Our friends at the Good Law Project

The Guardian says tens of thousands, which could be 20,000, although the Guardian itself probably didn't make the estimate. The organisers claimed 30,000, but organisers always exaggerate.

To be honest it wasn't the plagiarism that caught my attention, it was everything that followed.

The use of police and carter ruck to silence journalists, labelling students as racist if they complained about the quality of Ardays teaching and the bizarre back story that frequently changed.

If just one of the universities involved in this sorry mess addressed the original allegations, and were more attentive to Ardays story telling, rather than putting him on a pedestal, promoting him both professionally and in the media to demonstrate diversity credentials i cant help but think the outcome would have been different.

I said in a previous post that I thought Arday was a pawn in other games, and i still think that.

Arday plagiarised for his PhD. A PhD is where you do your training as an academic and researcher, where you learn to develop arguments and to conceptualise. If Arday had to plagiarise for his PhD, it means he wasn't even minimally competent at doing the basics of what makes an academic. That's quite different from some professor with a solid research record nicking a few ideas from a student essay, when she/he has taught the student and maybe even discussed some of the ideas with the student before the student wrote the essay (just to be clear, this type of plagiarism is still awful but can easily be rectified by simply citing/acknowledging the student essay).

There wasn't even anything sophisticated or advanced about Arday's doctoral thesis, it was all just "everything in British universities is racism", so it's not as though he had to develop much of an argument. (To be clear again, actual racism is awful but the fact that most people who teach in universities in a majority white country are themselves white is hardy a indication of racism.)

They put up a screenshot of the GLP website during the interview that clearly shows 2 donate buttons. Jolyon probably didn't realise everyone watching could see the proof he was lying while he was lying, deranged behaviour

I said in a previous post that I thought Arday was a pawn in other games, and i still think that.

And still is.

The BBC introduces the narrative that the plagiarism may be important then immediately spikes it with 'it was started by an academic who was fired for being racist'

The BBC needs you to know that racism is at the core of any criticism of Arday

You forgot the testicular cancer, the masked knifeman, the car accident , the WaterAid volunteering in South America, the 7 Up TV series.

A revealing theme running through all his fantasy is the many people who mysteriously foretold he would do 'great things'. There's the midwife, the volunteer aid worker, the village shaman. For a supposedly humble man isn't that a big red flag right there?

The BBC are also stuffed full of Oxbridge Grads so for them this is another interminable chance to name check their Alma mater. I mentioned the Walter Ellis book The Oxbridge Conspiracy elsewhere but had this been a case of plagiarism with him still at John Moore's or elsewhere no-one would have batted an eyelid. Maugham denied that he'd paid for Carter Ruck in the BBC interview, but I'm still not sure how he came into the orbit of Arday. Was it likely him who suggested it, and the SLAPP that GLP in other cases vehemently protest against?

SUTR as an SWP front inevitably apply multipliers to their attendance figures. What is droll is that they've got Weyman Bennett as chief Comrade of Colour to lead on this, given his role in the cover up of the assaults by his mate Comrade Delta.

Look. Another open letter

https://mediadiversified.org/2016/10/06/stand-up-to-rape-culture/

This whole story is insane. I honestly feel
like we are living in a post truth world where you can make up any old shit you like and so long as you have the “correct” views nobody cares. And woe betide anyone attempting to get to the truth of the matter. JA will now become a martyr for this movement. What an absolute shit show.

As RTd by Zack Polanski. Seems a good turnout

https://bsky.app/profile/zackpolanski.bsky.social/post/3mtct37s7mk2e

The plagiarism was the thing for me too, and the fact that JA, a Professor at Cambridge University, seemed not to understand what was wrong with plagiarism and why everyone was getting so upset about it.

The earlier investigation appears to have found what would be called blatant plagiarism if a mere undergrad had done it - examples have been published. e.g.
'Tinning (1995: 27) draws a parallel between van Manen’s interpretation of technical reflection and the first level of reflective teaching identified by Grimmett et al. (1990), which applies research findings to practice and ‘essentially represents thoughtfulness about action’. Van Manen’s level of practical reflection is characterised by the process of analysing and clarifying assumptions, experiences, goals, meanings and perceptions which underpin practical actions'- Zwozdiak-Myers.

'Tinning (1995: 27) draws a parallel between Van Manen’s interpretation of technical reflection and the first level of reflective teaching identified by Grimmett et al., (1990), which applies research findings to practice and essentially represents thoughtfulness about action. Van Manen’s level of practical reflection is characterised by the process of analysing and clarifying assumptions, experiences, goals, meanings and perceptions which underpin practical actions through dialectical, contextual and technical components'- Arday.
A Plagiarism and Fraud Scandal at Cambridge University

But it was explained away with as JA not understanding/autism/imitating/etc., 'He was cleared of plagiarism' seems to mean that there was plagiarism, but it was excused because he didn't know what he was doing.

In my experience, if this had been a first year undergrad essay, it would have been failed, but the student would have been given support to understand what plagiarism is, why it is such a no-no, both ethically and in terms of actually understanding not just parroting other people's work, and practical advice given on how to avoid it - footnotes, quotation marks, paraphrasing, referencing, sources, bibliography and that sort of thing.

But this was a PhD thesis!

JA may have been a pawn, may have been vulnerable, may have needed safeguarding - but he also very cleverly fooled a lot of the people a lot of the time and acquired status, fame, a big salary and a shedload of money from Simon&Shuster. He did OK out of it, until it caught up with him and he could no longer sustain it.

