Jason Arday, Cambridge Plagiarist?

[Angeruish]

I’m surprised to be the first to mention this, but what do people think about Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism, and the media row that is brewing around him?

For those that don’t know, three years ago Arday became – at 37 – the youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge. Arday claims to have been diagnosed with autism at an early age, and says he couldn’t speak until he was eleven, and apparently only learnt how to read and write at eighteen.

The appointment, made when BLM issues were very much in the news, was made despite allegations of plagiarism in Arday’s doctorate, which were dismissed by Cambridge as being beyond its purview, and because he had been cleared by the awarding institution, Liverpool John Moores.

Those allegations have resurfaced in the past few days, with examples that certainly seem fairly damning, including a misplaced s apostrophe in the title of part of his doctoral thesis (An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research). This blatant error seems to have originated in a phrase supposedly lifted from the thesis he allegedly plagiarised, although in that original case it formed part of a sentence in which it was grammatically correct.

My experience of dipping at random into the paper, which is available online, immediately showed a number of other very basic spelling and other mistakes, almost as if it had not been proofread at all.

In an abstract (the summary written by the author, which is placed right at the beginning of an academic paper) from a different 2018 Arday paper, the following three grammatical/spelling errors occur within a single paragraph of just 160 words (again, this can easily be found online):
This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling method, which operates…
powerful ways in racism unfolds within in the Academy…
dismantle inequity in all its suboardinated forms…

There are now reports that Cambridge – which insists that Arday is the victim of a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility” – is, perhaps not surprisingly, facing a “staff revolt” over the issue. Arday himself complains of “dark arts” being used against him, and says that autism led him to rely heavily on mimicry to make sense of information.

On the web you can find reports of various claims made by Arday (though several universities seem to be scaling them down, now that the spotlight is upon them). And yes, I have copied some of these:

• To have finished his PhD in 2½ years while working full-time and living with a brain tumour.
• To have featured on a television show that ran over a decade before he was born.
• To have run thirty marathons in 35 days, despite having experienced an epileptic fit, a seizure and a leg fracture. He also says he has run 600 miles in six days, just fifty miles short of the world record (no evidence of these extraordinary feats appears to exist, nor have witnesses come forward to testify to them.
• To have raised over five million pounds for charity (when challenged in recent days over this, Arday said this was done in association with others, who he declined to name because, he said, he had signed non-disclosure agreements that stopped him from doing so).
• To have played football and snooker professionally (no indication is given as to how Arday might have communicated on a football pitch when mute, as he says he was until the age of eleven).
• To have had a stroke immediately after graduating, causing him to lose his memory of working on his PhD.
• To have two GCSEs, in PE and Textiles (no timeline is given for when he is supposed to have taken these exams, but both of them would presumably have involved some writing – a skill that he apparently only acquired at age 18).
• To sleep only two hours per night.

Try searching online..... even "The Guardian" has now decided he is not everything he claims to be. So what do people think, and what does it say about higher education nowadays???

It’s a strange tale and Arday is obviously a fantasist. However until the last few days newspapers and the BBC were happy to believe these unlikely tales.
I’m not an academic so I don’t know whether his academic work is good or not.

It's possible he really believes the stories he's told about himself - i.e. he's confabulating rather than lying.

What a shit show. Those who promoted him should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

I wonder what it says about academic standards at LJMU
And about the recruitment process at Cambridge.
Neither come out of this looking good imo

It’s making me wonder why I am fretting over my PhD (am in the 4th/final write-up year.)

I was diagnosed AuDHD during it - assessed bcos both my Dc are and autism is a core component of the research project.

it sounds as tho Liverpool JHU didn’t do its due diligence OR given the climate around DEI was too scared to? For disability spelling/ grammar can be excluded from the marking criteria, so I am less fazed by this aspect, but turnitin should have picked up those quotes and the fact that they were not presented as such nor referenced. His director of studies and supervisors should have seen it multiple times during his period of study and done the turnitin check at the time of submission before passing it up the chain. The academic staff invited to conduct and chair the Viva should have also done so - otherwise how can they have interrogated him on it?

Has it been proven that he plagiarised other people's work? Or just suspected of doing so?

His claims do seem pretty far fetched. Like some of it, maybe. But all of those things together do sound kinda implausible.

If what he says about not being able to read til 18 is true then it wouldn't surprise me that there's plenty of SPAG errors in his work. But I guess I'm surprised it wasn't proof read and corrected by an editor before actually being publicly published.

I've not been following closely, but the dailymail.com making this their top story repeatedly, always focusing on race in the headline, seems horribly racist.

There have always been a few rogue academics, is this really worth the hype?

Try searching online..... even "The Guardian" has now decided he is not everything he claims to be. So what do people think, and what does it say about higher education nowadays???

That it’s been captured, like so many other fields and organisations, and that we are being instructed not to believe the evidence of our own eyes, and deny our knowledge of the world and how it works.

His director of studies and supervisors should have seen it multiple times during his period of study and done the turnitin check at the time of submission before passing it up the chain.

Someone did spot the plagiarism and the TES was going to write about it, but when Arday - or maybe someone else at Cambridge, was asked about this, they received a warning from Carter Ruck solicitors so the piece wasn’t published.

I genuinely don’t understand why, when people read utterly obviously outlandish bollocks, they think “wow what an amazing person” rather than “get out you fucking liar”. It’s the Salt Path and “Dr” Jessica Taylor all over again. How do they get so far in life before it all unravels?!

Has it been proven that he plagiarised other people's work? Or just suspected of doing so?

He doesn't deny the plagiarism in his PhD- his argument is that he didn't receive adequate supervision and therefore wasn't aware it was an issue.

