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???

Seconded.

The more I read, the more I think AI has been used in creating or embellishing Arday's fantastic tales.

His resignation letter came out as 100% artificial when fed through an AI detector. It seems highly likely to me that is not the first time he has used it.

The Atlantic article is very interesting in showing up differences in the book proposal and the published version. Not just tweaks or reshapes but significant events in his life that don't appear at all in the final version. Testicular cancer. A teenage car accident resulting in a three month coma during his GCSEs.

It's almost as if AI has been asked to write an adversity/misery memoir and thrown everything in. Some of it didn't make the edit. The remainder may have a kernel of truth. Or be completely hallucinatory.

It's a sign of the times story. Where DEI, 'my truth' and AI meet.

Bloody hell. Even more inconsistencies.

But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.

Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome. “As I will describe to readers in the book,” Arday wrote in the proposal, “these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.”

The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.” Instead, the memoir tells us only that he spent those months finishing his final year of secondary school and taking his exams. “I was relieved, beyond relieved,” the memoir says, when those were done.

Then there is the prophecy—the revelation Arday was given in Brazil, that he would suffer greatly and also do great things. According to the proposal, this occurred in 2005, not 2006, and the message came not from a local aid worker in her 30s but from “an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures.” (Later in the proposal, he calls this person a “shaman woman.”) “Do you know the story of Spartacus, the escaped slave who led a rebellion against the Romans?” this town elder asks, before telling him his fate in minute detail. “Every event she described,” Arday writes in the proposal, “has since come to pass.”

From that Atlantic article:

By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter. Still, he pressed onward. Still, somehow, he got a teaching job.

His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30.

The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style.

So, a reading age of 3 yet typing out his Master's degree thesis on the train.

🤔

I agree completely about the struggles some already face, and about the hideous use racists will make of this, Breadlegs, but nobody with the least sense would assume all black academics to be token hires, and what's the alternative - to disregard issues around DEI altogether?

I'm not sure that would help anyone either - least of all black people in all walks of life - but doubtless it would suit those who support police involvement and career destruction for anyone who dares even to question what's being done

Think I will… suspect there may be a drop in applicant numbers this year 🤣

Why did you apply? I was forced to by a beetle.

You'll fit a diversity box with that surely!

The more I read of Arday’s autobiography, the more I think he has cloned my life - also hit by a car (actually, not to brag, it was an articulated lorry, but not) after popping to a friend of my mum’s to borrow a potato peeler [god knows why I remember that detail] and also had a disagreement with someone on top of a slide aged 9 and lost, which I found out 10 days later when I woke up in hospital having been in a coma [yeah, yeah, I know, it explains everything]. The biggest trauma of the latter event was that I had been given a fully funded place to go to my first Brownie Camp that summer and it meant I missed out on it. 😭 Am still in therapy for that.

The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.” Instead, the memoir tells us only that he spent those months finishing his final year of secondary school and taking his exams. “I was relieved, beyond relieved,” the memoir says, when those were done

And when was finishing his final year of secondary school he was a teenager, when he was still only just mastering the ability to read and write? Though actually that seems a minor inconvenience compared to the testicular cancer, car accident, coma and locked-in syndrome.

I guess someone had already used the title 'A Series of Unfortunate Events', otherwise it would have been perfect for his memoir.

(Btw, the train journey from London to Liverpool doesn’t take 5 hours. It’s just over 2 on the faster service; around 3 on the stopping one).

Will get my novel draft done and then start work on an application, I think. No harm in trying is there? This scandal will largely blow over in a year as they sweep it under the carpet and wow £32kpa as a returnee to the workplace?! That would so exceed any expectations I had going in this [happy to take the £100k Arday was being paid, though 🤣].

I can write a very grounded DEI friendly story about why I am so flipping old to be entering academia proper, yet still have a good 20 years of academic research and student mentoring in me. I actually think that my maturity, life experience as a mother to AuDHD DC and how it’s fed and framed my research area and ideas for projects, is a core asset. No 25yr old PhD grad could even begin to explore this topic from the same perspective.

ETA Am really sorry that I have hogged this thread - next week will start my own somewhere and elicit the thoughts and advice of other awesome mature ladies with PhD experience on how to write a killer proposal and application.

We'll all write you amazing references. Oh, wait ... 😁

'but these tend to be lower anyway than other top non-Oxbridge eg AAA in some humanities rather than A star A star A at an Edinburgh or a Durham'

• a bit counter intuitive, you would think Oxbridge would have the higher offer.

