A University of Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row has resigned “with immediate effect”.
On Wednesday the university said it had launched an investigation into Professor Jason Arday “following new information” about his “academic qualifications and honorary appointments”.
Arday – who became the university’s youngest ever black professor in 2023 – has admitted errors in his work, but said he had faced “an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack” and was not a “liar”.
It came after a series of media reports questioning some of his achievements and allegations of plagiarism in his PhD thesis.
Arday said he had “concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away”.
In the statement posted by the Good Law Project on Wednesday, Arday said that being appointed professor had been “without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life”.
But he added: “There comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great.”
He said his resignation should not “be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge.
“Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.”
Thanking his students and colleagues, he said that “for my own wellbeing, for my family, and for those who have stood by me throughout this difficult period, I have concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away”.
Arday said “this is not the end of my work” and that he needed “time to heal”.
“When that time comes, I will return,” he added.
Accusations of plagiarism in Arday’s work were first voiced by Nathan Cofnas – a US researcher and self-defined “race realist”, whose role at a Cambridge college was terminated after backlash to his view that under a true meritocracy black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”.
He claimed on Substack that he had put Arday’s work through a plagiarism detection software, which found that “many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source”.
Cambridge had initially described allegations made against Arday as a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility”.
Liverpool John Moores University – which awarded his PhD in 2015 – had investigated allegations of plagiarism in his thesis that were made last year, but did not uphold the charges.
The BBC has contacted the university for further comment.