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?

What we’ve been told is that he said he “couldn’t go on” and that he appeared to be half his usual body weight. That last bit is hyperbole I expect but nevertheless suggests poor guy was in a state of high anxiety. I actually don’t recall hounding of JKR to the same extent. That’s my memory of it, could be wrong. Her career is still very much intact with the TV series etc. I don’t think it’s a very good comparison. Maybe Steven Gateley or Lucy Meadows might be more apt when discussing people hounded by media. And yet still it goes on.

Consider Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas has more first author peer reviewed publications than Arday. He has more publications, period. He has a first degree from a Columbia. A DOhil from Oxford. Arday got a BA from St Mary’s University (no I had not heard of it either). Yet Cofnas is still a post doc fellow. Arday was a Chair at Cambridge. It’s a complete joke.

Check back. You said “always”

He's also white; easy pickings for the virtuous to go after. Research proposals have to get ethical approval and his works was approved. However, it's easy to just call him racist for exploring an area of genetics that make white saviours feel touchy about. The offence is all theirs.

I get that Cofnas has touched third rail subjects. He chose that. For sure, he did not go down an easy path that would easily lead to promotion. He’s in Philosophy. It’s not easy anyway. That said, he will likely make it to full professor some day. By then he’ll have 4 times more publications and books etc. I would say he’s about where you’d expect him to be. He got an extremely competitive post doc position at Cambridge so that augurs well. Arday? Yeah he was made a Chair(for some reason).

Is virtue bad? Like empathy?

Empathy can be used as a concealment for virtue.

What’s at stake here is the corruption of academia. It’s the stealing of academic status. Academics are not paid well. They strive for these senior positions. If you make their seniors people who are utterly unqualified you kill motivation. We need our academics motivated to teach and research. Arday was a walking talking symbol of cynicism. He was tailor made to undermine motivation among the truly most intelligent people we have. He might have half-believed he deserved to be there. I suspect once it was all over he accepted he didn’t.

Research proposals have to get ethical approval and his works was approved.

Though it turned out one of Arday’s papers contained research that didn’t get ethics
approval even though it should have had it - but he made up the participants so supporters say it is fine as he didn’t potentially harm anyone…

Oh good grief, how appropriate.

Yeah it's only ethics - the fundamental principle that surrounds academic research. Fuck it. Thank heavens his field was Sociology and not Medicine.

So do you agree with him that black people are only very good at entertainment and sport?

Was that a hypothesis that got through an ethics committee?

He didn’t deserve the phd qualification. About one hundred passages of it were almost identical to a thesis that someone else had already published for starters.

At the elite level it is clear that people of west African descent are clearly better at sprinting sports and East Africans are better at distance running sports. That’s pretty indisputable. As Cofnas might have said, he doesn’t expect Jewish men with glasses to get reserved spots in the 100m final

If only a PhD was qualification enough even for an entry-level part-time fixed-term appointment at the bottom of the payscale!

A lot of people do not understand how academia and it's promotion levels work here.

Its, not it's. Oops.

His critics have taken extracts from Cofnas' blogs to make hyperbolic value out of it. Selecting a phrase is just lazy in the absence of evidence.

I think Cofnas is definitely a racist. The journalist who Arday reported to the police was just following a legitimate story, though.

Oh you know that for sure Cofnas is a racist do you? How perfectly said for a 2026 online pile on.

Even if Cofnas was a racist, how does that change anything that Arday did?

I then corrected myself 2hrs later and said 'some'. As I said, read the thread.

I think it's a bit sad that this has descended into a race row when really, I think race had not a lot to do with it. Had Jason Arday been a black academic who hadn't lied and cheated, he probably wouldn't have got the role. But had he been a white academic who hadn't lied and cheated, he also wouldn't have got the role. He got the role because he lied about his history to make himself extraordinary and then everybody wanted a piece of history.

It doesn't, but I think it is helpful to distinguish between the commentary that does seem motivated by, or at least come from the same place as, pre-existing racist sentiment, and that which was motivated by an intention to find and discuss the truth. Because the tendency since his death has been to comment that it was all an homogeneous 'racist pile-on', and precisely because I disagree that it was, I think it's important to be clear about the elements which were.

well, just based on the things he wrote.