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?

Matters how?

You can't have a proper investigation now, you'll never get both sides, he can't give his side.

You can't punish him unless you want the ludicrous spectacle of punishing a corpse.

Institutional investigations into institutional failings can continue.

But you can't prosecute the dead.

People hate those who they perceive as a fraud - think of the backlash about Raynor Winn, Rachel Dolezal, Gypsy Rose’s mother. Any and all of those who claim to have cancer online and then it ain’t so.
its awful for his family, but it blows over - this time next year it will be Jason who

Arday being publicly criticised isn’t an issue of racism. Of course, racists will have clung to the story. But that does not make the story in itself racist - just as vegetarians aren’t Nazis by virtue of the fact that Hitler was a vegetarian. It is a faulty generalisation.

This story has its strongest parallels with that of Marie Sophie Hingst, a white German historian exposed in 2019 for false claims that she had 22 Jewish relatives killed in the Holocaust. She in fact had no Jewish heritage at all, but had managed to build a career as a spokesperson for descendants of Holocaust victims. She was exposed in June 2019 in a series of high-profile media articles, and in July 2019 took her own life. Arday’s situation is hardly different.

It is tragic that Arday reached a point where he felt the only way out was to take his own life. It is tragic for the family and friends he leaves behind. But the situation is largely of his own making - you cannot falsify your professional and personal achievements to the extent he did, benefit from those falsehoods giving you access to a career many dream of and which is highly competitive, have it transpire that the awarding of that career was entirely undeserved and additionally based on your own exploitation of controversial DEI dogma, and then be surprised when life blows up in your face.

While JA's claims were certainly extraordinary , uneven development is actually the norm, not the exception.

In reality, development is not linear and predictable- uneven development is actually extremely common, particularly in neurodevelopmental conditions. Children can have very different rates of development across different domains, and those rates can change over time. A child can be profoundly delayed in one area without that delay being a reliable measure of their eventual abilities in every other area.

And I am also living the life. What I find much more harmful isn’t an extraordinary story like JA’s, which everyone can recognise as extraordinary. It’s the much more commonplace developmental simplifications you see repeatedly from other parents on social media: “they’re X years old but developmentally Y,” “they’re developing at half the rate,” "for them to catch up they'd have to suddenly develop faster than other children, that's very rare" “the gap will inevitably widen,” or the idea that because a child is behind now, you can simply extrapolate that trajectory into the future.

Those statements sound intuitively convincing, but they imply that development happens at a constant rate and that the developmental gap therefore behaves like a mathematical equation. That isn’t how real development works. Developmental trajectories can be uneven, asynchronous and change over time.

I think that’s actually a more important message for parents. We shouldn’t give people false (positive) hope that their child will inevitably catch up, but nor should we give them false (negative) certainty about what their child’s developmental trajectory will be. To me the latter is by far the more common and harmful trope.

Because I care about equality...as anyone who has half a brain should. Because inequality effects everyone...if you make women give up working when they get married as used to happen, you lose highly trained, experienced people from the workforce.

So i care that someone who made up stories implying he's being racially targeted when questioned about his lies as the next person who complains is impacted by that lie

Why are we still yapping on about him?

a) because the people at Cambridge who put somebody so obviously unsuited to the role in the spotlight need to be brought to account (which is why I got involved in the first place)

b) the same goes for other universities, and indeed the whole ideologically-distorted areas of sociology and education, and especially the idiots at LiverpoolJMU who allowed through a doctorate with an obvious grammatical mistake in the thesis title

c) because his actions harmed a lot of people: the woman whose work he plagiarised, the women who didn't get the job given to him, the families of autistic children given false hope by his lies, the journalist threatened by scary lawyers, the academic contacted by the police...

d) because people like you are still having your own good old yap, trying to ignore the points raised above and instead substituting your own false narrative of a racist witch hunt

I'm not saying development is linear. To write all of the nuances of development would detract from the thread.

There is little point in debating the exact trajectory of development JA took.

You made a number of statements expressed as certainties / truths which implied this model of development (copied below). You then used that reasoning to justify a view about how harmful JA's extraordinary claims were. I don't think JA's claims- which everyone recognised to be extraordinary (hence the media interest) caused much harm. To me the much greater harm is the very commonplace , massively simplistic yet much more plausible claims you made in your post which are trotted out so frequently . That's what I wanted to challenge as I think it's really important and the much more insidious/ troubling harm , that impacts both kids and parents.

reality bites, and in today's world, believe it that a child who is nonverbal and has a disorder that interferes with social interaction is going to be behind.
What people don't realise is that when there is global developmental delay the gap widens as time goes on. Think about it. Child X, average NT, develops 12 months worth of skills in 12 months. Child Y, globally delayed, is only developing 6 months of skills in 12 months.
So, at 3 years old, when they hit preschool and their only observer is not their parent, child X presents like a 3 year old. Child Y presents like a 1½ year old. 2 years later at 5, they start school. Child X is presenting like a 5 year old. Child Y presents like a 2½ year old. So now, the gap between them has increased to 2½ years from 1½ years.
For a child with GDD to 'catch up' they have to develop faster than the average child, and if they were going to do that, they wouldn't be delayed.
Now, there will be outliers

People are projecting their fury in the wrong direction. The reporters and media who exposed the dodgy recruitment at Cambridge are not the one's at fault here.

