The Jason Arday scandal

I don't understand how LJM found the PhD not to be plagiarism tbh given ppl are saying there were 200 instances of same wording as someone else's; this would have counted as plagiarism when I was at uni or is this just allowed now?

Spelling mistakes in their PhD thesis give people cold sweats in the night 20 years after their viva, but if all the racists who went looking at his work found was spelling mistakes, they’d have moved onto the next black academic they wanted to target.

So you're continuing to make this about race. You can be as self-righteous as you want, when your minimise plagiarism to promote your own virtue, you don't have the moral high ground. Have you thought about the authors, whose work he stole?

I work in autism and confabulation can be a thing. Something about understanding fantasy Vs reality and understanding the unspoken contract that generally speaking, one talks reasonably truthfully in conversation.

I think he was used by both left and right wingers in a racist way. He was held up as a poster boy by one and now a whipping boy by the other. In fact he sounds rather vulnerable, his lies are very transparent and he should never have been exposed in this way had people done the slightest modicum of due diligence.

How can we be surprised at this?

Universities don't believe in biological reality any more. They believe it when a man says he's now a woman so why would they check anything else?

The guardian said today that there is no evidence to back up the animal heads or the knife incident. They investigated the allegations with butchers ect

Poor little lamb. No of course hes not to blame. Its those bloody racists innit 😡

Aye, when you copy someone's work and just turn the sentence around you have to follow that with the apropriate grammatical amendments.

I suppose many people these days just use other people's work without citation so it becomes the done thing.

It’s not more or less pertinent, it’s just pertinent that he was initially exposed because right-wing racists targeted him.

Although now I think about it, maybe I do think it’s worse to be a racist who believes black people are less intelligent than white people, than to be someone who plagiarises your academic work and tells wildly unrealistic stories about your personal life. Both are bad, but I think the racism is worse.

He was a student. He was president elect of the Oxford union and had to resign from that role

The greatest impact will be felt by legitimate autistic and minority ethnic academics. And Arday wasn’t even smart enough or interested enough to reflect on that. What a pillock.

There has been plagiarism and what we might call 'making shit up' ism in universities for decades now. Who knew AI could assist so readily in proving the cases that esteemed professors 'investigating' couldn't? I suppose when your funding relies on results you have to keep a roof over your head...

Including reproducing photos of actual science effects and cropping the photos and reproducing them to pretend 'shit happened plenty times' in the sciences. I've been following this for at least 5 years. And that's on you tube and it included people from a range of races. The Peer Review Debacle by Boghossian/Lindsay/Pluckrose is a good place to start if this is news to you.

This one just happened to be SO bonkers at such a highly thought of university that it is making news. Still not on the BBC though I'm guessing. I don't watch it so I could be wrong...

Nah, you don't get to turn this one round on the right wing. Jason Arday made his choice, not anybody else.

Not to mention the racists who noticed his poor spelling in some of his correspondence.

No, not saying any or all of them are racist. I can’t know that. But it wasn’t his students complaining that led to the thesis and publications being scrutinised and this becoming a national news story. It was right-wingers who believe black people are less intelligent than white people targetting him. As I said, there was stuff to find and he’s bang to rights.

It is very well known that students consistently rate women and people of colour lower than men and white people in their student satisfaction surveys.

It's as though you're saying - I know you are not - that singling out cheaters, based on their skin colour is more pertinent than the cheating itself. This could be part of the reason why he did this in the first place, because he knew his go to response to suspicion would be "because I'm black". He has done enormous damage to DEI initiatives that were already found to be on wobbly ground.

His students were the first to complain about his lack of 'turning up' ability, 'staying til halfway through the lecure' ability and 'complete lack of intellect' ability.

Are you saying they are all racist?

People being scared of being called racist is the cause of many people not being called to account for their behaviour or investigated by the police in very serious cases. I’m thinking about Sara Sharif here as well as the many teenage girls who were victims of the rape gangs in the north of England.

Yes, he gave them stuff to find. But they aren’t going looking at white academics’ PhD theses.

No. Several German politicians have had PhDs scrapped and had to resign over plagiarism.

Maybe but some cases run and run and I think this is one of them.

I think the title of any TV docu/book about it all should be "To be honest I thought you just believe me" which was his response to a Guardian journalist asking for proof of some his tall stories achievements.

He gave himself to criticism; nobody needed to go looking for him.

I think in academia there has had to be deference to academics in candidates appointabikity and to judge appointees academic quality. And that’s correct- you can’t get an HR skillset that covers that as well. Has to be the subject specialists.

And so soecilaist appointing will always have been fraught. And be full of local biases and appointing candidates in one’s own image.

In this globalised marketplace of academic talent today, however, there isn’t a small network of people who have watched each other’s careers for years so who will already know each others capabilities and reputations informally. So it’s a blessing and a challenge for employers to navigate. Appontment processes haven’t kept up.

In a micro sense, because he’s the latest black academic to have right-wingers target him for scrutiny because he is black. Now it looks like he’s bang to rights, but that doesn’t change the fact that they picked him to go after and try to find something.

In a macro-sense, because Cambridge and other institutions have appointed him as a ‘quick fix’ when they were under pressure for the extreme lack of diversity in their students and staff, instead of trying to address the underlying societal and institutional racism that led to that extreme lack of diversity.

People being scared of being labelled “racist” is how he got away with it for so long!