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

When what has been said about Arday what’s wrong? I don’t know what you mean. I haven’t said anything about my beliefs.

You could see it that way, or you could see it that as Arday doing the decent thing. Horses for courses.

I’m not going to keep explaining the same things I’ve already said, read (or don’t) and make up your own mind.

Thanks for sharing this. Some startling and pretty race-war stuff in there about driving out academics that don’t comply with a white supremacy agenda, and what sounds like really shoddy research.

And a strong indication of why he was hired and just how alarming that was for his colleagues.

Cofnas resigned (from the university) and was dismissed (from the college). So it’s splitting hairs to say one was held to a higher standard.

Arday resigned but may have been dismissed - although it would have been on the grounds of maybe making up parts of his back story rather than his academic work which had already been investigated. He shouldn’t have been hired for his back story, but it’s clear he was - and as that’s where the issue was then Cambridge would have had to admit they were wrong in hiring him and publicising his whole story - whether they’d have done so we’ll never know.

Cofnas committed more clearly sackable offences in promoting a full-on racist agenda and using slurs about race and disability.

So they didn’t transgress in the same way in terms of their employment.

All this has really done is highlight the poor practices in higher education.

That both got jobs, kept jobs and kept getting offers of jobs whilst being highly suspect (albeit in different ways) shows gaping holes in the hiring processes in the sytem.

@OneArtfulUmberSquid
Cofnas committed more clearly sackable offences in promoting a full-on racist agenda and using slurs about race and disability.

Is that what he was sacked for (well, let go from an unpaid position)?

The reporting at the time made it sound much more like it was for rejecting DEI. That should never be a sackable offence for an academic philosopher.

Neither supporting nor opposing DEI should be. Nor should concluding that population level IQ differences are mainly hereditary, mainly environmental, or somewhere in the middle. Nor should even arguing for one’s politics. A huge number of academics do that, and while I don’t much like the idea of the “activist scholar”, that has been embraced by lots of academia. They can’t then turn around and say that’s for us not for you, on depending on whether we like the politics.

The letter sent by Emmanuel College reads: “The Committee first considered the meaning of the blog and concluded that it amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies.”
^^
“The Committee concluded that the core mission of the College was to achieve educational excellence and that diversity and inclusion were inseparable from that. The ideas promoted by the blog therefore represented a challenge to the College’s core values and mission,” according to the letter.

https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/27420?

Rather disingenuous to not mention the real controversial line from the substack post, which was that the number of black professors at Harvard would “approach zero” in a meritocracy and “Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.”

It’s one thing to oppose ‘DEI’ , another to imply all successful black peope outside of sports and entertainment are only there because of it. As we’ve established, there were only a handful of black professors at that time but it a sizeable body of black students. Would you trust him as a colleague or supervisor after that? And even then, we all agree in employment contracts to uphold the values of the organisation. If he didn’t agree with equity, he shouldn’t have accepted the position. That would be like me getting a job with UKIP and then using my own blog to tell everyone how shit they are.

I suspect ‘not supporting DEI’ is polite for ‘loony who insists race determines how clever you are’. I didn’t know anyone tried that any more.

David Harris investigated the plagiarism thing very politely and justifiably.

The race questions in this case are awful. My view is a lot of the vast coverage was down to silly season/lack of news/clicks.

The ghastly thing is much of the initial click appeal was humour and a dash of enjoyable righteous indignation, snowballing as every morning’s piece dropped a new twist.

Not funny now, is it. Most of the outrage was aimed at Cambridge but Arday was fatally shot.

I presume he was suspended from Ghent for not adhering to the terms of his post doc and maybe his comments on disability and race.

He sued Cambridge over his dismissal but lost the case as the judge/adjudicator ruled it was fair - so anyone’s opinion about what is or isn’t a sackable offence is moot seeing as it’s already been legally tested.

Not intending to be disingenuous. Genuinely don’t see how that crosses any line at all for what a philosopher can claim. It’s an empirical claim that might be right or wrong.

