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???

Nicely put.

How sad.

I'll bear that in mind the next time I see Brampton Manor and Homerton (presumably the sixth-form and Cambridge college you are referring to) on a cv. It shouldn't be like that, and the corrosion in terms of reputation (one that has been eight centuries in the making), driven by incidents like this, will set in faster than we expect.

Some posters are complaining that the media are highlighting the Arday case and its racial aspect. But, as I pointed out earlier, Cambridge really set themselves up for this, and perhaps the media are - consciously or otherwise - now flagging this as a canary in the crumbling academic coal mine. Gradual decline doesn't get written about at all, specific instances do.

The voice-over at 1:45 in this video is from one of the many gushing television pieces that Arday has generated:
s
"Therapists predicted he would need full-time assistance throughout his life," it says. Well, as it turns out, it looks as if that's exactly what he's had in his giddy ascent from being a PE Lecturer to a Cambridge chair in just seven years. Incidentally, I've seen him attached to Roehampton, Surrey, St Mary's (all the same?), Liverpool John Moores, Leeds Beckett, Glasgow and Durham as well, a dizzying whirl that is probably not conducive to serious research.

That clip continues with a frankly embarrassing shot of Arday being received by a, presumably, senior academic. "Look at the way his boss greets him. She is dribbling with excitement at all the DEI boxes he tick," as one of the commenters said.

So where does Cambridge go from here? Obviously nobody is going to be held responsible for this... the Emperor has no clothes but everyone is guilty, and ergo not guilty, of not having said anything.

The buck should stop at the top, of course it should. Either the vice chancellor has to get heads down the chain of command rolling, or her own should. She has a 500k private-sector-style pay package, and this - and the whole degradation of standards that PP alludes to - will cost the university countless multiples of that, in perpetuity. But will she die by the private-sector sword that she currently lives by, or will she hide behind her own protected characteristic, that of being in the public sector. I think we all know the answer to that.

I have just added a link to a video in my last post, but when it appeared it showed the opening scene and its unfortunate title (I have watched quite a few today...). The clip I was commenting on is from a (different) television programme.

I wonder if this is the tip of the iceberg and if anyone could look more deeply at Cambridge's admission tutor decisions they would be ridden with a current cultural bias to tick DEI boxes. The BAME student maybe did not do quite as well as the previous white public school boy interviewed but the tutor well knows the the university is keen to increase diversity so goes for the first candidate. The same would apply to neurodivergence - a candidate may perform poorly but if the poor performance aligns with any of a range of neurrodiversit conditions then allowances are made.

There have been years of posts on MN about suspected bias in Cambridge admissions from parents with straight A kids from let's say established backgrounds who have been shut down by being called bitter but maybe they had a point?

In fact it was neither Brampton Manor nor Homerton! Of course Homerton is well known for being easier to get into, esp for the PGCE but also for straight education. Rather this college is an old, “serious” one and students from there should ordinarily be very good. But the DEI drive for access means that across the University, there are students being let in who aren’t anything like as good as in the past.

The sixth form college is another selective London place very similar to Brampton Manor with a hugely successful Oxbridge admissions rate.

There is also something to be said about the ability in humanities (and my
field is in humanities) to BS your way through. You couldn’t write the same banalities elsewhere.

NB the number of black students at Cambridge is still minuscule, so I wouldn’t say there are just loads of black students here who aren’t good enough. I would say there are just loads of students (black and white) who aren’t good enough. I’ve written elsewhere here about how a growing percentage of students (99% white - the black student I mentioned wasn’t in this group) now require “reasonable adjustments” of the type Kathleen Stock cites. I don’t find them all reasonable, and my ballet dancer/pilot analogy often springs to mind.

Oh this is hilarious. I know the Dame through schools stuff and have been waiting for her to be called out for years. Writes the rules to suit herself, that one.

David Butterfield seemed to cop flack from resigning in 2024, citing falling standards at Cambridge.
https://thetab.com/2024/10/28/cambridge-uni-professor-resigns-over-alleged-declining-standards

Intriguing. I said Homerton largely because of the master.

Again, I really feel for you. So supposedly it is all more competitive now, but you are saying that actually the overall level is declining. That is despite a massive influx of highly-driven Asians, who probably more than prop up the STEM departments, so the humanities must really be in decline. It is interesting to note that the Oxbridge authorities wring their hands in concern over the poor degree performance of black students, but always point to factors other than the admissions process.

As to neuro-diversity, there was a piece in Varsity, the Cambridge rag, a while back from somebody who was anxious or something I don't recall, who had asked for, and got, a particular room in (I think) Pembroke. She was withering in criticism of her supervisor for proffering eminently sensible advice on the lines of "you won't get those kind of accommodations in real life".

