The Jason Arday scandal, part deux

[KatiePricesKnickers]

As the book launch is coming, let the discussion continue.

First thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5563599-the-jason-arday-scandal?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share
This is lifted from the thread in the education section, which is an interesting summary
https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/the-great-and-unfortunate-story-of?r=8w0woc&triedRedirect=true

Or AIBU with not letting this fade away?

Or maybe if he hadn't lied, he wouldn't have found himself in this situation.

I'm detecting a lot of confirmation bias in what you've written.

It's a bit like if I was a feminist and posted, 'This would have been a lot worse if he'd been a woman.'

Do you see?

Not just mumsnet unfortunately. We live in a time when people neither want to research for the facts or hear them from others before forming an unfactal opinion or just following like sheep a popular opinion.

I don't agree, he was clearly a liar , I mean look at his claims re marathons, re charity fundraising, re his late reading, writing, talking etc... he didn't supervise his students well re theses etc, he got jobs ahead of actually qualified people, which he was not , obviously... Was he mentally ill, maybe, did he damage real people? Yes. I actually have a lot of sympathy for him, and Cambridge did him no favours, but also he wilfully got jobs for which he must have known he was unqualified for... And did no favours for his students... Anyone who doubts this should look at stuff online of talks he gave etc.... awful stuff.... Massive damage for Cambridge, and huge damage to DEI in general... And for what? And why? I really don't know

People of all ethnicities are targeted by the media and social media. As we've said the Salt Ash path saga is still going on and on. People are often discussed and scrutinised at length. Look at the Princess of Wales and all the crap hurled at her when she had cancer, awful nasty conspiracy theories.

This is obviously tragic. He seemed to have been enabled and encouraged for years. Whoever did that should be ashamed of themselves. Arday himself didn't seem to care about the mental health of the journalist whom he reported to the police, seemingly not concerned if he potentially had his career and life ruined.

When someone takes their own life people always try to apportion blame. The sad fact is it is the person responsible. No one else.

Hopefully this will be a kick up the arse for those who didn't challenge him irl, who encouraged his delusions and then didn't support him when it all came tumbling down.

It was racism that put him there - the idea that black people should not be scrutinised. He was a token gesture who ticked Cambridge’s diversity boxes. He also pushed exactly the same narrative that you are now pushing and did so based on fabricated evidence and personal opinion. You believe there is authority behind your anti-white racism because of his very lies.

I'm uncomfortable with the narrative that he just lied and 'didn't deserve to die', as if he was killed by someone else. It's tragic that he thought that the best, or only, solution was to end his life, but nobody here or in the media did that. I also think it's legitimate discuss when there is an unusual appointing decision, especially if there may be systemic reasons.

The cries of ‘racism!’ is exactly the same strategy Arday used to silence anyone critical or suspicious of him. This included students trying their hardest to get degrees and being failed utterly by him; students in very vulnerable positions having accusations of racism thrown at them by their institutions for asking for a basic level of supervision.

Kathleen Stock had to resign for having legally allowable opinions because her university and union made no attempt to stop direct harassment. She was an eminently well qualified academic and a well respected lecturer. She didn’t tell any lies about anything either.

This guy faked a PhD and invented a history snd wasn’t, by all accounts, a very dedicated lecturer. His awarding institution and Cambridge both tried very hard to tell us there was nothing to see here when his PhD was obviously plagiarised.

so who got hounded and who got supported, and what do you want to tell me about race and sex as a result?

It’s very lazy of people to blame white racists for his hounding.

This looks like the last roll of the racism dice to try and shutdown the ongoing discussion of who Jason Arday was and how did he get to where he got to, and now, how was he left to kill himself.

I think tomorrow the papers will run with this story big time, especially as Andy Burnham has seen fit to comment and say we should think of his (Arday’s) many contributions.

I’m sure a lot more social commentators and bigwigs will be letting their thoughts be known and telling people how they should be thinking and feeling at this moment.

Leave it alone now. You’re sounding very mean spirited.

let he who has no sin cast the first stone.

Stock wasn’t hounded all over the press and social media with people even reaching out to her school mates to she what she was like. It was a media witchhunt that was wildly out of line with the allegations about him.

