Our friends at the Good Law Project

A funeral also doesn’t cost 30k. What’s that for?

Suicide isn't a crime, though. Jesus.

It wasn't started by the family, but by one of the "Windrush Peers".

Oh FFS. 🤦🏽‍♀️

Google tells me that, when appointed, over 80% of UK professors are 46 years old or more. Getting to that level of experience and having sufficient original published research material takes years.

Current DEI and other initiatives produce an enormous pressure to make Universities' senior appointments reflect the current mix of minorities within the general population.

Is this a reasonable approach when the population demographics of 46 or more years ago (when the current crop of professor hopefuls were born) are so different to now? Back in 1981 minority populations were less than 4% of the overall mix, go back to 1960 and the value was less than 1%. The current value is of order 20%

Looking at the current crop of people entering higher education it seems likely that the demographics of professors is likely to change massively in the next 10-20 years.

Entry rates into higher education - GOV.UK Ethnicity facts and figures (ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk)

The values shown in section 3 of the linked document are especially surprising and shocking.

Are some DEI efforts undermining the very real achievements of candidates because people want results now !

Edit, table to section

i think the reason the GLP is involved is the same modus operandi as their trans activities. Here is someone who says they are something they are not, who deflects initially polite enquiries with lawyers and police, who interprets disagreement as attack and who takes constructive criticism as -phobic/racist and therefore can be ignored.

The realists are all pointing out undeniable facts, the be-kinders are decrying the realists as terrible people for upsetting their pet.

My personal theory is that it has its roots in the same philosophy that says we must eliminate all negative feelings. The one that says no one should ever feel uncomfortable or disappointed or sad. So we make it easier to pass exams, or abolish them all together, excellence is somehow derided as elitism and asking critical questions is discouraged as no one wants to hear an answer that isn’t positive and upbeat. It’s how the Horizon scandal took hold at the PO - I’ve seen enough disastrous IT systems being imposed on me in the past to know exactly that was allowed to occur.

I’ve been reflecting on the people I’ve known in my own career - it’s harder to be a bullshitter in a lab environment but not impossible. I had a direct report once who simply would not write up his results in the mandated manner. I sat down with him once to go through it line by line and he was exceedingly frustrated and thought such detail was all beneath him. I was only holding him to the same standards as everyone else in the department, some of whom had been complaining that this guy was getting away with stuff they wouldn’t. And this guy was very charming and engaging and senior management thought the sun shone etc but the rest of us though he talked a good talk but couldn’t actually deliver (like Arday). He also used his ethnicity and nationality as a shield to criticism - it was quite subtle but if a conversation wasn’t going his way then he could drop in a comment about his background in a superficially innocuous manner that made all the well meaning white liberal people (me included) hesitate and think - oh no am I being racist? Just long enough for him to move the conversation in his direction.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwymmp30711o

Important lessons are now lost and Cambridge and Liverpool must be relieved to have avoided being held accountable for their gross failures.

All Harper's pieces are worth reading. This month has been his month - he also recently wrote a great piece about being a black academic in liberal academia that I can't recommend too highly

I was dealing with one of these idiots on another SM, who insisted that ND people had intellectual superpowers NT's did not possess, but needed the extra accommodations to unlock those powers.

To be clear, this individual was not claiming NDs had the potential to be as good as NTs with the relevant support. That's something no reasonable person could disagree with.

No - their claim was that NDs and NDs only possessed this brilliant creative superpower, far excelling anything NTs were capable of. Thus, NTs were jealous and fearful of NDs' much greater potential, and this was why they were trying to block academic accommodations for NDs.

They genuinely believed this.

This is all coming up roses for various university faculties across the UK, and I'm very unsettled by the precedent being set here. The institutions and individuals that elevated JA will have elevated other people who were also unfit for the posts they were given. What happens to the next one that gets exposed? Are they going to feel pressured to martyr themselves to protect a university's reputation?

Make no mistake, this is not a story about a uniquely persuasive con artist. His tales of adversity were as convincing as a 7 year old boy claiming that his dad didn't do the dad's race on school sports day because he was on the Mir space station. They believed JA because they wanted to believe him. Who else did they want to believe?

The GLP and its supporters are involved precisely because JA, like those poor trans folk, faced "oppression" on multiple fronts. And since the mantra is that we are supposed to believe people when they tell us who and what they are, then questioning that presentation can only be down to bigotry (racism or ableism in this case).

Some pretty intense thoughts on suicide here. Having been in that mindset a couple of times, I can tell you that any rational or compassionate thoughts about others are simply not within your capacity for about 20 minutes, and the mental pain is unbearable. Once the rush of feelings has subsided- and they ALWAYS subside- you can engage proper thinking again, etc., but at the moment it is incredibly difficult to see a way out for whatever the reason.

