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?

Sure - an impressively unsupported assertion, entirely consistent with the level of logic, reasoning and insight you’ve consistently demonstrated throughout this thread. :)

He was a professor of education who had been through state school, including special school, system.

If he’d done the usual gilded lily route of private school and Cambridge as under grad, it would have ill equipped him to write about the education system the vast majority of people go to.

I wasn’t there at his interview and selection conversation, none of us were. Perhaps they thought he was a breath of fresh air?

Perhaps they thought it was important to have someone who was more representative of British demographics than the usual Cambridge OK Yah brigade.

But as he stands, he’s qualified with 4 degrees and a PGCE, which in itself is positive. So he’s qualified with experience for role.

Let me ask you, what qualifications did Michael Gove have to allow him to poke his nose in and ruin state schools in England and Wales, with his posh Scottish education experience?

You think every posh, rich bugger in “the City”, Oxbridge and Civil Service, the media, parliament got their jobs on merit? No hint of the old school tie at all? Do me a favour!

You might not like the guy, you might think sociology of education isn’t a great subject, you might think there was something (I’m not sure what) lacking in his journey to professor. Fine, no problem. But he had a the requisite qualifications.

It is racist to assume that the Asian students excluded in favour of the black students must not deserve their places simply because they are Asian despite the fact that their test scores were higher. That is actually racist, indisputably. Trying to tease out the reason why black students test score are lower than asian students test score is complicated. Universities are better off just using their standard entry tests and avoiding social engineering missions because, if they are wrong, the affect is to destroy their own mission (academic excellence) and their credibility(especially with affected populations).

Sure- if someone assumed that, and asserted that it would indeed be very racist.
I haven't seen that argument made anywhere however. The claim that is being made is that black students/ faculty don't deserve their places/ positions as black people should only rightfully be succeeding in sports and entertainment.

It is just an empirical observation. It's a positive statement - a statement of what is not what should be (a normative statement). He is just saying that, without affirmative action, there would be no black people in top universities. He is not saying that there should not be black people in universities even if they were to achieve the same or better test scores. That would be racist. He does not say that.

it's not "just an empirical observation” at all.

The observation would be that, without affirmative action, fewer Black students might be admitted.

But concluding , therefore, that this is what would happen under a genuinely “merit-based” system — and therefore represents the rightful outcome — is a normative claim. You’re treating your / Cofnas's definition of merit as though it were an empirical fact.

Oh, don't you like a taste of what you're dishing out? As for logic and reasoning- you're still clutching onto one statement in a blog. You're not a philosopher- that much is clear.

Gosh that is all very mixed up. "Merit" is a catch all reasoning for giving people entry. Lowering grades for black students and raising them for asian students to block asian students is seen as merit based because, somehow, the asian students are not actually as clever as they show themselves to be with test scores and the black students are cleverer than they show themselves to be with test score. It is still about who is and who isn't clever. If you do that, you end up with Arday as a natural result because despite all the manipulation, there still are no high performing academics that fit the profile.

I am indeed not psychic.

So you’re saying that it was a coincidence.

Genuine question:
What were his four degrees?

@Sunnibee, even I can understand what @Whatevers is saying, and I'm geriatric. I don't think you are understanding, however, so I don't think there's much point you continuing to bang the drum. It's fruitless.

Do we know how went to special school?Or is that yet another thing he said that no one questioned?

What should equip a professor of the sociology of education is not 'lived experience', it's the ability to enquire and to interpret evidence, and then posit ways to apply that to the education system. I have 'lived experience' of going to state school, most people do, that doesn't qualify me for that role and nor should it. Jason Arday was absolutely not qualified for his role. Go 2 pages back and read where PP has copied 2 current job ads for much less senior posts at Cambridge, he didn't even qualify for those. There is no question that he did not meet the criteria for his post. You don't (shouldn't) get a Chair at Cambridge for being 'a breath of fresh air' unless you also meet all the objective criteria for the role.

Michael Gove was elected as an MP and then given the Education ministry by the Prime Minister. There is no suggestion that he got it by having relevant qualifications. You can say that's a ridiculous system but he got the role legitimately. Jason Arday did not get his role legitimately. There is no equivalence between Minister for Education and Professor at Cambridge, you don't apply to be Minister for Education with your CV and get appointed from an interview. Jason Arday did not have the qualifications for his role, nowhere near, and it turns out the ones he had were based on other people's work which he'd plagiarised. He was not appointed on merit (any more than the old school tie city lot you mentioned). Maybe you think that doesn't matter, I think it does.

He did not have the requisite qualifications

If he’d done the usual gilded lily route of private school and Cambridge as under grad, it would have ill equipped him to write about the education system the vast majority of people go to.

Do you think you have to have committed murder and served a couple of decades in prison to research murder and the criminal justice system? Or have had cancer to look for a cure? Or have had your family wiped out by a volcano to study geology? How does that work for palaeontology? Ancient history?

