Is Sacha Baron Cohen the culprit? Is it the famous comedian who created the DEI role model Jason Arday – the Cambridge sociology professor accused of plagiarism in connection with his doctoral thesis?
If so, Arday is one of comedian Cohen’s greatest masterstrokes.
First of all, there is the wildly exaggerated backstory. He claimed to have been completely mute until the age of eleven after being diagnosed with autism, and that he could neither read nor write until he was eighteen. Yet, despite these disadvantages, he completed a PhD before turning thirty – while reportedly suffering from a brain tumour.
This is what Toby Young writes in The Spectator. Young is a British commentator and sits in the House of Lords for the Conservative Party. He is the founder and director of the Free Speech Union and an associate editor of The Spectator.
Lord Young is not impressed by Britain’s new woke prince with the correct skin colour and fashionably politically correct hairstyle. Arday is a character reminiscent of Cohen’s Ali G, seen here delivering a commencement speech at Harvard University. Tasteless, but funny – it is, after all, a parody.
Arday is a far worse parody, because he takes himself seriously, and the woke elite follow suit. The British conservative press has lost faith in this figure. Spiked Online has dubbed Arday the “Woke Forrest Gump”. Arday is an example of how woke ideology has corrupted even one of the finest universities in the world.
The woke professor makes astonishing claims, such as having run 30 marathons in 35 days and from Edinburgh to London in six days, which would amount to around 160 kilometres a day – world-record pace. Naturally, every penny raised from these exploits was donated to charity.
The universities and the BBC swallowed these stories whole, and Arday consequently became an academic hero and a role model for politically correct Britons. One suspects that Baron Cohen must be laughing himself to death.
Arday’s academic career, like his sporting achievements, reads like something from a fairy tale. After obtaining a degree in education from St Mary’s University in Twickenham, he completed a doctorate at Liverpool John Moores University before becoming Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow in 2021 and subsequently Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge in 2023.
At the age of 37, he became the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.
But then some inconvenient people began asking questions about Arday’s credibility. Two sociology professors started raising uncomfortable questions about his doctoral thesis and several of his journal articles.
One of those who defended Arday was none other than Sacha Baron Cohen’s own brother, Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Psychology at Cambridge. In an angry open letter, he accused Arday’s critics of racism. It was the academic equivalent of Ali G’s famous retort whenever anyone challenged him: “Is it because I is black?” (Baron Cohen is Jewish and, of course, not black.)
About a week ago, however, the philosopher Nathan Cofnas of Ghent University published a Substack article accusing Arday of plagiarism. His allegations were subsequently investigated and largely corroborated by The Times.
The accusations emerged at an awkward moment, just one month before the publication of Arday’s autobiography, which recounts his “unlikely triumphs and heartbreaking setbacks”.
At that point, Baron Cohen must surely have thought the game was up – but no. This is a joke that simply keeps on giving. Jolyon Maugham, the self-righteous left-wing barrister, has launched a petition accusing “right-wing newspapers” of attempting to “smear” Arday.
The allegations are familiar and entirely predictable: racism, of course. Then comes the appeal to “stand against hate and division”. If you accuse a person with dark skin of fraud or dishonesty, you are immediately branded a hateful and divisive racist.
Among those who have signed the petition are the aforementioned Simon Baron-Cohen, together with the heads of three Cambridge colleges, five Labour MPs, Green Party leader Zack Polanski, and his party colleague on Leeds City Council, Mothin Ali. Quite a gathering, in other words.
Sacha Baron Cohen is the twenty-first century’s answer to Juvenal, the Roman poet best known for his biting satires on the moral decay of Rome. Juvenal coined such enduring expressions as “bread and circuses” and “a sound mind in a sound body”. The comedian has succeeded in shining a spotlight on the obvious double standards of our academic and political elites.
It goes without saying that any white professor accused of comparable misconduct would, in all likelihood, have been expelled from academia long ago. But because Arday is black and neurodivergent, he has instinctively been defended by people desperate to avoid appearing racist.
As Cofnas points out, applying lower standards to a scholar because he is black is, in practice, equivalent to saying that if he were judged by the same standards as a white academic, he could never possibly succeed.
Such thinking is all too familiar. For one thing, it is deeply patronising, and the question arises whether it does not in fact constitute a genuine form of racism.
If a white person is subjected to outrageous accusations of racism – the standard weapon deployed against conservative voices – the allegations are reported across the establishment media without any supporting evidence whatsoever.
But if one says something critical about immigrants or people with dark skin, one becomes fair game, and even the courts may decide to intervene.
In this way, the “elites” are paving the road towards internal conflict and, in the worst case, civil war. It almost appears as though that is the objective of the entire circus.
The Huguenots fled the religious conflicts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. Around 50,000 settled in England. But where on earth are today’s Britons supposed to flee?