Lanre Bakare

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569 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Lanre Bakare’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Today in Focus · Plagiarism and a pig’s head: the rise and fall of Jason Arday · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

This is The Guardian.

Thanks for having me.

I think the first time I heard about him was in 2023, when he became the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge.

Like a lot of people, there was a lot of glowing coverage at the time, some big profiles, including in The Guardian.

And yeah, I started to take in this incredible story.

Yeah, they're a massive deal.

I mean, if you're a professor and you're accused of plagiarism and that's stood up, then that's one of the only kind of fences that'll get you moved out of that position.

It's absolutely massive and the stakes in this story are really, really, really high.

The first place to report these allegations were the Telegraph.

So they'd gone back through Professor Arday's PhD, which he completed at Liverpool John Moores University before he started at Cambridge, and found 100 passages which were similar to

another PhD which had been completed six years previously.

So that's a big story.

Preservade and Cambridge came back and said, well, there's already been an investigation into this through Liverpool John Moores, because that's where he conducted the PhD, and they found that he didn't commit plagiarism.

But that explanation did not satisfy a lot of people, because when you look at the side-by-side comparison, I think to a layperson, immediately you look at the passages and think, well, they are remarkably similar.

I get to the layperson, yes.

I mean, I think if it was an academic, there's a slightly different bar, maybe, or it's judged in a slightly different way.

But I think to people coming to this completely cold, you will look at it and say, well, hang on, what's happened here?

And it's important to point out, I think, as well, that there have been other accusations of plagiarism levelled at Professor Arday earlier in his career, and corrections have been made to journal articles where he'd not cited people in the correct way.

So there was some precedent there.

But yeah, his work was intensely scrutinised.

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