The Harvard claim rests largely on their own submission to the Supreme Court, which said that if academic performance was the criteria, the Black share of admissions would drop from
about 15% to 0.7%.

afaik, the submission wasn’t talking about professors, but extending it is not a wild leap that could only be made by a bigot. If Black students are only 0.7% of elite academia, where is the pipeline for elite professors? In fact, that’s one of the main argument made in favour of affirmative action programmes.

Cofnas does think this is largely becuase of genes. That’s a controversial view but also not extreme in its field. Most people who study this believe that population IQ differences are some mix of nature and nurture. The view that it’s 100% one or 100% the other is the outlier.

So Cofnas’s offence seems to be to take two views, neither of which are extreme, put them next to each other, and draw inferences about society as a result.

If that’s out of bounds for philosophy then philosophy is dead.

In case you think I’m arguing this partisanly, I was on MN last week strongly defending the Cambridge Muslim academic who was critical of western education on the grounds that it undermines values of Islam. If we don’t let academics express views that are controversial then let’s shut down all of the humanities and save ourselves the money.

One can certainly debate that! Should debate have stopped when Maya Forstater lost her first case?

I think what the tribunal found that he wasn’t fully protected by the EA. If you were sacked for loving Man United, that’s also not EA protected. Would you call it a “sackable offence” too?

It’s a claim, I’m not sure it’s empirical, given it doesn’t have a sound evidence base. And he is not an empiricist.

I think to be fair the Harvard position was based on qualifications rather than performance, which isn't wholly semantic. And still, there are ways to explore and discuss that don’t alienate and actually further the debate. Having listened to Cofnas speak I think it’s possible that he’s constantly failing to explain his position - he’s an unimpressive communicator in many ways and has chosen his platforms poorly. The Starkey interview was grotesque. But given the stakes he should either get better at it or shut up. I’m inclined to think he’s hiding behind the ‘Harvard said it first’ because it aligns with his commitment to an IQ hierarchy that places him higher than others. So smart he can’t learn to keep his mouth shut before he makes himself unemployable. He’s found a way to make himself feel special and vindicated. As he said, not everyone is smart enough to be a professor.

Of course he can put any views together and come up with whatever inferences he likes, and I defend his right to do that. Civilisation and science depend on freedom of thought and expression. What he cannot do without legitimate criticism is claim an evidence base that doesn’t exist, or point to the evidence that does exist and gloss over the significant flaws in it.

I don’t know the field well enough to judge the details of his claim. But I know it well enough to know his claims aren’t extreme outliers amongst researchers, but rather towards one end of a spectrum.

The big difference, you are right, is that the usual thing when an academic reaches a stigmatised conclusion is to avoid saying the point plainly. I actually think there is merit in saying things plainly. Whether that’s the Muslim academic that many right wingers were cross with last week or Cofnas who the left are cross with this week. Then the point can be argued with and argued about on its merits.

On this particular topic, there are obvious historical and social reasons why it’s stigmatised.

But Cofnas’s political point is specifically against obfuscation. That’s the “revolution” bit. He is anti DEI and his point is that opponents of DEI will keep failing unless they are prepared to provide a cogent alternative explanation for big outcome disparities other than systemic bias. So saying the taboo bit of his belief is not an accident but is central.

You can agree or disagree with either his facts or his tactics, but it should all be doable within academia, unless we think academia should have nothing to say on social issues.

To be a success in life, a good tutor, a good leader does not only depend on your academic achievements - so to use that as the criteria for choosing candidates for senior university posts would be detrimental to the university overall - unless research was the sole role of the uni

It does surprise me that people can't see how poor Cofnas's argument is and think that because there's a statistic in there from Harvard, it actually holds up.

His argument is as follows

1. If Harvard only accepted based on academics, 0.7% of students would be black, far less than currently

2. Accepting based on academics only would be the best way to decide who gets to go to Harvard (this would be a true meritocracy)

3. Applications to Harvard are representative of the academic distribution of the population and not a biased sample

4. Professors at Harvard only come from students at Harvard

5. How suitable someone is to be a professor at Harvard matches their academic record at the end of high school

6. All high profile positions outside of being a professor at Harvard except for in sport and entertainment would be best filled by people who did well academically in high school - this would be a true 'meritocracy'.

