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???

I remember reading this in 2023 and thinking yeah riiight. It’s the fact the £5mil for charity didn’t specify the charity(s) that made me sus.

www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/11/jason-arday-cambridge-university-youngest-black-professor

When I first read about this, I was also cautious as some commentators seemed too keen to go in on the diversity angle. I then found this about the plagiarism:

Race, Cambridge and the Jason Arday Plagiarism Scandal

I would say it certainly is worth the hype. I think perhaps you should look into it more carefully and find out what the issues are.
I think if a white person had done what he’s done, It would be pretty newsworthy .
it’s made a laughing stock of one of the world’s very top academic institutions.
We do need to sit up and take notice.

I’m gonna be honest, I was insulted by this. I have an UG in mathematics but am about to submit my PhD in education, and you simply don’t know what you don’t know, and honestly unless you’ve read his work and that of the field (and are able to articulate critical race theory and apply it) then I just wouldn’t comment. It’s insulting to swathes of people doing research, regardless of how you feel about this individual.

I was baffled and perturbed by Stock's
"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". Presumably, she meant something more along the lines of, where the effects of these conditions were a significant obstacle, this was downplayed, rather than that the conditions themselves are necessarily an option?"

Autism and ADHD, with their hyperfixation and autism's common facility with systems, have never been a bar to academic careers. Sure, they may create spiky, "absent-minded professor" profiles ... but the absent-minded professor is a stereotype for a reason. Dyslexia? A disadvantage in some fields - rather more so than dyspraxia - and likely to be an obstacle in some disciplines. But both alleviated by straightforward technologies. Speech delay? Depends when and to what extent resolved.

I presume this was clumsy phrasing. The idea that academics should all be held to equally high standards in their discipline is fair enough. The idea that many people who are neurodiverse or have specific - specific being a key word here - learning disabilities aren't meeting those standards already is absurd, as Stock must surely know

But the whole thing is unutterably sad.
He is clearly an extraordinarily determined, talented person who has the potential to do a lot of good.
My heart goes out to his family.

Also the very worst people will be delighted by this.

Not a trial by media?

Well, you reap what you sow.

It seems to me that Cambridge made this whole thing as public as possible when it suited them in the wake of the rise of the BLM movement. They absolutely brought this on themselves, they played the race card as strongly, and publicly, as they could. Even when it was darned obvious that Arday's story simply didn't add up.

Upon Arday's appointment, Bhaskar Vira, the pro-vice-chancellor for education at the university, said: “Jason Arday is an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education…. his experiences highlight the barriers faced by many under-represented groups across higher education and especially at leading universities.”

Let's face it, this was a contextual admission... to a professorship which I have seen described as being the most important in the world in that academic area. Given to a guy who can't write, or spell, or get his story straight. In part because of his "experiences".

As to the university, the damage is done. It is now just a question of limitation.

I recently met, purely by chance, a very wealthy businessman (as in top 100 in the UK wealthy) who told me how he had been invited back to a special fundraiser at his old college. He told me that the display of wokeness they were treated to left him and the other potential benefactors, all of them very much of an age and a bank account to be considering their legacies, in a state of definite annoyance, defiance even - and not a penny was raised.

The university and particularly the college authorities are already treading a tightrope in convincing these older, conservative, benefactors to buy into the brave new world they are trying to forge. Then there is their other constituency – the mob of students and academics, or at least some of them, who like nothing better than siding with those they see as oppressed and displaying their compassion for all to see.

We've already seen a lot of them and their fellow travellers pile into a defence of Arday that is looking increasingly ridiculous. When the whole thing unravels, will we see them apologising? I won't hold my breath.

Actually, you don’t need to know anything about CRT or be able to articulate it at all to understand his thesis as it has nothing to do with his PhD - it’s a qualitative study on how peer mentoring between student teachers might inform reflective practice. CRT is not mentioned once and is not the lens through which his qualitative analysis was done.

Perhaps people who’ve not even looked it up, read the abstract or skimmed the contents and introduction, should also hold off commenting?

He also claimed in an online interview that he was followed as part of the Seven Up documentary series. That's such a reckless untruth because it can be so easily disproved. For people of my age it was a memorable and groundbreaking series, I can clearly remember the children. He was not one - he was also too young to be part of the original cohort ( born in 1957) and too old for the 2000 reboot.

Utter scam artist.
I peaked when I read that he said he’d featured in the documentary 7 up.
Who is enabling this misfit? It’s shameful.

I wasn’t commenting on Jason’s thesis at all, but my own perspective and research, I didn’t articulate this well though.

I just found the PP to be insulting, especially as it did not bring anything to the argument. That’s all I was commenting on.

I don’t know enough about Jason’s work to comment (which is why I didn’t). I am interested in this thread and what people have to say (hence why I am reading it and haven’t commented explicitly).

