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???

But from what I remember, not everyone was offered EE. It depended on the subject. Some required you to do well in several subjects.

The university has been asking for it for years; and the pressure should be relentless until the people who appointed him are hung out to dry

@Marchesman yes I agree those responsible for promoting him above his abilities should face consequences and also those who allowed him without question to tell obvious whoppers.

I'd rather Jack Grove does. Cofnas would use it probably to push his wider ideas about black people's IQ which I don't support.

It is discrimination. The university preferentially admits underperforming demographics, notably state educated students and black students.

Hilary uses the arts, auto ethnography and poetry in her research. She welcomes approaches from collaborators also interested in these methods and ideas.

Poets, artists or auto-ethnographers interested in collaborating can find her contact details in the link.

In what way underperforming? Are they offered lower grades than privately educated (or white) students? Can you link to any data that backs up your statement?

Totally agree with 38th Parallel above .

Enough of this BS.

Write to whatever institution you are affiliated with and tell them you've had enough, and certainly won't be sending them any money, or children to study with them, unless they make significant changes.

Given the current environment, all universities will have to be making significant changes anyway, so that might prod them into wielding the axe where it is most needed.

How can discrimination against one group be corrected by discrimination against another group?

Well, there is that issue over trans rights provision riding roughshod over the rights of women and girls…

The entrance exam was used for everyone applying in all subjects. I think it was ended about 1995 because it favoured pupils in private schools.
Don’t forget about the compulsory Latin paper!

I don't suppose you can remember which student society did the 'natives' ball? I googled but couldn't find anything.

Re the Old South ball, I found this :

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/education/cambridge-university-cancels-gone-with-the-windthemed-ball-after-racist-complaints-9202156.html

So it was cancelled after complaints ? Still bad though..

Am I being an auto ethnographer when I tell the cat what I did at work all day?

Excited to collaborate 👍👍

People should be treated as individuals, not stereotyped as advantaged/disadvantaged by belonging to a certain group - it’s too blunt a way of determining who is truly disadvantaged.

I sat the exam back then, no compulsory Latin. You couldchoose to sit the exam and get a 2 E offer if successful after interview or go the interview route without the exam and get a higher grades offer.

Yes, that’s true.

Totally agree!

I didn’t spot that!
is that real or are you doing a fabulous spoof?
i genuinely cant tell

Contextual offers - the criteria for each uni vary but essentially it’s 1-2 grades lower. They have set DEI criteria but disability doesn’t count and they won’t even consider a case by case for which I thought was odd. Anyway this type of discrimination is called “positive action” so is permitted

as an example of the kind of sociology our taxes go to fund....
(chosen at random, I promise, from the link to recent Phds awarded by Cambridge):

Through a critical genealogy that traces the colonial classificatory violence of binarity, its implementation into bureaucratic administrative violence of nation states and its automation in contemporary algorithmic violence, this thesis challenges the algorithmic relation to transness, the presumed technooptimist ‘objectivity’ of algorithms and the ways in which the algorithmic organises the necropolitical infrastructures of targeting, surveillance, and cisnormative violence that trans bodies live under. This intervention posits that algorithms—as the computational set of instructions—constitute the channels through which the trans body is classified and translated as information, coded as data, marked-as-different and imbued with necropolitical violence that cannot valorise transness, which position transness against and in tension with the binary valorisation of life itself.

You couldn't make it up, and neither could I.

It's real:
https://faculty.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/cremin

Get it while it's there. I tried calling the number and it came through as disconnected.

When was that?
It must have been an intermediate step, I think.
In fact, I have a feeling that when I took the exam, Latin was optional but you had to choose a foreign language paper.
Previously, it had been compulsory, but I’m unsure when that stopped.

I've got a lot of time for sociology and sociologists and Jason Arday isn't a sociologist. It's another reason I'm amazed he was given a professorship with 'sociology' in the title, although I suppose it is within what looks like a weirdly dysfunctional Education Studies Department.

Just think of the great sociologists: Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Levi-Strauss, Giddens ... bridging subjects, analysing the structures of society, introducing ground-breaking theories of culture(s).

And then there's all this 'Education of ...' malarkey.

Anyhow, gotta go and write a poem about myself. 'The Woman Who Ate the Moon and Gradually Sicked it Back Up Every Month.'

Early-mid 90s

(posted earlier on the other AIBU thread):

From the Atlantic posted earlier: https://archive.ph/SA5Gc we have these new claims:

• he was in a coma for several months after a car accident
• his parents were advised to take him off life support "as an act of mercy"
• he was physically abused by his speech therapist
• he typed up his dissertation at the same time as claiming only to have the reading standard of his three-year-old daughter
• he claims to have had testicular cancer (in addition to one, or two brain tumours)
• he testified in court to save the people who once mugged him
• two of them then reappeared as his students (despite apparently being four years older than him) - saying he had changed their lives around
• he became godfather to one of the men's children

He also admits to not being very good at maths. Which is clearly why none of this adds up.

So you end up with a simple choice:

Is this somebody who should be treated like a lying child with an over-active imagination (in which case he definitely shouldn't be given a Cambridge chair, and instead offered extensive medical therapy)?

Or is this somebody who should be treated like an adult? (in which case he should definitely be removed from his Cambridge chair for plagiarism and lying, which cost somebody, somewhere, a good job)

I am hoping that when Arday's book comes out, Melissa Katsoulis (author of Telling Tales: a history of literary hoaxes, 2009, and reviewer at The Times) will review it.

Well that's most certainly one of the most clearly articulated proposals I've ever read, with an equally clear outline of the data that will be needed, how it will be collected and subsequently analysed. Whoever came up with this is definitely a genius and I'd recommend that they don't even have to bother writing up the thesis, as that's obviously just going to be a formality. I'm especially intrigued to read more about the necropolitical violence that cannot valorise transness, which position transness against and in tension with the binary valorisation of life itself, as there really is so little research that has been done in this area. And it's of vital importance to really every aspect of all of society in every part of the world. I mean, if this tension can be identified and corrected, well, we don't even need to figure out how to cure cancer or dementia or world hunger or violence and war.