To break it down:

1. he got those stats from Harvard. This is the only defensible part of his argument. People seem to think that the rest follows from this.

2. The other criteria are character, extra-curriculars and athletics. He makes no effort to dismiss those as relevant to suitability to study at Harvard, it's just assumed that they are there to improve diversity. Yet UK universities also select based on those criteria and always have done. You want to be a well-rounded candidate who shows resilience, independence, leadership and so on and UCAS personal statements are specifically constructed to help you show this. Exceptional candidates get lower offers because the university wants them.

3. obviously false

4. obviously false

5. That would be an indictment on university teaching if they can't improve their intake in any way

6. This is the wildest leap of all. That all the things that he dismisses as being relevant to what makes a good Harvard student are also irrelevant to all high profile positions in society. Like all politicians or CEOs or whatever need no personality, people skills, ability to communicate, resilience, just a good high school record.

His argument is just bullshit. And he's a philosopher. Philosophers are trained in logical argument and he is apparently a clever philosopher who has got into hard-to-get-into programs. Therefore he should know that his argument is bullshit.

Either he is thick and doesn't know the flaws in his argument, therefore he's a diversity hire to prove that the university is a bastion of free speech (or standards are really low in the philosophy dept as well as education)

Or he started with point 6, which his is opinion because he's a racist and tried to construct an argument to support it and did some hand waving to obfuscate the lack of coherence and logic.

I disagree.

I think 1 is true. 2 is a values statement for sure (how one defines meritocracy in the context of a university). But I also don’t think it’s a crazy conception of what meritocracy in a university means either. Like, if I told you that elite football clubs were simply selecting for the best footballers, you might think there are other important things that should go in, but they aren’t committing some sort of obvious idiocy with that criterion. [eta: I do know that Oxbridge is much more academics-focused than Ivies. I think both have their merits. Jesus College Oxford’s admissions tutor is very interesting on this on YouTube. Always saying for Oxbridge admission talk about “super-curriculars”, ie things that relate to the academic interest and go beyond it, and don’t labour “extra-curriculars” like leadership, sports, etc which are basically ignored.]

I don’t think 3, 4, 5 are required for his argument. I doubt he claims them.

I think 6 is his most questionable claim, but I haven’t studied the data enough to have a proper view.

He doesn’t need to believe that prominent positions go to the top-performing students in some linear way (definitely false if he does think that). His claim is about what one should expect about a population that has a mean tested IQ (for whatever reason) about 1sd below the overall population (in the US. No idea if he is claiming globally but presumably not). I really don’t know enough about what the ingredients are for “prominence” in all different fields to know if that’s plausible or not.

Analogy: the best basketball players are definitely not just the tallest people. There’s loads more that goes into it. Height can even anti-correlate with other success measures at elite levels. But Cofnas’s analogous claim is that if you have a population where the average height (holding distribution constant) is 1sd below the overall mean, you should expect to get near nil elite basketball players from that group.

Whether that’s plausible or not depends on how many fields are to tested IQ as basketball is to height. That I don’t know. Intuitively it feels quite plausible for things like law, much less so for entrepreneurialism or politics.

You're bringing IQ into it, yet his argument didn't mention IQ.

This was his argument

"Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. (Even that might be an overestimate, since high-school credentials are sometimes given a boost by affirmative action.) In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%. Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment."

Do you not see the hand waving? Judging only by academic qualifications becomes 'meritocracy' rather than something that needs justifying. Harvard applicants are extrapolated to represent the entire population. High profile positions outside of universities are assumed to be best filled by someone who did well in high school.

It's a crap argument. I'm assuming that you are trying to bring in arguments he has made outside of this one to prop it up, but that would just be agreeing that it has holes in it.

Philosophers shouldn't be making arguments that have massive holes in them.