We all know about the whole extra time in exams thing and the pipeline of supposed, and probably self-driving, disability that increasingly leads to a life on benefits. But I suspect that there are also plenty of Cambridge students who are now discovering their colleges are a soft touch when it comes to handing out, for example, en suite rooms. Reportedly, over a quarter of the university's undergraduates now consider themselves disabled. Meanwhile the very people who are keenest to champion sustainability in a broader sense somehow fail to see how utterly unsustainable a situation like that is.

A year or so ago there was a letter in the Guardian from somebody who used to invigilate exams somewhere unnamed, but got fed up with it after having to get a separate desk to put 22 cuddly toys next to somebody who just couldn't manage otherwise.

The world is out of joint, oh cursed spite...

I agree with many of your points and am slightly grimacing at the thought of the woke environment you describe as my DD very specifically wants to go to Cambridge, but - the “good old days” you hark back to did mean a time when in excess of 50% of all places at Oxbridge went to the privately educated.

From my understanding now, Oxbridge do NOT award contextual offers (ie lower grades) but you are more likely to be offered an interview in the first place if you are from certain schools, postcodes etc. Other RG universities do offer ‘one grade less’ contextual offers.

In the grand scheme of things and with many private schools boasting over 50% A*A grades at A level, this hardly seems to me to be swinging things overly in the state educated’s direction.

I previously worked for an organisation that was obsessed with political correctness of all kinds and indirectly experienced a purity spiral, which was terrifying. So there’s a lot that I could say about all this!

Did anyone else watch Amol Rajan’s original documentary on social mobility? 2019 or thereabouts. The premise was about comparing three young male graduates as they tried to get their first job. Strangely, this programme disappeared from iplayer very quickly but this review gives a picture:

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jul/29/how-to-break-into-the-elite-review-our-prejudiced-society-in-action

I can’t remember all the details but I suspect the problem was that that the ‘privileged’ candidate was simply too ‘good’. He had similar academic qualifications to the others but also came across as genial, hardworking and very likeable. Any employer would logically hire him, if he passed their other assessments. Whereas the other two candidates, although lovely young men, would probably have needed some mentoring or development to reach their full potential. So in some ways the programme probably failed to illustrate what it set out to do…I wonder if the BBC got viewer feedback to that effect?

My spouse has a leadership role in an elite profession and their team has an ongoing issue with the calibre of graduate trainees (often from diverse backgrounds) and other recruits coming through the HR process. This is demanding intellectual work, but they have had issues with the quality of work product, level of output, timekeeping, inappropriate behaviour with clients leading to disciplinaries…Yet they also know of highly qualified people with outstanding academics and experience who have been rejected by their graduate scheme (who perform brilliantly when recruited via another route), possibly because their background is too ‘traditional’, too ‘nice’?

Somewhere along the line the following ideas became widely accepted:

Society is unequal and social mobility is hard to achieve on an individual and societal level. I agree.

There are talented people who experience disadvantage and barriers to success and efforts should be made to identify those people/remove barriers. I agree.

All fine and reasonable. At which point, some less-critical people grabbed hold of the ‘pool of untapped talent’ idea and added:

People who have experienced disadvantage therefore inevitably hold within themselves undiscovered wells of ability, talent or wisdom and this should be regarded as a positive attribute that outweighs formal qualifications or experience.

Not so sure about that…

At worst, we end up with a topsy-turvy world where someone with fewer qualifications and less experience is somehow deemed superior to someone with lots of qualifications and experience because the second person is wielding ‘privilege’ and the credentials are deemed worthless because not everyone has ‘access’ to them.

The final point is that a certain strand of politics believes that positions of power and honours have been wrongly withheld from Black and Brown people (which historically is true), so there is a rightness and justice to awarding such appointments or honours, even if the candidate is not the most appropriate person for the appointment.

Perhaps some of this applies to the appointment of Prof Arday?

Apparently his forthcoming memoir is co-written. This begs questions in itself. Why is someone at his academic level not capable of writing his own memoir (yes, I know many celeb memoirs are ghostwritten but an academic should be capable of this task)?

I'm guessing the co-writer is Raynor Winn.....

The Times has him on page 5 this morning, with the heading ‘Plagiarism row professor’ and a small photo of him.

It details his claim that his parents were sent a pigs head, which he reported to the police. But the police say they have no record of the incident. It also talks about the ‘Seven Up programme, giving a friend’s unlikely explanation of it.

Are you happy with that type of reporting? Do you see any racism there?

It's his truth, innit.

See also Rachel Reeves.

The co-writer is Eve Claxton - who, as well as being a writer and producer, is known for being a ghost writer.

