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

I usually use Instagram for fun stuff (those skateboarding dogs!) but Issy Vine popped up yesterday with her awful list and I was surprised Lanre Bakare and Tyler Austin Harper were on it. Most of the comments were dross about white supremacy from verbose young women.

I guess these are who some others are referring to as the left, though I don’t recognise them as even political. It’s all culture war, a dash of activism, but no politics to speak of. I think I’m just old.

I am holding people to account for their actions

YOU are conducting a witch hunt

The first person I saw with a list was Will Self. I found it pretty shocking, tbh. What is supposed to be the outcome of that?

Quite. J’accuse Will Self of being a bit of a pompous prick.

Byline Times are a bunch of loons on a glorified micro-blogging site, they're no better than Guido Fawkes.
The Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday doesn't become an actual thing instead of a wacky conspiracy theory Just Because You Capitalise the First Letter of Each Word
Here's the owner fantasizing that he could have saved JA if he'd returned from his holiday sooner, it's disgusting and not responsible journalism to talk about suicide in this way.

Re. Cofnas - yes, he holds what most people think of as despicably racist views. But he was at Cambridge on a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship, I gather. These are really competitive, with a success rate (to application) of about 10-15% And there's information on the public record that Arday got the Cambridge post over 2 more senior women of colour. He also was in discussions with the Guardian about putting his own side of the story, after putting Carter Ruck onto Jack Groves of the Times Higher (a very reputable journal for HE), and siccing the police onto a journalist just doing his job. There's a trail of really problematic issues ... nothing criminal, nothing overtly awful, but enough to make thinking people suspicious or uncomfortable.

On the other hand Dr Arday served as a useful stooge for somewhere like Cambridge - look, we've got black professors! etc etc If you've heard him speak, you know he's engaging, and interesting, with good stuff to say. BUt nothing extraordinary. If Cambridge had appointed him overtly & expressly as a public spokesman on issues of literacy and as an advocate for black boys & lifting their levels of achievement, that would have been honest & very useful & important work to do.

We should also reflect on how we mix up the message with the messenger, in our desire for "authenticity" (Exhibits 1 to 1 million: The Salt Path). What if a middle-aged white woman had been saying the same things as Arday (well, the woman who's work he plagiarised, for example!)? Would she have been invited everywhere, asked to edit the Today programme, etc etc.

I think not.

I really feel for black early career academics - Arday's smokescreen has made a hard career just that much harder.

I have found a couple of podcasts wth useful more long form reflection rather than pious platitudes:

Successive episodes of The Two Matts, including Matt D'Ancona's knowledgeable defence of academic rigour & explanation of why plagiarism is such a sin

Meghan Murphy on The Same Drugs discussing with Marie Kawther Douade her latest book, Not Your Victim (published by pretty left wing Polity Press, a legit political publisher). Really interesting conversation from a Moroccan-African-French woman at Oriel, Oxford.

Murphy ran Feminist Current for a long time & her story of a move away from identitarian politics as a feminist is fascinating.

@Wadsworthy thanks for those recommendations.

And @DrudgeJedd no useful comment, just that I love your user name!

@Wadsworthy I’m not actually sure this has disadvantaged black academics even more. Ones were disadvantaged when he was appointed. Maybe sex discrimination should have come into
it if they were better suited to the post?

Now, I would love to see the best people getting the jobs. No agenda and no bias. There are plenty of black people who fit this profile and they are disadvantaged by no one if recruitment processes are fair. As it turned out, Arday disadvantaged them. The future could be better. Would they maybe like to get the job on merit and not favouritism?

Nothing like a bit of public self-flagellation to signal your virtue to the public, eh, Jukes? What a pile of self-serving crap.

As for the idea that his article would have changed anything - the problem wasn't that people were duped by a racism campaign, the problem is that the racist campaign publicised a genuine issue that previous, more valid routes had been prevented from publicising using lawyers and the police. The suppression of the story became part of the story.

Yes @MeetMeOnTheCorner I take your point - black academics are disadvantaged, although I'm wondering about proportion of global majority academics in UKHE relation to proportion in the general population? I know that the UK HE professoriate has only around 20% women, when we make up a bit over 50% of the population, so we still have a long way to go with regards to sex, as well as race.

When you say this
Now, I would love to see the best people getting the jobs. No agenda and no bias.

I can't help wondering if our definitions of "best" and our criteria for "the best person for the job" are what needs examining.

There are people looking for addresses. It’s just as grim as the worst excesses of the media they claim to hate.

What was the "agenda" of the TES reporter whose scrutiny was shut down by heavy duty lawyers (BEFORE the public revelation of Cofnas)?
And as other PP have said, the "agenda" that any academic institution is supposed to have is to educate students by giving them access to the best academic educators they can afford. It's not to change society to suit an ideological imperative.

They're marching under the banner of a rat's anus but never once stop to think 'are we the baddies?'

What's quite funny about that Byline Times article is that it treats Arday as a reliable source.

An ideology is just a system of a system of ideas and ideals, so every institution or structure is ideological. The same with an agenda. That can include figures such as Thiel funding Polygenic Scores to push a particular perspective, or institutions declaring their adherence to certain DEI policies.