I read it as a one-paragraph sketch of the argument, not the fully argued version. I’ve never read a Cofnas peer-reviewed paper but if it’s like that then it would be woeful. But I’ve read plenty of Substacks and that’s not out of line.

The tested IQ bit is becuase I do know enough about Cofnas to know that that’s actually what he rests his argument on, and that his root claim about the distributions does just seem basically borne out by the US data (setting aside the question of the cause. I’ve no informed view on that either way).

Given the distributions, I think Cofnas’s claim moves from “self-evidently false” to “feels like an overstatement given that quite a lot of fields probably aren’t like basketball, would need to look much more carefully at each field”.

Then he has bamboozled you, as I suspect was his intention.

If he had a fully argued version, he'd have argued it, and he cannot flesh out that argument because it doesn't stand logically as presented. Mathematicians do this sometimes, present the basics of an argument and say 'proof: trivial' or 'left as an exercise for the reader'. When they do this, bits missing from their argument are obvious, or arguable. The bits missing from his argument are not arguable and the missing assumptions are wrong.

You don't go around as a serious academic drawing headline-grabbing and extremely offensive conclusions like 'black people wouldn't occupy high profile positions outside of sports and entertainment' from 'one paragraph sketches' that you intend to flesh out later. You go into it damned sure you can justify it. Except he doesn't. He handwaves. He wanted the conclusion and he bodged the argument.

Who would want that conclusion enough to bodge the argument? Not a serious academic, but a racist.

As an aside, I've seen people claim that his conclusion is incorrect and have people come back with 'but the data isn't his, the data is actually provided by Harvard'. It's not the data that's the problem with his argument, but it seems you can always fool people into sounding more clever and sciencey than you actually are by presenting a statistic.

@GeneralPeter @noblegiraffe massively enjoyed your recent posts.

Can’t Cofnas be a philosopher and a racist? He appears to be trying. I don’t think you’ll get the public acknowledging the difference between his two chosen missions.

I appreciate being deliberately misleading and offensive is hard to defend for all sorts of reasons but has to stand under free speech. Not least so we can debunk it.

We all know what Gen Z think of being offended, however. No debunking opportunities allowed.

I think someone said he was favouring Jews in his Harvard claims as he is Jewish but as I understand it Asian students would get by far the most places in a meritocratic uni -Jews, white and black people fewer

It’s pathetic of them to pretend to have an issue with him. But if Cofnas is subject to the same scrutiny he insisted Arday be subject to he can hardly complain. Having previously read his blog he is an open white supremacist and vile little racist which he has never hidden.

(I have be also seen critiques of his work and what was interesting is while he appeared in the comments to argue back, he never did with with an incredibly well articulated and clearly evidence rationale for why he’s wrong.

Hold on:

Senior academics at the University of Ghent are so appalled at being forced to work with Israel-supporting racist Nathan Cofnas that they wrote a whole paper for the university’s management about his lack of qualifications and his “shoddy” and evidence-free work. And before anyone concludes that they are merely trying to distance themselves from his role in triggering the lethal media pile-on against the late Prof Jason Arday, no. They wrote the paper months before the pile-on and Arday’s subsequent death.

So as well as a racist with an especially passionate loathing for black people…he also appears to be a hypocrite.

(I have no idea what that link is.)

Yes, Asians more than double their share. That’s what led to the lawsuit where this data had to be disclosed. All other groups down (from a bit to a lot).

I may not have a firm view on the hereditarian point, and I can see arguments for selecting on a broad range of things not just academics. But I think whatever the right solution is, one that more than halves the share given to one specific group (Asians) cannot possibly be just. They get to carry the weight of all the other group preferences it seems. (Including the white preference that arises via legacy preference).

Again you are doing the handwavy Cofnas thing of assuming that basing entry purely on academics is the 'meritocratic' way of rating people.

Is the hothoused child from an elite private school with no interests outside of doing school work a better candidate for university than someone who got lower results but worked two jobs while attending some terrible school that is more likely to see its pupils end up in prison than Harvard? I mean, those are two extreme examples but Cofnas's argument hinges on that being true.