That's exactly the type of reporting this warrants. Similarly the Guardian article - which hasn't been the top of the Guardian website and doesn't scream "person from a minority group did a bad thing".

Interesting you should say that .... on the continuing thread about The Salt Path author it came out that the agents, who sold the book to Penguin, were originally ghostwriters. It is these people's job to promote what readers want - tales of fortitude against all odds, resilience, miracles?

I am an academic. How on earth is someone sitting a PhD viva only two weeks after brain surgery?

It would be interesting to know whether Arday came out of his PhD viva with minor or major corrections / no corrections from his examiners, given the typos (including the incorrect possessive apostrophe in the title!) and echoes of another doctoral thesis.

I think multiple things can be true at once. Full disclosure I'm an academic (around the same age as Arday), I went to Oxbridge and I'm not white. With that said:

• Arday is a fraud and a fantasist. You can't fire someone for being a fantasist but you can fire for fraud.
• His academic work is seriously mediocre. Even without the plagiarism. They are not published in top journals and they are not hugely cited either. He shouldn't even have been shortlisted for the job. And probably wouldn't at most RG universities.
• LJMU supervised him badly. He should have been stopped at this stage. He says he had one proper supervision. It may be a lie, but since LJMU exonerated him after an investigation it may be that they are trying to protect their own reputation. He's obviously blagged his way through life.
• ALSO this is now being used to discredit non white academics and also those who work on race. And to minimise racism in academia. I have had colleagues get death threats and racist letters. I've seen a young Muslim colleague with a beard be jokingly called a 'wannabe terrorist' in a public forum. I've seen another Muslim colleague be asked if 'his family was involved in October 7th' and then the person laughed. The colleague isn't Palestinian or even from the Middle East (not that this would be okay). I've heard a European colleague with a thick accent say she can't understand what one of my Black colleagues is saying because 'what he speaks isn't really English.' He's a posh London boy who went to private school and despite his ethnic background has never claimed to be anything but privileged. When European colleagues post Brexit were asked to show HR that they had the right to work in the UK once the deal was done, I had one tell me that this was 'outrageous.' When I pointed out that international staff like me had been doing it for years, he said, 'but people like you are different.' And that's just one actually quite nice Department, and most of my colleagues are lovely.

My suspicion is that he's a very troubled individual who has been telling lies for a long time. And he's made up in his head, what it is like to be a beleaguered Black academic and is playing that role.

And back to the two things may be true at once:

• As a non white academic I know PLENTY of white academics who have positions they shouldn't. How many other Cambridge professors have been accused of plagiarism? Several. Matt Goodwin had AI hallucinated references in his last book that was terribly written.
• And I also know a small handful of ethnic minority staff who have used their race/gender to full advantage. It's not the majority, but I do know a few. We laugh at them behind their back. Not all of them get to Cambridge professorships though. And none are fantasists- just very good at playing the game.

But it’s not problematic for people who are against [whatever] to point out obvious idiocies that thing brought.

Yes - but 50% of the cohort were also not privately educated?

Moreover, today 25% of students at Cambridge are overseas students. Parents who can afford overseas fees will likely have privately educated those children. Of the remaining 75%, of British students 29% are privately educated - ie 23% of the overall intake.

So, today, 48-50% of all students there are privately educated… just not exclusively in the UK? Ie, the private:uk state-educated ratio remains pretty identical after 40 years?

And whilst they do not make contextual offers, there are considerable numbers of pathway programmes that are specifically for those from ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds operated through numerous schools and 6th forms (Peter Symonds 6th form is an Oxbridge recruitment college running enrichment programmes etc) and from which white, middle class kids are explicitly excluded? I’m not anti these by the way, I do think bright kids of all classes, races and cultures should have the chance - it might have made Oxford accessible to me when I was applying - but whilst Oxbridge may not make contextual offers overtly, that is just window dressing?

A contextual offer only reduces a 3x A star offer to a 2x A star + an A - ie one grade. If a student from a disadvantaged background/school misses their offer at an Oxbridge college by one grade, the contextual data is then assessed and many (I believe as many as 32% on some courses) are given places with those lower grades… so in effect the contextual data is not used at the time of the offer [as they don’t need to do this as an inducement to pick them] but IS made on results day. The result is the same, though?

