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?

No. School exams are; and sometimes interviews and aptitude tests.

Based on what I've read , I genuinely can't understand how someone comes to this conclusion from the actual facts. forget the media narrative- look at the facts.

When you look into what has actually been established - it's into the territory of parsing whether at x point in his life he ran this many miles in z many days or y many days. And what's that got to do with his appointment anyway?

Arday was neurodiverse. Maybe he exaggerated anecdotes about his personal life in media interviews. There are lots of reasons why he may have done so beyond manipulation. And so what anyway? What's the relevance really? The press made him a spectacle , they othered him and then they HOUNDED him.

Even if the allegations (ie plagiarism) were true (hasn't been established), how was this any more than an internal HR issue and minor media story?

It wasn't.

except in this case- a black man with dreadlocks- his face became the national symbol of the anti- DEI agenda.

But Arday was a person, and all those who personally knew him simply say that he was lovely, gentle and deserved none of this. He did not deserve to die.

Has anyone considered that the publisher of his memoir Simon and Shuster may have been able to legally claim breach of contract if any of his claims had turned out to be false? He would have signed a contract and been in breach of this contract if he had told untruths. There could potentially be significant financial claims for damages.

Maybe this was just too much for Jason to face?

That's assuming they didn't already know or chose to minimise facts which didnt add up.

He believed he deserved to die. No one else did. I’m not sure Arday and his fantastical life story are the point. His dreadlocks and his black skin were the reason he got the job. They weren’t the reason people objected to him getting the job or keeping it. No one said- “ oh Zadie Smith has black skin she shouldn’t work in a university” not even if she gets dreadlocks. Arday was totally unqualified for the post. It was Glasgow and Cambridge that did the crime. This poor sap was pretty malign in his scholarship(I’m told) but, on balance, he is one of the victims. He’s like the noble savages paraded through high society. He was duped into believing people thought he was talented and clever. He wasn’t, It caught up with him.

God do you know how racist you sound?

I think the press was hounding Cambridge more than Arday.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/08/14/jason-ardays-schooldays/

Coming back to this - he never went to a special school. He went to mainstream schools at both primary and secondary level.

"So what you’re doing is taking test outcomes that are themselves influenced by inequality, treating them as evidence of who is “rightfully” qualified to attend Harvard, and then using those outcomes to justify racial conclusions about who does and doesn’t belong there."

If you can get hold of the manual for the WISC-IV or WISC-IV, you will see the extensive analysis of bias and standardisation. They use sample groups to weed out questions which may skew results because of demographic profiles.

Yet you have no problem saying Cofnas thinks he is part of the master race; It's a well used antisemitic reference. Do you not believe antisemitism is being racist?

Standardising a test can help ensure that it measures cognitive performance consistently; it cannot tell us why one population scores differently from another across the test as a whole. Environmental, educational and socioeconomic factors can affect cognitive test performance — factors that are themselves affected by inequality.

Can I ask you directly: do you believe that racial differences in IQ reflect differences in innate intelligence, and that Black people are therefore, on average, less intelligent than white people

Answering your question, no. I don't think that there is an inherent difference in innate intelligence, and I think the inequalities that lead to a disparity in academic performance need to be tackled at root level.

However, I also think that the answer can not be to allow people with below standard academic ability to occupy roles where academic ability is the essence of what qualifies an individual for the role.

For clarity, had someone stuffed up their GCSEs and A Levels, but went on to get a great degree, Masters, PhD, etc., and had a solid publishing history, etc., then I don't think they should be held back by their former failure. But in this case, there was no evidence of the level of academic work that would qualify someone for a role of this prestige.

I don't know but of all the people I know who went to university I don't think any had to take an IQ test. Generally it was exam results but I did know someone who made an appointment with someone in admissions and basically talked his way in.

Thanks, I would agree with most of this apart from the last point regarding the assumptions about Arday's competence as an individual and his suitability for his position.

