The Jason Arday scandal

[Ilikesundays]

To think that Cambridge University’s reputation has been shot to pieces by the revelations about ex-professor Jason Arday?

How convenient it would be for bad actors if nobody were allowed to investigate their misdemeanours for fear that they might commit suicide.

This is fascinating and very much like The Salt Path scandal where increasingly outlandish claims are made and everyone nods and smiles as there is obviously money to be made or prestige to be had.

The original journalist who was referred to the met police becuse they asked questions laments that it was exposed on substack rather than in the times because this person has an agenda.

There are victims in this - is the academic who has been plagiarised a Cambridge professor? No, maybe people think they’ve been plagiarising this guy. What about all the students this person has taught or supervised poorly? How many people who have questioned him in the past have been accused of only doing so because they are racist? This is a serious accusation and can destroy reputations and careers.

I personally think all the universities involved come out of this looking terrible, Cambridge in particular. You can’t be all like 50 A*s and Westminster level debating skills to get a foot through the door for an interview to study here and also have absolutely no due diligence for people you are employing as professors.

I hope LJM's clearance evidence is going to be subject to external moderation.

Again, I’m not excusing his behaviour, or the actions of the institutions involved.

But I think people are probably misunderstanding the appointment process, and vastly overestimating the extent to which one prof has an impact on a student’s degree.

It’s highly likely that he was headhunted by Cambridge, rather than applied for an open vacancy as a Professor that others could have applied to. As I said upthread, this was a quick fix for Cambridge, who were under pressure for extreme lack of diversity. Cambridge is loaded. It can afford to create a role for a Professor that isn’t actually filling any teaching, research, or management gaps.

And Profs at Cambridge don’t actually do a great deal of teaching. Again, that’s not to excuse him arriving late and leaving early, it’s not like there’s students who have had entire modules taught only by him.

One of those calling out his lies was, in fact, a massive racist, which does lend some credence to the idea that the attack on him was motivated by racism.

It was only ever a balance-of-probability conclusion in the first place, and the subsequent lies unearthed will surely tip that balance.

This guy is a liar, narcissist and someone who has gone through life unchecked. His problems are of his own making.

At this stage I have no reason to believe he is autistic, was non-verbal until he was 10 and illiterate until he was 18. It should be easy enough to prove.

This man has noone else to pass the buck onto for his current treatment apart from himself.

The only people I have empathy with are the black, autistic academics who have had some tough challenges and worked hard for their accolades and are now going to have to have extra scrutiny because of a selfish and stupid man.

Okay, one of his critics was a proven racist, I accept that, but Arday is now a proven liar, so both are not covered in glory here.

Arday first faced allegations that he plagiarised parts of his PhD thesis and other academic research late last year, and has rejected the claims. An investigation in Feb 26 by Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his PhD in 2015, did not uphold the charges of plagiarism but said they were probably caused by “honest and reasonable error”.

So many posts on this thread have assumed he's guilty of something that he was actually investigated and cleared of months ago.

Cambridge Uni are now looking into claims around honorary appointments, there is no outcome on that yet. It does seem like a bit of a witch hunt.

I was listening to radio - perhaps I missed the balance - but we weren't watching TV news last night - it's something we do less and less of TBH.

So I can't say I saw all BBC output on every channel on it.

However I walked away with impression it was all because of racism. DH was similar it's why he went and looked into it a bit more later.

There will always be people who lie about their achievements and qualifications to get ahead in the world (including quite a few politicians...).

What concerns me is that Cambridge did not have HR processes robust enough to weed out liars and fantasists and that they then failed to act when initial concerns were raised.

Also, it is already hard enough for people who are disabled or/and from BAME background to get into senior roles, because discrimination is undoubtedly real.

And now this individual is giving ammunition to those who are only too happy to claim that people from these groups only get ahead because of 'wokeness' or diversity and equality tick boxing and that is very concerning too.

There’s people on TikTok that went to primary and Sunday school and with him who say he was not non verbal, and actually was a joker and the class clown- a popular, chatty kid.

It’s disappointing because in their desire to have a diversity poster boy and use Arday for their own gains / self promotion without doing any due diligence, Cambridge has set back the academic black community several decades.

Yes. About 15 years ago there was a massive scandal in Germany that was quite extensively reported in the UK press, and was headline news in Germany for weeks. Like the Jason Arday case, it involved bigger issues than purely plagiarism- I seem to remember the discourse centred around whether universities had been deliberately allowing plagiarism in cases when there was a potential future advantage to them (in the form of a cosy relationship with a politician who was en route to making it big - in return, the politician got a doctorate, which is much more highly-respected in Germany than here, and gives the person a definite advantage in politics). Two or three politicians had their doctorates rescinded and lost their political careers. Like Jason Arday, they gave thin excuses for the plagiarism and attacked the motives of the people raising the concerns, but as here, they didn’t prevail as the plagiarism was plain for all to see.

