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...

On Monday the friends that Lord Woolley arranged to meet & support Arday included Diane Abbott who has been monstered by the media for the last forty years. Why weren't any friends or family with him on Friday? They should have had him on suicide watch.

I agree. Surely the NHS has emergency facilities for people with suicidal feelings of even the Samaritans? There are plenty of help groups for people with depression and suicidal thoughts with expertise and I just wonder if Jason had had the correct care at the correct time things may have been different.

It seems the people who had surrounded him were more advocates that supported his cause rather than people skilled with working with the suicidal.

Of course the NHS provides urgent support for those with suicidal feelings

www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/mental-health-services/where-to-get-urgent-help-for-mental-health/

Whilst we don't know what went on behind the scenes, it's slightly alarming the people around him left him to it.

https://beyondtheabstract.substack.com/p/analyzing-the-rise-of-jason-arday?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=nyagd

Has anyone read this?

There used to be a running joke at the LSE that you'd only ever see your tutor twice in a term. Once at the start of Freshers week, and next when they were expounding on Some Important Topic on Newsnight

Disagree strongly.

Done correctly, DEI is about removing unconscious biases and ensuring that you get the best candidate for the job regardless of colour of skin, sex, religion, etc. What you are describing is DEI done badly.

Then you clearly have no idea what d&I is. Maybe you've only seen it practiced poorly? D&I is literally about merit based opportunity.

Yes, this is how I understood it too. It was never about levelling up or down, about giving lower grades, it was about making selection for university and employment as ‘blind’ as practical so that candidates from minorities got fair consideration. For eg - assigning candidate/applicant numbers in first stages of screening so that names like Khan or Oluwaseun can’t be picked up and eliminated from the pool. It was about removing the university from CVs at screening stage so that HR and interviewers cannot see that they got their 1st from Kingston or Cambridge (both class and - until recently - race indicators). It’s about removing dates of birth from cvs so that you cannot consciously screen a person out because of their age?

It was never about taking a lesser qualified candidate because they ticked a DEI box.

Exactly. Broadly, it’s about making sure that people from any kind of under-privileged or under-represented group have access to the same opportunities as people from more privileged groups so they can be considered for the same opportunities. The best candidates for those opportunities are then selected on merit.

As an example, let’s say a particular role is usually only occupied by people from a particular group.

An example of effective and fair D&I work to resolve this would be to work out how this role has been advertised and to make sure it’s advertised to people from as many other groups as possible (usually by engaging with those groups), and to work with those groups to understand if there are any barriers preventing them from applying to the role and working with them to address those barriers.

The goal is then to receive as many applications as possible for the role from as many different candidates from different groups as possible. The most qualified and experienced candidate is then chosen from a wide pool of candidates.

D&I is also practically very difficult to practice for academic appointments as no names can be removed because you need to list publications. It's far far less controlled than a normal company. Some departments will ask applicants to come in and give informal seminars before the formal process and have going for dinner or coffee as part of that. Many applicants will have had discussions with the selection panel members one by one informally before the formal process. Try overcoming affinity bias with that kind of process!

Is there any context in which D&I doesn't begin with at least a cursory analysis of existing demographics? If there is one, and if there is no intention to increase representation from one group of people and decrease it from another, then I agree.

If you want to talk about DEI, that is a slightly different kettle of fish because outcomes are relatively immutable.

I think people confuse Inclusion and affirmative action. They aren't the same.

Analysis is part of that. Women make up 60% of our entry posts. By assoc prof that drops to 50% and prof it drops to 15%. Clearly these women are not all incompetent. So we have things in place to try and support women through. Better return to work policies, making sure we try to ask the same questions to every candidate rather than the men's panel being an hour of cricket discussion. It's not saying we will promote women because they are women or not promoting men because they are men, it's just trying to level the opportunity.

I’m not in academia but I can totally understand where you’re coming from. I also imagine recruitment processes differ quite a lot between institutions. This will make it really difficult - and maybe impossible - to put in place good D&I practices across the board to attract a wide range of well qualified applicants for academic jobs.

You would like to see more women in post relative to men. Although that can be rationalised, it introduces a bias into individual judgements.

Also, the reputation of some institutions - e.g. Oxford and Cambridge, and a few others - are so elevated that this might actually put off people, who would’ve been well suited for a role there, from applying to them.

From what I’ve seen, Oxford and Cambridge do very effective outreach work. Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s very positive. I think it will only improve as and when their students from different groups feed back about their uni experiences and use that to inform future outreach work.

I just really hope the situation surrounding Jason Arday doesn’t overshadow or negatively impact all of that previous and ongoing good work.

I think people would be shocked to see how lax it all is. When I first started in academia an HR representative used to sit on the panels. But with funding cuts across the sector this doesn't happen anymore. Decisions are made behind closed doors and then a piece of paper is sent to hr.

I've sat on panels where panel members have asked candidates if their husband would mind them relocating, whether they are starting a family, where the panel has debated whether two blonde candidates are too similar.

It may introduce a bias in individual appointments, but I think the unis with the best practices will be very aware of that risk and working to avoid it.

One way of handling it is to have a strong pipeline of female students (or students from other backgrounds too, as well as male students) right the way down to undergraduate level. Their unis should support them to achieve their full academic potential and encourage them to pursue postgraduate study as far as they wish to take it.

Obviously, one of the barriers to that (as well as student experience at university and aptitude for postgraduate study) is funding, as postgraduate study is really expensive and has very little funding available.

Wow that is concerning. I think that definitely needs to improve.

I wonder if unis could learn from institutions who have experience of recruitment practices that try to remove bias (e.g. much of the public sector), to see which ones they could adopt? As you’ve said, some of them can’t be transferred to academia though.

Couldn’t there be more standardised interview questions though? I think a very strong case can be made for that. At the very least, interview panels should be advised not to ask personal questions like the ones you referred to here.

I should be shocked that those questions are still being asked, but sadly I am not.

Cambridge's efforts in this area illustrate my point about bias and poor judgement.

They set out to increase their intake of students from low SES backgrounds and from state schools. Over the course of a decade they increased the annual intake of POLAR4 Q1 students by a small number, around 50. They did much better with state educated students which was well publicised. However, from being on a par in terms of outcomes with privately educated students state educated students have lately performed significantly worse - privately educated students are 50% more likely to achieve firsts.

So, Cambridge - working on the false assumption that attainment is inflated for the well-off by schooling, rather than heredity and parenting - preferentially selected a demographic that appealed to their world view, and kept on preferentially selecting them year by year as they saw the attainment gap widening according to school type.

To a limited extent they got what they wanted in terms of diversity and inclusiveness but at the expense of outcomes. Does that ring any bells?

edit - annual intake

Lord Wooley demands investigation of the press.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/7047107345c85abe

Interesting how people keep boiling it down to 'he was only accused of plagiarism'. He wasn't
He made a career and boatload of cash from fabrication. He was enabled by Cambridge. If it wasn't such an extraordinary tale the media would not have been interested. As it is, a lot of people are very interested.