I think it is also worth noting that people are treating “Cambridge professor” as though it tells us everything about the academic status of Arday’s particular position. It doesn’t. The Faculty of Education has a rather different institutional history from Cambridge’s traditional faculties. It was formed in its present form only in 2001 when the University brought together its existing education departments with Homerton College. A significant part of that history was teacher training and professional education, rather than a traditional university established academic discipline. The University Department of Education had focused heavily on teacher education, including the PGCE, while the Cambridge Institute of Education specialised particularly in in-service education. Homerton had an even more explicitly vocational history: it was established as a teacher-training institution and, for much of its history, was primarily concerned with preparing people for the teaching profession.

So we are talking about a faculty of a distinctly different character than the centuries-old disciplinary traditions of subjects such as Classics, Mathematics or History at other parts of the university. To assess Arday's suitability for his particular position, you really need to look at the appointment criteria and the academic expectations of the Faculty of Education, rather than simply invoking the prestige of Cambridge as a whole.

Great, so we can agree that there is a case for a very close examination if not termination of the Education faculty at Cambridge. Every single appointment should be re-scrutinised and if this organisation needs to be cut out of the University and placed in ‘special measures’ that might be an adequate response. At least this could serve as a cautionary tale for other people thinking of conducting social engineering.

I have zero idea how you got from what I said to an endorsement of that conclusion , but the (lack of) reasoning seems consistent with a lot of your posting. 💁🏼‍♀️

Hilarious. We are now on to willing Cambridge to dumb down its programmes, to fit in with the innocence of one black professor.

Mandatory chanting at Cantab faculty meetings: “I am Jason Arday!”

The racist rhetoric in this thread is becoming increasingly apparent.

That line doesn’t work anymore. Calling everyone a racist is just admitting defeat but carry on.

Pointing out racist rhetoric when it appears will always be part of challenging the normalisation of racism. Calling it out isn’t ‘admitting defeat’; pretending it isn’t there is precisely how that rhetoric becomes normalised.

An embittered 'race realist' kicked out of Cambridge targeted Arday to exact revenge on the university, while promoting his warped agenda around racial IQ differences.

The press and fellow racists joined the pile on with a contemptible disregard for basic journalistic verification.

The nonsense about lying about the charity marathons has been debunked, unless Arday orchestrated a mass conspiracy where a bunch of people lied about seeing him run and sometimes running with him, he did the marathons.

The nonsense about plagiarising publications was investigated and found to be non existent. Minor irregularities of attribution in a small proportion of papers were found and corrected. These irregularities are commonplace in academic work and Arday's publications were peer reviewed before publication and found to be original and worthy of publication.

Now the unfortunate man has killed himself there is an outbreak of doubling down, deleting posts and deleting social media accounts in a pathetic attempt to deflect culpability. Arday may have exaggerated claims in conversation and applications. Let who has never gilded a story or 'polished' a CV cast the first stone.

We can't bring him back, those who gleefully hounded him could apologise and reflect, which with few exceptions is notably absent.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻. Thank you.

Plagiarism is NOT common in academic work, and the marathon stories were NOT debunked. The non-verbal stuff, the strokes, the cancer, the tumours and so on also remain unaccounted for, to say the least.

You and others screaming racism every time a back person is criticised or loses their job, etc are the problem.

You’ve spent so much time and effort defending Jason Arday for no other reason than he’s black. His personal tragedy was engineered by such as you. Elevated beyond his capabilities by people determined to show how righteous and inclusive they are. In fact they are the racists, who clearly believe allowances should be made for certain minorities not being capable of achieving high office without their patronising help.

That idiot O’Brien stated he wouldn’t have criticised JA because he was black and that would have made him a racist. It’s madness. Black people are just that - people. The same flaws as the rest of society. Pointing that out isn’t racist, no matter how hard you and others try.

I hope the tide’s turning and that society becomes much fairer for everyone, regardless of colour.