I’ve never met Professor Jason Arday. I don’t know whether he has genuinely run 600 miles in six days. I also genuinely don’t know the truth about the remarkable similarities between parts of his doctoral thesis at Liverpool John Moores, which helped propel him rocket-like up the academic greasy pole to a chair at Cambridge, and passages in a dissertation written six years earlier by someone at Brunel.

Did it never strike either Cambridge University or some member of the academically distinguished electors who made up the appointment board for his chair to suggest an elementary piece of due diligence?

Did it never strike either Cambridge University or some member of the academically distinguished electors who made up the appointment board for his chair to suggest an elementary piece of due diligence?

It is undoubtedly possible that this is nothing more than an honest, if rather careless, omission to acknowledge earlier work: academics are, after all, proverbially absent-minded, and writing theses is stressful. On the other hand, the passages may indeed have been copied as an intellectual labour-saving device in the assumption that no one would be any the wiser. This happens; and frankly, if you do it in a provincial university you’re probably safe. Turgid post-modernist theses on social........

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