It inspired a website where plagiarism in German universities is tracked and exposed - look up Vroniplag - which I haven’t kept following since the initial scandal, but my memory is that everyone who went down over it in the first year or so was white. The first and highest-profile politician was Karl-Theodor zu Gutenberg, a white German aristocrat.

What tipped the balance for me on plagerism is not only are there complete paragraphs that have only a few words changed but they had the same references in the same order in the same part of the sentence as the alleged source material.

Oh, come on! The guy has been caught out in multiple lies and exaggerations. At best, he's a fantasist with mental health problems, at worst he's a conniving con man.

Various different people have questioned his veracity and credibility over the years, and the gullible and credulous, with their own particular financial and political agendas, have defended him. And in many ways, it's the latter group who are the more serious focus of this story.

Oh I agree completely. The box was ticked and in he went.

My point is that IF you are awarded that advantage/privilege/position, and are going to participate in all the celebratory noise about the fact that you - as a disadvantaged and under-represented minority - have made this incredible breakthrough, then you better fucking rise to the challenge becuase if you don't, you are not just letting yourself down.

JA very much bought into the narrative that made him a poster-boy with no thought for the damage that would come with the unravelling, not just for himself, but for every 'unlikely' candidate out there. For every person of colour, person with learning disabilities, person who has overcome any kind of prejudice. Through his lies, he made himself a 'beacon of hope' - and that is unforgivable.

Yeah I don't hugely trust Tik Tok but I am sure there will be some footage at some point of him in a play/sports day/speech day.

It’s disappointing because in their desire to have a diversity poster boy and use Arday for their own gains / self promotion without doing any due diligence, Cambridge has set back the academic black community several decades

I agree Cambridge has massively screwed up here, but which of us expects to be told to prove a personal story about our past? This is one of those things that isn't an issue until it is.

If I overcame significant health issues to achieve something, I wouldn't expect to be to told to provide documentary evidence of them if my success was to be publicly recognised.

We take things on trust, which is why cases like this (and The Salt Path) are so shocking.

It's not so much of a witch hunt as a fucking brilliant story.

"Top academics convinced by someone making such outlandish claims that a toddler would be sceptical".

The plagiarism stuff is fairly boring and that's not really what people are interested in hearing about. It's the claiming to be on a TV programme that aired before he was born, running multiple marathons on a broken leg, having brain surgery and losing his memory shortly before heroically defending his thesis. Each day brings a new and even crazier claim. This story will run and run so long as people keep digging up stuff that he has said, so that people can continue to say 'why the fuck did they, apparently the most brilliantly clever people in the country fall for this obvious fraudster'?

Also true.

Perhaps, but these people have named the primary school, the church and the mutual friends they had. The poster I was watching said that they knew it was only a matter of time that he would be found out but wouldn’t have exposed him as this is so damaging to the black community.

I can't speak for the bit you heard, but in terms of Today on Radio 4 yesterday morning, its segment on Arday followed a similar pattern to the BBC television news report I've referred to above - it had interviews with those same two people, Kehinde Andrews in defence of Arday and claiming this has come about owing to racism, and Kathleen Stocks suggesting otherwise, and that this is about broader questions for universities on academic integrity and pursuing a DEI agenda blindly etc. It's worth saying that when Kehinde Andrews was being interviewed, and defending Arday, the presenter did challenge him and his defence of Arday, pointing out many of the accusations of plagiarism and discrepancies in his biography that we know about.

Incidentally, I'm not saying the BBC is perfect - of course it isn't - but I don't think it has been one-sided in its coverage of this Arday story from what it I've seen, heard, and read.

If I overcame significant health issues to achieve something, I wouldn't expect to be to told to provide documentary evidence of them if my success was to be publicly recognised.

And what about if your didn't overcome significant health issues to achieve something, because those significant health issues never existed, and were so ludicrously overblown that anyone who knew you in your childhood would immediately recognise them to be lies?

Don't get me wrong, I am not defending Arday. But to suggest that there's no racist motive anywhere in this story and it's all simply about outing a fantasist would be incorrect.

And of course there's plenty now for racists to pick over in the whole 'DEI appointment' angle.

An academic take - all Arday’s academic papers are published and publicly available. When you read them it is clear that there are recent papers which have a high risk of fraud in them. The papers quotes person A as a female student in a 2018 paper and then use the exact same quote for a “female professor” in a 2020 paper. And that happens repeatedly, not just once. It is like someone saying they study moon dust and publishes a scientific paper saying they personally went to the moon last year to get some samples. You don’t need a great big investigation to see that something is very wrong.

this is not just about the PhD and the public statements about his marvellous cv.

It is recent and repeated bad practices (possible fraud) in published academic papers that has led to all these investigations.