Sorry, not meaning to be a pedant but like my DCs I am AuDHD so am wired to be precisely that 😬 - I found myself going down the rabbit hole on this with their applications - despite going to a college which should have resulted in a contextual offer, our postcode and the fact that for SEN reasons they had had to attend a private school until 16, disqualified them from being considered for contextual offers. That said, again, there were other routes to those lowered offer grades: for both mine on their courses, if they attended an interview and passed it, they could get a grade reduction. Both of mine have done that and received lower offers based on interview performance. Given that getting to some of these universities for those interview costs considerable money in train fares [hotel accommodation for one of them] and/or parental support, that process likely excluded those less privileged but saved by the contextual system. So, in that the interview scheme therefore favours middle class kids, it again means much of this is still window dressing.

On plagiarism, I think our understanding of it and way of judging it is really poor. We tend to zero in on one or two sentences having some words in sequence the same. Having done a PhD, the huge amount of research and bringing together an entire text of book length, with around a thousands quotes and references, I think it’s extremely easy to mislabel a quote in your notes, or think a sentence you write was a thought and not realise it was intended as a reference or thought starter. I’m not saying we shouldn’t be careful and obviously entire passages lifted is a knowing transgression, but a few sentences amid a 80,000 word thesis that have ended up mislabelled or unlabelled… I bet it happens unintentionally in almost any thesis - the question is just how hard people are looking and wanting to tear someone down.

Far more egregious but much harder to check is basic lack of originality in thought. So many academics just rehash the same basic ideas and put new long words on top - especially in humanities. It has always stunned me how impressed fellow academics can be simply by overly complex sentence structures. Academics are almost seen as gurus by making their writing incomprehensible. It often just hides a lack of clarity of thinking and an unoriginal brain….. or someone who couldn’t be bothered editing.

The massive majority of academics are not truly original. They are reasonably academically smart people who have looked into a couple of subjects relatively deeply and strung together a lot of long words and sentences about it…. And can pass on what they’ve learned in the process to the next generation . I’d say That’s 80% of them. Then there are maybe 10% of fraudulent, knowing plagiarists at one end; and 10% of truly original thinkers on the other end. Wherever this guy sits in that spectrum, it’s definitely disproportionate for the daily mail to be so excited… that is undoubtedly fueled by racism.

Jason Arday has been active in defending his alleged plagiarism. For instance, the Plymouth academic that was reported to the police and the threats of defamation to the Times Higher Education from his lawyers.

Doesn't Jessica Taylor have a PhD?

cantabsupervisor - how sad to read your confirmation of the lowering of academic standards at Cambridge, particularly following on from the 2024 resignation of Dr David Butterfield.

I hear you - having spent the last 4 years in post grad education, it is quite clear to me that there are many ‘academics’ really shouldn’t be there - not only is their intellectual rigour questionable, but so is their teaching and mentoring ability!

But there are others who are incredible in both those functions. I cannot fathom how that disparity occurs and is maintained.

as I say above, i am deeply concerned about this story:

• it risks devaluing the UK education system considerably
• this may impact the number of overseas students coming to the UK. It is clear with 25% of students across the UK being overseas, and paying higher fees, universities are still struggling to survive and retain niche yet worthy academic courses/departments and UK students will ultimately be the poorer for that
• at a time when Uk students are building considerable debt to pay for these courses, the last thing they need is a public and employer perception that their qualifications are anything other than evidence of intellectual ability and academic rigour - that they will leave uni with critical thinking skills, creative and problem solving skills and basic essential skills like having mastered SPAG/or the technology that supports it
• I deeply fear for the knock on effect that this may have on students/graduates from non-white backgrounds at a time when Reform/Restore are whipping the uneducated masses into a frenzy
• I worry that, just as we have had decades of women needing to be better than male counterparts to prove they are not tokenistic recruitees, black and ND students will now have the same derision and assumption of having been carried etc to battle against. It may push diagnoses underground and mean many do not access the support that they are entitiled to - as much as I empathise with and admire Kathleen Stock, I am actually fluctuating between disappointment and feeling absolutely livid as the dismissiveness with which she reference a range of ND conditions, demonstrating utter lack of understanding of what these are or the varied spectrum of difficulties people with them manage. (As also mentioned above, I will not formally register my AuDHD precisely so that no one can suggest that it gave access to a lower standard of performance or scrutiny. It will only be acknowledged in my thesis itself to protect myself from accusations of examining topics and writing in voices that I have misappropriated.)

I could go on, but I am sooo angry - not just at Arday [whom I am willing to cut some slack, because he is actually autistic and therefore may have been groomed and manipulated over the years into believing the fantasy version of himself that has been constructed both for and with him] - but most especially with DEI sycophants at the numerous institutions he has been involved with and studied at, because they have not only brought about the opposite of what they aimed for [respect, inspiration and support for DEI category students] but have trashed the UK university system on the global stage. Thousands, tens of thousands, of students and graduates will now have to spend the next decade proving that they are worthy of their qualifications in a way that should have been unthinkable.