Readers, a hilariously obvious fraud is in the news once again, which in my part of the world is a bit like turning on the Bat-Signal. Remember that Steven Spielberg film Catch Me If You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as real-life scammer Frank Abagnale? As played by DiCaprio, it’s an eminently winning role: Spielberg tells a tale of how, before the age of 19, young Frank pulled off millions of dollars in cons by convincingly impersonating everyone from an airline pilot to a doctor to a lawyer, only finally being caught by a rumpled Tom Hanks.

Alas, pretty much none of it turns out to be true. In a rather predictable development, Abagnale turns out to have been lying to the world about being a world-class liar: Sure, he was an authentic white-collar criminal with a record, but aside from temporarily wearing a pilot’s uniform for a few months in 1970 to pass forged checks — not really the most glamorous of crimes — none of his other stories check out at all. (Whether this makes him a “genuine fraud” remains a semantic paradox for the philosophers to ponder.)

Abagnale was lucky to have Spielberg as his chief tribune; instead of treating Abagnale’s stories about himself with any skepticism, he took his idol John Ford’s advice, intoned at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Would that such standards applied to academia!

In fact, maybe they do — if you’re the right person saying the right things. Otherwise Cambridge University’s Jason Arday, professor of “sociology of education” (translation: professor of exactly the sort of critical race theory you’d expect), would be sweating far more than he is right now.

Arday is one of the U.K.’s newest academic superstars, a true success story as the youngest black scholar ever to become full professor at the University of Cambridge, Britain’s second-best institution of higher learning. His life story is truly impressive, an inspiring tale of a man rising to a prestigious position from severe disadvantages in life — Arday claims to suffer from an autism so severe that he was entirely nonverbal until the age of eleven, and wholly illiterate until learning to read at the age of 18. Now, not only is he a national pseudo-celebrity, as a “high-functioning neurodivergent,” he’s at the top of the academic hierarchy.

Allow me to quote Nathan Cofnas, a scholar from Ghent University (and a former research fellow at Cambridge), summarizing Arday’s remarkable vault up the academic ladder, after claiming to have only achieved literacy after he started attending Sixth Form:

Under the influence of a white high school teacher who “gave [him] agency,” Arday pursued higher education. After receiving a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University, he rocketed up the academic ladder as a scholar of racism, education, and inequality. In three years he went from senior lecturer at Roehampton (2018) to associate professor at Durham (2019) to professor at Glasgow (2021). Ivy League universities (plural) tried to recruit him, but he had his heart set on Oxford or Cambridge. In 2023, at age 37, he became the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge. He is one of the youngest people of any race to ever hold a chair professorship at Oxbridge.

But by gum, it gets even more inspiring than that. Arday also claims that before becoming a full professor at Cambridge, he raised over £5 million for charity. And built clean-drinking-water facilities for South American and African peasants. While becoming an ultra-marathoner who ran 600 miles in six days (only 50 miles short of the world record) — all without any formal documentation of said feat. He has a heartwarming memoir about his triumph over adversity, with the glurgy, quotidian title of Great and Unfortunate Things, due to be released on August 11. Is there anything this heroic autist can’t do?

As it turns out, the answer is scholarship. If something seems a little too good to be true about Arday’s life story — from nonverbal illiteracy to the halls of Cambridge — then perhaps that’s because it was. Arday may be a fabulist. But according to Cofnas, who has produced a devastatingly thorough report on the matter, Arday quite clearly is a serial plagiarist, having stolen enormous chunks of others’ scholarly work — pages upon pages of it, usually almost verbatim — for his Ph.D. thesis. In academia, one’s thesis is essentially one’s professional calling card as a budding academic. Plagiarizing it was once a death penalty offense; just ask Claudine Gay.

And much like Gay, he apparently has kept on plagiarizing well into his (remarkably thin) academic career, up to and including seemingly stealing clinical data (in other words, interview responses) from others for his own pieces. He didn’t do the work himself — he simply rewrote someone else’s work; the approach leaves more time for marathoning, one supposes. Needless to say, the sort of academic work he is vulturing from others is itself largely worthless, which is its own irony — the inevitable decay of “remix culture,” imported into scholarship.

This has not gone entirely unnoticed in academia. Long before Cofnas’s piece, other independent researchers had been raising red flags about Arday’s research, including his unusually hostile reaction to being asked for the data sets he used in several of his published papers. In fact, the Times Higher Education supplement — the U.K.’s most prestigious journal of news from academia — was prepared to run a full exposé about Arday’s career of academic theft . . . until the solicitors came calling, that is.

You see, Arday had gotten wind of the piece and realized that the jig was up. His (tellingly cynical) response was to take advantage of Britain’s scandalously censorious speech laws and hire one of its most notorious defamation firms to threaten defamation proceedings should the piece go to press. (They cited the potential “damage to his reputation” and his financial stake in the upcoming memoir.)

That much was to be expected, especially from Arday, who seems increasingly to be a glib-talking con-jobber who masquerades as a scholar because it’s the easy grift. But what makes this a true scandal is that Cambridge has given him its full-throated support in all of this: Rather than acknowledging that their star hire might be an academic fraud, Cambridge has declared via spokesman that Arday is the “victim of a vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” Apparently — and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary — the university has determined that he is cleared of “allegations of plagiarism regarding his thesis and journal publications.”

That sort of response — to acts arguably far worse than what ruined Gay at Harvard — is the most brazen sort of stonewalling: the presentation of a united administrative front to simply silence opposition. If Jason Arday can be cleared of allegations of plagiarism, then who will ever be convicted of it?

At the risk of being altogether too blunt, I’d wager to say that we all know why Arday is receiving this defense. He is black, poor, autistic, and an aggressive critical race theorist who is selling a heroic life story of clawing his way up from desperate poverty and ignorance to the heights of elite society. Why, it’s almost as though he checked every imaginable box for the sorts of people who make hiring decisions in academia. Who would ever have thought to doubt him? And why should Cambridge start now?