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???

So what are we now saying academic institutions should do to check credentials. Is checking the PhD certificate no longer enough - are we saying they should look at the actual thesis because we don't trust the awarding body. Are we saying that examination of PhD's is not robust enough and may (not always) lack academic rigour. Likewise with academic papers - do we expect employers to verify the papers listed on a job application were published and then trust the peer review process or do we expect them to check the papers for plagarism, AI use themselves. Any of these goes way beyond a problem just with Cambridge.

I wonder if he can sing too?

I see him heading a Boy George tribute band.

Haven't rtft yet but will. I'm boggling less at JA - there will always be individuals who make spurious claims - but at the whole Cambridge recruitment process. Did nobody read his work and if they did read it, were they really unable to see the flaws? The plagiarism wouldn't necessarily leap to the eye, but what about the lack of intellectual depth? Were they that incapable of making an academic judgement call?

I think we can be common sense about this. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. In this case a quick glance at one of his outputs would have shown it wasn’t prof level and it would be worth looking harder.
The institutions involved here showed a complete lack of common sense.

Tbh, if I ever get to the position of interviewing for lecturer jobs/post grad research, I would actually be flipping offended if my interviewers had not taken time to actually read some of my PhD - the abstract, intro and summary/conclusion at the very least - and talk to me about it and my processes. I’d expect them to want to understand the aims/method/outcomes as it would, surely, be informing my teaching style, mentoring approach, and how I plan to set up the post doc projects? I’d expect to be offered a place and funding because they have engaged with my work, been impressed and can see how supporting research arising from it would be beneficial to the department in both what I have added and will add to the field but in using that experience to mentor, inspire and nurture excellence in undergrads and new grads.

Or am I completely naive as to how this works? The revelations of the last week have really made me question what I thought academia is - hopefully one of the clever people who are in academia can come along and reassure?

What I am now wondering, as always looking for a positive spin, whether mature female [ND] post-doc candidates may get a look-in now?

Also,
Are we saying that examination of PhD's is not robust enough and may (not always) lack academic rigour.

Surely anyone who has worked in academia for a while knows of at least one case where a student in their department has passed who shouldn’t really have, or of someone somewhere in their field whose early career research including PhD was really a bit weak.

I would like to think most of the time the system works as it’s supposed to but it would be naive to think a PhD is a 100% guarantee of ability so yes I think you would keep a tiny reservation about it. If everything else stacked up well you wouldn’t be bothered but you wouldn’t go, ‘this application is terrible but he has a PhD so he must be ok,’ you would be aware of the possibility they had passed undeservedly. I don’t think that’s anything new.

Racism on both sides. The hidden racism of the do-gooders who believe all black people need the help and support of white people to achieve, ie that black people are lesser, and the more obvious racism by those people who believe black people are lesser.

Both sides believe black and brown people are less than white people.

These are all extremely intelligent people, whose jobs revolve around assessments of different sorts. They should have been well capable of realising within 5 minutes of talking to him that he wasn’t ‘Cambridge material.’ I think all normal judgement was suspended.
I would have thought it would be normal to get a minion to check the credentials of anyone being appointed to a position, but perhaps not. I hope they will do so in future.
Also, I imagine that appointment to Professorships involves a fair bit of behind the scenes activity involving the wider academic community. Normally about quality of scholarship etc. In this case, I suppose it was EDI based activity.

I think the only way anybody is likely to read part of your PhD is if the application process involves submitting work, and you submit a chapter. They aren't usually easily accessible for a few years after publication so it has never been the norm for interview panels to read them that I know of.

Very soon after completing your PhD, or before depending on field, you'll be expected to publish peer-reviewed papers, usually with the first few based on it. In some fields that would be a book. Interviewers are much more likely to read these.

So they might be reading part of your PhD very early on if you facilitate that, but if you are a strong candidate, that's unlikely, and it certainly wouldn't be for long. They'll expect you to be able to explain those aspects of your work without having to read the PhD. This is just as well because most people are sick of their PhD work and no longer keen to discuss it well before they submit. You will keep on moving! You'll be talking about what you have done with it and where you are going next.

