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

Oh come on. Are you really trying to suggest that the majority of the public have the slightest interest in the work of a sociology professor or the recruitment practices at Cambridge?
The people baying about this are typically those who dismiss the work of Arday's discipline as Mickey Mouse woke nonsense anyway, and what goes on at Cambridge in the "Woke Sowflake Department" is about as relevent to most of us as what goes on on Mars.
Yet all of a sudden, its of national import and effects us all to such an extent we MUST be allowed to talk about it?
The only reason Arday's case had the publicity it did is because racists have made certain we all knew there was a bad black man. They went looking, just as Tommy Robinson goes trawling for mistakes by Muslim doctors to screech about while not scrutinising white ones.
If no white academic has been treated similarly its because no one has gone looking to discredit white academics. And if they did and found one, unless it was a person in a highly influential role who's work was directing policy, it would be of no interest to anyone.

No it isn't.

You are right most people have no interest in academia, if all he had done was plagiarise (I appreciate for those that work in academia this would have been bad) then it wouldn't have made the front page.

People are not talking about the plagiarism, that is not what has got all the media clicks.

I'm going to copy what @LordFarquard how can you blame it all on racism?

It is terrifying that you think because of skin colour someone should be above question. Which is possibly the most racist thing I've heard.

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.

I’ve been an academic for 25 years, am not white, and am a Professor. I think it’s important to distinguish between racism towards Arday (which I don’t deny has come from certain quarters) and legitimate criticism of how DEI has been operationalised by Universities to serve themselves rather than the communities they are claiming, with much fanfare, to uplift.

There certainly is significant public interest in Universities. You may not have noticed it, but working in one, I have. The press has been relentless in the last few years in attacking us, and this is yet another instalment in a narrative of declining public trust. Cambridge has not come out of this well, and there has been plenty of criticism from left-wing outlets and anti-racist campaigners that have made clear that appointing someone who was not objectively at an appropriate level of seniority was a cynical self-serving move on the part of the University that has had the effect of fuelling racism rather than tackling it.

It’s also important that people are not deemed to be beyond criticism because of their protected characteristics- we should hold them to the same values as everyone else, to do otherwise is to suggest that they are inferior. In this case, no, a white person would not be in this position because they simply wouldn’t have been given a Professorship in such a thin record of academic achievement. I have seen plenty of academics with inflated ideas of their own achievements but nothing close to the level of fantasy and elevation that characterised this case. But, it is Cambridge who needs to answer questions here, not any individual.

No, the reason it became such a big story is because JA was about to be exposed for plagiarism and he called the Police and employed a combative legal team to shut it down .Claiming. Which worked at the time.

But caused suspicion so then bigger publications started to dig and when The Guardian made it known they were going to publish an article he came up with some lame excuses and doubled down on claiming this was all a racist witch hunt and made wild claims of being threatened by a masked intruder, once with a knife in Cambridge offices but he hadn't told anyone about that occasion nor were either occasion reported to the Police. But said a pigs head had been sent to his parents and the Police investigated.

When the Guardian could find no evidence at all of any of that it made it a much bigger story, caused even more suspicion, and more digging and more questions to be answered.

HE caused it to be such a big story with his lies upon lies and attempts to shut everyone down by claiming it was all racist.

If it had just been about plagiarism it wouldn't have been a big story regardless of his race.

The only reason Arday's case had the publicity it did is because racists have made certain we all knew there was a bad black man.
I don't think racism played that big role with many. With some, yes. People are interested in prolofic fraud like that. That's why we have hit series like Inventing Anna, Tinder Swinder, the dropout etc.
When it's really really that "out there", normal people do get interested. Newspapers know it. "How the fuck did x get away with it for so long with people who should know better" is the question. It's a popular drama - docu genre now. And this one, people watched live not later dramatisation on Netflix.

Some of the racism accusations is based on stats from Harvard on meritocracy for university entrants where the conclusion was that if entrants were solely on academic ability the numbers of Asian students would soar and the numbers of white, Jewish and black would drop. So some balance is required.But it’s not racist to admit some do better academically than others.

He, probably with some Cambridge involvement, used Carter-Ruck to close down the THE story late last year. I wonder why CR weren't then employed a few months later to try to shut down the other papers. Too many discrepancies and evidence of his fabrications by then? Cambridge could see the way it was heading and decided to try and deal with it internally? CR with new information advised it couldn't send out the same letter and anything less would be an acknowledgement of the truth of those claims it didn't challenge?

I’d go further: US affirmative action is the clearest and largest example of actually-existing systemic racism in the Western world.

If the US (reasonably) thinks representation and inclusion is important, and more important than merit, it should have the courage to have that debate. I think there is a respectable case to be made.

Instead of which we have had a general denigration of whites and whiteness that somehow also snares Asians because they aren’t politically favoured or organised.

Harvard went to the Supreme Court to (disingenuously) argue that Asian applicants have defective personalities and that is why they don’t get admitted at anywhere near the rate their test scores would merit. They should have said: we think it’s undesirable, as well as politically unacceptable, to have almost no black students and so we have designed a process to reflect that. Apply, or not, as you choose.

It’s like they looked back at their treatment of Jews in the 1920s and decided the same trick was worth another go.

(Before anyone thinks I’m ignoring the white Harvard advantage here: their numbers would drop in a meritocratic system, entirety because whites dominate the legacy admissions, and whites like me should be comfortable with that drop).

