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

Indeed. I would actually have called the police and asked for a well-being check.

Maybe he did - somebody must have called 999, it might have been B-C, or he might have consulted with a number of friends and then they decided to call.

Good synopsis of the failings of how this was handled, particularly by Cambridge University, in the New York Times:

https://archive.ph/z56sL

Interesting to read that, of the other, more experienced, finalists in the selection process for the professorship, two were women of colour. It is people of colour (and people with other marginalised statuses, such as autism and other disabilities), who suffer when employers make hamfisted and virtue-signalling parody-attempts at diversity instead of doing the much harder work of genuinely working out how to remove race- and disability-related obstacles to appointing the very best people.

It is horrible to see how diversity imperatives have been hijacked by corporate branding. I'm reminded of the plight of the Darlington nurses, whose reasonable complaints about sharing a changing room with a man were met with an explanation of the Trust's financial/commercial need to seem "progressive, in order to attract students. Seeming is the objective. Seeming is cheap. Actually doing the work of equality is hard and relatively expensive.

My autistic child is outstanding at any stem subject (it’s the way her mind works rather than any innate talent). They ought to get huge academic accolades in the future based on their academic ability, not due to the fact that they are autistic.

I had a vague memory of seeing a documentary about something similar, so I googled it, it was the case of Donald Crowhurst.

In the late 1960s he entered a lucrative round-the-world solo sailing race. But he only got as far as somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, where he stayed for 7 months giving false reports of his progress, as if he was circumnavigating the globe and leading the race.

His abandoned boat was found, but his body never was; it was assumed that he had killed himself rather than face up to what he had done, as he had left notes about the truth being revealed and the game being up.

His deception and death were so mysterious that he came to be regarded as a sort of tragic hero, a victim of the total isolation of the solo sailor, and several books and films were made about him.

Obviously there are differences - Crowhurst didn't manage to acquire any money, fame or status from his deception, as JA did, probably because Crowhurst was obviously less good at it, and because you can't deceive the ocean.

But the 180 from fraudster or fantasist to misunderstood tragic victim has already started.

Actually doing the work of equality is hard and relatively expensive.

Yes, it’s the difference between establishing the barriers to, say, higher education, and addressing them via better teaching in primary and secondary/making sure pupils know university is an option available to them too/access courses for those who could have made the grade but didn’t, or lowering the entry grades for some demographics.

…it was assumed that he had killed himself rather than face up to what he had done

Shame and humiliation from being “caught out” is one, but also if someone has built a false narrative for themselves which they truly believe and it’s then destroyed, I should image the shattering of their sense of self is highly damaging.

I haven't been following the Arday story, but got the gist of it after I read the news. Something seems to have gone terribly wrong with this person and Cambridge. Thanks @ItsCoolForCats for the NYT archive article.

Sorry that I haven't read the whole thread, but in three or four pages I have yet to see one important point mentioned:

The reason formal procedures are needed for non-white-male hires is not because of the applicants.

It's because the people doing the hiring are incapable of seeing merit in anyone but white males. There's much published research backing that up. And it explains why they hire Ardays over actually capable applicants. To them, anyone outside the dominant group is just a seething mass of government-mandated bodies.

So the problem cannot be resolved by anything the applicants/hires do because they're not the root of it.

Making it impossible for those hiring to know applicants' personal details helps, and works well for things like music auditions, but is hard to apply in many other situations.

Still, its success where a blinded process can be applied tells us that's worth pursuing. The more different actually capable people can rise through the ranks, the more people will get used to the idea of not flipping out over it. (There's also published research backing that up.)

https://x.com/i/status/2088656356299464967

I was reminded of Crowhurst as well! I might have posted about it upthread. He's been rehabilitated a little from a conman to a more nuanced figure. He's certainly caught the creative imagination, there were two films released a few years ago for example. Perhaps Jason Arday's afterlife will become more nuanced, as much sinned against as sinning?

FFFFS

Oh that's a very good analogy. Crowhurst was guided by desperation to make his business work and his boat was absolutely ramshackle and he quickly realised it wouldn't be able to cope with the Round the World yacht race so he dawdled round the mid Atlantic hoping to slip in behind the also rans. He hadn't figured on all the others dropping out leaving him as the (the reporters thought) likely winner. The pressure to maintain the lie was immense. I remember the documentary it's haunting. There was also a film with Colin Firth

Oh FFS they really can't help themselves can they. Main character syndrome.

