The controversy has attracted a range of opinions, including within the academic community.
More than 12,000 people – including Green Party leader Zack Polanski, at least five Labour MPs and some Cambridge academics – have signed a petition set up by the Good Law Project supporting Arday.
Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University, said Arday was the victim of a “smear campaign” that was “as predictable as it is baseless”, while Alan Lester, a University of Sussex geography professor who specialises in colonialism, called it a “non-story”.
Simon Baron-Cohen – a cognitive neuroscientist and fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge – raised concerns about the impact the media coverage was having on Arday.
“We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards,” he wrote on Friday. “However, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues. This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues. It’s time to stop.”
But some academics say there are questions to answer over academic propriety.
John Preston, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Essex, said “there is a case to answer here”.
“Mistakes happen. If sociology of education is to ever be a field with any credibility, we need to be able to point these out, correct them, and move on,” he wrote, adding that there was “no personal shame in making mistakes and admitting them”.
A Cambridge University spokesperson told the it took allegations of academic misconduct “incredibly seriously” but that it was “standard practice” that inverstigations were carried out by the institution at which the research was done.
They added: “Allegations of plagiarism regarding Professor Arday’s thesis and some of his journal publications have been investigated by Liverpool John Moores University and the journals in question.”