The Jason Arday scandal

He does appear to have sidled into Sociology by the route of Education. And education research, certainly at that time, and probably still now, was absolutely bollocks and full of progressive wankery.

This is an embarrassment for the state of education research - writing about peer mentoring in PE teachers should at best be a PGCE essay.

Kyle Gordon, a comedian, recently did a viral video parodying Graceland about white musicians going to Africa and portraying the people as mystical and full of ancient wisdom and basically projecting their fantasy of a magical black man onto normal people.

Can't think why your post just reminded me of it. (It's a banger).

https://youtube.com/shorts/PPpAr1N3_ng?si=9OZhAKnFNMmnlAeC

It's a prissy discipline, requiring no scientific application. A subject that is obsessed with power structures.

This!! ^^

It applies to all DEI. Whatever the field. It's pure laziness. More interested in just ticking off a check box on an algorithm than searching for someone who is the best candidate and fits with your DEI policy. Those people are out there. You just have to put some effort in to find them.

With its own replication crisis.

In non academic speak, that means nobody can replicate anything which infers it is all made up bullshit.

We can basically file it next to all the other made up bullshit. In a university sized filing cabinet.

And it's really concerning that an area that seems completely lacking in proper research and adequate peer reviewing has such a huge impact on wider society - I mean these people are responsible for the "research" behind educational policies. The whole subject seems to effectively be idiots quoting idiots, and conclusions made with zero understanding of the most basic statistical methods (and by basic I mean first term of first year undergrad, if not earlier)

So next time you hear of some completely mad new idea to be imposed on schools, this kind of thing is the reason for it.

If the effects of this were confined to niche areas of academia it would be laughable, but unfortunately this kind of thing has very serious, real world consequences.

Exactly. It isn't so much the man himself, who is clearly just a fantasist. The question is how the F did he become a professor AT CAMBRIDGE!! What is going on in these institutions? Are they now so obsessed with DEI (and so afraid of left-wing pressure groups) that they're covering things up and promoting people who can't do their job? Does this include the medical profession? Are brilliantly clever people missing out on opportunities so others can be fast-tracked? We need to be asking some questions.

If he'd been a lecturer at an obscure polytechnic, that would be bad enough, but Cambridge and Oxford are supposed to be elite institutions. Imagine how fierce the competition must be.to secure a professorship at Cambridge!? Imagine how intense the scrutiny must be of your work! Are you telling me no one had any suspicions? He was surrounded by some of the cleverest people in the world ffs!! Or is the truth that many knew he was a fraud but were terrified to speak out?

Social sciences are a waste of time, I don't know why people bother studying them. Schools and universities should be concentrating on hard sciences.

I think 'shot to pieces' is maybe a bit extreme but I do think this will adversely affect Cambridge University's reputation.

More broadly, though, I think this reflects very badly on the social sciences and humanities subjects at a time when they're already under attack (closures of arts degree courses). The fact that he was a professor at one of the top universities in the country and hailed as the "best of the best" doesn't help those arguing that university is still worth the extortionate cost.

AND the people churning out this research aren't teachers. No bloody clue about what actually works in schools.

I remember hearing Dylan William talk in about 2010 about the state of academic research in education - something about whether homework makes a difference or not and looking at some research. It's widely touted as 'research shows homework makes no difference at primary, but does at secondary', and you read this on MN all the time. However, even the slightest bit of thought about this makes it obvious that that is a bollocks conclusion. Reading with your kid at home is hugely important at primary, like, one of the most important things you can do. So if you say homework at primary is sending home reading books and encouraging reading, the research is wrong. But if you say homework is 'build a volcano' then it's obviously massively dependent on parental input.

At around that time Ben Goldacre was trying to get education research to be more rigorous, trying to introduce randomised trials and so on. I think he gave up quite quickly. There are just way too many variables.

Exactly. I am 100% against positive discrimination. Remember, when you allow someone into an elite institution based on DEI, someone else misses out. It might be positive for some, but it's negative for others. Someone very intelligent, very talented, and very hard-working (and possibly more intelligent, more talented, and more hard-working than the person you let in) has to go elsewhere.

'lesser cultural forms '- what do you mean by this?

So what? If they are the most intelligent and best qualified, too bad. We should be ignoring EVERYTHING except someone's ability to do the job.

Personally, I have completely lost faith in academia. The literary canon has become the new target. The left don't like the fact that most great works of literature were written by the dreaded "dead white men". Well too f-ng bad. If they were then they were. Should we pretend that Shakespeare and Dante and Homer and Tolstoy and Proust and Dickens were no good?

The loathing I now feel for the left is beyond words. The original left was committed to helping the poor. Today, they are a bunch of sneering, bullying fanatics hell bent of provoking and antagonising others. A bunch of arrogant, intolerant attention-seekers who have the nerve to accuse others of hate and intolerance when they are the most intolerant, hate-filled people on Earth.

The whole higher education industry has been shamed. But Cambridge especially. It's an absolute disaster and the amount of racism it's generated is horrendous.

A joker, eh?

He was and is a con man. But, no, it won’t affect the university.

Would you 'bless him' if he were white? The 'racism' seems to be that some people expect him to be treated differently, ie more leniently, because of his ethnicity.

It's really concerning on multiple levels, first that this happened, but secondly that it has provided the perfect right-wing fodder for bashing DEI.

I don't know anything about DEI in general, but Cambridge had a massive problem with diversity a few years ago, really under-represented BAME population in both the staff and the students.

There are so many wonderful BAME academics out there who could have made a real contribution to Cambridge

It’s page 1 on the bbc news website.
I don’t believe it’s not prominent on bbc.com overseas.

The most succinct comment on the thread.

I suspect there were better qualified people than him who applied for the job but they were able to tick the diversity box by appointing him.

Cambridge was the alma mater of at least 5 of the top spies to have betrayed this country 60+ years ago and they survived that, I think this will be forgotten by the general public long before 60 years! The inevitable film might be interesting though.

What I HOPE is that this gives them all a kick up the arse.

DEI appointments have, for too long, been fannied in order to tick boxes. Not just in academia but across the board. Better candidates have missed out, appointments made that should never have been made and qualifications and competency have been excused in favour of hitting BAME targets.

Not only is this is a dis-service to more worthy people who miss out on positions, it's a dis-service to the BAME community who deserve to have their best people representing and trailblazing in positions of prestige.

Of course there are fantastic black/brown academics out there - so find, vet and appoint them with the same vigour you would a white middle-aged man. Tick your box when you can with the best people you can. Stop looking to fill number and percentage quotas, accept that the best person for the job might not be BAME but ensure you keep offering equal opportunity. It's not fucking hard.

Re the men part, I think this can be overstated as far as fiction goes : Austen, Charlotte & Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield are all canonical I'd say, US fiction has Willa Cather, Carson mcCullers, Flannery O'connor, Harper Lee & both have more as the 20th century progresses.
The gap is much more notable for the eras of Homer, Dante etc but that's unavoidable.
As to lack of African, Asian etc authors, often people overlook that until the 20th century there weren't many in Britain from those places. Modern literature courses at least generally don't teach translated fiction, so there's many excellent authors from those areas who can't be included as they wrote in Chinese, Hindi, Persian etc Not only those areas: I'm partly Polish & there's lots of excellent Polish & other Eastern European fiction which gets overlooked partly as fewer people know those languages and partly simply as it's not in English so can't be taught in English Lit.

I can't think of a single student around us whose parents (who are without exception funding postgraduate degrees) don't discuss the decision in detail with their student children. Maybe some parents write blank cheques but that is not the standard around us.