You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies - which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world - what I want to forget.
Joseph Conrad
You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget.
What should have remained an internal academic dispute of the kind that universities manage all the time has instead become a source of international headlines and viral online reaction. Jason Arday, who came to public notice as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor at the age of 37, has been accused of serial plagiarism in his doctoral thesis. These allegations sit alongside a life story of extraordinary achievement and disability overcome — a story so remarkable that it ought to have made any institution pause before accepting it uncritically.
That pause does not appear to have occurred at Cambridge, one of the world’s most distinguished and ancient seats of learning — although the doctorate was awarded by Liverpool’s John Moores University – but Cambridge hired him on the strength of that record. The trope that helped drive Arday’s elevation to Professor of Sociology of Education was, inevitably, DEI; and the same impulse seems to have shaped institutional efforts to defend him, at least until the evidence became difficult to ignore.
The scrutiny began in July, when The Daily Telegraph and The Times published investigations into his thesis and his biography, following questions from DEI critic Nathan Cofnas. In his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things (Simon & Schuster), Arday was diagnosed with autism and other conditions at age three, did not speak until he was 11, and could not read or write until 18 — despite having gone on to obtain GCSEs in physical education and textiles. From there he moved through physical education studies, accumulated degrees and ultimately a doctorate. His work focused on Critical Race Theory and race and inequality in education.
As the evidence mounted, his position became untenable. Cambridge, facing a rising tide of criticism, opened its own review and Arday resigned on 5 August, saying “relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary” had taken “a profound toll”, while insisting his resignation was not an admission of the accusations against him. On 14 August he was found dead at a London address; the matter remains under investigation, so no further comment can be made for now.
It is a perfect storm. The Arday affair illustrates several rebarbative postmodern tropes: identity and race politics; the post-truth world; the curation of identity through neurodiversity and trauma; and the long march of the progressive left through universities, accompanied by the dismantling of merit and the rationalisation of anti-scientific thinking. Others read the same events differently — as a case of a man hounded to death by a media pile-on regardless of the truth of the allegations. Both interpretations are likely to be argued indefinitely.
Arday’s case raises a difficult question: how do institutions respond to reality-challenging claims protected by a pseudo-moral narrative? No clinician has evaluated him and the alleged plagiarism findings and the biographical disputes, however tendentious, aren’t themselves proof of a psychiatric syndrome.
The explanation may lie elsewhere. The study of the pathology of lying is relatively recent. To paraphrase Disraeli, there are lies, damned lies and mythomania. First there is normative lying, which can occur for a variety of reasons, not least of which include evasion of responsibility and criminality. This is followed by compulsive lying, where the subject cannot avoid lying about everything, even when there is no reason, which invariably leads to problems — occasionally causing such difficulty in a person’s life that they seek help themselves.
Normative lying and compulsive (or pathological) lying lie along a spectrum at the end of which sits mythomania, otherwise known as pseudologia fantastica: extensive lying that constructs elaborate fantasies with only a remote connection to reality, in which the person begins to believe the fantasy and may attempt to fulfil its premises — usually with damaging results. The classic example is the premises made by Munchausen’s syndrome patients to seek unnecessary treatment.
Mythomania as a phenomenon is nonetheless useful for understanding how such stories take hold: the building of a self-myth so complete that institutions, journalists and admirers become collaborators in its preservation, sustained by sympathy, by guilt, and by the fear of asking the wrong question. It thrives wherever status is awarded not only for achievement but for the story of suffering around it. Cases like Belle Gibson’s fabricated cancer “cure” and Harold Lasseter’s unfound gold reef — for which he died pursuing in the Australian desert — are often cited as examples of legends that grew because others wanted them to be true.
This is critical in understanding mythomania. Every liar needs a mark who wants to believe what they are told without submitting it to critical examination; without such willing believers, mythomania just shrivels.
The lesson is not that every tale of adversity is false, nor that every beneficiary of diversity policies is suspect. The fact remains that compassion is no substitute for verification, and that institutions risk their own purpose when they treat moral sympathy as a substitute for evidence. Universities exist, among other things, to test claims. Whatever the final judgment on Arday, that principle stands on its own.
If nothing else, the saga reminds us that we need to devote more study to the pathology of lying in order to understand what motivates and drives those who exhibit it.
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Robert M Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist, writer and historian. His latest book “Medical Murder: Disturbing Tales of Doctors who Kill” is in press. His podcast series “Frontal Lobotomy” is on Apple and Spotify.