The academic responsible for exposing Jason Arday, the late Cambridge professor, for plagiarism has been suspended from his position at Ghent University in Belgium.Nathan Cofnas, a philosophy of biology and ethics researcher at the university, announced Thursday he had been suspended, predicting "They will almost certainly fire me.""The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party," Cofnas claims.De Sutter is the highest ranking academic officer at the university, and previously served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Belgium under Belgium's green party. .This comes in response to much criticism over the death of Arday, who was found dead last week.The 41-year-old became Cambridge's youngest black professor back in 2023 and resigned from his position as a professor of sociology of education earlier this month.This followed a series of reports that alleged he plagiarised his PhD thesis at Liverpool John Moores University.Questions about Arday's credentials started last month when Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge philosophy researcher, published an article on Substack detailing Arday's claims..Cofnas reported earlier Thursday he was "under investigation for discriminating against Arday."Ghent, in a statement, claimed they are against "discrimination, hatred, and racism;" they say they value academic freedom but "that freedom is not unlimited.""It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others," stated the university.In his substack article, Cofnas claimed to have put Arday's work through a plagiarism detection software, finding "many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source.".Initially, Cambridge had stood by Arday, pointing to an earlier investigation into the plagiarism allegations by Liverpool John Moores University, which gave Arday his doctorate. However, earlier this month, the university opened an investigation into the matter.Arday also previously claimed he was nonverbal until age 11 and learned to read and write at 18, while claiming he passed secondary school exams before 18.He also said he completed his doctoral work while suffering from a brain tumor, which was removed two weeks before his oral defence, and that he subsequently suffered a stroke and had to relearn material because of memory loss..Arday has a book deal with Simon & Schuster, a memoir called Great and Unfortunate Things, which he has claimed is worth £1.4 million.The memoir was published last week.