All very sad that he didn't seem to have support to get him through this.

It is not a comparison to the crimes of saville. It is about death not being an adequate excuse to not investigate people. But you know that and were being disingenuous.

We don’t know whether JA was autistic or actually had NPD, we don’t know the extent of any impact it had on him if he was because we do know that much of what he said was untrue so whether anything was true is unknown.

As for his lies having little impact - students were defrauded of tens of thousands of pounds and had their careers impacted, his false research has polluted the academic field leading to his unevidenced ideological opinions being pushed into schools and across mainstream media. He has caused immeasurable harm.

He has caused immeasurable harm

Oh please.

Grow up. Someone having died does not and should not exempt them from being discussed, especially when they have made a career courting publicity.

No one is sending the thread to his grieving family, this is a public forum. Point at the posts 'luxuriating in the suffering of others'. You can't, there aren't any.

Yes I do think I'm morally superior to people who steal and lie and then try to shut down questions about their lying, stealing, and inability to do a job they're paid handsomely for, by claiming racism. Not sure how that's going to 'catch up' with me. I think you should be ashamed, for trying to shame others out of discussing how and why this situation has come about, and what it means about our institutions and our society. But I dare say you'll continue to believe you occupy the moral high ground, while trying to control what people say so it fits your belief about what should be allowed to be questioned.

None so blind as those who will not see. Critical social justice is an insidious harm in our society and push by lies.

What gets me is how utterly useless his ‘research’ and the other research output of his colleagues was and is. It’s activism. It’s not science. It’s the debasement of academia which contributes to the destruction of everything that has made our society relatively successful. Once you see how large parts of academia have fallen so far, it’s not surprising to see how Arday fitted in so well according to those running it. I’d favour shutting down these departments and starting again. We need academia functioning properly.

Immeasurable harm??! 😂.

Have you heard of Duke University researcher Erin Potts-Kant, whose systematic fabrication of research data on mouse lung functions was used to secure tens of millions of dollars in federal grants.

Nope? Know what her face looks like?No?

Now please ask yourself - why?

(This is just one example of numerous academic frauds that have had much more substantial consequences.)

Are these people dead?

Now ask yourself why.

I don’t believe for one second that you have not ‘spoken ill of the dead’ regardless of your upbringing and your own claim to moral superiority. This is just hypocrisy teamed with an attempt to hide problem and ignore any safeguarding that may be revealed.

I disagree. My experience is that of all the children I have known in the time I've had a child with SN, the gap has widened as they've grown up.

I don't much care if you disagree and I stand by my comments.

The obvious answer is that Erin Potts Kent is in the US and hasn’t been talked about much in the UK, as far as I can see. Most people have never heard of her here and with good reason, whereas Jason Arday has been for some time.

Your better comparison would be William O’Reilly, though he limited himself to substantial plagiarism without the exotic claims, backstory and publicity that Arday developed.

And herein lies the harm.

You are describing your own experience, and you’re entitled to it. But presenting that experience as though it establishes what development generally looks like- and presenting it as a certainty for other children - is exactly the problem.

These narratives are the harm, not the extraordinary claims of individuals like JA about beating the odds, which (even if they were believed) everyone recognises to be exceptional.

What about Wakefield who falsified data on vaccines? Ever heard of him? Not dead either despite huge publicity. Should there have been no publicity about his fake (and now retracted) paper?

In all fields where institutional rot occurs it takes a case to catch the public interest before investigation is done. Of course many people have vested interests and will be desperate to hide the rot.

They weren't well known in the US either- beyond academic circles , and nor is this person dead. This is the overwhelming norm with cases of much more extreme academic frauds- let alone plagiarism (which is a much more common misdemeanour in academia).

Indeed.

If Farage died tomorrow would they be posting on threads about him saying 'shut up, who cares about the 5 million?, don't you have compassion for his family?".

I think not.

But you are describing exactly what JA did - describing your own experience, and you’re entitled to it. But presenting that experience as though it establishes what development generally look like. Except his ‘own experience’ was also made up. It is still that narrative that harms.

Several pp seem to think that JA claims were limited to embellishing his CV (considerably). That is not where the harm was - he was in a role that educates other and pushes forward certain narratives through that education, through research, through that research being put into practice, though media appearances. THAT is where the harms were.

Actually- no . I hadn't heard his name and I don't know his face.
He's not dead
I just looked him up.
I've heard his false claims - which did very significant, widespread harm (literally led to the reemergence of diseases that kill and maim children) corrected in the evidence base and advice.

This is exactly how it should be, and demonstrates my points perfectly.

JA's face has been all over my social media and front page news for weeks. I know exactly what caused the difference.