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...

I’d just like to say I’m in solidarity with you… i will never regret doing the right thing by my children even though it swallowed up my career. I hope I too can eventually write something meaningful that will resonate with others.

Good luck with all your efforts x

Nearly all publications, whatever their financial resources, have legal libel insurance. A term of that insurance will be that potentially contentious stories are 'legalled' before publication. Publishers risk losing their cover for legal costs and damages if they publish against that advice. Private Eye magazine famously does not take out insurance and 'self insures' by maintaining its own substantial fighting fund. Given the nature of the stories they publish this is probably commercially more economical than paying stratospheric premiums and because they can thus maintain complete independence.

No it doesn't . It really doesn't. Echolia is not acting like the class clown and putting on funny voices .

A footnote in the Carter Ruck letter (posted above) says:

“Professor Arday is currently supervising 15 PhD students and has examined over 35 PhD theses as an external examiner.”

Presumably those fifteen students are/were at Cambridge.

You can probably BS your way through the occasional undergraduate lecture, as apparently he did at Roehampton, but one-to-one supervision of a doctoral thesis? That would really be difficult to pull off.

Given that he apparently only had one supervision when writing his own thesis at Liverpool John Moores, perhaps he thought that would be sufficient…

Apart from the fact that they were unlucky, do we know any more about these fifteen doctorands? Have they spoken out?

Fifteen is a mad amount to be supervising at once. I’m not sure how you could with a full teaching load - and I am not sure about Cambridge but many Oxford depts only allow you to supervise 6 at once. In any event, to have examined 35 is also very unlikely - for equivalence I have a similar level of experience to Prof Arday being his age and having got my PhD at the same age. I’ve been in permanent posts since age 30 and have examined about 7. Sure as a Cambridge prof you’d be asked more often, but it takes a long time to read and write the report and all the follow up. Doing 3-4 a year is a massive undertaking on top of 15 doctoral supervisions per month (most places ask that 1 supervision happens month) and a full teaching/research/admin load.

Yes, sorry I don’t take things in accurately enough but it was a David Starkey (historian left Cambridge in 2020 after I think 45 years) interview with Nathan Cofnas on you tube - at the end of the video Starkey explains when he thinks the DEI implementation started

https://ethos.bl.uk/catalog?utf8=%E2%9C%93&op=OR&title=&creator_search=Arday+&abstract=&date_issued=&contributor_search=Arday&funder_search=&doi=&ethos_identifier=&university=&sort=score+desc%2C+system_create_dtsi+desc&search_field=advanced&commit=Search

Searching the EThOS database, there is one search result for 'author' Arday, and no results whatsoever for 'supervisor' Arday. So that means that no-one that he has supervised has had their thesis published to date.

That makes sense, given that he was only appointed in 2023, but what does it mean for those 15 students going forwards?

https://gradstudents.ch.cam.ac.uk/degree-committee-policy-research-student-supervisor-ratios

Interestingly, Carter Ruck's statement, if true, is saying that JA was supervising more than double the number of students permitted by policy at Cambridge. I'd say that's unusual.

Mmm... just what I was thinking too. Perhaps it was all of his students over the three years. Even so, it is not the kind of thing to tell a journalist who specialises in that area and could be expected to understand the situation.

I kind of got the feeling that much of what we see in the letter rather directly reflects JA's own interpretation. The letter goes on to say:
“…our client has arranged for his PhD thesis to be independently peer-reviewed by individuals at the University of Cambridge. As part of this review, his thesis has been run thorugh Copyleaks, a similar plagiarism detection program to Turnitin, and it returned a result of 2.6%. Scribber, another similar platform, returned a percentage of 7%. Our client has also processed his PhD thesis himself through Turnitin and it returned a similarity result of 6%.”

These seem to be very low figures given what Nathan Cofnas came up with, and the numerous specific instances of apparent plagiarism that many of us have seen. So perhaps that was just JA's undigested take on the findings?

How can I put it delicately... could it be that it wasn't just Cambridge, loads of other universities, a publishing house and an adoring media that he duped?

I imagine that a class action lawsuit may already be in it's early stages - that threat will have played a part in Deborah Prentice finally going public. There will be a lot of Arday's students who will want their work and results reviewed, plus compensation. On top of the class action Covid claims that all universities are facing, it could be an expensive year for Cambridge.

Iagree - echolalalia is much more like (say) inappropriately blurting short song lyrics or bits of favourite TV or film dialogue or conversational fragments completely regardless of the social context, often when the person feels under stress:

So imagine if that’s in the quiet time for reflection during a funeral, or during a breaking bad news situation, or in front of small kids, or during someone else’s happy news situation, or whenever the person with echollalia is meant to be responding to something in a particular way.

or the person might be in the moment immediately repeating back sections of what’s just been said by someone else. That can be taken as extremely rude and provocative. Its linked to anxiety and can be incredibly upsetting and stressful for the person who has it because they may be trying to use it to cope with a social situation but it can get them into huge trouble and cause loads of offence. Other people can react very badly because it can be so far from what the social norms of the moment dictate; or what’s expected in a reciprocal conversation. Much more likely that a class would turn on someone with this, tbh and the person would be shunned. They wouldn’t be able to ‘save it up’ to appear to mock only certain teachers by repeating back their words.