As AnonyMumAuDHD says, you'd expect there to be some discussion of a person's research philosophy and output during an interview, not just 'how would you manage the timetable and marking load'. For a professorship maybe that wouldn't go as far back as PhD but he should have been defending his postdoc research.

JA has made lots of basic employment claims which weren't checked - e.g. Glasgow Uni has said he was never a Visiting Professor...

Academia is peppered with self-aggrandising charlatans who believe their own lies, and lazy 'policing' of their work which fails to recognise the lack of substance.
Perhaps Arday was simply 'playing the game', and was ushered through doors into spaces where his actual merit shouldn't have taken him.

Ah, thank you - really useful to know that. I really assumed they dipped into what you had done but it makes sense that you would cherry pick a portion and send that to ease screening.

So, whilst doing the exegesis [am such a newbie I only learned that is what the critical/academic part is called recently 🤦🏽‍♀️] I should be considering how to use aspects of it for separate publications and also planning out post doc articles?

Ironically, I was looking at writing something on the lack of representation of non-white autistic experience in contemporary fiction given that the white/male centric research paradigm has not only been exposed as a barrier to diagnosis for women but also people from other ethnicities. There is a slightly wider access to assessment in the US in the last decade and stats show that more Hispanic and Black Americans are now finally being diagnosed - but the existence of autism in those communities is still not discussed or represented in fiction/film/television which is, in turn, a cultural barrier to acceptance of autism within those communities or encouragement to seek diagnosis.

It’s outside the remit of my paper (which has already expanded to include late diagnosed women), but I have been building up a repository of data to explore this - my adoptive/step fam are Iranian/British Asian so I am fascinated that their experience of ND is not really acknowledged culturally. Again, it is why I am hopping mad about the JA situation as it stymies exploration of autism in minority ethnicities and attaches shame to potential diagnoses when we needed a positive cross-cultural narrative.

God, I talk a lot of bollocks some times.

Yes, almost certainly. People who have neat 6000-8000ish word sections of their thesis ready to slice off and submit for publication get off the starting blocks nicely. It's not always possible, and the priority is to get through the thesis as you know, but it is a great advantage when it can be managed.

I'm not in your field but the fact that you have tendrils shooting off and are accumulating data to match sounds very promising, yes.

As a secondary school teacher I am astonished that more due diligence is not carried out in the recruitment process and that academics seem to be allowed to write their own bios without anyone cross-referencing for accuracy.

Arday has said - and I paraphrase because I can't be arsed to find the original quote - that due to the fact his field is sociology of education, he can essentially be excused for shoddy scholarship because he's not killing anyone.

But Professors in Medicine and Science, Engineering and so on - if they are not the 'real deal', they could be teaching students totally incorrect information that could go on to contribute to real bodily harm coming to individuals.

In teaching at primary and secondary level, we have to account for every single year of our lives after graduation in a job application, we are subject to police checks (if you have worked abroad) and background checks, and I have known some schools to even phone universities to double check degree certificates are real if there is any doubt. We also have our DfE issued unique numbers that we all receive when we complete QTS and these have to be supplied in applications so that schools can check us on the DfE database. Obviously schools as opposed to universities have to be more more rigorous due to the age of the children being taught, but given the potential consequences of fabricated or even just shoddy scholarship and teaching, I think it's time universities tightened up their recruitment processes.

How anyone can have read this man's CV and listened to his outlandish claims of his many impossible 'achievements' and not immediately pegged him as a charlatan, I really do not know. To think that the hiring committees behind these decisions consisted of so-called 'top' academics should be ringing alarm bells about standards inside our apparently 'elite' educational institutions. It beggars belief that three top tier universities hired him as a professor without doing any checking into his past (all it would have taken is a quick Google to uncover just how many contradictory and outlandish claims he's made over the years) or calling bullshit on his 'research' - which is not academic or rigorous in its scope, and poorly written to boot (and you can tell that just from reading the titles ffs!) - says so much about how academia has sacrificed standards on the altar of identity politics in recent years.