"The lying on a CV is damaging, but the damage to the world of Autism is so much worse."
@Lougle

I'm surprised, too, about everything being questioned, but not the autism diagnosis. Some people told in one of the threads that their child with autism sometimes gets stuck within an obvious lie and can't easily find a way out or how to retract it.
My experience with autistic people is that they are often so honest they disadvantage themselves because they can't lie, they put a lot of importance on honour, honesty, rules and "doing the right thing".

From this experience, the CV and the claims which were found to be untrue are completely at odds with autism. (However, of course not every autistic person is exactly the same and I'm aware of that).

In this way, I wonder whether the autism / ND claim was just one more way to claim "support for minorities", and some of the discussion now veers in the direction of "look what you made the ND person do".

It also ties into the discussion of identities and stacking up in how many ways someone is "disadvantaged" (in a systemic way) as Arday himself discussed in his own papers and talks; and the more identities and community connections you can claim, the more supporters you can gather, instead of looking at individual situations.
I do acknowledge there are systemic disadvantages, but I don't think they predict the life of every single person who experiences them; there are always individual factors at play, too.

It was damaging for ND people what he did, because it is such a public case and it will increase prejudices against ND people: that they tend to fantasize and be dishonest and that they may need the trickery JA did in order to "succeed", which is of course NOT TRUE at all. It also increases prejudice against genuine inclusion and equality.

I am sorry for his death and his family, but I also hope the discussion and investigation in this case will continue, so that it cannot happen again.

She wasn’t hounded all over the press and social media? Okaaay.
even if that were true ( it isn’t true) Arday’s colleagues didn’t put flags all over to signify their contempt, nobody pissed on his office door, and the UCU didn’t put out a statement in response to the scandal saying they deplore plagiarism in all its forms.

you go

The plagiarism stuff was all going to go away. Cambridge were making sure of that. It was the autobiography that brought the media attention

I think it's best we all stop commenting despite our differing views and opinions. The bloke is dead and regardless of your position on the situation before it that shouldn't have happened.

This will likely get pounced on, but I have been thinking about whether a different diagnosis fits Jason Arday's behaviour better than him being ND.

A person with NPD is very likely to make incredible claims about themself, to be very charming, and to react strongly when someone questions them or their story. A person with NPD who has to face the fact that their constructed image has been exposed will go into ego collapse, which has a high risk of suicide. I'm not saying he had NPD, I've no idea if he did. But his incredible claims about his triumphs over adversity, and the way he responded to being 'found out', make me think about it.

Absolutely not. His victims still need to be considered. The fake research that gets pushed into schools still needs to be retracted, the appointment process and the terrible standard of academics particularly in certain disciplines still needs to be addressed, the role if DEI ideology still needs to be examined. It would be all so convenient use Arday’s suicide as an excuse to push this back under the carpet.

@Todolisttoolong ”It would be all so convenient use Arday’s suicide as an excuse to push this back under the carpet.”

You can see that already happening on the threads.

Even worse - people know the facts originally, but they don't appeal, so they chose to build a different reality or 'narrative' (eye roll) and portray that as believing it to be factual. Sometime they may even convince themselves. There's one very well known example of this we all know. Scary times.

Incredible isn't it. The hoops, stress, and exams that for eg. Oxbridge undergrad applicants have to go through to mostly, be unsuccessful. And they look at this guy who walked into a top job in Cambridge uni based on huge lies that were not even checked or verified. Mind boggling. Double standards? Virtue signalling gone wrong? Toxic racist academia reaching it's inevitable grim conclusion before change needs to happen? Who knows.

I already said in a previous post the organisations and Cambridge need to be held to account as they clearly used Jason as a resource to gain points and abandoned him when he needed them the most. Why didn't anyone intervene before this as it's pretty obvious that the fanciful things he said while maybe having a grain of truth were so out there no one would believe them. They left him to the mercy of the right wing press giving said press all the ammo they needed.

This isn't about DEI,left or right it's about the fact that Cambridge and whoever pushed Jason forward did so with no regards to anything but their own gain and when the media got hold of it they did exactly what we expect.

What I meant by shutting up is that folk going back and forth on here will achieve nothing and we should remember that regardless of the situation a Human Being is dead.

You are correct, of course.

But also of course, many people on MN will string you up (metaphorically speaking) for speaking this truth bit out loud.

Actually I think MN seems to prefer 'hand your arse to you on a plate'

The truth shall make ye fret