It's still a tragedy for his loved ones, and there should have been a period of quiet, respectful reporting of some basic facts - the kind of bland things that can be said about controversial figures in the immediate aftermath of their death.
Instead, there a complete 180 by the media, and almost instant canonisation.

If JA RIP was a pawn before, the vigil in Trafalger Sq shows that he still is.

You would think so, wouldn't you? It's like having a ginormous red flag 30ft x 30ft being waved vigorously six inches from your face. So the question is: why didn't any of these people see it - and why aren't they seeing it now?

The best explanation I've seen comes from the ever-astute JK Rowling, as wise about this as she is about everything else:

"The more nonsensical and obviously absurd a belief is, the more people who hold it (or pretend to) will resist recanting. The potential for humiliation rises in direct proportion to the ridiculousness of what they've publicly swallowed. They see no choice but to double down."

It's significant I think that it's Nathan Cofnas who's pointed at as the accuser. Well, he's a wrong 'un isn't he? Scientific racist and all that. Yet the problems were identified also by Jack Grove at Times Higher Education - hardly a right wing gutter rag, by anyone's estimation. They were the ones who received some very stentorian letters from Carter Ruck. Dear old Martyn Hammersley, from whose books I learned about qualitative methods many moons ago, was another. Dave Harris, at Plymouth Marjon was another. While not in the mould of Nathan Cofnas, he's been a longstanding critic of critical race theory, so you could say he had an axe to grind. But it's clearly not just a problem Nathan Cofnas highlighted.

yes: Jack Grove at Times Higher Education was on the plagiarism story first

It's Goebbels and the big lie.

A problem I have with the whole story, which may just be down to my ignorance, is that I thought autism predisposed people to find lying and fabulation almost impossible to understand. How does that fit with JA's multiple lies about his own life and experience?

I think that is one of the many cliches or overgeneralisations/oversimplifications about autism, @SqueakyDinosaur. I don't think we can really get a clear picture of how lying sits (or doesn't sit) within an individual's autism without understanding that person as an individual

Fair enough, @MyThreeWords. I have very little knowledge of autism, but had seen that as a sort of trope a few times & wondered if it was true.

And the 600 mile run from Edinburgh to London in 6 days with no support or evidence and his 30 marathons in 35 days oh yeh and he ran the last 9 marathons on a broken leg, then there was the locked in syndrome where he remembered hearing the drs telling his family to switch off life support but recovered miraculously.
And my personal favourite was him being offered a MBE in 2017 but he turned it down

The narrative that's being pushed all over progressive media is that the substance here is plagiarism, which enables comparisons to be made with other cases in academia, which led to different outcomes for other academics, so that the conclusion can be reached that because the important difference between Arday and those other academics is skin colour, therefore the difference in outcomes was because of skin colour.

When we know that the argument "imagine if Arday was white" is a non-starter because a "white Arday" wouldn't have reached the same heady heights.

I posted a link to a Substack article by Sam Kriss called The Carrion Eaters and for some reason it's being hidden.

The article was linked to by Tyler Austin Harper, ex-Academic and now journalist for The Atlantic. And it's a fascinating piece about the state of academia in the UK. It also discusses how this reduced state of the academy affected the progress of Arday through his career.

There are a number of parallels, some of which do indeed involve white people as the protagonist, and the outcomes were similar. In the mid 1990s Malcolm Pearce of St George's Hospital, Tooting claimed to have done a revolutionary operation in which he'd successfully transplanted a foetus in an ectopic pregnancy back into the mother's uterus. He actually got this published in the Lancet, yet when questions were raised about this, the purported woman herself, and the baby could not be found. Then questions were raised about the rest of his published output, and its credibility was found wanting. He lost his job. So, unlike some have suggested, it's not just the social sciences which are susceptible. Another example, also from the 1990s concerns Penny Prophit who was appointed to a chair in nursing at Edinburgh University yet was dogged by questions as to whether she genuinely held a PhD. She wore a nun's habit, yet it didn't match that of the order to which she claimed to belong, and she snaffled handsome research grants from the Scottish Office on the basis of a very meagre background in research. She claimed also to be a concert pianist yet no one had ever heard her play. She was forced out of her post in 1992. Both of these cases received massive publicity at the time. Indeed, Pearce's antics were said to exceed even that of the Piltdown Man fraud. Everybody seems to have forgotten about them now. I've got a geeky interest in the history of science and scientific failures, so I know about them, but it's as if every time this happens it's unprecedented. If you add to the allegations of malpractice a few other colourful character elements it's a real gift to journalists and, these days, online creators, so the stories run and run.

I keep thinking of Rachel Dolezal as well. The white woman who pretended to be black and had all sorts of roles off the back of her claim. Her exposure as a fraud and the ensuing press coverage was pretty brutal.

Weirdly, for me this link goes to Sara Morrison’s crowdfunder.

DrudgeJedd · Yesterday 18:32

^https://x.com/i/status/2089390287395119111^

Jolyon absolutely fizzing with self-righteous indignation on BBC news today. How dare anyone suggest that the big yellow DONATE button on their petition page is soliciting donations!

I saw that on Twatter earlier, he's lying and ranting angrily in plain sight; I wonder what specious nonsense he'll bat it away with, when inevitably called on it?

I was looking at one tweet, which I can't find again, which said that Arday was promoted over two Black women, who were actually qualified and experienced in lecturing.

All the usual defects are wanging on about how it's all driven by racism and too many reports by right wing rags, from Tatchell, through Polanski and Owen Jones. Jones hasn't resigned from the Guardian, in protest, despite it running a number of articles about his whoppers.