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

@RapunzelHadExtensionsAnd what did they lie about? Or maybe they didn’t. This is not about being black or having autism. It’s about lying and Cambridge not following recruitment law or good practice.

It’s way more complex than your simplistic statement.

I am genuinely curious to how those people that are currently having ago at the press and social media.
How do you feel about those that are on social media, and in the press using his death his death for political, personal gain or just to race bait people?

We don’t stop talking about bad things a person has done just because they’re dead.

Name one.

Plenty to be disgusted about there too - some people falling over themselves to show how upset they are, when they should have been better friends to him during his life.

That said, these are two of the most vain and disgusting men, glorifying in their ‘vengeance’ against Cambridge, and with no thought to the impact on an individual. Just pleased to see their racism ‘vindicated’. Let’s hope Cofnas’s work sees the same scrutiny he applied to others.

He was publishing his autobiography.

It is these lies that people are interested.

The vast majority of readers don't care about plagiarism, indeed I doubt they know what it means.

And as for relevant to his role, his level of teaching is certainly relevant, as is the handling of complaints.

The fault lies with those that didn't do due diligence, that didn't even check references.

A poster on another thread had a very good answer to this.

The idea that if someone kills themselves everyone should recognise how complicit they were in that person’s death is a very dangerous one. You are effectively building up suicide as the ultimate route to vindication. Not a safe or healthy thing to do.

OP named one in the OP.

Now you are being disingenuous.

can be deemed unfair to "positively discriminate" in favour of one demographic
Yet so much of western culture has positively discriminated in favour of white men for centuries

188 articles over 9 days, mostly from the usual suspects. Which other person has received this level of scrutiny?

Rachel Reeves has been hounded at times, there has been a long time campaign to discredit her.

It is the sheer number of discrepancies that has led to the volume of reports.

for example
William O'Reilly - same institution as JA - plagiarised his own students' work, plagiarised plenty of other people's work, appeared as witness for an alleged rapist in a case he was himself supposed to be investigating, threatened to sue student journalists - didn't lose his job or be hounded by the media.

Andrew Wakefield - claimed he had proved autism was caused by vaccines - he had falsified data - was struck off the British medical register but wasn't subject to scores of articles in the press and a massive scrutinising of him

Maurice Wilkins - shared Rosalind Franklin's research on the structure of DNA with James Watson without permission; along with Francis Crick they used her data to publish on DNA and scarcely acknowledged her....The three men later shared the Nobel Prize (she had died) and again scarcely acknowledged her

You can't compare Wakefield. It was 1998 and he is one of the most hated people by anyone with brain. If he did it today and it came to light he would also be all over. He has paper written about him.

Wilkins was in 1962!

Which other person has claimed to have had locked in syndrome; testicular cancer; a brain tumour; autism; epilepsy; mutism as a child until the age of 11; had a reading age of 9 when they attended university aged 20; ran 30 marathons in 35 days with a broken leg; was unable to read or write until they were 18; ran 600 miles in six days; raised a mythical £5.5 million for charity; received bullets, bananas, poison and a pig’s head in the post (none of which he reported to any official or the police); received rape threats and death threats; was threatened twice by an intruder who was armed with a knife which he didn’t report and continued with his work afterwards, and which was not caught on CCTV?

@OneArtfulUmberSquid which of your three examples claimed anything akin to the claims above?

Hard questions remain - none has a one-word answer.

If you dismiss them by saying ‘racism’, you’re shafting Arday’s memory and the next person it could happen to.

Arday isn’t comparable to the others (eg Wakefield, an appalling fraudster) because questions about race, hiring and ND as well as his own flaws are all crucial to the scandal.

These don’t feature in the other academic cases, which weren’t about such well known figures.

IME Cambridge should have done due diligence on Arday’s CV & asked a few questions about his startling claims of life experiences.

Had they done the boring basics at the time, as well as having a quiet word with him about the achievements he claimed, this tragedy wouldn’t have happened.

Academics are colourful types, and the tall tales could have been dismissed as ND in action.

But Cambridge panicked and cried ‘vile racism’ when doubts began to surface over his credibility shortly into the job. Students raised those doubts because their marks were so low after Arday’s teaching.

The plagiarism issue was raised by a guy who previously campaigned for anti racism, not a frothing gammon.

Cambridge stonewalled the very idea of checking for three years - police, Carter Ruck fuelling the fire - and still did nothing.

By that time too many press knew of Cambridge’s aggressive refusals, and press releases for the autobiography had just landed on newsroom desks. Containing further startling claims. No decent journalist ignores that, and neither should they.

It’s desperate and sad. But Cambridge wasted the four years they had to tackle critics - critics who had a point.

This. I don't think think anyone with a non verbal autistic child was garnering any major hope their 18 year old would not only start speaking, but become an academic professor. By the time they are secondary school age any small hopes for single words are dashed usually, let alone anything more. JAs claims were so out there, it very rarely happens on the speech level alone. A basic Google would show that.

As a pp said, this sort of fantasism most certainly is more common than we think. Does anyone recall the NHS consultant psychiatrist, who didn't even have a medical degree? They were only caught out because of some sort of audit, there was never any questions of their competency. I recall another case of an A&E doctor with no degree either. I think he was Eastern European and was only caught because he contested speeding tickets as he said he was rushing to A&E. He even had a blue light on his car! The court took pity on him because he had aspired to go to medical school but didn't get the grades, so forged his degree certificates and came to work in UK.

I thought the David Starkey discussion was fascinating - he explains how we got to this position where following DEI is the first rule, not meritocracy, it started in 2012 following Blair who decided we didn't need to limit the number of foreigners coming into the country (which the rest of the EU did) and there were many UK citizens unhappy about their jobs being taken and villages being filled by mainly eastern europeans taking advantage of higher wages here. Someone decided promoting DEI was the first requirement of senior staff to fix this 'racism' and no longer meritocracy the first requirement in a leading role. Henry Novak, a result of this as well as Adnay. It's thoughout the lanyard class. And as Cambridge Education department set what teachers teach - is across our schools and colleges
The michaela community school being an exception with old fashioned values where 70% got A/A* (the new education minister wants to do away with these academies - wonder why)
Edit - the scary thing imv is that we perhaps needed racism discouraged in the past when minorities were minorities (we are/were less racist than just about any other European country but the lanyard class decided we needed to be even less) but now with the minorities being majorities in some part of the country the British locals are being seriously disadvantaged eg in getting into top unis etc as DEI comes first and changing what were pretty admirable British values into a thing of the past.

Funny that the many east europeans have now gone back to their much more prosperous countries which are immigrant free!

absolutely!!!

Evidence to support white people are disadvantaged regarding university admission, and that DEI is priority?

Universities have been international workplaces for centuries - particularly posh old ones.

DEI is a really good idea, and university targets for Brits are modest enough not to frighten the horses. The principle is that given you can’t choose your parents, who determine your life chances, DEI will give you an opportunity to rise to your potential if mum and dad aren’t the Grade 8 viola type.

You would have thought somewhere like Cambridge, who’ve been teaching and hiring from all over the planet since forever, could have managed without fucking it up.