I do wonder whether he is a fantasist rather than just a liar. I also agree with PP that parts of the press have leapt on this story and are using it as part of a general anti-DEI argument- I simply cannot believe that the world at large is that interested in the activities of an academic that hardly anyone outside his field had ever heard of- the story fits a wider right wing narrative about DEI.

As well as race, the story is being used as a way to comment on the application of the social model of disability to neurodivergence in academia- comment from Kathleen Stock "at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well."

All of this is massively unhelpful to the numerous excellent academics who are black and/or neurodivergent who may now face even more discrimination. The whole thing is a massive shitshow and huge failure on the part of the people who should have been both supporting and challenging Arday.

How do they get so far in life before it all unravels?!

I agree, but as a pp pointed out, Arday may be a genuine fantasist who believes his own tales. I had a relation like this who told the most outlandish stories including, iirc, that he taught Ayrton Senna to drive, and he, the relation, was on the front line of the Paris 1968 evenements hurling Molotov cocktails at the chief of Paris police.

The whole thing is a massive shitshow and huge failure on the part of the people who should have been both supporting and challenging Arday.

@Rubicons what do you think Cambridge should do now?

As far as I can see Cambridge are still saying nothing to see here. As long as they do that it will feed the Daily Mail.

All lies. not mentioned is his incredible charity fundraising too

@38thparallel In the short-medium term, they should be supporting and protecting him. I can't imagine how awful it must be to be in the eye of the storm like this and to have every racist halfwit against you. I hope they are advising him on how to approach things and whether or not to give interviews etc.

In the longer term, I don't know and I think it probably depends on how much of all this has been deliberate lying rather than confabulation. But it should be dealt with as a private employment matter not trial by media.

I’ve been following this on X, whilst others dig deeper. Once the Guardian no longer has his back……

Admittedly I am an accountant, not an educational sociologist(?), knowing plenty of STEM academics, but I am struggling to see how what appeared to be a literature review and talking to a few trainee teachers about reflective practice was something worthy of a PhD. I could probably produce something similar, sat down for a couple of weekends with an academic library sub and Google AI.

I wonder what Simon & Schuster are going to do about his book (which is presumably boxed up and ready to be shipped).

It was as if he kept inventing more and more outrageous back stories (the pig’s head, for example), to goad people into investigating.

All very odd, and I feel sorry for the genuine senior academics who might get tarred with the same “diversity hire” brush.

“Incredible” seems to be very much the operative word

Transparency is key.

I sort agree with this - we know that academics are caught plagiarising and loose their tenures etc as a result. The problem is that most of them were not the poster child of specific causes - autism, BLM - and their lack of celebrity outside their specific academic spheres means that their professional falls from grace are largely hushed up by the institutions they work for or were awarded their degrees from and they are encouraged/helped to go away quietly.

However, I’m not sure it is quite racist - if his race and autism were the fast-track tickets that greased the rails to move him along in academic and get him to that role, there will necessarily be justifiable pique that that was ‘abused’ - ie that it lead to significant failures in academic protocol and oversight - and equal outrage that it undermines the achievements of other black or autistic individuals, or may lead to repercussions for those currently in the system.

I wish they would just take the ‘black/autistic’ out of the headlines, ie stop foregrounding it there, and look to explaining the way the DEI system has either been played by him personally or led to massive breaches in academic oversight in LJHU and others - including Cambridge as they absolutely SHOULD have been 100% certain (by doing their own review of his work) prior to appointment that there was nothing lacking. Because of the scrutiny his appointment was going to inevitably make, they should have doubled their efforts, not waved away concerns.

I saw this reported on the bbc. One issue may be unfortunate, but the cumulative effect of all these issues is to make one inclined not to believe a word he says.

He doesn't deny the plagiarism in his PhD- his argument is that he didn't receive adequate supervision and therefore wasn't aware it was an issue.

How do you get to Ph.D. level and not know that plagiarism is a big no no?

Ph.D. students aren't supposed to need handholding and spoonfeeding by supervisors.

I am more and more thankful that I did my degrees when I did, when they were still worth something.

How do you get to Ph.D. level and not know that plagiarism is a big no no?
Ph.D. students aren't supposed to need handholding and spoonfeeding by supervisors.

Of course. I didn't say it as a defence of Arday but as a response to the person I quoted who asked whether the plagiarism allegations were proven. They are not denied.

I am more and more thankful that I did my degrees when I did, when they were still worth something.

This is the real harm because most PhD students work extremely hard and take great care to avoid plagiarism.

I'm a person who left education after A levels. I was left unimpressed and underwhelmed with his interviews about his rise to become a Cambridge Professor. He seemed nice enough but not particularly eloquent/academic/intelligent - I couldn't honestly see why he was such an impressive candidate to warrant such a prestigious position. It all seems a bit 'Emperor's New Clothes'.

Perhaps you should read the article rather than dismissing it as Mailonline racism - if only half true it’s an incredible deceit!

The Good Law Project currently have an open letter in support of him. It’s quite hard to find on their website now though.

Yes, this is a big issue over the impact this has on the credibility of people with disabilities. I have deliberately NOT logged my AuDHD with the university or asked for accommodations or adjustments. I have only flagged it within my reflexive commentary/statement of interests [and discussed it with my supervisors] so that I can speak freely about autism without anyone stating that I am being ableist or otherwise am not ‘qualified’ or permitted to discuss the issue, in the way that some people take issue with white authors/academics having black main characters or discussing race issues.

My DS is going to uni in Sept and whilst we will log his Autism/ADHD with the disability team, I have counselled him not to discuss or disclose it outside those who need to know or unless he feels utterly safe in doing so. Ironically, Physics is massively populated by ND students and ND researchers/staff so most Unis are very ND friendly. Nonetheless, i would hate for his achievements to be derided and devalued because of the likely negative push back arising from this case.