The media are full of stories about the fraudster Jason Arday, supposedly the youngest Black professor at Cambridge, who allegedly had to overcome a mental disability, vicious racist attacks, and so on. It is now clear that he fabricated much of it. There was no disability, no racist attacks, and he did not even understand sociology—he had studied a different subject. And he managed to remain at Cambridge for three and a half years.
That he was not a sociologist? I disagree. Jason Arday is a brilliant intuitive sociologist. To deceive one person and extract, say, some money from him, you can simply be an ordinary con man. But to deceive thousands of people at once, including students, professors, and journalists, you need to understand the mechanisms operating in that environment, and you need to know how to work them. He managed that brilliantly, even if mostly by intuition. He had an uncanny sense of what each audience wanted to hear so that nothing would strike them as strange. He was equally adept at intimidating those who might have wanted to dig deeper. And he was just as effective at activating mechanisms of self-censorship.
Of course, it helped that although he did not understand sociological theory, he was a good speaker. He could speak engagingly, and listeners came away with the feeling that they had heard something interesting.
In the end, what brought him down was that an Indian professor of postcolonial studies took up the fight against him, which in itself requires no further comment.
One way or another, although Jason Arday never studied sociology, he handles it better than Petr Hampl. Otherwise, it would be Hampl who was a professor at Cambridge.