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???

Yuck what a disgusting specimen and a whole system to protect him.

Crikey. You're right (not that we should be surprised at this point).

From what I can see from the link (I refuse to go down the Twinkl route and download it) he is said to have:

• an undergraduate degree in sociology from the University of Greenwich
• a Master's in race, education and social justice from King's London (in 2003)

Those are both new places entirely to add to the already long list of institutions he has graced with his presence, five of them in London alone and nine in total, not forgetting all the various places where he is a visitor professor (though as noted above, Glasgow appear to have disowned him).

I think the roster currently looks as follows: Roehampton - where I recall reading that he took a sabbatical year as the students' union sports rep - St Mary's, Surrey, Greenwich, King's London, Liverpool John Moores, Glasgow, Durham and Cambridge.

Substack article:
Yes, that is the one - although I think she made a very poor choice in the main case she used to illustrate her point (a student death).

Cambridge is keeping its head down. Are we going to have an explanation from Prof Hilary Cremin who described Arday’s research as ‘the best in the world’?

Compulsive lying is a mental health problem, and typically involves lies that don't result in personal gain. This is just someone deliberately telling lies to inflate his own reputation and secure a coveted academic position.

Common or garden fraud.

Thanks for this - I had speech delay, interestingly, and ended up attending speech therapy on and off for years [erm, not 3 hour sessions daily LOL, just one a week in what I presume was 8 week chunks… like my children also had. None of us an ASD/ADHD diagnosis at the time though.]

My DH can’t quite believe it as I as am gobby/wordy in real life as I am in my posts… I am thinking of buying him a teeshirt that says ‘I love you, but can you please STFU’,

I will go and read the link as I felt she may have lacked understanding of the wide ranging presentations people under the umbrella terms of ‘dyslexic’ and ‘autism’ have, or the fact that some are able to overcome the challenges of their individual presentation with support, even if many others might not be able to, in an academic environment.

In that article with the University of Bath, he also says:

“…. I did a Masters in Psychodynamics [after the PhD]. I became a qualified counsellor which gave me such a rich understanding of mental health.”

These don’t appear on his Cambridge profile, which is odd. Your degrees add to your credibility and speak to your expertise. Why wouldn’t you add these qualifications to your credentials?

It strikes me that the problem actually arose at Glasgow University, with the original Chair being awarded at a very young age.

Any insight into that?

What is so bizarre here is that he is telling huge porkies about a time period in recent living memory, when record keeping was rapidly improving, digital cameras were coming onto the scene and the internet was growing exponentially. There will likely be proof or disproof available for anything he did as an adult, 2003 onwards.

But perhaps he believes it all himself?

This is why I am concerned he may actually have bipolar of schizophrenia, but noone is stepping in to get him assessed and treated. I fear his wife/family may have a vested [pecuniary] interest in his career as much as Cambridge and the academics who have clipped themselves to his shirttails.

Glasgow is backpedaling:

Jason Arday made false claim about Glasgow University job

https://www.thetimes.com/article/77e2e640-5bc0-42c9-a697-3e576e3fce10?shareToken=249266cf29188ba766af41b3d7fd7e26

If I am reading it correctly, though, they don’t seem to be saying he wasn’t a professor there, just that he’s not and has never been a visiting professor there.

Yes. I believe they are being honest and also trying to downplay their association with him. The tone isn’t, actually, he was a professor here. Instead it’s, no he wasn’t a visiting professor here.

Finally looked at the bits he lifted - it looks to me as though he faked the whole PhD - because those plagiarised quotes are being presented as being from the interviews that he was supposed to carry out in order to do the qualitative analysis? Not sure if I have got that wrong without reading his thesis, but if this is the case that may be why his PhD passed - because it was the source material that he plagiarised (ie pretended to have carried out himself?) and they were looking at his analysis?

It seems as though he’s the sort of person, and I’m sure we’ve all worked with one, who talks absolute bollocks and no one believes, but everyone smiles and nods because it’s easier than challenging them. Unfortunately for him he’s ended up in the papers.

His bio on Jesus website also says: "He is a Visiting Professor at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion."

Part of the point of the viva is making sure you’ve done the research yourself, so they might ask you about practicalities of how you carried out interviews, for example.
I wonder if that’s why he had a brain tumour that caused him to lose his memory two weeks before the viva 🧐

The Telegraph is reporting that he isn't..!

Archive link to Telegraph article here:

https://archive.ph/F8qrO

Bloody hell: ‘Prof Arday has, in recent days, put his apparent plagiarism down to autism, saying he absorbs information through mimicry.’

Way to throw all autistic people under the bus. It will be harder than ever to be taken seriously in academia and any profession really as an autistic person if he keeps on with those sorts of claims. It will mean those with ND diagnoses will be increasingly reluctant to share them any more.

ETA esp annoying given my post above and the belief that it was not mimicry at all, but failure to carry out the required interviews and a deliberate fudging of them with transcripts from other works.

So much of it is looking at things through the lens of bloody Foucault rather than actually finding out something of practical use.

That mimicry claim has infuriated me - how dare he?

Wow... very much worth a click - this Telegraph article begins

Journalist questioned by police for investigating Cambridge professor
Times reporter accused of harassment after emailing series of questions to Jason Arday about his academic record

The world gone mad...

Seriously, where is the anger about this kind of idiocy?

Hilary Cremin is the one who gave the utterly cringeworthy display of welcoming Arday in the clip at 1:50 in the video I cited earlier (search Leo Kearse, Cambridge's Diversity Hire).

We always knew that doing education at Homerton wasn't really a Cambridge degree, but the whole field just seems to be full of grifters only capable of regurgitating word salads.

The really worrying thing is what they are thinking, and apparently believing, now is going to be what schools will be obliged to teach in ten or fifteen years' time.

Sorry, I omitted mentioning this from the Telegraph article (thanks again to TwoLoonsAndASprout for alerting us to this):

On the Cambridge Faculty of Education page, (Arday) claims to be a visiting professor at the US university (Ohio State) in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
However, a university spokesman said they had “no record of an employee by that name” and that “visiting professors appear in our employment records”.
Ohio State’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion also closed last year.