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...

In your experience do you think they will?

If we put aside the DEI aspects and the web of self aggrandising behaviour and look at the core of this, then students have been the victims of fraud and are carrying the financial and academic consequences of that. That's what makes me so cross. The real crime at the heart of this is being lost in a sea of noise. That matters because thousands of students and parents trust universities every year.

🤣

Not read the full thread, but heard Prof Kathleen Stock on the subject. She was brilliantly succinct and cut to the chase on the fact that the Cambridge academics who hired him did so entirely for their own gain, ie because of how it looked to the outside world.

We need more ppl willing to be plain speakers like her. We've got to a state of complete double speak in life. It's such bollocks.

Daniel Tammet is a fraud? How so?

A recent example of fraud by false representation https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2lqj9lye9po
Someone who got senior management positions in NHS with fake CV and was eventually given a four-year jail sentence

I'm assuming we've already had James O'Brien and his flustered admission that he was duped

https://nitter.net/LBC/status/2085680930291671516#m

Im hoping this spells the end of Celebrities proving they are nice by Signing Open Letters* for a Cause

( * Usually in the guardian)

I thought it was the surface of Jupiter 🤔

From my perspective it is the wider Cambridge faculty that should be reviewed. Some of the academics who have witnessed these appointments have been involved in the related controversy for a few years. Simon Woolley, Bhaskar Vira, names you see in these articles.

The appointment of Nathan Cofnas, for a start. The whole furore around his unscientific views. You get the same players mentioned, as below in a Varsity article. His Substack blogging is what did for Jason Arday. But then, if Jack Grove had not been shut down by Arday reporting him to the police and threatening THE via Carter Ruck.

This has been playing out for a few years:

Uni academic head admits ‘failures’ over ‘race-realist’ fellow | Varsity

Birkbeck, where he claimed to have done a master’s in counselling, has confirmed they have no record of any student of that name registered with them.

As to his supposed university affiliations, I stopped counting at ten:

Roehampton - where I recall reading that he took a sabbatical year as the students' union sports rep - St Mary's, Surrey, Greenwich, King's, Birkbeck (so six just in the London area) Liverpool John Moores, Glasgow, Durham and Cambridge.

and visiting professorships (I think all denied, at least in terms of existing appointments) at Glasgow, Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Ohio Stage

Re the question of whether the police will take action, I don't know, but I'm not holding my breath...

Does anyone know which courses he was teaching?

Because if it's sociology as part of the HSPS degree, HSPS attracts a lot of very high achieving students and is a "proper" degree - he will have been teaching lots of very capable students.

The Cambridge education degree on the other hand .. it's an education degree without QTS - you have to wonder why people would want to study this and the calibre of applicants is much lower I would imagine. I've looked at the content of the course (to massively discourage one of my students who applied for it, and was successful despite not really being a particularly high flyer) and a lot of the modules there are really pointless, from an academic standpoint. Basically I'm not really sure why Cambridge runs this degree.

I posted a link a few posts up.

Nick Adderley . The top cop who fabricated his CV was charged under :

Fraud Act 2006 (legislation.gov.uk)

It is ongoing at the moment.

Also, now a university where Arday has co-authored papers is concerned:

Jason Arday: Queens University Belfast to investigate work - BBC News

😂

For those saying other academics have retained tenure amidst proven allegations of plagiarism, I wonder if the difference here is what appears to be a wholly false back story of severe ASD, v serious physical illness, overcoming these serious conditions in spectacular fashion and going on to achieve multiple academic and sporting feats. The claims of marathons run on fractured limbs, the viva after brain surgery. That’s what elevates this case from a plagiarism case isn’t it? His back story was hugely integral to the rags to riches, adversity triumphed that accompanied his appointment.

Arday has a PhD from Liverpool John Moore so he hasn't fraudulently claimed a qualification to get jobs. He was over promoted from his level of competence with no managers or Heads of Departments seeming to pay any attention to his teaching or research.

I hope the students do get their complaints of poor teaching/supervision answered. Any modern uni is so terrified of poor student feedback/low NSS scores that they would be falling over themselves to address the students complaints.

Is one annecdote from a student at Roehampton? And the group of students all from Cambridge? Will be interesting if ex-students from Durham and Glasgow also start sharing their experience of being taught by Arday.

I believe he did Mars first then stopped at Jupiter after a week of solitude and contemplation on Uranus.

Now here's a strange thing.

In the previous thread, someone mentioned that JAs name appeared on various electoral registers when searching on genealogy websites. I had a look and saw this was the case. But the Durham address looked as though it was an industrial estate, not a residential address. I didn't have time to check that out there and then, but it certainly seemed odd.

I've just gone back to have a better look - and my searches are no longer throwing up the Durham address, nor half of the other hits I had previously.

Can anyone else check this out?

(Sorry, I didn't mean to quote another post there!)

Any provable lie on a cv, which facilitated the appointment, is potential deception.

Re academics who research neurodevelopmental conditions like autism identifying themselves to the university as autistic, it's very easy to get a diagnosis of autism or ADHD or indeed many conditions on a one-off Zoom call, just by paying a few hundred pounds & reciting an appropriate history & symptoms to the assessor. A more comprehensive assessment would seek some external evidence that the history & symptoms were not fitted, deliberately or otherwise, to get the diagnosis, but this is not usually done.

Surely a way to discourage further fraudsters is to sell his assets and use his book sales to pay back the students who effectively spent tuition fees on reading a comic strip and have the allegation of "racist" on their records.

Yes there is the criminal offence of fraud by false representation. As someone has already mentioned the Chris Constable Nick Adderley is currently going through the court system for similar issues. Sian Jenkins, who was convicted and then acquitted of the murder of his foster daughter Billie-Jo, was also charged with the same offence of fraud. He was a head teacher at the time of his arrest and it turned out he’d faked his educational qualifications.

I don’t think it’s prosecuted that often. I think often if a business finds out their employee has lied they just sack them rather than going through the criminal process.

Not his doctorate, no, but he has apparently fraudulently claimed to have a postgraduate psychodynamic counselling qualification from Birkbeck which gave him a ‘rich understanding of mental health’, but Birkbeck says no one of that name ever studied there. He claims to retain an honorary professorship at Durham, where he used to work. Durham says not. He claimed to have had visiting fellowships at Ohio State and the U of Glasgow, but they say otherwise.

That’s entirely aside for the well-founded plagiarism allegations (including his doctorate, to the awarding institution ruled it was ‘honest error’) and the book he claimed to have published with Palgrave, which had only ever been a proposal.

I've just checked the electoral reg again and this time I have all the hits I had previously. But the Durham address is indeed on a business park; it's not a residential address. Why should this be?

Interesting post and I wonder if Cambridge should be more agile about their course offering?

There will be obviously students prepared to compromise to go to one of the best universities in the world and there may be some aiming for education from Cambridge rather than say a less vocational degree elsewhere.