I understand perfectly well what the poster is saying. The problem is that you- and that pp- are failing to distinguish between understanding an argument and accepting its underlying assumptions. The argument assumes that IQ scores reflect academic “merit” and therefore determine who should be admitted to Harvard under a merit-based system. There’s no evidence for that assumption; it’s a normative claim, and in this context a racially informed one that is in turn being used to justify a racist conclusion that black students / faculty at Harvard don't deserve their place .

What do you think the criteria for getting into Harvard should be?

Harvard’s current admissions material describes the following :

• GPA/transcript and SAT/ACT
• essays
• extracurricular activities and athletics
• leadership
• awards
• teacher/counsellor recommendations
• interviews
• life experiences and other considerations

Crucially, Harvard itself says that it considers the context in which a student’s academic achievements occurred, including differences in educational opportunity and resources.

If only you'd put that much research into understanding free inquiry in academia. Mind you, the hierarchy don't much care for it either when Universities are desperately clinging onto DEI hires, at the cost to meritocracy.

According to my, admittedly senile, understanding they are not saying anything of the sort.

They are talking about statistical studies. As I understand it, they are saying that when you look at outcomes of eg undergraduate degree results at age around 21 and place them alongside IQ scores as they were recorded, say age 7, the children who had the highest IQ scores aged 7 match extremely closely to the individuals with the best degree results.
If you then look at the IQ scores of ethnic groups, black children would be predicted to achieve lower degree results than white people and white people lower than Asian.
That is all they are saying as I understand it.
Supposed IQ may well be an artificial construct of various intellectual qualities predicting examination success. Nevertheless, extensive academic studies have shown it to be a powerful predictor of future success. The question is about life as it is, not as people would like it to be.

There is of course, a separate discussion to be had about supporting improved access to educational resources for black families.

My post is intended to show, @Sunnibee , why you’re talking about something altogether different from the current discussion. Nobody is arguing for injustice or lack of equity. It’s a value- free statistical study.

It’s the entry score that determine entry not the IQ scores. Post hoc you can try to explain why the scores were what they were. Cofnas is saying we should not ignore that IQ could contribute to those test score results so affirmative action will unjustly discriminate against able students. It’s like you run a semi final race and then swap in a slower fat runner because you think that maybe he’ll do better if he’d lost a bit of weight. At some point you need to say, no. Now is the point when you need to be ready. There is a whole free state school system that gives you free education to get to this point. It’s not like you’ve received no help to get ready. Enough, it stops here. Otherwise you end up like Malaysia where ethnic Chinese kids can’t get into their unis, Malays then get quotas in public sector jobs and company boards. It never stops. This ideology just wrecks everything.

'You might not like the guy, you might think sociology of education isn’t a great subject, you might think there was something (I’m not sure what) lacking in his journey to professor. Fine, no problem. But he had a the requisite qualifications'

But he didn't have the requisite experience and qualifications as has been posted here repeatedly. People actually in academia who know how these things work have explained patiently?

Dont minimise it by making comments about 'not liking the guy', I'm sure he was very nice in fact in his many media interviews he was full of charm. So it isn't that anyone didn't like him or that sociology is a micky mouse subject, rather his cv didn't fulfil the expected criteria required for a professor.

I understand the statistical claim, and I’m not disputing that IQ can correlate with later educational outcomes. But that isn’t the point I’m challenging. The problem is what is being inferred from those correlations: that they tell us what a “merit-based” Harvard admissions system should look like, and that deviations from that predicted racial distribution indicate lowered standards or unfair admissions. That is not a value-free statistical observation; it is an interpretation of the data that requires additional assumptions. And those assumptions are what we’re discussing. And when those assumptions are then used to suggest that Black students are disproportionately undeserving of places or positions, we are no longer talking about just "statistical studies” we are talking about a racialised claim with racist implications.

Like it or not, when they stopped favouring black students, their numbers getting in fell and the number of asian students rose. It’s hard to argue they reintroduced racism into selection

IQ is an inherited trait (people with high it tend to have children with high IQ). This is a very uncomfortable fact for many people to deal with. It is why there is always likely to be an attainment gap between rich and poor children - higher IQ people tend to be wealthier as they are more capable of making more of their skills and opportunities (as they have high IQs).

Currently the favoured way of dealing with this is to lower the boundaries for poorer people so there are more equal numbers of richer and poorer people in university. Then once out of uni the higher IQ people still take the lead. So then it is ‘well we should positively discriminate in favour of the lower IQ group’. At a societal level we then dumb down and become less productive and less able to compete on the world stage. It might explain how we have ended up with such a miserable selection of politicians across all parties.

Of course, there are also issues with differences of opportunity that must be addressed but this does not override that IQ is inherited.

The difference in opportunity is starker in the US though where schools are mostly just funded by their local community (and you cannot go to a school outwith the local community). So schools in wealthier areas have much more funding.