The Jason Arday scandal

Then god save the world from US identity politics is all I can say. It's a fucking cancer unleashed on the world by idiots.

Youngest white working class man would have got him nowhere though, white working class man is not a fashionable characteristic at all, if anything the opposite.

He just happened to have the right characteristics in the right place at the right time, and took full advantage. Con men are always there, it was the self righteous Cambridge academics like Hilary Cremin who made this happen, because people like her know best, always. In their opinion, and its one they are happy to enforce

In my case, it was an early adult. But yes, Arday's family must have some views. I suppose it's a bit like when Rachel Dolezal talked of her blackness and her parents came forward and openly said she was lying.

You're misguided in your thinking. This is exactly the point I was making in 2001. Arday has done a disservice to all black academics. He has used the fact that he is black to advance his position and to give himself status.

This story was always going to be given front page news because of the status of the university, the scale of the lies, and the publicity that was previously afforded to him because of things that have turned out to be lies.

Had he been the same man, with the same story, but white, he probably would have changed the narrative to 'youngest working class' or 'youngest formerly non-verbal'. He still would have hit the headlines for his lies because he chose Cambridge University to showcase them from.

Thing is his family/wife must know and have been enabling or complicit? I mean, if my DH was on TV spinning an absolute bollocks fantasy about himself, I’d die of embarrassment. They are never seen and have not been approached for their corroboration of his stories. It all seems strange.

I mean, a lot of the problem with cultural discourse right now is that both England and the US speak the same language so we see a lot of US commentary on social media without necessarily realising that it's American. It seeps into our vocabulary too. I've seen children being referred to as 'minors' on MN by English people, for example, where we don't usually use that word here.

True. And the group that suffers the most through DEI college admissions are Asian Americans. An Asian American applicant might have unbelievably high scores, be the child of refugees with supermarket cleaning parents and they will still lose out to a black student with much lower scores and who is the child of a judge and law firm partner.

WTAF?!

As well as this guys’s lies, his thin academic record even ignoring him having plagiarised his PhD should never have got him to Cambridge in the senior position he got appointed to. I don’t think those who appointed him can have read his thesis and I really struggle to see how he could end up being senior in the sociology department - if he is genuinely a talented sociologist based on writing up the results of a few surveys of a small handful of students and suggesting that this might represent the lived experiences of many people, then sociology is very devalued.

I used to know someone who compulsively lied. He'd be off sick from work with a broken arm (with no cast) then go bowling. His lies weren't in any way plausible and we all used to bluntly say 'that's not true, is it...' but still he told lie after lie. He genuinely didn't seem able to control it.

And we haven’t even begun to dissect the lies in his ‘auto-biography’.. they make the cv and plagiarism look lightweight.

It definitely would have made the newspapers. The Salt Path scandal wasn’t a racism issue and it still shocked an unsuspecting public.

No, Munchausen's is where you pretend to be sick now to get sympathy and people looking after you, where Arday just made shit up about his past to make himself sound better.

He made up that he had a masters, that he had volunteered abroad with Water Aid, that he became godfather to the child of a student who had previously beaten him up etc etc. It wasn't just illnesses he fabricated.

I know of people who have made up massive lies that benefited them at that point that could be easily disproven (yet weren't for a long time), he's certainly not unusual in that.

It's kind of difficult to form an opinion on a post without reading it, don't you think?

I think it less to do with America and much more to do with Social Media dominance and algorithms.

Definitely time to sort that crap out.

No-one has died? Is that the only time a crime matters?

He has committed gross acts of fraud - he has tutored and ‘taught’ students who will have incurred £10-15k per annum of debt for the privilege of being scammed by him and the uni of Cambridge (and, it would seem his previous universities also).

He has taken a job that at least two other [female] people should have been offered, depriving them of the uplift in salary and career and academic opportunities that would have flowed from it.

He has taken sponsorship that could have been allocated to another disadvantaged black student.

He has misrepresented the potential to overcome global developmental delay and mutism, cruelly giving hope to desperate families at the start of their journeys - he is no better than a snake oil salesman.

But all you can see is that he is a black man and that the only issue here is that his conduct may be triggering to an imaginary group of white people?

Yes, that’s triggering - because you are being deeply racist in framing our outrage through your anti-white lens [for what its worth, I am fairly sure many people here are not white] and in doing so are being deeply insensitive to the swathe of people impacted by what he has done.

"So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, "Oh, how fine are the Emperor's new clothes! Don't they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!" Nobody would confess that he couldn't see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.

"But he hasn't got anything on," a little child said.

"Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?" said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, "He hasn't anything on. A child says he hasn't anything on."

"But he hasn't got anything on!" the whole town cried out at last.

The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, "This procession has got to go on." So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn't there at all."

https://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html

I had a dinner conversation once with an English Professor from a Russel Group uni. He argued that there is merit in exploring the idea that Jane Austin might have been non binary or gender bending.

I have not been to uni, so did not argue too much, but, liking Austin a lot I found it a stretch. 😁

Could that be an example?

Anyone else think Arday may have Munchausen syndrome?

I find this whole story hilarious.

It’s honestly been incredible so we can thank him for that.

I thought you were saying he’s autistic as you were referring to effect this will have on autistic students. He’s lied about everything else and I have watched his speeches. I don’t think he’s autistic at all. The opposite in fact. He’s highly skilled in a lot of things people with autism struggle with.

It's common in US I think. I do find it a bit odd though I understand there are reasons the practice started.

'I don't think most British people born before 1990 (?) had even heard of Rosa Parks'- I don't think teaching about the civil rights movement is force-feeding, it was an important historical event with outstanding examples of moral courage. And if it is taught, why shouldn't Rosa Parks be mentioned? It's only recently that the sexism in the movement and the downplaying of major figures like Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer & Dorothy Height has been discussed.

Was the US civil rights movement not taught in history lessons until 1990? I suppose in the 1960s it would have been too recent.

'Even the dreaded n-word is American, whereas forty years ago it was only known as something from Huckleberry Finn.'- I don't think that's accurate. What about the Agatha Christie novel 10 Little Ns, for one? Or the 1897 Joseph Conrad novel The N of the Narcissus?

  Forty years ago was 1986, I suspect it was used as a racial slur by at least a few people then.

'Nearly all the rap songs that use the n-word, and call for attacks on the police, are American.'- grime and certainly drill are UK and can be very aggressive to police. I don't think that's solely due to America though that is certainly an influence.

Not sure what your point is - but no I am not sure he is autistic at all, but Arday claims he is.

Why you find that funny is beyond me,

Also agree - it has always been abut the need to raise this kids up, not to dumb the environment down. The issue is the fact that state schools are underfunded, operated like businesses, too big to be child centric, and have little provision to support kids from disadvantaged backgrounds or with support needs. We need to have outreach programmes and free specialist summer schools from the age of 5 to help kids reach literacy and numeracy targets, to scaffold under achievers to where they need to be and to offer extension programmes for bright, talented kids - so every child has access to these, not just those with families who can afford them. There also needs to be community engagement programmes to elicit support for education from parents who were failed by the system themselves, the ones who are jaded by their own experience and lack of opportunity and therefore unsupportive of their children. It requires societal change and huge government investment, though.

Of course it would. It’s absolutely scandalous and so funny.

Same thing happened with salt path last year. It’s got every element needed for drama, shock and gossip.