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???

For my current role (management consulting, non-regulated), I had to find my original O-Level, A-Level and Degree certificates despite having an easily verified professional qualification and experience. It's basic due-diligence,

but I seriously feel for his kids.

I always feel sorry for the children of controversial figures. Apparently people used to shout and jeer at Michael Gove’s children when they were out and about with him.
Diane Abbott may or may not have been a hypocrite for privately educating her son but when that blew up it must have been hell for him - he rang in to a chat show which was discussing it to try and defend his mother.

The idea that the boffins at Cambridge deliberately planted an inferior black academic as a professor (because they feared genuine, formidable black intellectuals) is even more worrying than the idea that they were either genuinely fooled or too scared of being accused of racism to call him out.
Whichever you call it, the sorry saga definitely discredits the practice of DEI.

The more I think about the motivation behind Professor Arday´s hiring, the more I can see how implicitly racist it all was. It unfolds like this:

1. Hire a clearly inadequate black professor to firm up your liberal credentials and prove that EDI is not all rhetoric (which it usually is, by the way).
2. Word gets round amongst the insular but perceptive university staff that he is not the goods.
3. Following the initial shock, university staff choose not to ponder on the deep-seated ramifications of the decision for the university,but indulge in sly mocking of said individual.
4. This satisfies their racist and imperialist tendencies. Bias remains intact and even reaffirmed, while the surface-level performance of inclusion continues apace. Base instincts are satisfied while onerous external demands are met.

I wouldn't say quite deliberately and consciously, but I think I do recognise the dynamic @supermum52 is describing

Looking at his CV he presumably was on an education rather than research contract. I am guessing that is the cause of lack of due diligence as most research intensive universities don't consider academics on those contracts 'full' professors. There is informal tiering so a teaching-only prof could have had their research overlooked as it's not actually part of their contract.

What are the practical underpinnings? Curious!

This is bullshit, and deeply offensive, and written By someone without a clue about the many ways in which minorities can be denied equal access because of their race and circumstances. Signed, a do-gooder.

HI claims in filmed interviews to have been diagnosed Asperger’s and GDD at age 3. That would be 1988.

Aspergers was added to the ICD10 in 1993 and the DSM IV in 1994.

So his claim to have been diagnosed with Asperger’s 5 years before tgat existed as a diagnostic label seems decidedly dodgy

The fairly extensive piece on the Today programme, mentioned by some posters, begins at 08:09 (easy to find, but only today, on https://www.bbc.com/audio/play/live/bbc_radio_fourfm then scroll back to it).

Kathleen Stock – who was herself effectively drummed out of a job – is as always, very coherent.

Meanwhile Kehinde Andrews is unabashed in his defence of Arday, saying that the personal back story is irrelevant, that there is no plagiarism, and we should all have moved on as Liverpool John Moores cleared him.

Surely anybody saying that at this point is being wilfully ignorant. We can now all see for ourselves what happened and don’t need to rely on an institution, especially one that has a vested interest in defending him. The evidence of lifting chunks of other people’s work directly is as clear as anything, and trying to deny it at this stage is to descend into truly Orwellian depths of self-deception.

Andrews also bangs a drum about him and his colleagues being made redundant by Birmingham City essentially for being black (his MA in black studies and social justice was cut because of low recruitment). Which rather conveniently ignores the criteria used in recruiting them in the first place. “What happens to black academics is … you are very, very successful and then you get made redundant”.

Some people might ask how I came up with these conclusions. Actually, it was based on my own experience at an RG university in a specific department that employed lots of foreigners. I observed that they dealt with the rampant colonial attitude of the white British middle-class, who were always our managers and often behaved as if it was still the zenith of the British empire, as follows:

1. Uncle Tom. The uncle tom accepts the inferiority imputed by his colonial academic masters. This person then becomes either the enforcer for them (snitching and bad-mouthing the other foreigners). They also mimick their masters, adopting a cut-glass British accent that is markedly different from their original one, and even posher than the white British middle-class who surround them.
2. Colonial Native. The colonial native is different from the "uncle Tom" insofar as they seem to just accept their inferiority without any pretensions to alter the departmental dynamic. They say things like "I am sorry, I am so stupid, could you explain this to me" to someone who has nowhere near their publication record because remember, the colonial native has to work twice as hard for half the recognition. They adopt a servile attitude reminiscent of the worst days of Empire.
3. Exotic and Sexy. Granted,not everyone has the appearance to play it this way but I have noticed that when they do, they certainly play that card, flirting and flattering the male higher-ups.

Obviously, none of these groups have any solidarity with the other foreign academics. Sometimes the cycle can be disrupted by a foreigner who comes from a wealthy background, or has significant independent capital (inheritance etc) and who refuses to bow down to them in this way. As one can imagine, the colonial masters take this lack of deference very badly.

That, and chasing impact and engagement (which are a major component of research funding).

I suspect that Research Exercise Framework metrics played a huge part in this. Moving your impact and engagement (and environment) scores from a 3 to a 4, where both the narrative and Arday's outreach would help, would bring millions of pounds to a large department.

Practical factors such as easier to manage black hair that has been braided is what I meant.

Some of my friends braid their children’s hair at the start of term because unbraided Black hair needs special management if going swimming or doing PE etc. It can be easier to shower and condition braided hair independently when children are younger. As a curly haired person, I know braiding reduces tangling/knot formation (especially at the nape and when wearing tops with any form of collar). It lengthens the period between hair cuts, too, as there are very few hairdressers who really understand how to properly cut black hair outside certain parts of the major citied. One white mum, with mixed race twins at my school, said she had to take them to a town 10 miles away as we live in a predominantly white/middle class town none of the hairdressers knew how to handle her boy’s hair or had the correct products for it.

