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???

Jesus College is… special.

His high profile and Cambridge professorship opened up other lucrative side gigs. He may well have paid Carter Ruck himself. There’s a post on Twitter (sorry can’t link) of a talk he did at Soc Gen about overcoming his autism etc for which he wld have been paid a tidy sum. Organised by their well-being/mental health team. Organisations are desperate to spend money on such things to show they care about DEI and their workforce. In this particular case the Twitter poster is feeling very hurt and let down on behalf of her SEND son, as Arday’s story of triumph over adversity gave false hope to parents.

There are lots of second order effects of Arday’s promotion. Those who facilitated it have done a lot of harm.

As an aside, this farrago seems to have revealed that a Cambridge prof earns £100k which is not bad at all. Is there any objective evidence that anyone in the Faculty of Education is worth such a salary? More than a lot of school heads!

MailOnline is reporting that there’s been a drop-out from the GLP petition letter.

Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, disappeared from an open letter supporting him

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16025369/President-Cambridge-college-quietly-withdraws-open-letter-support-plagiarism-row-professor.html

He came to speak at my institution and my department and team were involved in the travel arrangements etc, so he was brought in to say hello. He was a very sweet, shy young man but seriously the reverence with which he was ushered in and the speed in which he was whisked away - I felt as though I’d just met Michael Jackson or perhaps the Dalai Lama 😆

Don't mind your detailed response at all - I'm just getting my head around it all ref my daughter's aspirations (and half-minded to dissuade her). I get your point around the international students aspect but taking UK students only, there's no getting away from the fact privately educated kids still are hugely over-represented given their minority numbers in the overall demographic (6-7%).

As far as I know ref the contextual offers and the pathway programmes - you have to tick several boxes in order to be eligible - my daughter wouldn't likely be as the only boxes we tick are postcode decile (lowest) plus state school educated (not even sure that counts as DC go to grammar school and have also been in private ed for 4 years before that.

Current UK stats for private ed admissions for Oxbridge is something like 35-40%, and by college some colleges as high as 55% and some as low as 5%.

Was reflecting on all this with an old university friend - both of us 1st gen in the family etc, but both only received offers for the universities we did not have interviews for. We felt this was the most meritocratic as ultimately we couldn't shine our way through it with all our super-curriculars (good job as neither of us came from remotely cultured families, the only books in my house were one encyclopaedia and some Readers Digest) and it was done on grades alone.

This is so frustrating to read. I can understand that having personal experience of a condition gives more insight, but there are also so many problems - it limits people to artistic endeavours within their own experience and, as autism campaigners/activists like to say "if you've met one person with autism you've met one person with autism".

You shouldn't be insulted by the poster, you should be insulted that this counts as PhD work in educational research. It's crap most undergraduates could pull off.

Not sure where you’re getting your stats from. Cambridge publish a very comprehensive document for each admissions cycle. The most recent one for 2025 has for U.K. students (“home students”), 27.5% from independent schools.

It does vary from college to college. As an aside, Fitz where Andy Burnham claims to have been a fish out of water as a state school northerner, had 85% from state schools. It has always favoured/been more open to state school applicants. (AB seems to be another Cambridge fantasist?!)

https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/apply/before/application-statistics

I know exactly what she is talking about.

Not people who do fine with doing what needs to be done as an academic, whatever their diagnosis.

She is talking about people who are unable to meet those requirements.

Because they are being framed as disabilities, and so need to be mitigated by the university in order to be fair.

An example, a friend of mine teaches in law school. There are students there who are being given accommodations for things like not needing to meet deadlines, not needing to have good spelling, not having to present, not having to answer questions or speak in class, having someone to summarize reading for them.

So they are graduating students who in fact will never function as lawyers.

I understand why people feel it's unfair. I majored in a field with significant requirements for rote memorization. Which I stink at, my ADHD brain struggles. I managed just to pass those courses, I did very well, almost without effort, at other requirements, which arguably are higher order them memorization.

I would have loved to go on to graduate work, and in a way it seemed unfair that as a quick thinking person I wasn't going to make it because of something as stupid as memory work.

But the reality is, I don't have the right qualities of mind, which are rare actually, to be an academic in that discipline. And in hindsight I wouldn't have loved it because the kind of slow, detailed work that it requires at a higher level is also not something I love, for the same reasons I struggle with the rote work.

Academia is a bit like elite sports. Most people aren't suited, they don't have the right natural skills and brain.

Trying to push people through because they have a diagnosis, and it has to be fair, is nuts.

how so?

I think this raises so many questions.

If George with dyslexia can't spell, and I am just a bad speller, why do I get dinged for submitting work full of errors and he doesn't? Is it because we give his inability to spell a name?

And if spelling really doesn't matter, it's not an inherent requirement, why does anyone get dinged for it?

What is the degree supposed to mean anyway?

There is a fundamental difference between making “reasonable adjustments” to allow someone to produce work of the required standards and pushing someone through despite mediocre output. The work has to be judged on its merits.

I studied classics, as a woman, while it was indeed mostly men in my department. Which was fine with me because our interests were the same.

There were departments with mainly women students. I was not so interested in those disaplines.

I do not understand this idea that we all have to like the same things.

I think that what you articulate isn't unreasonable - allowing for the fact that different people would draw the line in different places. But I also think that Stock, assuming this is what she meant, utterly failed to articulate it. Not everyone reading her article will make those mental corrections, unfortunately.

