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???

Sorry, that was an extended rant. Will go and have a coffee and get back to my thesis…

@cantabsupervisor
A university exists to pursue truth through rigorous scholarship. Once academic excellence ceases to be the overriding criterion, the institution begins to lose the very thing that gives it its legitimacy.

Dodgy standards in academia have been around for years (there's a book in my own specialist field from the early 2000s which enrages me) but my perception is that they are getting worse. Whilst what is called advocacy research is okay in limited situations (say, a charity seeking data to present to the public to furthers its cause), it's not okay to publish it in a journal which is presenting itself as an unbiased bastion of truth. It's also not okay to fill in the box saying that you have no conflicts of interest when your living depends on the claims that you are making being true. If you're sponsored by a drugs company, you need to admit to that when you publish the results of a medical trial. If you publish a paper showing the positive impact of a certain remedial reading scheme on KS2 children, you need to fess up to owning the company that publishes the materials used in the classroom. If people fail to do these things (and they do) they undermine trust in the whole of academia.

As for the whole thing of 'I didn't know plagiarism was bad'... FFS, I knew as an undergraduate that it was morally wrong to claim someone else's work as your own. If Jason Arday can't work that out for himself, he shouldn't be in any position of responsibility.

I've been quite interested in this person's alleged sporting achievements and the (lack of) curiosity around them.

Others can correct me if anyone did properly look into it at the time, but I find it strange that these pretty extraordinary claims seem to have been just believed by media on face value and with no evidence (eg Strava, photos, experience of anyone else involved etc etc).

And apparently nobody even thought to ask experienced long distance runners for a basic sense check (they would have said 100 miles a day for multiple days is - unlikely). Plus I think these achievements would have been the talk of the town in the ultra running community, so it's telling if nobody appears to know anything about it

I concur...

A friend recently told me that a contact who is high up in HR in some big investment bank said they now simply do not interview anybody who is white and male.

She also said that the English tutor at her son's college at Oxford (old, relatively wealthy, but relatively low profile) completely refused to accept anybody who was privately educated, regardless of how good they were.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that there is tremendous dumbing-down to accommodate the abilities, sensibilities and, above all, lack of resilience of those who are admitted. So tougher stuff like Chaucer, which modern youff can't be bothered with, gets ditched in favour of something more modern that ticks boxes and can be identified with.

An all-too familiar story, but one that has now got to the point where it looks as if you can get an Oxbridge classics degree without having studied either Virgil or Homer. Now I of course appreciate that classics is a strange case, given that it is taught so little in schools, but apparently the "problem" is that boys (men) are getting too many top degrees, though it is not very extreme. 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.

@Angeruish agree - my DD is studying classics [won’t say where as outing, given other posts I engage with] and because they recognise that Latin, Greek and A Level classics are not taught in many schools (private or state), she has been studying Latin on an accelerated course and could take it (or ancient Greek) all the way through. She beat herself up for not applying to Cambridge because she actually had good enough grades in the end, but with her SEN I had discouraged due to the likelihood she would not cope with intensive 8week terms.

To be honest, I discouraged it because she had MH issues related to gender dysphoria, and I felt that letting her go to Cambridge would be like locking an alcoholic in a brewery.

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.
FFS!
I am female, and my field of study is WWII. The pointy end (fighting and Axis occupation), not the home front.

Cambridge University recently successfully defended a tribunal case brought by a black candidate, Dr Calbert Graham, who wasn't shortlisted for the role of associate professor in the Faculty of Education.
Apparently the subject of his PhD thesis wasn't an exact match for what they wanted.
I wonder if they will have another tribunal case on their hands, depending how they handle the plagiarism etc allegations.
Edited to remove link as it produced an image I couldn't see a way to remove. I have inserted the candidate's name instead so people can find the case if they want to.

So interesting! For my English BA I did a dissertation on WW2 Italian Jewish autobiography - the full backstories of some of the writers and of the experience of Italian jews, their descriptions of the death camps and brutality there is absolutely not for the feint hearted. Little about how that war was conducted in Europe is. Sadly, I think shying away from teaching that reality is why we are spiralling back into repeating it.

That was how I remembered it being described, though all I see now talks of an attempt to make things more accessible. There was also an undercurrent of suggesting that public school boys arrived better prepared than their (privately-educated) female equivalents, and so they had to shift the course so there could be equality of outcome.

For people that don't know, those who have already studied at least Latin at A-Level (Classical Civilisation is not enough) can do the three-year Cambridge course. People who are entirely new to it can do a four-year course, which I think merges to an extent.
How on earth they can judge whether the candidates are up to the major task of learning at least one ancient language from scratch after a brief test and a couple of interviews is utterly beyond me.

This sums it up neatly. Let's all admire the emperor's new clothes. And it's bad form to point out he is in fact stark naked.
There are no clothes.
Let alone magnificent new ones.

