Celebrity Cambridge professor Jason Arday, who resigned suddenly on Wednesday after the university announced it had opened an investigation into his academic credentials, has a history of claiming he was the victim of violent, criminal threats that are not supported by law enforcement or any other available records, the Washington Free Beacon has found.
Arday—in a speech given a year ago—made a series of lurid and macabre claims about threats made to him and his family, including "pigs' heads in my parents' door." But a year later, with Arday now fighting accusations of rampant plagiarism and lies about his life story, there's no evidence police investigated these threats or that the threats even existed, based on records searches, recent news reporting, and a document obtained via a freedom-of-information request and viewed by the Free Beacon.
The freedom-of-information request, submitted to the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, the police force for the medieval college town, inquired about any reports to the authorities that matched Arday's descriptions of threats and stalking. A search produced no matching reports.
The University of Cambridge, after previously declining to investigate Arday for plagiarism, announced on Wednesday it has "begun an investigation following new information about Professor Arday's academic qualifications and honorary appointments."
In his resignation letter, posted by the left-wing legal advocacy nonprofit The Good Law Project, Arday admitted no wrongdoing, and instead cited the attacks on him as motivating him to step away from the public eye. "Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack," he said. " While criticism is an inevitable part of academic life, what I have experienced has gone far beyond scholarly disagreement. The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love."
Arday, 41, who in 2023 became the youngest black professor in Cambridge's 800-year history, said in a previously unreported speech given at a British university a year ago that people opposed to a black man holding his prestigious academic post had sought to drive him from his position with a series of vile and violent threats. The Free Beacon obtained a recording of the speech from a source who requested that the precise location of the speech be kept secret and that the recording itself not be published.
Recounting what he said were the "top of pops" of the threats he's sustained (referring to the British music show), Arday said in the speech: "It goes from bullets in the post, to pigs' heads in my parents' door, to threats of raping my 18-year-old daughter, to being threatened at knifepoint at work."
Arday added, "They do not want a black person coming in the chair." He said people emailed him and said, "We're going to break you." Just four days prior, he asserted, someone said, using British slang for suicide, "We're going to make you top yourself."
Of his tenure at Cambridge, Arday said: "And if I leave, my end will come, but it will be at my own hand, not at the hand of racists and bullies and people who think that for some reason that I don't—I and other underrepresented people—don't belong in a place like" the university.
Also in his speech, Arday said he had largely kept quiet about the barrage of threats, but that Cambridge authorities were aware of the campaign against him. "I've kept it to myself two years, and I've been told not to say anything," he said.
He said he was instructed (perhaps by law enforcement, he didn't specify) to conduct a "risk assessment everywhere I go," and that one assailant had gotten very close. "It is a real thing when someone's five foot away from you, who traveled four-and-a-half hours to kill you because you took a job," he said.
Now, after what appears to have been a long silence on the matter, the increasingly embattled Arday is retelling a new version of the pigs' heads threats, and adding some new ones. Many of the threats he has described could lead to criminal prosecution in England. But no records of any police report or investigation can be found, nor have any contemporaneous named witnesses come forward, according to a records search by the Free Beacon.
Arday told a new version of the "pigs' heads in my parents' door" story to the Guardian last week, saying that only a single severed porcine head was delivered, in a large cardboard box, to his parents' south London home.
The Guardian, in an otherwise sympathetic profile of a black academic under siege, largely debunked the pig's head story. London's Metropolitan Police (the Met) emphatically denied the professor's claim that they had ever conducted an investigation, and specifically denied the suggestion that they had sought to find the butcher who provided the pig. And none of the butchers whose names Arday provided the newspaper said they had ever heard from the Met about such a matter.
Arday—who said the threats started coming as soon as he assumed his Cambridge role in 2023—also told the Guardian that a masked man had twice accosted him at his faculty building, brandishing a knife the second time, and threatened to harm him if he did not resign. The paper reported that no such intruder was ever detected by campus surveillance, including by enhanced CCTV. Arday told the paper that he did not immediately report either incident, nor did he alert colleagues to the assailant.
Arday said he also did not document the severed pig's head, which he said he intercepted and disposed of before his parents could see it. The Guardian reported that he did, however, send an open letter in July 2025 to government minister Jacqui Smith. According to the paper, that letter claimed Arday had been "threatened with a knife, physically assaulted and spat on; [had] rape and death threats being made to him and his family; bananas and bullets being posted to him via the university campus; and corrosive substances and mutilated animals sent to his family home."
The response from the Bedfordshire Police Headquarters—of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary—to the freedom-of-information request viewed by the Free Beacon covers the time period of the letter to Smith, and there is no record of any police reports.
Smith, who until last month was U.K. minister of state for women and equalities, held a meeting on Sept. 15 with a "range of academics to discuss the harassment of black academics." She did not reply to requests for comment asking if this meeting concerned any allegations by Arday.
Additionally, neither Arday, nor Cambridge, nor the Met, nor the Cambridgeshire Constabulary returned a request for comment.
There are, however, law enforcement records concerning Arday: In 2025, someone close to him, or Arday himself, contacted the police about a journalist and an academic who were separately probing the plagiarism allegations. The individual alleged harassment.
The journalist, Jack Grove of Times Higher Education, first learned of the matter when the Met called to tell him in February they would no longer be pursuing the investigation, after a four-month probe. But they still told Grove to cease contacting Arday because it was harming "the professor's mental health."
But by then, Arday had already long since won his battle against Grove. The previous fall, Arday hired British law firm Carter-Ruck, known for intimidating journalists out of publishing unflattering stories about their clients. In September, the firm sent a threatening letter, which the Free Beacon obtained, to Times Higher Education. The letter accused Grove of "a campaign of harassment" that the firm suggested was grounded in racism. Grove’s bosses spiked his story.
Arday's reprieve from bad press wouldn't last for long.
From the ashes of Grove's investigation came a devastating pair of exposés about the plagiarism accusations against Arday, published on Substack by a Belgium-based American academic, Nathan Cofnas, and by Retraction Watch last month, which tripwired an onslaught of devastating media coverage.
In its account, Retraction Watch reported that Dave Harris, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University, emailed Arday in 2023 with probing questions about similarities between his and other academics' scholarship.
Arday did not take kindly to Harris's inquiry, writing back: "Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment."
According to the Telegraph, Harris's inquiries to Cambridge about Arday triggered a complaint about Harris to the Metropolitan Police, which passed it along to Devon and Cornwall authorities. They declined to investigate.