Universities are complex organisations with many - often competing - agendas and ideologies sometimes tied in with funding, sometimes with adhering to other imperatives, as well as competitive and sometimes resentful individuals who have a stronger sense of individual autonomy and agency than employees in other organisations (that's well-documented). We've all seen press coverage of what happens when the tensions between academic freedom/insitutional ethos or agenda/freedom of speech reach breaking point.

If you look at any university's mission statement, or even the ways academic awards are described you'll see that changing society and what might be thought of as EDI are frequently mentioned. For example, for a doctoral award in the UK, graduates are expected to 'build relationships with peers, senior colleagues, students and stakeholders with sensitivity to equality, diversity and cultural issues.' The National Framework for Qualifications in Ireland describes one outcome of doctorates as 'Scrutinise and reflect on social norms and
relationships and lead action to change them' - the UK has something similar as it's in alignment with EU awards.

What it means to 'educate' students or what it is to be an 'educator' is continually shifting, so I don't think there's any common sense or consensus on what that actually means.

I do think everyone should be attentive to who or what organisations/networks fund or have influence in universities, and ignoring the role of Thiel (in this instance) is in itself to adhere to a particular ideology or agenda. We're creatures of our environment including the news/media environment and fundamentally hard-wired to find certain narratives exciting or unusual, or to be attracted to ideas of the truth, villains, heroes and so on but as adults we also have to follow the money, accept our own biases, and not be stimulated into a mob mentality.

I assume that ‘not be stimulated into a mob mentality’ covers those now trying to whip up hate against those journalists @OneArtfulUmberSquid ?

@Wadsworthy All employers should draw up criteria for jobs and candidates should be measured against them. For academics it could be the quality of academic output? Then they judge that and consider it against that of the other candidates. There’s lots of things they could look at - eg student engagement with the academic. What they should not do is look at colour and age above other, more rigorous, criteria.

Covers everyone - I don't think anyone (me included) can help being caught up in big and interesting news stories, and I often don't or CBA to do due diligence and fall prey to confirmation bias. With this one, I think I was probably wrong in terms of my initial response and jumped to certain conclusions - and then others.

Not a conspiracy theorist, but reading that article about Thiel reinforced my sense that at this stage I don't really have a fixed position on it other than to pray for the people most directly affected by JA's death and keep my counsel on how it all developed or is developing, and that I don't think anyone should be speaking with absolute certainty about what happened, what it meant/indicates, nor why it received so much coverage.

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.

Going back to your OP, @OneArtfulUmberSquid and I agree that this was a big part of the issue over the appointment of Dr Arday. If he'd been appointed as some sort of outreach tutor, I think it would have been very different.

But he was appointed to a very high status (a chair at Cambridge) partly on his backstory. Interesting that women's backstories are rarely seen as significant in their appointment to high-rank academic posts; in fact, most women's backstories are seen to be a problem, obstacles to their appointment.

On the latest Two Matts podcast, Matt D'Ancona gave a list of a number of academics who've been sacked or put under extreme pressure by the press (or both) - it's sadly quite substantial. Think Kathleen Stock, for example. But her backstory was used to abuse her even further.

@Wadsworthy Surely Stock was under the most pressure from Sussex!! Why do we keep saying it’s the press? Yes, it would have stayed quiet if there had been no press coverage, but were they wrong? Her university’s failure to act was the issue yet again.

Also don’t forget the mainstream press often pick up stories from the specialist press if it looks interesting. There might not have been much interest in Arday at all if Cambridge had not trumpeted his appointment. Who normally cares about any of this? Not many people. Then he wrote a book that the press reviewed. Of course they would! He was interesting to say the least and his lies were then open in full gaze of the journalists and it didn’t add up. I think they have every right to bring us such abuse of position and power.

Almost every job has people who

I don't know about how women's back stories are handled, but the emphasis by Cambridge was deeply unsettling - as Jason Okandaye said 'Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race'.

The promotion of that sort of inspo-porn/Oprah-fication of disability/race doesn't help anyone, and must have piled the pressure on JA to live up to his billing as mister magic (and maybe keep embellishing it? who knows).

Cambridge clearly believed he was autistic and had overcome seemingly insurmountable odds so it seems irresponsible of them to show him off the way he did. His seeking publicity could be seen as congruent with the terms of the appointment.

On a selfish note, as an academic, if I'd lost out to JA and had a stronger academic track record I'd have probably been a bit miffed.

@OneArtfulUmberSquid Only a BIT miffed! Is this not part of the problem too? Were the black women academics meant to join his cheerleaders too? Stay quiet about fair and responsible appointment processes and join in with the adulation? I’d be seething!

Out of interest, what was wrong about your initial response?

Academics are targeted if they don't go along with the big bag of progressive ideas. Kathleen Stock challenged TWAW so was ripe for a pile-on by her university and, depressingly, by many of the students.

Jason Arday fitted right in with the big bag of progressive ideas, being both black and ND so he was championed and promoted by his univerisity.

It's all a bit crazy really and doesn't help anyone in the long run.

Well I don't know really how I'd feel. I looked at the job description - he could be described as having met the criteria - but then the public statement from Cambridge was about stuff that nobody could compete with - so I wonder if someone was more qualified on paper would they have a case against the University for unfairness seeing as the criteria weren't have a great back story?