The Jason Arday scandal

Appointing people on the basis of immutable characteristics to provide evidence of your progressive values is narcissistic, exploitative and dehumanising which makes it inherently bigoted. The racists here are the people who appointed and enabled his delusion to make themselves look good. People offended by the term woke should understand this case is an example of what people who use it pejoratively mean when they use it.

So many people have been harmed by middle class white liberals who want to feel smug about how progressive they are mostly because they don't have the brains to understand the potential unintended consequences of pandering to their own egos.

He may be a liar or a Walter Mitty but he's now an object of mockery and the people who enabled him are quietly abandoning him to save face so I actually feel sorry for him.

Not sure what you mean. Children turn into students, students can turn into academics. The principle remains the same: work hard and reap the rewards.

Are you joking. He appears to have plagarised chunks of his PhD thesis from another academic., then denied it including sending threatening letters to a journalist who uncovered. He has shamed his race and culture. Checkout BlackBeltBarrister on YouTube for excellent coverage which shows both pieces of work. Then you can make up your own mind on whether plagiarism has occurred or not. But it is how he has dealt with the accusations that reveal just how slimy he is.

I struggle when people bring "left" and "right" into dicussions about human society. I just see manipulative extremists making us all fight each other rather than fighting them.

He himself is a tiny problem.

The underlying reasons he got as far as he did are a huge problem.

How patronising to a grown man

It’s been so interesting. It’s saying a lot more about society than it is about the charlatan.

Can’t believe the conversation is about racism rather than the hilarious claims he has made. They are amazingly funny.

I have asked myself more than once why his qualifications/credentials weren’t checked as a matter of routine anyway. Was it because such due diligence would be seen as ‘racist’ when applied to a non white person, implying that their word can’t be trusted?

😆

Half the posters on this thread seem to have lost the ability to type.

I feel incredibly stupid now, but I saw a video about him about six months ago. I have a young child with ASD and GDD diagnoses who struggles a great deal. Seeing the story of a non verbal autistic child who went onto achieve such things gave me so much hope. I thought of his story often when I was feeling low.

To find out it was all lies has really crushed me. I think it’s despicable to lie about such things, and I’m sorry it’s upset you too @LifeBeginsToday

I have zero wish to read anything the BBC puts out.

I said 'I could be wrong' in the original reply.

Also an engineer.

My own, probably prejudiced view, is that "Sociology of Education" is a vapourware subject. Once the University had made the mistake of thinking something like that could be academic discipline the rest followed naturally. Like many similar subjects it was always going to attract chancers.

It’s not that difficult.

The left need to stop looking at everything through the lens of racism and realise that it’s not racist to call out bad behaviour in black people.

Until that time, the far right will continue to make hay when someone abuses the race card.

What if he hadn't been rumbled at this point? I have a feeling that he might just have quietly resigned from Cambridge and disappeared abroad after pocketing the advance from the publisher, knowing that the game was up, or very soon would be. Increasingly I can't see him as anything other than a very clever confidence trickster.

Exactly- this guy is a personality hire to attract funding. Most students going to Cambridge will see through someone like this any way so it won't really affect them.

No, but if they haven’t brought down an 800 years old university, this won’t either.

Her dibling's name is diblijg. Clearly.

Universities seem so desperate to make these headline-grabbing appointments that due diligence seems to go out of the window. The Johnathan Black-Branch/Southampton University law school fiasco is another example.

Yes, this must be devastating. When an apparent outlier from any community achieves success and is held up as an example of how everyone else just needs to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, it’s reductive and damaging to the whole community.

That his apparent background was widely reported on his appointment in 2023, and subject to no critical evaluation in the press, underlines how little understanding there is of autism and the lifelong struggles families face.

This is a difficult issue.

He made the police report saying he was targeted regarding his race. So now any time he talks about racism people will call him a liar, and a bunch of white people will feel empowered to push back on all narrative about race- some of which will be legitamate.

Yup.

Its akin to police finding a knife during a stop and search then claiming it was racism that led to them being searched, so its the police that are at fault for being racist and not the offender. They would have gotten away with it too if it wasn't for those meddling racists!

What's a diblijg?
And a faang company?

I agree with this, and I would add to it, albeit in a tangential way.

Society tends to look at academia as the goalkeepers for so many things. The bastion of truth. A place of new ideas and inventions, proving things, improving.

I know nothing about sociology, I am an Engineer, and I have seen Engineering Academia not only embrace vaporware projects, but actively promote them.

The scenario is a snake oil salesman pushes an idea. The politicians buy in, they go to the Universities, and they should be the ones saying "woah... steady on, won't work cos physics". But no, they take the money and say "no problem".

It's a big story. Of course they're covering it.
I wondered why you thought they wouldn't cover it, and why you are surprised that they are.

What next, get the local handyman in to take a class as he has completed a thesis in astrophysics?