PNR 291 – editorial (Sept-October 2026)
One aspect of contemporary academic plagiarism by professors, lecturers and students is the characterlessness of the material plagiarised – the more anonymous, or style-less, the ‘original’ which is being adapted, the less detectable the plagiarism is likely to be. Plagiarists borrow from a text where small adjustments might deceive plagiarism tracking programmes. There is no snow, and the plagiarists footprints are less likely to show. If at the same time they invent data and plausible attribution, the weave of their deception is more complete: the policing programmes are looking for outright theft, not invention. The early retirement of the Cambridge sociology professor told us a great deal about contemporary recruitment practices in some of our leading institutions. It is possible to feel that Jason Arday is no more at fault than those who awarded him his PhD and appointed him to a sequence of distinguished jobs. Who are they, and should they too not be considering early retirement? Their discipline is damaged by their credulity quite as much as by his unproven statements, most of which he perhaps believed to be true, and some of which are now proving to be so.
Plagiarism is a scary charge to face. When I submitted The Novel: A biography to my publisher in 2012, without alerting me they put it through a plagiarism detector. I received a message pointing to a single plagiarised passage and asking me to alter it. I had incorporated a paragraph from a review I had written. Though the original text was mine, I was asked not to recycle it. It was long enough ago for my auto-theft to be regarded as a matter of impropriety, not improbity.
This editorial was written before the death of Jason Arday was announced on 14 August.