But I fear you are perhaps misinterpreting the purpose of my needing to disclose and acknowledge that I am autistic. The novel is not autiobiographical, so it’s not about my personal experience of autism - there are several autistic characters. The ‘if you met one autistic person’ thing would only be relevant if I was the only autistic person I had ever known, but I am not. Have half a dozen diagnosed family members, multiple friends with diagnosed children, many of whom have also been diagnosed - I have a pool of experience that I have accessed over decades. I am a member of a rich and diverse community of ND people on a macro and micro level.

So just as you could argue that a book by a black man about a black man would be just as limited as he only has experience of his own life as a black man from which to draw, when creating his character and devising that character’s story - we know this is not the case either? He has grown up as part of a black family, within a black or multi cultural community, with access specific sub-cultural groups where friendships and relationships have either expanded his experience of own blackness, or enabled him to explore and learn about other people’s experience of their blackness - it is this rich life-long social experience which he would bring to writing a novel about a black man. It would be assumed by agents/publsihers/readers that he has a vested interest in presenting his characters authentically through a compassionate, respectful and informed lens, within which he shares his understanding of others who both share in and deviate from his sense of self and cultural/racial identity.

This is what is assumed when you write about autism in a project such as mine. I don’t just draw on my self and my life, but from my family, the community of SEN/ND families I have known and am part of, of the patterns of experiences we share, of the times when individual experience deviate from everyone else around around them and what we have learned about each other in understanding that deviation.

I am exploring this project as the mother of two very very different AuDHD children who was subsequently observed as and confirmed that she too shared this diagnosis. The in-depth knowledge and understanding that I need to display in my critical analysis when I explore why so many authors get it wrong when they depict autism will reference the fact that none of these authors were autistic themselves, or had links to the community through family etc, nor even sought to forge those links and gain the knowledge and insights needed to even begin to authentically present a version of autism.

They did no research whatsoever, relying on socially held notions and stereotypes of autism/Aspergers (The Curious Incident) or created hypersexualised yet masculinised idea of what an autistic woman might be like (the girl with the dragon tattoo). Despite both authors here explicitly or impliedly intending their characters to represent their idea of autism, NEITHER author took the time to research or explore actual autism - and as a result have generated significant criticism within the community for creating characters that fetishise aspects of ASD, that misrepresent both its strengths and its challenges, and this is what agents, publishers and academic research into the arts is trying to redress/address.

This is why I both need and want to declare my autism within my research, so that I can invite the trust of my reader in my writing - in the care, compassion and respect I hope to convey there for the many diverse and complex individuals grouped under the banner of autism - because autistic readers will be looking to see themselves fairly and authentically represented and non autistic readers will inevitably be using to books like mine to inform and expand their notions and understanding of people with autism. This carries through to the academic research, where reviewers and fellow academics will be able to assume that I can and will treat the topic sensitively as I deconstruct other author’s writing and processes through the lens of an #actuallyautistic person and mother.

Sorry, that was a bloody long answer. I may cut and paste this for use in my reflective section though…

There are dozens of instances of entire paragraphs that are word-for-word identical. I suppose impossible to show that it is definitely plagiarism. Sometimes independent processes can yield identical results. But due to the quantity of identical text, the probability of it being an accident are very very low. (Also the excuse he used wasn't "woah, I can't believe two independent processes created the same text", but "ooops, I forgot to cite them" - which is sort of mad. As you can't just republish someone else's work if you remember to cite them)

I bloody love this sort of story. It’s like the fake army Veterans. Or people who claimed they survived 9/11 but didn’t. . Fascinating people. What makes them do it??

Agree - he used passages from other peoples work and did not make it clear he was citing someone else's work (multiple times) or reference it each time. They teach that stuff at A Level, then again in whole modules in the first year of University. And then again as a compulsory component of MAs, to hammer home its importance. By PhD level there really is no excuse other for the occasional reference that you may have forgotten to attribute - but a good supervisor should pick those up and flag them for correction prior to submission to the academic board. I am finding it hard to understand how this was ever submitted and do wonder whether there were huge gaps in his training and shortfalls in his academic supervision. [Trying to take a balanced approach!]

I don't know, it seemed absolutely clear to me.

Really? I don't see it at all.

Like that guy who posed as high ranking soldier for decades that attended the cenotaph and hundreds of other events in that guise. The gall, but did he actually BELIEVE that he was a colonel or whatever, or was it an intended con? With Arday I don’t think we know enough to work out whether he is a deluded fantasist or a con artist milking the system. If the latter - then his wife, family etc must all have been a party to it. It’s a Catch Me If You Can revisioning…

There are dozens of instances of entire paragraphs that are word-for-word identical. I suppose impossible to show that it is definitely plagiarism. Sometimes independent processes can yield identical results. But due to the quantity of identical text, the probability of it being an accident are very very low.

Did he actually do any original research or have any original ideas himself? How the hell did he get through his viva? When I had mine (a long time ago) some of the questions were clearly designed to establish that it was all my own work. I assumed that would be routine. (Since it was all my own work, it didn't bother me at all.)

There was a con artist who called herself ‘Lady Rosemary Abadour’ who stole £2.7 million from a charity in the late 1980s and early 1990s to pay for couture clothes and general high living.
Obviously Jason Arday isn’t doing that but this woman was another example of a fantasist. A title can be easily checked and apparently people realised the title and name were fake but people didn’t realise she’d stolen all the money from a charity so they humoured her.

Uh... okay. No idea what you're talking about now, but just copied your spelling as I'm not here to correct it. And I'm not you, as is evident from my bafflement.

There will be many more doctors doctoring their doctorates and many more engineers engineering their crumbling deceptions