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???

And so? If they all need the same grades to get in, which they do, all that shows is you cant erase all those years of privilege in 3 years at university.

Thank you for sharing the link to your previous post, a very interesting but sobering read. Can I ask - do you see any difference whatsoever with state school kids who might have studied the IB rather than A levels (asking for a friend..) as it's certainly being punted to me as a parent as plopping out 18 year olds more attuned to critical thinking. It's been depressing as a parent to see how much of the GCSE years has been focused on learning how to answer exam questions - everything they have been taught seems to be around how many marks a particular type of question is worth in the exam.

With one state-educated daughter fixated on Cambridge as a destination (this may change of course and who knows how she'll fare in admissions) your post is very depressing to read. I also went to state school and know I would have been eaten alive in any Oxbridge interview because I wasn't immersed in any culture whatsoever outside of what I learnt at school, and I just don't know how you can mitigate for this.

Humanities or STEM? DM me - happy to help!

Correlation does not equal causation.

Luckily there have been thousands of proper statistical analyses on wide data sets across time and geography, and they all show that the single biggest determinant of success in life (whether you measure that as degree, job, £, strong relationships, health, whatever) is who your parents are. That’s it.

It is not whether you went to private school or not.

(And not everyone in the same subject at Cambridge has the same grades, so your baseline is not uniform anyway.)

They have decided that it is because girls (women), who are in a definite majority in that department, are put off by the bellicose themes in work of the two giants of their respective literatures.

Given the gory realities of rape and childbirth that women face during our lives, I submit that women are unlikely to be deterred by adultery and a war raised solely to abet Menalaus in committing spousal abduction.

Eww that woman and her dodgy mates (shes mates with Amber heard too 🤢)

Jason Arday is a grown man who is responsible for his own actions. I can’t see why we need to be ‘compassionate’ towards him. I think less of the furore has been caused by racism than by just for once, the spectacle of an absolute lying bullshitter being called out and questioned on his lies. We’ve all worked with them, and they mostly get away with it. This time the bullshitter hasn’t away with it.

A few pages back, someone suggested that Arday's appointment was a tokenistic attempt to deflect scrutiny so that Cambridge could get on with the serious business of social conservatism and racism. However, if you look into the people who appointed him, it seems almost certainly to have been ideological and/or personal.

There is a YouTube recording in which Hilary Cremin says (13 mins 42 secs in) that A-level attainment is "simply a marker of schooling" unrelated to intelligence or potential.
(She also says that teachers should give up on the idea of teaching and become mentors and enablers). It goes without saying that there is a wealth of research that shows she is wrong about A-level attainment, a link to Cambridge's research into its own student outcomes was posted earlier, and there is ample evidence that A-level attainment is an independent predictor of workforce success.

For her own sanity Cremin must believe six impossible things before breakfast. @cantabsupervisor suggested earlier that posh white kids are not innately cleverer, but of course they (and posh black kids and every other colour in between) are. SES correlates with intelligence and other heritable factors, and outcomes at school and beyond depend almost entirely on selection, not schooling as Cremin claims.

When Jason Arday came along, Cremin and her ilk can't have believed their luck. Cremin herself started off from humble beginnings, her PhD was from Nene College of Higher Education, later University College Northampton, then Northampton University. Arday's alleged backstory must have been a dream come true, 2 GCSEs, black, learning difficulties, an ex-poly PhD, Glasgow prof - a vindication of everything they hold dear.

Rather than the focus on Arday, perhaps a more important question is who appointed Cremin?

"peace education" and "rewilding education"... 😆

I watched the video on Youtube and noted all 41 comments were made within the last day (the video was put up 8 months ago) and all savage her.

Wonder when it will be taken down...

A very good friend of mine used to recruit for his group at a large multinational. They took a lot of people with STEM PhDs, mostly Oxbridge and RG, and similar institutions overseas.

He received an application which looked very solid and where the person's PhD sounded really interesting. The PhD was from one of the new universities.

He came away from it saying, 'Well, that was a waste of our valuable time. That wasn't what I would call a PhD. Never again.'

I mentioned 'The Great Hip Hop Hoax' upthread and am currently working my way through my ironing pile whilst watching it on Netflix. It was originally on C4 some years ago - I found it by accident one night. Due to be a film next year, I think.

There are some interesting points about how they constructed their alternative personas:

• They did research, finding out details about their alternative home town online, despite it being the early days of the internet.

• They worked together to maintain the fiction, so that if anyone came close to asking too much they would do something wacky or throw in a tangent.

• They lived the new personas consistently, so kept them up all day every day.

But still the stress of maintaining all this began to wear on them psychologically. Whereas Jason Arday seems to have done zero research, gone to no care to maintain the fiction and been utterly inconsistent. It is very peculiar.

Admittedly this was the 90s but my very well regarded selective independent school taught us very little outside the curriculum and how to pass the exams. There was almost no preparation for oxbridge either. What actually helped me most at my Cambridge interview was the environment at home - by which I mean lots of books and discussing things together, as in the news or watching documentaries. My parents didn't have oxbridge degrees themselves and were each the first in their family to go to university.
They didn't have loads of money, and rather ironically, they paid for the expensive school at some hardship to themselves precisely because they thought it would give me opportunities that they felt had been lacking for them (so just as well that I wasn't discriminated for it - although I have been later in life by people who assume I'm somehow privileged, when actually my background is fairly ordinary.)

I'd like to know more about his mentor.

Yes, it's bizarre isn't it? What on earth were his publishers thinking when they saw the proposal for his memoir and then agreed to it?? It's almost as if he was seeing how far he could push it and still get believed - I watched the video of him being interviewed that someone posted much further up the thread and I thought it was so bad, the utter nonsense he was coming out with it was like a parody, Philomena Cunk style.
I can't help wondering if he didn't just think "well I know I'm not very academic but I want to pose as a professor, I know I'll just say I have a learning disability, they won't know". Which would make so angry if true as my DD actually has autism and global development delay and I would be happy if one day she could just live independently, or perhaps come out of nappies, let alone become a Cambridge professor.

I'd be even more angry about it if I were you and your DD because, hey, if JA can overcome all these adverse factors in his life to succeed, then what's your DD doing wrong to not be able to get her PhD by the time she's 31?

Apart from all the other things are going to be negatively impacted from the fallout of this, people who really have experienced grave physically or mentally challenging conditions will be (by some) measured against his ability to overcome them.

A guy on TikTok has claimed he went to primary school with Arday and the latter was a 'chatty patty'.

The Telegraph is reporting that some students are considering this.