Our friends at the Good Law Project

[Gymnopedie]

I know this doesn't belong here but given the bollocks from the GLP about issues that do I thought people might be interested.

It's about Professor Jason Arday, a Cambridge academic. The story started when there was a claim that large chunks of his PhD thesis had been taken from another (sometimes not even changing typo errors) published a few years earlier. His justification is that he's autistic and his way of coping is 'mimicry'.

Sine then his many claims about his charity work, fundraising and physical exploits have come under increasing scrutiny - much from the Guardian - and are unravelling fast. He's having to backtrack and 'explain' a lot. He's claimed to have been on a TV programme that he never was and it was chronologically impossible for him to be on it. He has claimed a lot of nasty harassment but has no evidence of it, no photos, no messages, and didn't report any of it to the police. (Well he claims he did once, but the police have no record of it and the story doesn't stack up.)

What does the GLP have to do with it? They're organising an open letter in his support, claiming that there is nothing to see here except that he's a victim of vile racism.

Support for a left wing cause that bears no relationship to the facts? Where have I heard that before?

Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor (The Telegraph via MSN)

Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor | University of Cambridge | The Guardian

Glasgow University denies Jason Arday visiting prof claim | The Herald

@Hoardasurass Unfortunately when fantasits like Arday are caught out in their lies and are publicly exposed they often kill themselves and/or their families.

That's awful. I didn't know that. All the more reason why so much more care should have been taken by the people that employed and promoted him, knowing that so much of his backstory didn't add up.

This was a cowardly and selfish act that hurts nobody at all except his family and the people that loved him.

Its 1 of the known triggers for family anhilaters along with loosing a job or the wife/girlfriend leaving them.
Ardays stories were just so clearly fake all of it and every single organisation and person who allowed him to keep failing upwards and believing his evermore fantastical claims are in part to blame for this outcome.
The entire DEI system also has a lot to answer for in this whole sorry mess aswell

Oh I didn't know that

I wonder if he ever thought about what would happen if he was caught out and exposed. Did he think it would never happen? Or maybe he believed the lies? It's so hard to understand his mindset

I know we all feel horrified and saddened and it's normal to try to apportion blame but... how could Cambridge properly safeguard and care for Arday without acknowledging he was a fantasist?

So awful for his family, I can't imagine the pain

Fully agree with @Hoardasurass

https://www.thetimes.com/article/08648266-d83c-44ce-a39c-9e1b416dd900?shareToken=5611f74c0f0a06b31e25ccf229916cab&ver=article

Accusations from his family that he was the victim of a "sustained campaign of abuse" and he was "undermined".

And so the deification begins.

There are so many people who are implicated here, from way before Cambridge, then the panel who appointed him professor, and on.

I wonder who advised him along the way, if anyone, including if anyone else who was involved in the decision to counter as he did with that Carter Ruck (of all the law firms) letter and the referral to the police.

So the gist of that is, all the universities are very, very sorry? Get your line out there early, I suppose.

They had a duty of care not to promote him beyond his competence in the first place! Concerns had been raised by other academics, and by the students who were assigned to him. University leadership could have dealt with this quietly and honestly in-house years ago.

Instead, they seem to have supported him to be more visible in the public eye at the same time as his stories became less and less plausible. Someone senior should have stepped up long before he got a publishing deal for an autobiography of all things. It's like they were setting him up to be found out on as public a stage as possible.

Yes, that’s what I feel too.

And this autobiography is going to be published soon? This is just an awful shit-show, isn't it? His poor family.

It was released in the US this week and is supposed to be released in the UK in a week or 2

It's due out on the 27th of August. As far as I can tell, the publicity to drum up sales for the book has been pivotal in this whole house of cards crashing down.

This might be another one to lay at the doors of a publishing industry dominated by overly gullible Eng Lit graduates with limited life experience, to be honest.

Oh, and another thing! Arday got bookings to speak at workplaces about his inspiring life overcoming childhood disability. His personal myth-making had further-reaching effects than costing businesses the sum of a speaker's fee and travel expenses, because well-meaning audience members naturally went on to share what they'd heard with parents of severely disabled children. We know this because parents have come forward on social media to discuss how they had friends and work colleagues telling them that their children might have a similar future to JA, provided the parents worked as hard as JA's mother.

You might be reminded of Raynor Winn and her suggestions in the Salt Path that strenuous and sustained outdoor hiking pauses the progression of a terminal neurogenerative disease. It matters when publishers and companies do not do their due diligence. People who actually have a particular disorder get told they're not trying hard enough to overcome it, based on these authors' claims.

Yeah, predictably enough, there was someone on Unherd the other day comparing it to the Hitler Diaries. And obviously, they had a point.

Well said.

well-meaning audience members naturally went on to share what they'd heard with parents of severely disabled children. We know this because parents have come forward on social media to discuss how they had friends and work colleagues telling them that their children might have a similar future to JA, provided the parents worked as hard as JA's mother.

Autistic children and their families need to be protected from this shit, not exposed to it. It's fair to want your disabled child to get an actual education as far as possible and not just do colouring in all day at special school, but selling this kind of lie to parents is unforgivable.

I had missed a lot of what had been discussed this week as I had been busy, but this is really concerning. The pressure already faced by many families is immense without adding to the pile of misinformation that families have to sort through to find solutions that work for them.

I’ve just seen a repeat of an interview on Sky News with Maugham from earlier very upset at the news; laying the blame firmly with the press.

This story didn’t begin with the press. They came into it a long way down the line. Plenty of other people and organisations came first. Right wing people blame the left wing press. Left wing people blame the right wing press.

People like to blame the press because it’s politically or emotionally expedient for them to do so.

JM had his own role to play in the later stages of this. He just had to jump on a bandwagon without first checking the facts and if this was in any way helpful to anybody involved.

Yes i agree with @AstonUniversityPotholeDepartment above, but also fear that the publication/release of the book in the US on Tuesday may have been the final straw for him. They should have pulled it. I think the publishing industry is as brutal and self-serving as those in academia here.

As I say on the other thread - both academia and the publishers and every single person who benefited from his celebrity and income over the last 5-10 years but whom did nothing to intervene and get him psychiatric support as the lies and fantasies he spun escalated, every single one of them let him down.

I find the Suprise Surprise clip from 2021 with Array and his partner charming (link in this substack). At this stage he was being recognised as making it as a lecturer, had raised £250k and run 30 marathons and seemed quite bashful. His partner is telling the TV host all about his achievements, the obsta does overcome and they appear believable. But the achievements and claims of the last five years have been less believable. I wonder now whether the letting down of family has been a huge factor. They may well have believed that the academic success was merited. He will have known otherwise. I expect he felt very trapped. It's a sad story.

In fairness to the universities, there's every indication that they allowed him to get away with everything for so long because they believed him. Now that raises serious questions about their gullibility, but it also explains why they didn't have better safeguards. If he had been telling the truth, no safeguards would have been needed. And they apparently genuinely thought he was.

I don’t feel that ‘believing’ him is good enough - they only had to observe his seminars/lectures [and the rambling on about tiny tempeh and lack of academic content]; or do random checks of marked assignments [normal in any uni that I’ve attended, as they are usually externally checked to ensure consistency, quality control etc], had a sample lesson observation as part of the recruitment process [as is standard]; or properly investigated student complaints when lodged. At that stage they could have offered him training or ensured that he was not promoted further?