Jason Arday, Cambridge Plagiarist, thread two

[Angeruish]

We are nearing our 1000-post limit on the original thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5561878-jason-arday-cambridge-plagiarist?reply=153910946

I have now removed the question mark after "plagiarist".

I can't believe the sequel will be as good as the original, but you never know...

Is there any approach to or model of DEI that recommends institutions do not announce the hiring of a black person or someone with a disability in terms of their 'diversity'?

I’ve got two kids who are now saddled with £30k+ worth of student debt each after achieving high end degrees at high end universities. I don’t want to think that their degrees were capable of being done by someone with a reading age of 9. The fact that Arday keeps going on about this shows how little he understands about scholarship. It isn’t about standing at the front of the lecture theatre and talking in cliches.

Truly it’s the Britain’s Got Talent model of achievement: no talent, but a ‘difficult life’ back story and a habit of repeating ‘I can do this if you give me a chance’.

The lesson may be that if you’re going to lie, lie big. Unlike the Salt Path ones, this guy could still cash in on his fame if minded to.

Don't people have to do real proper exams any more ?
This is what I can't understand.
I guess with the long essays dissertations thesis even a person could pay someone to write them for you.
As they are created and composed away from direct immediate scrutiny.
Obviously there is or should be thorough scrutiny later....
But. Aside from impersonation how does someone sit and pass exams which demand writing there and then under time restriction and having to construct an answer just from what's in your head.
Or can be cobbled together from snippets in one's own mind.
I wonder how I passed most exams.
Followed the old dictum.
Write everything you know about the subject relevant or not.
The rest make up.

But at least it was all my own work...

So he must have had more functional literacy and at an earlier age than he purports to have passed regular exams. First degree still has final exams. I hope...

Someone I know had a non-verbal autistic son who's just been made head boy of his secondary school.

How is this person going to do head boy duties?

It just keeps coming, today the Spartacus connection! If you read the Atlantic article in his book proposal the prophetic women who speaks to him actually says 'Do you know the story of Spartacus, the escaped slave who led a rebellion against the Romans?” before telling him his own future in detail. This presumably includes the 'great and unfortunate things' which appears to be taken from the title of episode 7 of Spartacus and refers to Sura's prophecy about Spartacus's life.
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/08/jason-arday-cambridge-academic-memoir-resignation/688206/

It's actually starting to look like satire beyond anything Chris Morris came up with it is SO blatantly bullshitting

"remember, Cake is a made up drug"

There are plenty of degree courses - even at RG unis - that have no final exams. It’s all coursework. The added challenge now is that this can all be AI - in the past there was just the risk someone else had done it.

He and his mother fought tirelessly to overcome his early difficulties, he became verbal and able to attend a mainstream school and is now doing fantastically better than anybody would have expected when he was a non-verbal 4 year old. The person I was quoting was looking for success stories so I gave her one. It wouldn't be much of a success story if he'd stayed profoundly disabled would it.

My bet is romance fraud. He has the experience and the pedigree.

Indeed.

Part of the issue here is the definition of ‘non-verbal’.

Both of mine were late talkers. Said pretty much nothing at all until 3, and only a vocab of a few words at 3.5. Then had speech/pronunciation issues that meant they had to have speech therapy to learn how to create the sounds needed to be intelligible until they started school. One was regarded special needs on application to infant school on the basis of his speech needs. We only later (in teens) received autism diagnoses and then ADHD.

I had an identical path to speech - massive lisp and sounded like Donald duck apparently. But all of us got there by 6 or 7 and, essentially, haven’t really shut up since. With my eldest we joked that she either didn’t feel she had anything to say to us or that we were too uninteresting/unworthy to warrant her time. She spoke once she felt she had something to say and once she had someone she deemed worthy to listen.

I think without a real explanation about what his ‘mutism’ or ‘non-verbal’ issue was, ideally the actual clinical diagnosis, we can’t really hope to understand the extent of his issue or the level of achievement in overcoming it.

It’s all smoke and mirrors until then.

I was following the “maybe he believes his own myth” line until I read the student accounts.

Seriously though his academic career I'd in tatters and he is too high profile for other employers to risk. He will have had some pay off from Cambridge but how much? Maybe he can keep the book advance?How much pension did he build up? Does he have a family to support.

He has a wife and two children reportedly

Apologies id this has been posted already: https://www.whatthelawdoes.com/p/good-law-project-and-dr-jason-arday/comments#comment-310663840

The people who hired him.
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/who-hired-the-ridiculous-jason-arday

So reading the guardian editorial they basically want to view Jason as an individual aberration and that the fiasco around his appointment should not distract from diversity issues i.e. the under representation of black academics.

Personally I think there needs to be further enquiry into those who hired him and importantly the culture that led to his appointment and continued tolerance of his documented lack of ability to perform the role. DEI as a philosophy has been exposed as a tool to achieve ethnic minority representation despite the significant and on going harm to an elite university's reputation.

I suspect there may be other Ardays. Maybe their profile won't be as obvious but recruitment practice needs to be examined. We already have maybe some deep.seated doubt a about Cambridge 's drive for greater inclusion of under represented groups and we need to gain confidence that their recruitment and admission policies are not ideologically driven.

Glasgow appointed him to a professorship first - have they said they'll be conducting any enquiry into that?

Yes.

Widely reported that
Glasgow Univ are investigating how he was appointed there.

I think we have to be careful about the 'reading age' angle. As a child I read about Fred Epstein, who died 20 years ago. He was a renowned neurosurgeon who was so dyslexic that he had to convince his university to let him tape record assignments. However, the key is that he had the academic ability to achieve if the barrier of writing was removed. I think it's very different from what is being implied here.

ok good...looking at the original ad and so on, he doesn't seem to have actually committed fraud to get the job in terms of meeting criteria; the issue is that Cambridge really loved the sensational back story. PR triumphing over HR.

I have noticed in other contexts that it has now become incredibly offensive to mock or criticise someone's use of the English language. To criticise someone's spelling and grammar now looks incredibly classist or indeed racist if English is a second language. If you add in the complexity of neurodiversity then you can perhaps see a culture where someone sees sub standard academic work but is not courageous to call it out for fear of being labelled a bigot. I think this is relevant because a lot of Jason's work did indeed have grammatical imperfections and even structural inadequacies but there is a culture within academia and perhaps the wider world of criticising the written word as a form of discrimination.

I have been in work places where I have to be very careful to ask someone's meaning of a sentence or paragraph because the English was not great. There is a school of thought that good writing skills exclude those who are brought up in cultures or settings where English writing is not valued or indeed those that are neuro divergent and I wonder if society needs to reflect on this?

So Cambridge are digging their heels in saying their hiring systems don't need reviewing. Utter arrogant shameless cunts.