His death has caused an issue for media outlets, with the complicating factor that it was most likely suicide. None of them is handling it well. It seems they are either infantilising him, or blaming others. They could have just reported it and waited for the outcome of any inquiry. Still, I suppose we are in an age where people - including me- put their thoughts on the internet rather than talking to their friends in the pub, making the story hard to contain respectfully.

This was interesting, but I also feel this person could have taken a week instead of publishing so quickly, out of respect for the family.

It was JA's choice to be so public and use his race as part of his identity to leverage conversations. He bears the sole responsibility for the situation he was in. As much as I respect the author's experience- having similar experiences as a woman with liberal leaning men of all races- I still wonder if it is possible to actually change or is this just part of the process of repairing the effects of racism and sexism.

I think a false narrative about what happened should be challenged, as respectfully as possible.

I agree- I would love to avoid any type of narrative for a while and am disappointed at the BBC, particularly for doing just that.

I wouldn't be surprised if the publishers had a clause clawing back money for fraudulent misrepresentation, bringing them into disrepute etc as well as cancellation of the contract.

The publishers have been left with a book they probably won't sell that many copies of since it's now widely seen as more of a work of fiction. Not to mention all the publicity costs that they'll still incur, even if it has all been cancelled.

Had a peek in and in the UK amazon listings it is 17th in general bestsellers, 1st in a few other categories. (ethnic studies, psychology, top 15 for Autism). Preorders in the UK have risen. Stats for 1st week sales in the US not released until next week I guess there are a lot of ghouls out there.

Rachel Hewitt has experienced the tragic aftermath that can happen when a serial liar becomes publicly exposed. She has written about it quite sensitively. https://rachelhewitt.substack.com/p/paywall-lifted-what-happened-to-jason

sarahditum.substack.com/p/the-most-unfortunate-thing

Sarah Ditum's article on JA, following on from her review of his book.

There are loads of articles about this scandal (well, combination of scandals) but that one's well worth reading.

thanks to @SylvanMoon and @AnonyMumAuDHD for the two articles above. I can't say I enjoyed reading them, but it was illuminating.

The publishers have no one to blame but themselves. The synopsis Arday submitted was very different from the final version, so they knew quite well he was a fantasist.

Sarah Ditum's piece is one of the more honest, less sanctimonious ones that I've seen. I really rate her writing.

Thank you for this - I agree with many of her points re SM/the news. But I think the issue was less that SM was looking to excoriate JA, but the fact that as many PPs have said - there is a wider social issue here about the impact of DEI on recruitment, retention and promotion that had significant negative impacts upon students, colleagues, the careers of those candidates pass over from promotion, and the wider - global - reputations of our best universities. In a culture of self-paying students, rising student debt and graduate unemployment, in a culture where women are still not as represented in higher roles in unis despite being 50% of the student cohort and often higher at post grad/junior lecturer level, in an environment where the implications of this spread to corporations and industry - this story was bigger than JA, bigger than one man.

This news coverage did not actually need to centre of JA at all - he and his family, and the university, could very easily have stated at the outset that he had an underlying MH condition that had escalated and that he was stepping away to obtain treatment with all their support.

However he, the GLP, politicians, colleagues at the uni and many, many others chose to place the race card. It was this that propelled the story and the man into the laser-beam scrutiny he was subjected to. The siccing of Carter Ruck (sp?) on Grover at THE and the Met Police’s subsequent actions meant that JA (or his PR/the uni if they were behind this rather than he) instigated a race-based debate and centred himself within it (or, like I say, those people around him advising and stirring did).

The Sarah Ditum piece is very good, and sums up a lot of how I feel about this whole sorry business.

Rachel Hewitt's piece is very interesting - and I remember how shocking it was to read of Pete Newbon's death, having followed a little about what had been happening to him. But it was a very different set of circumstances. Newbon's tweet and its aftermath had been barely covered in the mainstream media, but was, as Hewitt says, the subject of massive focus online. The phrase "social media pile-on" doesn't begin to do justice to it.

And it makes me think that when people like Baron Cohen and Lord Woolley talk about investigating the media assault (as they see it) on Arday, they really miss the social media element of it. I don't doubt that it was devastating for Arday to be constantly pursued by journalists and to read stories about himself in newspapers. But the social media part - thousands upon thousands of tweets and Facebook posts mocking him and attacking him - must also have had a significant impact. And what can you do about that, if anything?

I also agree with AnonyMumAuDHD that part of what kept the story going was the decision by GLP and others to go on the attack rather than to keep schtum. If you find yourself at the centre of a media frenzy, the best thing to do is say nothing at all, difficult though that might be.