Ok, I had a look at the Newscord article which collated this data. It lists every single news article at the bottom of the page
https://newscord.org/editorials/jason-arday-pile-on

What it also says is "The allegations were serious and much of the reporting was substantive"

If you scroll through the articles then there are some events which are widely reported to boost the number of articles which seem reasonable to have reported in this timeline:

1. plagiarism claims about star professor
2. questions emerging about his other claims e.g. 600 mile run and pigs head
3. police investigation of Times Higher Ed journalist
4. Arday resigns from Cambridge
5. Cambridge has questions to answer about how this happened (a lot of Arday articles are actually about Cambridge)
6. Met police acknowledge mistake in investigating journalist
7. Memoir claims e.g. testicular cancer
8. failure of woke/DEI in universities (a lot of articles)
9. book tour cancelled because of improbable claims
10. Arday's colleague's link to terrorist group
11. Cambridge to hold inquiry into appointment

I think claims about 'he received this level of scrutiny because he was black' need to be set alongside the fact that an awful lot of the articles 'about Arday' are actually about the failure of an elite institution to detect a complete fraud (not just a plagiarist, but someone who has been highly lauded by them for personal achievements which appear to be false). Does Cambridge deserve that level of scrutiny?

Thomas Sowell raised this years ago when he as a black Professor at an Ivy league college realised most of his black students were failing and wondered why? Racism?

When he looked at their SAT scores they were significantly lower than counterparts of different ethnicity. Would have been in the top percentage of other colleges and excelled but not at the elite highly competitive level he was teaching at.

Setting the black students up to fail under the guise of promoting diversity and ensuring their continued funding and PR.

Just been listening to BBC Radio 4, they're doubling down on the racism aspect, unsurprisingly.

So JA's victim status has been restored and instead of learning from this tragic case, it looks like institutions like Cambridge will carry on with their inept policies to promote DEI without doing the groundwork to make it function properly.

It’s cruel. Those students who were set up to fail would have been outstanding successes in almost any other context.

We don’t do this to people whose best interests we really have at heart. And those black students who have Ivy level SATs are unfairly discredited too.

Yes, Professor Thomas Sowell is brilliant.

I agree that white men have had significant power for centuries. At the same time if you seek to counter this by adding "positive discrimination" you have to acknowledge that this will negatively impact everyone else. Or do you disagree there is any external cost? This is the core of the problem with a positive discrimination approach.

Unfortunately, it appears to me, that the sociology departments that study this area and act as "thought leaders" seem to be doing a terrible job of navigating this tricky subject. In my view we all subconsciously know that this is an issue. The exposure of how badly sociology departments, even Cambridge's own dept, are run is the main story here.

Hear hear!

And he's opposed to DEI in the USA precisely because it leads to the kind of craziness we've witnessed in this case.

Assuming you think that was wrong, was that wrong because they were white or because it was discrimination?

The answer has to be, as non-white academics have already pointed out, for unis to treat their people with equality.

Cambridge didn’t - Arday’s peculiarities were shielded by aggressive counter accusations of racism that enabled his fabulism for 4 years and an autobiography to boot. Packed with new crazy, too good not to share.

Racists don’t give a bugger about being called racist, normals like us are the ones self-questioning & intimidated. Everyone in the press backed off, until they could no longer.

The big question - on what planet could Cambridge toffs not notice the guy was bonkers - remains.

Agree - but striking that there are so few examinations of the panel who hired him, lauded and enabled him given that all of this could have been prevented.

Yet all of a sudden, its of national import and effects us all to such an extent we MUST be allowed to talk about it?

It does affect people in the UK because Oxbridge (as well as LSE and Imperial) had the reputation as one of the leading academic institutions in the world. This reputation directly leads to funding for research which develops the UK economy. The Cambridge Science Park is an example. The reputation of Cambridge academics is vital to the businesses willing to invest in the UK. Foolish to ignore the impact on the economy.

A few people in Cambridge decided to make a recruitment decision which has impacted the reputation, worldwide. It cannot not be emphasised how significant this is. It's the Gerald Rayner PR disaster...his comments wiped £500million off the value of his company overnight...This scandal has done so much more damage and I feel for Cambridge students who are studying under this reputation cloud

I think it’s fairly obvious that ‘DEI’ has not been properly applied in this case. The point is about levelling the playing field, not holding back other players. A professorship reserved for black applicants would have been true EDI, with the best candidate being successful. We don’t yet know how this recruitment happened, but it clearly went wrong. It’s convenient to blame ‘DEI’ but that’s just ignorance of what it means (and the fact we don’t even use the term in the UK).

I guess the Cambridge inquiry into his appointment will cover that, assuming it still goes ahead.

@5128gap
Yet all of a sudden, its of national import and effects us all to such an extent we MUST be allowed to talk about it?

The bar for what we must be allowed to talk about should always be set very low.

One would hope it does. I mean though that the only others that appear to have been in the crosshairs are the colleague who had nothing to with the hiring decision. Where are the hit pieces on the head of department, the reviewers who let his articles go on to publication, the hiring panel, the Simon and schuster agents who were determined to continue the book tour and publication despite their obvious failure to fact check? I’m not suggesting the should have happened, just that the personal nature of the coverage continued to be directed at him, relentlessly. And no-one else who might also be considered culpable.

I’m interested why you think reserving a professorship for a black applicant (or any particular race) would be levelling the playing field.

Doesn’t it guarantee an un-level playing field, at least between races?

And given that professors aren’t fungible (academics are specialised in particular things) you are almost bound to end up with significantly worse appointments.