The vicious media furore around former professor Jason Arday, the first Black professor at Cambridge, erupted after another academic, the self-defined "race realist" Nathan Cofnas, was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024. He told the press he found some instances of plagiarism in Arday's work.

Cofnas's job had been terminated amid a backlash to his view that under a "true" meritocracy, Black people would "disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment".