To compare and contrast coverage and outcome of the Jason Arday scandal with that of Cambridge plagiarist William O'Reilly

[OneArtfulUmberSquid]

Partly due to being an academic, the slow news season and the sensationalism, like many people I've been following the Jason Arday story and have been appalled by the scale of the fabulation and the abysmal lack of due diligence by Cambridge when they appointed him - I've also been appalled by how he was presented by the University when he was hired in terms of the emphasis on his back story and what he represented rather than his scholarship.

It's interesting to compare/contrast with the case of William O'Reilly - who was caught plagiarising his own undergrad students' essays and was then found to have plagiarised other scholars' work a number of times before...see https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/27433

He also threatened to sue student journalists for exposing him - not as bad as Arday calling the police, but still pretty risible
https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/26105

A further issue relates to his witness for the accused in a rape case despite being involved in the investigation.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/22/cambridge-university-sexual-misconduct-cases
https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/18747

I'd be interested to know what anyone else thinks of the two cases in terms of academic misconduct and outcomes, particularly anyone who works in Cambridge. O'Reilly claimed that the scrutinising of his work was due to homophobia.

More here but behind a paywall
https://www.ft.com/content/ae7f16ae-95ab-4aae-a676-0748e3e61b6d?shareType=nongift&syn-25a6b1a6=1

You may be fine but you're losing the argument... Hence why you and the other poster start trying to cancel it!

There’s a reason ARU is known as “dustbin”…

Never even hear of O’Reilly. The media seem far less interested for some reason.

To all those saying this has been a racist witch hunt, have you actually read any of JAs work?

His entire academic body of work was sociological research focussed on racism within academia and how it holds people from ethnic backgrounds behind. So the fact that he has then been found to be a fraudulent imposter as a senior academic is a huge story!

He also made up research to fit the narrative he wanted to convey. His position in society, as a senior academic at Cambridge, was as a "thought leader" on how to help ethnic minorities in academia. As we all know this is a sensitive subject as it can be deemed unfair to "positively discriminate" in favour of one demographic as it obviously then negatively discriminates against another demographic.

That he was a fraud within such a contested area of research is the biggest story for me.

He singularly focussed his career on racism not the media.

Ill also add that the Guardian was running it as the main headline on multiple days when it broke as a story. Do people think they are a racist media outlet?

New GLP petition

Bloody hell, this seems remarkably ill-advised even for Maugham. Talk about making yourself a hostage to fortune (again)

I believe the PP said they weren’t prepared to believe this particular claim, because so many of his other claims had already been shown to be false. Sounds like scepticism to me, based on a sensible assessment.

If a witness has form for lying, that will certainly be pointed out. So where the ‘evidence’ for a claim is simply that someone says it’s true, part of the merit of that evidence is how credible the someone is. The credibility of someone who has been shown to have lied multiple times is obviously not great.

I’m not familiar with the workings of that kind of publisher, but it’s a huge sum of money for an advance and extraordinary failure of fact checking. The proposal that’s been doing the rounds contained different questionable details than what’s apparently in the book. And to proceed with its publication when so much of the biography was called into question seems bizarre. Is this normal behaviour for a publisher?

Depends on your disability, and how it affects you. Should autistic people not be allowed to become academics? How about dyslexics?

ETA I haven’t actually seen anyone claim that JA was allowed adjustments because of his disabilities, or indeed that he had a disability. He described his autism as causing him to mimic to understand, hence the plagiarism, but I haven’t seen anyone explicitly say ‘and that’s allowed as a reasonable adjustment’. Probably because it isn’t.

What hatred?
Nigel Farage is hated, just look anywhere on social media and you can see that.

I haven’t seen any clear case of people openly hating Arday.

Yes, all his bullshit has finally been dragged into the daylight, his lies exposed.
But most of the SM is ridiculing that, and questioning how he managed to avoid scrutiny for so long.

@SwitchnowSurly there’s still a need to do your own work and not lie about your achievers? I don’t care who you are, but these are basics. There have been many disabled academics but they didn’t lie.

Yes I do wonder why, the fantastical back story might have something to do with it.

And it looks likely he had lied about cancer - I don't understand how people can claim that it is all racism.

Of course there is, where did I say there wasn’t?

What does beg a question is how did he get a professorship in the Sociology of Education without any qualifications with the word “Sociology” in them.
I doubt that anyone would even get a normal university lecturer’s job without a bare minimum of a first degree in the subject.

Not quite that simple. Lots of people come to post-grad humanities from an adjacent humanities background. Not all law professors have undergrad in law.

Yes of course it's ableist, and more to the point would have discounted just a handful of incredible minds from pursuing incredible feats in their chosen fields:

Albert Einstein: Dyslexia and delayed language development
Thomas Edison: Dyslexia and severe reading difficulties
Leonardo da Vinci: ADHD and severe dyslexia
Nikola Tesla: Serious obsessive-compulsive traits and sensory sensitivities.

I feel incredibly sorry for J. A, who clearly saw no other way out from the media picking at his bones.

Let it lie, now, for the sake of his loved ones.

Yeah still not getting it. His fantastical back story is irrelevant to his wife. “Man makes up so childhood stories” is not news. The only thing relevant to his role is his alleged plagiarism and in that regard I share OPs question.

You don't think that lying about having cancer twice is relevant to a person's character?

Just a side issue...That's interesting becsuse I was talking to ppl on her rrecently who were supporters of Lucy Letby. They were adamant that however weird and mendacious she sppeared to be, only hard evidence of murder should stick, andvfor that reason she was innocent.

Whether he lied or not, the double standards are breathtaking; the number of people in public office who have been accused of similar or worse and who have not been persecuted the way he has simply for being a black man is an absolute disgrace.

He’s dead. Why do posters feel the need to continue with behaviour that lead to his death with no thought for his family. It’s beyond vile.

How biased must you be to look at the media stories on this over the last few weeks and conclude 'he has been persecuted for simply being a black man'.

He wasn't persecuted, his outrageous lies were called out, and he was publicly mocked. Not for being black, for being a liar.

Can you name some with similiar number and style of stories who have got away with it? I can't think of anyone with that expansive fantasy list

He hasn’t been ‘persecuted for being a black man’. That is why he was promoted though, ironically over black academics that were qualified.

He was a high profile and prolific fraud that has a long history of courting the spotlight. He fueled the media interest in this story by weaponizing his race to try and shut down any investigation into him with accusations of racism. He had the police and law firms threatening journalists.

Cambridge massively promoted this man, completely failing to do even the most basic amount of due diligence, and his race is a large part of the reason why. Cambridge, one of the most illustrious and revered public institutions not just in the UK but the world, has just revealed the rot at the heart of it. Of course this way going to be a massive story, and of course the attempts to shut it down would only fuel it.

He built himself up in the public eye, and his downfall was also in the public eye.