I’ve only just seen all the controversy and apart from Arday being a complete charlatan, how the hell didn’t Cambridge do their due diligence. Employees now check prospective employees’ social media accounts, get references, and that’s for a bogstandard job so for an eminent role this seems preposterous. The university should be ashamed of themselves and it puts academia in to disrepute.

I echo the above. I'm not sure Kehinde Andrews' interview on the Today programme on Radio 4 earlier helped. Leaving aside his valid point that there is a story to be told in terms of under-representation of ethnic minorities in senior ranking positions in higher education (which is arguably how we've got to this position in the first place), the amount of deflection on his part wasn't great.

For example, he repeatedly said the plagiarism claims against Arday have been investigated and closed. He also said, on the subject of the PhD thesis, that Arday sent him his thesis to look at a year ago, and Andrews conceded "Look, there's some bad scholarship but it's not plagiarism. That's exactly what Liverpool John Moores said. There's no story there". When asked what he would have done had someone made similar claims at his own university, such as claiming to have written a book that was never published, Andrews said "Well, I'm no longer at Birmingham City University as I pointed out, but people start books and don't finish them all the time. It's actually not that rare... If it's true they gave him a job without knowing the book wasn't published, that's on them. That shows you don't understand the field".

It hasn't helped Arday's case.

He'll be fine - he has plenty of transferable skills - for instance, he could go and work in a Burger King - he knows plenty about whoppers. If that's not his scene, plenty of women of a certain demographic find his type irresistible and he will never be short of money; I suspect this is part of the reason his career soared in academia.

I found a post on Reddit by someone who attended his lectures at Roehampton. They said he was only there for one term, was a poor lecturer and they made a complaint about him.
I'm amazed there aren't many students / running buddies / schoolmates coming forward (positive or negative) it seems he has popped out of nowhere?

I know we are being flippant here - but according to his thesis opening credits, he is married with children. He isn’t the only person impacted by this. I appreciate his wife may have sat back and enjoyed the proceeds of his scam and MUST have been aware of his lies, but I seriously feel for his kids.

Well, the GLP thinks a woman can have a willy so it's not surprising it has a more, er, flexible approach to the truth...

Whilst I wouldn't have expected cambridge to review his entire body of work ('work') the employment vetting seems extremely lax. As someone else said, this wouldn't wash in any other industry. For my current employment, I had to locate a transcript of my BA modules from 30 years ago - in a completely unrelated field to my actual profession. I guess to check integrity of my claims to have degrees.

I read that as well. The person also said he was given a grade for an assignment but no feedback. He went to chat to JA for some feedback and also to ask why the grade was slightly lower than he might have hoped. Apparently JA asked him to reflect on his white privilege in wanting a higher mark.

In my view, Jason Arday was "an uncle Tom" for some of the rancid white middle-class English who run the UK universities. As I know, a distinctly colonial outlook on "foreigners" but especially ones from the former colonies, which they try to cover up most of the time but it easily surfaces in any type of prolonged interaction with them. "No Irish, blacks or dogs" was still prevalent even in the 1970s in the UK.
They are actually afraid of a formidable black intellect, so they appoint an ersatz version who will pander to them and corroborate their liberal white credentials. This also chimes with the managerial strategy of devaluing all academics and making them interchangeable, so that relatively few of them have any leverage with management. They are then converted into powerless pawns who must humour their masters. They closed the department of sociology in University of Birmingham, thereby neglecting the legacy of brilliant black sociologists like Stuart Hall who trained towering figures such as Angela McRobbie and Paul Gilroy. Needless to mention, Arday discredits the work of these towering black intellectuals (Gilroy, Hall).

Great post. Thank you.

Yes I think that is the shame of it.. setting recruitment targets whether it be based on gender or skin colour is fraught with danger. We had this in the 90s in the big multinational I worked for. The diversity target was 20% women in the top 200 positions within 5 years. Given women make up 50% of the population this was still a stretch target as they just didn't have a big enough skilled pool for the jobs. There was a lot of unhappiness amongst the chaps who were not promoted in favour of younger women who though talented didn't have the experience the men had and after about 5 years the target was never mentioned again..
It favours everyone when it is clear the best person gets the job irrespective of gender / skin / neuro diversity etc etc.