@Angeruish I'm fine with public criticism of the universities. I feel uncomfortable with the emphasis on Arday himself- I quite like the end of the Stock article on this-

"But I can’t help thinking another loser is Arday himself, wandering like a modern-day Forrest Gump through various prestigious institutions, treated like a sage for every strange or incomprehensible thing he says. To be radically unsuited to an Oxbridge professorship is scarcely something to be ashamed of. Indeed, these days, in my book, it is practically a badge of honour. There are plenty of decent jobs Arday might have found earlier on, more suited to his skill set, which would not have set him up for such public humiliation later. Yet — whatever pieties university managers spouted at the time of his appointments — ultimately, the real reason for his elevation was that they saw the symbolic benefit of his protected characteristics for themselves. Irrespective of the truth about his research techniques, it is obvious Arday is already being treated by Cambridge and other places as — quite literally — a useful idiot. His fairy tale is not yet over; but I think we can already identify some clear villains."

@Oftenaddled completely agree- maybe clumsy editing? It's hardly a secret that academia is chockful of extremely talented neurodivergent people (as in the old joke that, given the number of ND people working in research science it's far more accurate to say that autism causes vaccines 😉).

Incredible in the literal sense.

It is certainly very sad. But I haven't seen any evidence that he's particularly talented - indeed, his plagiarised PhD from Liverpool John Moores and the bits of his writing I've read suggest not. Happy to be corrected if you've read more of his work and have been impressed by it.

Astonishing that Cambridge have a) appointed him in the first place and b) are still defending him.

Cambridge tries to invite my DH to these, but he won’t donate to them either [he’s not a top ten earner LOL].

My DC applied to uni last year and this year - DH actively discouraged Cambridge [and Oxford] for them in its current form as it is no longer the institution he remembered from his time there. Neither of my DC even visited, though both have places (or an offer in youngest’s case) for top 5 unis for their chosen courses. DH was in college with the PM and played on a specific sports team with him - neither PM or my DH got there on special circumstances. Both bright lads from the midlands/north, first of their families to go to uni anywhere and did so because they got the grades , shone at interview, had a packed CV of extra curricular, despite their schools being shite. No special lists of schools, no postcodes considered to be disadvantaged, no race/class criteria and no drive to get as many overseas students in as possible to keep the coffers full.

Its not what it used to be: the events of the last few years - of the free speech debates that don’t happen, of the students harassed and bullied for holding different political views or for being Jewish - erode it’s academic reputation for excellence and intellectual freedom. DH won’t be putting his hand in his pocket to support them ever.

I think it's very difficult to directly accuse someone of not being truthful.

I had a friend who worked part-time for a charity and claimed, despite her part-time hours, to get over 40 days holiday per annum. I thought the organisation must value her incredibly highly until I eventually realised that it simply wasn't possible that a charity would pay for a part-time worker to get almost double the standard holiday allowance and she had to be lying.

Yep and using words such as “loot” to describe the funds he raised for charity, Subtle but the bias is always there.

He will have signed something when he submitted the PhD to say it was his own work.

I wasn’t surprised to see his PhD was in education - I started a Master’s in Education as it would be free through my work and I thought the academic standard was so low I didn’t continue with it. I found it non-rigorous and frankly unacademic. When I saw the words “action research” in his title my heart sank as we were encouraged to do this - I mean fair enough in theory but the standards to which we were held were non-existent and we could have written any old bollocks.

Agree completely, but he hasn’t made a fool of Cambridge all by himself. Cambridge has made a fool of Cambridge. If they’d done their jobs properly, he wouldn’t have got through the door. DEI is a joke and he/they have stopped the best candidate from having that opportunity.

It is embarrassing and shows how much damage you can do if you make knee jerk decisions to appoint people because of criticism of lack of diversity. The low proportion of black students and academics at Oxbridge has been used for years by left wing press to some the universities and possibly they have reacts by looking separately for appointments to counter the narrative of being racist anachronistic institutions.

you now have the reputational damage of one of the best universities on the planet having a fantastic as a professor who is mediocre at best. How is Cambridge going to deal with this shi t show?

This is very true. The examination of The Salt Path lies showed this very clearly - it is particularly true when it is someone's health. The author of these untruths doubled down when challenged - just as Jason Arday has.

ETA When challenged by The Guardian, Arday said that he thought they would believe him.

He is also on the record as saying he received speech therapy for 3 hours a day, 6 days a week for a long time when he was a non-verbal child. As the NHS has never poured such intensive resources into one child, you have to assume it was for paid for privately. But his backstory is also that he lived on a council estate in a deprived part of London, so that seems unlikely. Not to mention the fact that speech therapists are thin on the ground and I doubt, even if you could find a good private one, that they would work so intensively with one child.
Oh, he also says he’s had two brain tumours, not one.

Glosswitch (Victoria Smith) has pointed out that grandiose claims about incredible achievements despite serious medical/neurodiverse conditions are particularly painful because they create unrealistic hopes for other people with these conditions (or whose loved ones do).

“Autism causes vaccines”. Fucking brilliant!

You should also try a Cambridge maths lecture. I strongly suspect that “hunt the neurotypical” would be a fun and challenging game to play.