Its sad Arday felt there was no other way out, I think given the right support he probably had a very interesting story to tell.

Im musing over the claims of vulnerability versus someone who used the police and carter ruck to silence journalists. I really struggle to reconcile to two and so Im coming round to the idea that Arday was a pawn in someone elses game.

Donald Crowhurst's writings, when he was losing his mind in the Atlantic, were at least original.

It's incredible - does Baron-Cohen not have any sense of his own complicity in this? Either he was wrong to sign the letter originally, or he was wrong to remove his signature. You can't possibly have it both ways. How did he explain the reason for the removal to Arday? I don't expect we'll ever know.

I got a reply from Sky News, saying that of course they don't take sides...

I've just watched the 9pm news and it is more balanced - in addition to the 'unfair scrutiny/media pile-on because of his race' interviews, they have a new 'package' which includes points like concerns about academic integrity, that issues with JA's performance had been raised by students in the past, and that Cambridge's scrutiny of his credentials before appointing him are in question.

I then switched over to the BBC news and there was JoMo being interviewed - I couldn't bear listening to him again😠so I don't know how they are currently covering it.

lcakethereforeIam - sorry if I missed your earlier ref to Donald Crowhurst.

Great minds @MarieDeGournay or were you plagiarising me?🤨😁

😏😁

Im wondering if GLP might have been the ones to suggest Carter Ruck to him

We don’t know the full facts but it seems incredible that such a vulnerable person was not being actively supported at what clearly be a time of acute need. He should never have been left alone at this time.

Cambridge that ought to have had a duty of care and given active support even if he had resigned given that the institution was instrumental in placing him in the position of coming under scrutiny in the first instance. The intensity of focus was because it was Cambridge.

I couldn’t watch the news last night because they were all taking the 'vulnerable man hounded to death' line before all the facts of the case are revealed and it was an unhelpful and unnecessarily simplistic headline enabling Cambridge to avoid taking any accountability. It felt ghoulish to me, almost as if the newsnight presenters were relishing the opportunity to accuse the bad racist people of causing the tragic outcome.

Who here still has the recurring nightmare of realising that you have to sit a GCSE/ A-level exam in an hour's time, but you forgot to attend any classes for it? I do!

I mention this because his former students seem to have experienced a subvariant of realising they had to take exams, but that their university lecturer had forgotten to teach them any of the content. Oh, and they experienced this for real, and paid big bucks for the privilege; it wasn't just a nightmare.

What about their mental health? Honestly, just reading those students' accounts had me hyperventilating in sympathy.

One very notable point about the original GLP petition is that it was first published after side-by-side comparisons of Arday's work was published online, which would indicate to any reasonable person that he had extensively plagiarised the work of others. It was this kind of last-ditch defence which inflamed the situation, rather than defused it. Had Arday quietly resigned last year, when the Times Higher had the story, outcomes would have been a lot different. But the determination of Arday and others to fight this to the bitter end is what turned this from a matter which could have been resolved with little public attention, to a major media story. Even today, you can read the Guardian framing the plagiarism question as an unresolved matter. Then general tone of this story has been the lanyard classes telling others that there is no problem, and this is fuss about nothing, in direct opposition to what normal people can see with their own eyes. And that is why this particular story has become a major running item in the news.

Meanwhile the GLP is now running another letter, now complaining about the press coverage (which they themselves helped inflame) because they are horrible ghouls who can't help exploiting the death of someone else to promote their own particular politics.

there's a lot of hot takes coming from a culture war / omnicause kind of view.

The guy who complained was a wrongun, Arday was extra picked on because he was black and also because he was autistic. I find those three things hard to dispute, I guess I give it 'yes', 'probably' and 'maybe' respectively.

And honestly I've not done my own research here. What I'm seeing from my good people on socials is 'okay a bit of his admin might not have been quite right, and that's not uncommon, then everybody bullied him to death because he's black'

That's massively at odds to what I'm reading on here.

We have this local guy who just just comes out with massive howling fibs -everybody knows it - but he's harmless enough and not a bad lad at all, so we just kind of nod along. I generally find liars quite upsetting (autistic thing probably) but for some reason I just let it go with this guy. There's no point in being mad about it I guess.

I feel terrible for Arday's family and friends, and it's such a shame he felt so bad about his situation that he took that as his only way out. It's a bit too close to home for me, in multiple ways. No further remarks.

edited to correct spelling