, including that one. But at times, his responses have added to the controversy.

In an interview with The Times of London published on Friday, Arday appeared to acknowledge some errors in his early work, but blamed them in part on his autism and what he said was insufficient support from academic advisers. And he said he was the victim of a long-running “dark arts” campaign to oust him from Cambridge.

Arday canceled a planned video interview with The New York Times on Monday. But in a statement emailed to The Times by Simon & Schuster, Arday stated that a “detailed investigation” of his doctoral dissertation had “cleared me, acknowledging honest and reasonable errors that did not amount to plagiarism.”

As for his personal life, he said he “had no reason to lie or fabricate,” and reiterated that he was the victim of “a wider campaign, motivated by racism, to discredit me in every single way possible.”

“There is a well-documented playbook for discrediting Black academics in high-profile positions, and it’s been used to devastating effect in the U.S. and now with me in the U.K.,” he said in the statement. “My greatest hope is that what is happening to me now will serve to further expose these actors and forces.”

Simon & Schuster told The Times that it is standing behind “Great and Unfortunate Things,” which it described in a statement as “Arday’s memoir of overcoming remarkable challenges and responding to adversity with resilience.”

“We have worked closely with Professor Jason Arday on ‘Great and Unfortunate Things’ since acquiring it and can speak to the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication,” the statement said. “He worked closely with his co-writer, as well as our editorial and legal teams, to carefully research, write and corroborate the narrative.”

Asked if, at any point in the editing process, revisions were made to Arday’s book to adjust or correct claims that have been challenged publicly, a spokeswoman said that Simon & Schuster does not comment on its editorial processes.

The initial public charges made against Arday last month came from Nathan Cofnas, a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium who had previously been disciplined during his time as a fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, following an outcry over a 2024 blog post in which he argued that in a meritocracy, the number of Black professors at Harvard University “would approach zero percent.” (Cambridge concluded in an investigation that his writing did not violate the law or “contravene university regulations designed to uphold free speech.” Cofnas sued Emmanuel College for unlawful viewpoint discrimination, and lost.)

In his newsletter, Cofnas published dozens of excerpts from Arday’s 2015 Ph.D. dissertation that had been flagged by plagiarism detection software, presenting them side by side with passages from a 2009 dissertation by another scholar. The passages from Arday’s dissertation appeared to copy verbatim, or only lightly paraphrase, the other scholar’s work.

Cofnas asserted that Cambridge had tried to cover up and quash criticism of Arday’s academic record and also questioned the veracity of details of Arday’s life story, including his claim to have once run 30 marathons in 35 days.

Retraction Watch, an online publication that covers academic misconduct and research ethics, then weighed in with an article describing criticisms of Arday’s scholarship that scholars began raising privately in 2023. The corrections subsequently appended to some of Arday’s published work, the article claimed, did not fully acknowledge the extent of the changes made.

And over the weekend, British news outlets, including some that previously ran admiring coverage of Arday, raised fresh questions about possible anomalies in his published work and unsupported elements of his personal story, including his claims about the pig’s head and the masked intruder.

Arday’s supporters have said he is a victim of racially motivated attacks. A petition in support of Arday organized by the Good Law Project, a progressive nonprofit, has drawn more than 1,400 signatures, including from prominent figures including Simon Baron-Cohen, who is the director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, and five members of parliament from the Labour Party.

The petition calls the allegations of plagiarism against Arday “entirely false,” and part of a broader “attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence.”

Asked about the questions surrounding Arday’s academic work, Cambridge’s communications office provided a statement on Monday saying the university takes allegations of plagiarism “extremely seriously,” noting that standard practice is to refer issues to institutions where the research was carried out.

“We have either advised complainants to approach the relevant institution or passed on complaints,” the statement said. “Allegations of plagiarism regarding Professor Arday’s thesis and some of his journal publications have been investigated by Liverpool John Moores University and the journals in question.”

In a statement, Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday earned a Ph.D. in education, said it received allegations of academic misconduct against Arday in September 2025. “A confidential procedure was conducted in response to those allegations and Professor Arday’s Ph.D. still stands,” it said.

But some scholars who have independently examined Arday’s research and citations say they are seeking to uphold academic standards, and that the investigations and corrections so far have not been adequate.

John Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex who has conducted research on the sociology of education and race, said in an interview he believes there are legitimate flaws that warrant attention and correction.

“The central question of similarities in the text cannot be excused as ‘a right-wing hit job.’ There is a case to answer,” he said. “As academics we have a wider duty to standards, our field of study and the next generation of students. That means admitting if we get it wrong and doing the right thing.”

Martyn Hammersley, an emeritus professor of educational and social research at the Open University in Britain and an expert on research methodology, contacted Cambridge in 2023 with questions about what he said was significant plagiarism in some of Arday’s work. In an interview with The Times last week, he lamented that the political and racially charged debate has overshadowed important questions about academic rigor.

“We now have a public scandal in which right and left confront one another, so that there is not much space for sensible discussion of the issues,” he said.

The allegations against Arday come amid broader concerns about the ways accusations of plagiarism are being weaponized, particularly as widely available plagiarism-detection software makes possible infractions easier to identify.

In late 2023, conservative news outlets highlighted plagiarism allegations against Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard. The university then announced that it had identified several instances of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution” in her scholarly work, which would be corrected.

Gay, a political scientist and Harvard’s first Black president, resigned soon after, calling the campaign against her, which she said was driven in part by “racial animus,” an effort to undermine the university. After Gay’s resignation, one of her chief critics, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, began highlighting what he said was plagiarism in the scholarly work of several Black women employed by Harvard.

At the time, some observers saw a targeted effort to discredit the work of Black scholars, particularly those whose work focused on race and diversity.

Arday’s work, according to his website, focuses on race, education, neurodiversity and mental health. His 2025 book “We See Things They’ll Never See,” written with Chantelle Jessica Lewis and published by Princeton University Press, challenged “neurotypical hegemony” in the educational system and in society at large.

In a 2023 interview with the BBC, Arday spoke about his first exposures to the rigors of scholarly research as a new graduate student who had only learned to read and write a few years earlier.

“Everything I submitted got violently rejected,” he said. “The peer review process was so cruel, it was almost funny, but I treated it as a learning experience and, perversely, began to enjoy it.”