So, yes, just meant his hair was likely braided for a number of practical reasons.

I think it’s also racist in the sense that, if you believe the only way you can fill the gap for a black professor is to hire someone academically weak, you must also believe that there are no black scholars out there who are academically strong enough.
Since there are very few Cambridge professorships and a lot of talented academics in the UK and elsewhere who would be perfectly capable of filling the role, that’s a heck of an assumption to make.

So his claim to have been diagnosed with Asperger’s 5 years before tgat existed as a diagnostic label seems decidedly dodgy

Asperger syndrome was first described by Dr Lorna Wing in 1976. It was well known in the 1980s which is why it eventually made it into ICD10.

I put it to the forum that this man's career flourished with the advent of AI. If you plot his career trajectory against the popularity of AI, you'll spot the connection. All the material produced by this man will have been made by ChatGPT- you can tell from the resignation letter that the AI bot knew him well.

Hadn’t realised it was only added then - so definitely dodgy.

My DD was diagnosed with Autism at 13 in 2014 and her report expressly references ‘presents in a manner that would formerly have been labelled Aspergers, but is currently labelled high functioning’. So the term was booted out almost as quickly as it was introduced … and even ‘high functioning’ is not used any more because it was deemed offensive. [My DD didn’t like it either - she felt that if she was high functioning she wouldn’t be needing a diagnosis! She felt her label should have been ‘Autistic with high IQ and profound social and communication impairment’. A bit wordy though. ]

I am sorry but your reading comprehension must not be all that great. I precisely said that his hiring does a disservice to the talented black academics out there, citing (historically) Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. There was also the case of Dr. Calbert Graham who sued Cambridge for not appointing him as associate professor despite being eminently qualified for the role. In my opinion, they are reluctant to hire black talent and can only tolerate inadequate black talent which would not threaten them. If it is any consolation to you, they usually do not let a foreigner, especially from the former colonies, best them in any way, which causes academics to adopt the identity positions I described in a later post.

It favours everyone when it is clear the best person gets the job irrespective of gender / skin / neuro diversity etc etc.

While this is true, @MrPickles73, implementing it would involve disregarding an awful lot of vested interests, some of them with genuinely good motives

What's happened reflects worthy intentions being taken way too far by the sort of people who prefer tokenism to common sense, and complicit silence to evidence - as we've seen with the threats to those who tried to investigate

Nobody's been done any favours here, least of all genuinely brilliant black academics, but to my mind those with most to answer are the universities themselves - except they'll almost certainly try to shut the whole thing down rather than address what they've done

@Puzzledandpissedoff I'm sure there were plenty of good intentions but in my experience quotas often backfire and those who get most hurt are the very groups they were intended to help. You have to be very aware of the unintended consequences and it seems Cambridge had zero awareness. They have been well and truly exposed with their pants down..

There is no evidence that this was the case and the statements from Helen Cremin and Bhaskar Vira do not support it ("You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do” and "Jason Arday is an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education"). He was very much a Full Professor (research and teaching) and was marketed and fawned over as such.

I would like to hear Helen Cremin, Bhaskar Vira, the shortlisting and appointments panel, the Board of Electors, and Sonita Alleyne
(Master of Jesus College) apologise and admit they got it spectacularly wrong. I'd like for them to acknowledge the impact this debacle has had on his students, the unsuccessful applicants to the position, his research field (if you can call it that), the reputational damage to the Faculty of Education and the University of Cambridge, and, I suppose, if I'm being generous, to Arday himself. That he can claim, even after all of this, that "I'm not a liar" is utterly ridiculous. I'd like for him to bear some responsibility and to apologise.

But I bet that none of this will happen.

Agreed.

But the NHS uses the manuals and doesn’t vary or use experimental terms outside of the manuals in our experience. So I don’t believe he got an Aspie diagnosis age 3.

Especially alongside GDD as they’re just incompatible symptoms/observations. Autism/GDD matches his mutism claim (and usually low IQ) but Aspergers are highly verbal (usually with above average IQ) and communication is used in part to separate the two diagnoses.

Maybe he got GDD at 3 which was then later revised to Asperger’s at a later age. But the story just doesn’t ring true in its current form - it’s just not clear where the grain of truth lies.

He also speaks of observing and learning body language in his years up to 11. That this taught him empathy and non verbal meanings. He also speaks of having to “read” the police and navigate racism around stop & search. Also moderating tone and body language to manage interactions with them.

Based on my family members with ASD I find it hard to believe it could happen like this in any sophisticated way. Poor emotional regulation and meltdowns in stressful or unexpected situations are a feature of these diagnoses - frequently leading to not following instructions from authority figures. And for someone with GDD I would not expect their response to stress to be subtle…

Im not a health professional but my “lived experience” with the kids is now 18 years, plus all the families I know, the training courses Ive been on, and a bookshelf on the topic that measures around 4m long so im not coming at this from a low knowledge base!

And that’s just the autism… all before dealing with all the other extensive health claims: brain tumour, stroke, epilepsy, hairline fractures etc. All within a few short years… It’s a lot for one person especially when combined with ultra marathons, multiple masters degrees and working as a PE Lecturer/teacher.

Each claim on its own seems unusual. When put together on a timeline they look utterly crazy!!

As things stand, without completing an investigation, I think this would be libellous. It seems likely that some legal agreement was reached before he resigned, possibly agreeing forms of words and non-disclosures on both sides. Not certain, though.

I agree completely, MrPickles, but have to smile at the many demands on here for Cambridge to "explain"

That isn't how such things work in today's world, and an institution who's main drive in this affair has been for silence - even to the point of having people threatened - really isn't likely to explain anything

I noticed that the name of "Sonia Alleyne, Master, Jesus College, University of Cambridge" as she signed herself on the Good Law Project petition has been removed.