So, this is a man who, by his own admission, has very poor literacy and comprehension skills.

Yet as a Cambridge professor he presumably would be charged with leading and facilitating academic discussion at a high intellectual level (or so one would hope!), and reading and marking students' work, as well as analysing others' research and producing his own original work.

Nah. Didn't happen. I'm not 100% sure of which part of that didn't happen but it's clear that he's been promoted way beyond his self confessed academic skillset.

(ETA missing apostrophe!)

'profoundly different way of perceiving the world.”- well, that bit's true, at least..

And yes @AnonyMumAuDHD , go for it ! If you really want to, that is!

But then again, as an intelligent and articulate person, are you sure you'll fit in? 🤔😎

This. DEI has led to bad promotions but people shouldn't be automatically judged for the colour of their skin.

Oh, I certainly don't agree with everything he says. But the moment we start going down the route of 'I don't like you and your motivation, therefore I'm going to throw out everything you say' is the moment that we make space for even more horrendous (political) thought to arise. This is exactly what's happened in politics in the country - supposedly reasonable people painting all concerns about immigration as 'extremist right', when actually often they were the genuine concerns of normal people, and in so doing, leading to the bolstering of an actual extremist right. The same is the case in academia. If Cofnas had been listened to, rather than cancelled, then we wouldn't now have the added space for racism that's opened up now, with people saying 'All black academics have got in like Arday'. That's why the University (and all universities - but this one is particularly prone, it seems) needs to stand up to cancel culture.

I don't think being 'conned by men like Jason' IS that common.. Jason frankly seems stupid. He wasn't some devious plotter like a lot of financial con artists. It's even more embarrassing that Cambridge fell for him, for that reason.

Agree Cofnas' claims about Ardray should have been listened to- though I think he made the Ardray posts after his dismissal? As pp said, the journalist reported to the police for sniffing out Ardray's inconsistencies should have been listened to earlier, too.

I've tried to edit this, but can't.

I should have made a clearer distinction between the student's colleges - one is the London sixth-form college where he studied for A Levels, which gets lots of kids into Oxbridge. One is the Cambridge college he got into, where I supervise (amongst many other colleges), and which has a master who in her infinite wisdom, has championed DEI to the extent that vast amounts of benefactor money has been spent on controversial campaigns, and students have been admitted on very obviously DEI not academic grounds. I believe in reasonable adjustments, but surely a much better use of these funds would be to fix things long before these kids apply for university, so they end up getting in ready to hit the ground running. I don't know if you can see my other posts (I am not a frequent mumsnet writer), but I have written elsewhere about decreasing standards at Oxbridge (and presumably across higher education more generally).

“Today, in academic circles, that’s what I'm known for,” he writes in his proposal. “Everybody says, ‘Jason is the guy that teaches everyone the tricks.’”

From that Atlantic article. Says it all. From the mates filling in his uni applications and giving him their notes through the degree to him not understanding most ofwhat's going on at work - he's been totally winging it and ill-fitted throughout, and people like Cremin (her own biog is batshit!) have encouraged it. This is the mad end result of the 'everyone should go to uni' idea and it's quite the climax. And all those publishers and 'fact-checkers' just stand back and don't comment, letting it all play out. Things have got deeply, deeply fucked up.

I could dye my hair blue?

Arday has raised eyebrows in Cambridge for years! Not only straight concerns about plagiarism, which were upheld - Jason Arday’s boss gave ‘full support’ after hearing plagiarism claim - but high table conversation across the city here has skirted around the various claims about his background for a long time.

It's absolutely not enough for Hilary Cremin to go - this stuff needs to be entirely rooted out and the culture changed. Even Priyamvada Gopal's demand for an enquiry finishes saying that Cambridge bears responsibility for racism - I can't work out how that should be the focus of an investigation which isn't just about one bad apple being able to pull the wool over the institution's eyes, but about a whole culture of privileging stuff above academic rigour.

👏👏

@cantabsupervisori totally agree. There are many barriers to succeeding but the answer should not be to lower standards and entry requirements but instead to support people to get to the same standards e.g. this country used to have some really good access courses that got mature adults to redo their GCSEs and A Level equivalent quals, then they could apply to Uni etc. accepting kids with fails or low grades is setting them up to fail.