A ‘Class clown’would be someone thinking up what would amuse the group and carrying that out very strategically and consciously to create a funny situation- which is all about being iable to read the room and be very socially fluent, aware and intuitive.

Ha! X posted with you.

Honestly if the claims about ND and learning difficulties were a lie that’s absolutely disgusting, I think that’s why this case is so affecting for a lot of people.

I think to a small child it could be their memory if no one ever explained it. My autistic child is echolalic and even the teachers didn’t understand (despite my explanations) until we finally got the specialist teacher in. Autistic traits are very frequently totally misunderstood.

Agreed . The plagiarism is one thing but the disability faking is disgraceful

If it’s a deception then it is shameful, but we’ll never know because it’s private info.
Just have to deal with people looking askance at others with legitimate diagnoses in the workplace or having unrealistic expectations of what kids with these same named diagnoses could hope to go on to do.

It can also be completely normal childhood and even adulthood behaviour.

Just look at six seven for instance. One kid starts that up and the whole class will repeat it, it's not echolalia. It's what kids do.

The tiktok I saw of an alleged classmate spoke about him just saying common kids TV adverts/jingles of the time and then others would laugh and join in.

Which I did as a kid as did probably all the kids in my classes.

I'm a kid of the 80s and my contemporaries even now will start repeating advert quotes or TV jingles of the past if someone mentions them.

Someone suggested that the Carter Ruck letter may be a fake. If it is, whoever faked it has committed a criminal offence.

well if it's repeating stock phrases or funny voices it could be, no?

Well it's not as if someone is forensically analysing what he actually did - 'class clown' could be shorthand for someone who made them laugh as he was inappropriately repeating TV jingles etc. I don't see the point in jumping on every fragment of someone's memory as if it's verifiable fact.

If it was fake would Carter Ruck not have made a statement to that effect by now

Someone suggested that the Carter Ruck letter may be a fake.

Perhaps someone misunderstood the joke that the Carter Ruck letter had been copied from another Carter Ruck letter?

If anyone was DEI, it's David Starkey from a disadvantaged background with a club foot and also gay! But they threw him out after 50 years because he made one inappropriate comment.

Can I ask people of they think there was a certain inevitability a Jason Array was going to appear in accademia?

I ask because I do have questions and the academic ability of some of the senior academic staff at a local new university. The university used to have professor of politics openly boasted about her 2 E's at A level and how A levels results shouldn't hold you back. The woman was a brilliant administrator, politically astute, great networker and was heavily involved in local politics (with a lot of strong opinions about educational systems being geared to favour the priveleged). However her research was sporadic and not of great quality and she didn't simply sound academic i..e. immersed in her subject in conversation (lots of opinions on bias against ethnic minorities but not a huge grasp on 20th century politics or political theory).

she has since been promoted partly I believe because of her advocacy and OR work

Arday above

just catching up/marking place.

picking up a couple of points about JA’s early education where a few comments have raised queries:

• JA claims diagnoses of GDD and Asperger’s at age 3. Imo those 2 diagnoses are incompatible with each other due to his claims of mutism.
• More importantly Asperger’s wasnt a diagnosis until 1993/94 so the NHS wouldn’t have given this in 1988.
• In the 1980s/90s he would have had a Statement of SEN, not an EHCP which only came in from around 2014. These were notoriously difficult to obtain but he’d have needed one to attend special school.
• JA claims in an interview (possibly C4) that he went to a Special School but a classmate came forward (the one who also mentioned Sunday School on TikTok) to say he attended a mainstream Heathbrook primary. Confirmed by the school on twitter in 2023.
• The same primary school contact de-bunks the claim JA made about being mute until 11
• He seems to have attended a Stitched Up textiles programme at a Lambeth charity until age 14 but accidentally refers to this years later as “Seven Up” which attracts a lot of negative attention but probably was not actually one of his fabrications?!
• He claims he couldn’t read or write prior to 18 but went to a Mainstream Secondary in Wandsworth and left at 16 with 2 GCSEs: PE and Textiles.
• Theres a gap 16-18 where he hasn’t claimed any educational activities - is this the football/snooker period?
• At 18 he turns up with his mum at Merton College and she persuades Sandro Sandri to let him on a BTEC course “with no qualifications”. It was 2003. Without English GCSE or Functional Skills this must have been one of the lower level BTECs which wouldn’t facilitate access to university. JA claims that Sandri spent hours teaching him to read and write - after which he ends up with a reading age of 3, 9 or 11 depending on which interview you listen to!
• He credits Sandri with instilling him with self confidence. I wonder whether this is where he learns how to lie… Because at age 20 he gets into St Marys Uni to study PE & Education. How did this happen without some sort of dishonesty? He can’t have a Level 3 BTEC by this time and he hasn’t got GCSE English/cant have it with the reading ages described when he arrives at uni at age 20….
• 2005-2008 Undergraduate degree - how did he pass this?!
• 2008-2009 Masters degree - how did he pass this?
• 2009-2010 spends 1 year working in St Mary University student union
• Around 2010 he gets job at Roehampton as a PE Teacher. It seems that JA finds this all a bit boring and after this the timeline goes berserk and there are multiple overlapping courses and jobs and qualifications which make no sense and Ive no idea how anyone could afford to fund it all…

Has anyone seen a description of how he manage to pass the undergraduate and first masters in the first place?

ETA typo