@cantabsupervisor ‘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.’ I’ve been talking to my son (Oxford undergrad and masters, now doing PhD) and he is baffled by this case, because he’s a mathematician and so many of the dodgy/borderline/reputation-based practices that shore up (some) humanities research simply don’t work in maths. He’s always loved the fact that in maths, it’s perfectly normal for a student to point out possible mistakes in more senior people’s work, often to their face. This isn’t seen as aggressive — it’s just a perfectly normal part of the process. And he says that plagiarism just doesn’t really fly in maths.

This whole thing has made me think about whether the humanities are really focused on getting to the ‘truth’ of anything at all.

On the racism allegations — there’s another Cambridge professor fighting off plagiarism allegations right now. He’s white, and his case has not had anything like the same coverage. Arday’s case is obviously a bit hallucinatory so I get why it’s had more attention, but among it all I’m sure there are some people (including some of the people who originally investigated it) who are frank racists. But then, that’s part of the problem of our current intellectual moment, isn’t it — people can be utter wankers and still be telling the truth sometimes. It feels like there’s a whole lot of people in academia (and business and media) who decide what to believe on the basis of who’s saying it, not on the basis of whether or not it’s fucking true.

The high profile ultramarathon runner Damian Hall has declared the 30 marathons in 35 days to be totally plausible and not remarkable nor requiring any great athletic prowess. Likewise, 100 miles in 24 hours is an accepted ultramarathon target, but he adds that running an average of 100 miles in 24 hours over multiple days is less likely, though not impossible, and would have attracted the attention of the elite ultramarathon community to this previously unknown prodigy in their sport. I agree with you, @ShinyBlueTractor, that since these were supposedly high profile challenges to raise "loot" for charities one could reasonably expect there to be witnesses, contemporaneous items in the news archive or the charities' reports, and possibly tracker evidence, although 15 years ago this was less prevalent and less sophisticated than it is now. And of course Prof Arday's claims to have had opportunities at a high level in other sports should be able to be verified from the archives of the publications about those sports.

I suspect that if this aspect gets much attention beyond the running community, the focus will be on the money that was reportedly raised and distributed to charities rather than the unlikeliness of the feats of endurance themselves.

This example of a young woman who went through the US school system (and got into university) without being able to read or write, similarly demonstrates the flaws in a system that abhors discussion of failure. Of course, she wasn’t telling people she was performing well, quite the opposite, but was pushed along anyway.
Telling people they’re not at the standard required is uncomfortable, and I think some educators are trying to avoid it.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/27/us/connecticut-aleysha-ortiz-illiterate-lawsuit-cec

Not at all - it was extremely interesting.

I did a masters at a top uni in London and several of the PhD students who were conducting the module seminars could not string a sentence in intelligible English together. One Spanish 'tutor' for example, she spoke in a monotonous voice in English using a Spanish speech pattern and her seminars were entirely incomprehensible (could as well have been delivered in Spanish) and therefore useless and a waste of time. Considering I was a fee paying student it was rubbish. I say that as an immigrant who was / is EAL.

I think you need to join the dots here !

Please clarify your connection of Homer and Virgil, Italian Jews in WW2 and political correctness !

Perhaps you should read the post I was replying to [about the perception that women are less able to cope with gritty topics in education/academia leading to curating of topics offered accordingly] and stop with the passive aggressive nit-picking on my posts in particular?

That way you may be able to join the dots yourself?

My DD has had similar issues - she says at times it would be easier if they did just deliver in their mother tongue language so that she could convert a recording to a transcript and then translate it. She is afraid to say anything in case it might be deemed racist or xenophobic and assumes it may be in part to her AuDHD, so blames herself rather than ask for clarification of points she could not understand.

She struggles with attendance as a matter of course due to her ND, and knowing that when you have found the courage to get yourself out of your room and onto campus you will have to sit through a lecture that makes no sense, when it would be better use of time to read a book about the topic, download the powerpoint presentation and teach yourself makes it doubly hard. Especially when, like you say, you are flipping paying for it.

She needs to report this to the Student support Services of her University.

Eh?
I did read it and it wasn't clear to me what you meant. Passive aggressive??? I still don'tknow how women and gritty topics connects to repeating history, or Italian Jews in WW2.
I really simply am after clarification!

Presumably because the poster is a woman and the topic of Italian Jews in WW2 is gritty, as she says in the post about it not being for the feint-hearted. It's pretty clear and did seem PA how you started picking on it, but hope it's clear now.

Honestly, the more I read here the more infuriated I become. And I really do think the entire D&I movement has a lot to answer for. I’ve done well on my own merits, efforts and hard work. This charlatan cannot say the same.

Also,not surw how this spoofer ran so much with a head of hair like that.

Oxford in general makes the same offer grades to everyone (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).

Cambridge has minimum offer grades, but will make higher offers to some students eg 4 A star offers are not unknown at a private school local to us.

When it comes to students who miss their offer grades, both tend to favour contextual students if they still have spare places (rather than go into clearing).

There is no particular transparency around this and it varies by college.

I've been following this story for a few days now, it's absolutely fascinating. The 7-Up claim is the one that really stands out for me - what was he thinking? I feel very sorry for any black academics that now feel that they are being questioned as a result.