Was Jason Arday just the perfect victim?

[KellyK2026]

Surely I can’t be the only one that feels like Jason Arday was a victim, right? Yesterday he was found dead and I feel bad for him. Here’s the reasons why I think he was a victim:

1. It is absolutely insane to me that Cambridge University would appoint him as a Professor when he was in the early stages of his career. It’s practically unheard of. At any university you typically have to earn your dues (which means working as an academic for many years) OR do something truly special, like a Nobel Prize nomination, to be promoted to Professor. I cannot imagine the amount of pressure he had been under to prove himself and likely had a tremendous amount of imposter syndrome. Cambridge let him down.
2. I’ve worked in academia for many years, and let me tell you, academics are under a tremendous amount of pressure to publish. This pressure can compromise quality. Arday isn’t the first nor will he be the last to publish questionable papers.
3. As I’ve worked in academia for years, I’ve experienced academics make racist and sexist remarks first hand. One white academic I worked with got drunk at a work get together and started a rant about how Black people shouldn't be president (this was when Obama was in power), that Obama was a Muslim and interracial relationships were ‘disgusting’. What made this somewhat even worse was that this particular academic wrote about racism in the public sphere, so he profited from writing about Black struggles while harbouring these personal views. There was no repercussions for him, despite presenting himself as something other than what he was.
4. I’ve also been sexually assaulted at a conference by a male academic. No repercussions for him either and he no doubt pretends to be a feminist in his work.
5. I don’t think it’s in doubt that Arday had autism. Now I don’t know how it affected him personally, but, again, that must’ve been extremely difficult and perhaps even blurred what is and isn’t acceptable in higher education.
6. He was also cleared of plagiarism but, again, so many academics have plagiarised ideas and papers, but they haven’t been strung up like Arday has been.

So, long story short, I feel like Cambridge let him down. And I feel like he was targeted because there’s plenty of other examples but they never get called out and nobody cares. It was a witch hunt. But I’d be interested to hear what others have to say on this matter.

So what? Seriously: whether or not his viva was internally examined makes not a jot, tittle or iota of difference to the implausibility of his entire narrative about his condition when he took it. Your correction is gloriously irrelevant.

Well I certainly haven’t said it was the right-wing media, I think it was all media. Lots of journalists have now come out from various news outlets to express regret at what happened and they have accepted responsibility. Now, before anyone jumps on my case, it’s not me saying that these specific journalists needed to apologise, it’s just an objective fact that they regretted what they did and felt like they themselves had wrongly treated Arday. You can find videos of the journalists who criticised Arday when he was alive now apologising and saying that they jumped on the band wagon without thinking of the man at the end of it.

So correcting incorrect information is irrelevant? You do understand that that’s exceptionally ironic and you’ve attacked your own argument? Thanks for the laugh.

The truth is that the examiners at his viva were not (or we are being told they were not) internal.

The relevance of this to the argument that Arday's account of his viva is high grade end product of male bovine is zero. It is precisely as relevant as it would be if they had been blue-based baboons.

HTH HAND

I wasn’t responding to you. I was responding to a person that said his PhD was internally marked with the simple correction that it wasn’t. Then you interjected yourself into the conversation and started talking about something else that I wasn’t even talking about. I wasn’t discussing a brain tumour. I wasn’t discussing the quality of his PhD or how he handled his viva. I was correcting a point. Get over it and move on.

Getting rather silly now methinks.

There is usually an internal examiner along with the external one. Vivas are rarely failed and, judging by the talks he gave on video, they probably couldn’t make head nor tail of his answers and were glad to pass him and get out of the room!

No, I am giving you the facts about his qualifications you are speculating (at best). If you read my very first, and long post , you may understand my rationale better.

KellyK2026
Get over it and move on.

Oh, sorry; I clean forgot you are only prepared to accept to the thread contributions of which you approve.

I can only apologise for having been insensitive enough to "interject" myself into your personal conversation.

Or possibly I think you are rapidly vanishing into the twilight zone and really ought to go out for a nice walk and stop stressing about people not thinking everything you say absolutely important and not under any circumstances to be seen as anything but wonderful..

Perhaps you'd do well to take your own advice, for the sake of your psychological well-being.

Again, if you read my original and very long post , you will see that I have already made similar comments myself so we still have some points in common but I am not willing to hypothesize about whether his race played a part in his meteoric rise as I don't know that to be true.

Most Vivas have a couple of external markers. The internal marker is the student’s supervisor and they aren’t allowed to talk. They can observe and offer support. Many vivas are failed although you would hope that, if a PhD is not up to par, that would be picked up on by the supervisor and it wouldn’t be put forward for viva. Very few PhDs pass through a viva without corrections. We weren’t there on the day of his viva. He may have answered the questions well. He may have barely passed. There’s no point speculating about that as we weren’t there. The only people who can comment on that is the external markers themselves.

