Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism and of exaggerating his backstory, has achieved in a very short period of time something of a Falstaffian ideal. If not himself visibly witty, since he seems to have intended his lavish claims to be taken seriously, he has certainly been the cause of wit in others.

Arday has been likened to Don Quixote, Walter Mitty and Finchy from The Office. His seemingly more fanciful claims include starring in ITV’s Seven Up! documentary series, raising £5million for charity, and having bullets and mutilated animals sent to his family home.

More remarkable still, like the hero of one of his own apparently tall tales, the Cambridge don has kept going, scaling an even higher cumulonimbus of credulity with every new claim.

To give just one well-known example, Arday has boasted of having run 30 marathons in as many days (give or take) and covered 600 miles in six days – a feat that would, if true, put him in the absolute elite of endurance athletes. Some have seen fit to ruthlessly mock the claim as Baron von Munchausen-tier confabulation.

But Arday outpaced all scepticism when it emerged that merely completing these tasks in these times was the least of it. He had, it seems, run the last nine of these marathons after sustaining a hairline fracture in his leg – demonstrating character far beyond mere fitness and determination.

To run over 200 miles with a hairline fracture would require the kind of indifference to personal comfort that is normally only found in Victoria Cross citations: John Cruickshank, for example, who, as a badly wounded pilot in the Second World War, refused morphine so that he could continue to at least supervise his plane’s landing.

Reading tales like these, my traditional reaction has been to wonder at such heroism emerging under such awful conditions, and muse that such people simply no longer exist. Does the Arday case force me to reconsider this? His marathon feats may well be true, but my very, very strong suspicion – as strong as I can state it without attracting the attention of notorious law firm Farter-Fuck – is that, if anything, the Arday case only further deepens my despair, to have been born at a time when the human race is so degraded.

The resort to gleeful mockery of Arday’s seemingly more improbable claims is, I think, the healthiest reaction, and one that has a proud history. It has been encouraging to see that Britain, in particular, especially after the meekness with which we accepted Covid restrictions, can still at least mount a decent response when confronted with such apparently lurid displays of self-aggrandisement.

But laughing alone is not good enough. After the laughter dies away and the thing gets stale, we have to stay focussed on the rot that’s developed in our most treasured institutions.

Oxford and Cambridge are, for now, still regarded as among the very best universities in the world. Their global ranking is almost invariably in the top five, and often top three. They cannot allow their reputation to be undermined by seemingly appointing people on the basis of DEI priorities rather than merit. In this case, the Cambridge education faculty may well have failed in its duty to enforce the highest standards in awarding professorial chairs to an alleged plagiarist and fantasist.

The idea of a university has been discussed by many great men and women over the years. Cardinal Newman wrote a famous book of that title – which, in the spirit of this article, I will now plainly state I have not read. But Newman’s idea has been interrogated and distilled by many others before and since. And on the very short list of non-negotiables to which the university must aspire, truth sits at the very top.

The quest for truth is not merely an affectation of academics, an abstract ideal for be-gowned dreamers. The excellence of Harvard, Princeton et al is arguably the rock on which America’s entire project – and certainly its dominance since the world wars – has been built. Britain’s continued ability to maintain a genuine rivalry to US universities’ otherwise unchallenged eminence is a small, soft-power miracle. Oxbridge is one of the very few British institutions that has – unlike the BBC, Church of England and police force – not yet become an international laughing stock nor lost the dressing room at home. Not least because it is quite naturally regarded by most of us to be above our pay grade to judge.

But not anymore. Anyone scrolling through their newsfeed can now see that yet another long march through our institutions has reached the vital organs. They have something seemingly close to academic sepsis, and serious measures may be required if they are to survive with their reputations intact.

I am reminded of two examples of showing the threat to the university’s core tenets. One involves a famous little book by philosopher Harry Frankfurt, entitled On Bullshit. There he explored the idea that more harmful than liars to the intellectual health of a nation, or its subdivisions, are ‘those who are almost entirely unconcerned with the truth’. Liars are at least actively aware that the truth exists and are trying to conceal its whereabouts. Bullshitters just don’t care.

Everyone loved that little book and knew exactly the sort of thing Frankfurt was talking about. Yet like intellectual knotweed, this indifference to the truth has proved not only resilient but anti-fragile. It has a few dauntless foes, but from every bloody stump of neck, two or three new heads seem to spring every day.

The second is a quote from 2022 attributed to Katherine Maher, the CEO of NPR and former head of the Wikimedia Foundation: ‘Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.’ I say attributed to – I saw her say it and you can, too. It’s from her TED Talk and she seems to be in no hurry to distance herself from it. She might, of course, argue that the context was important, and she was not talking about the criteria by which we appoint professors to one of the great seats of learning in the history of the world. And maybe she’s right. But honestly, why should I care?

Stay focussed. Demand action in our universities. If not heads, then mortarboards at least must surely roll. And if that suggests an impossibility, given their geometrical properties – well, then I think we know just the man for the job.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Staring at the Sun, are on sale here.