You’ll find that lot of these commenters insist on the truth while coming from a place of pure speculation. We’ve had imaginings about how he performed in his viva to what sorts of mental health conditions he had. It’s extremely ironic as I always thought that if you prize yourself on truth what matters is fact, not what you think happened based on the little you know about a dead man.

What? Jesus Christ. Now you’re speculating about my mental health. I think you’ve well and truly lost the argument now and I’ll be ignoring your silly comments from now on.

The problem here is that people are speculating about how the system failed, how he snook though the system without justification and we simply do not know that.

We know exactly what Cambridge is reviewing now, because the university has publicly stated the scope. It is not a plagiarism investigation into his PhD (that was Liverpool John Moores, and they cleared him). Cambridge’s review is about his appointment and tenure, plus a wider audit of senior‑hiring procedures.

Cambridge is reviewing how he was appointed, whether his CV and claimed roles were properly verified, whether his achievements and biographical claims were accurate, whether concerns about his research raised during his tenure were valid and finally how Cambridge’s own processes may have failed.

They are not reviewing his PhD plagiarism allegation, that was already resolved externally.

Everything else is damaging until we know the truth.

Yes, when I started this Thread I actually thought that JA wasn’t as qualified as he was because I had been partially convinced by the media that that was the case. I am glad I created this Thread because I’ve learnt a lot that has encouraged me to do some more research. It is absolutely evident to me now that the media played up this whole JA slipped through the net narrative and downplayed how capable he was. Whereas I would’ve disagreed with you at the start based on what I knew at the time, I now agree.

It doesn’t really matter that the university has cleared him of plagiarism because there are articles in the press pulling apart his work and showing large sections were plagiarised, so it will never again be accepted as a good piece of work. It may technically not have officially been accepted as plagiarised, but we all know it was. It’s the Al Capone of PhDs.

On a separate note I’ve got second hand embarrassment for the people rallying for him in Trafalgar Square, they’d rally for anything.

No he wasn't a perfect victim.

He created lies and fantasies about himself, which he used to market himself as a persona for personal gain ( is university career and a side career as a media personality). He used his book to market himself too. He seemed to want to market himself as a man about love and forgiveness.

Yet when journalists started to look into his claims he reported two of them to the police. Trying to use the law to potentially destroy someone else for revealing the truth about you does not make someone the perfect victim. It makes him a deeply flawed and deeply self-interested man who was prepared to harm others to protect himself.

Finally, he was prepared to hurt his children by bereaving them rather than face up to the consequences of his fantasies being exposed.

He could have acknowledged what he did and apologised. That is the quickest way to end a circus. Who knows, he may have even salvaged a career if he had done this. Instead he created more lies to cover his original lies.

That he chose death is terrible for him and more importantly his family, but he was not without agency and responsibility from the very start to the very end.

It is absolutely evident to me now that the media played up this whole JA slipped through the net narrative and downplayed how capable he was.

Capable of what though? Cremin said on film that he was the best of the best in the world at what you do. Which just seems to be joining in with the chorus of "everything is racist in Britain".

I mean have you read a PhD from a decade or so ago? Most of them aren’t great and wouldn’t pass today because things move on. Research moves on. Best practice moves on. Methods move on. The amount of professors I’ve known who have laughed at how poor their PhDs were isn’t insignificant. They might’ve held at the time, but they wouldn’t under modern day scrutiny.

Poor you Kelly. It's okay that he was an over promoted academic because everything moves on.

My name isn’t Kelly lol. Do you honestly not think that there’s many other Professors who are sitting pretty who perhaps submitted a PhD years before we had the technology to detect plagiarism who, if it was put through technology now, wouldn’t pick up on parts that are questionable? Like, seriously? So JA is one in a billion?

I meant ‘good’ as in the quality of his work, as in if he came to you for a job you wouldn’t think ooooh he’s got a PhD he must know what he’s doing, you’d think oh that’s the guy who stole someone else’s work and disregard his PhD. It is Rimmers BSC (Bronze Swimming Certificate)

OP you are remarkably keen to see him redeemed, I think you’re going to be disappointed!

But his work isn’t being investigated as many others have pointed out. He’s been cleared through a formal process. It’s neither here nor there if you agree with it or not.

Using a username isn't assuming it is your name lol.
You make it hard to take you seriously.

You didn’t answer my question.

But it wasn't that that undid him, was it? If it was that alone the story would have died soon enough. What made this story so compelling was (a) he was shown to be a completely unreliable narrator throughout nearly every aspect of his life, and to have created wild fantasises to aggrandise himself and (b) that when these started to be exposed he created even more fantastical and absurdist lies to try to cover his exposed lies.

THAT is what kept the story in the papers. He and Cambridge kept feeding more material to the story by the way they reacted to it. And the reason there were so many articles was also in good part because there were just so many things he had made up and fantasised about. All things he had freely chosen to put in the public domain to promote himself. Its unfair to complain about public scrutiny when you have so freely chosen to put so much of life in the public domain to be scrutinised.