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

Yes, I've read a lot of extracts from his autobiography, and there's nothing in it to suggest autism, or learning disability. It would fit with dyslexia though.

Ironically, that is one ND/disability he does not seem to have claimed, though?

There's lots in that article that is very good - the less personal parts, speaking of the horrible hijacking of diversity objectives by PR objectives, and the costs that hijack generated for Arday.

But he should have written it without leveraging his personal connections to Arday. Those parts seem exploitative. Unlike his sister, he clearly didn't know Arday well enough to be deeply traumatised or grief stricken by his death. If he had done, no words that he wrote so soon afterwards could have been experienced by him as publishable. He would feel the insincerity of any attempt to weave orderly thoughts out of the mess of his reaction to the event.

Someone upthread spoke of the 'massive ego inflation' of thinking that you could have been the person to intervene and swerve someone away from suicide. At first I felt that was unfair. It is guilt, rather than ego, that makes us ponder all of the counterfactuals in which If only I had done x differently, this would never have happened. Anyone who has lived through the suicide of someone to whom they are close knows how utterly compulsive and self-torturing those thoughts are. But perhaps our sense of guilt is a kind of ego-inflation. We swell our sense of our own power to create a comforting fantasy world in which we omnipotently prevented suicide. And the fantasy comes at the price of torturing ourselves with guilt in the actual world.

But, regardless of all that, there is a different kind of egoism altogether involved in spinning your messy feelings into a newspaper column, exploiting the precise distance from a trauma that gives you some useful thoughts without devastating you so much that you can't smash those thoughts into some plausible, readable sentiment.

I'd like to start a petition for a public inquiry into the Good Law Project.

Its behaviour in this situation has been disgraceful.

For clarity, I would not deny that some of the press scrutiny was written and/or read by people who have unhinged views on EDI efforts and/or are straight-out racist.

But concerns about Arday's performance had been circulating for years, with a good amount of evidence stacking up in relation to sustained academic misconduct. The idea that you don't copy other people's work or make up your data is Research Methods 101. This sort of misconduct is not something that can be overlooked as part of a reasonable adjustment under the Equality Act. It was (and remains) entirely appropriate for Arday's work, and the circumstances of his appointment, to be scrutinised. If LJMU did a good investigation of the PhD thesis, for example, then that will be replicated when others repeat the process.

So when the GLP jumps in immediately to say that this is just a racially-motivated pile-on, it looks like it places no weight on the evidence. It also makes people more likely to want to investigate all Arday's work, and fact-check every claim in his CV, interviews and memoir. And as we have seen over the last few weeks, that process did not go well for Arday as it uncovered more lies and exaggerations.

And to now be calling for a public inquiry ... it's the same failing strategy, and will just strengthen the positions of those claiming that EDI has 'gone mad' and we need to shake up woke universities. Arday is not a good example of a person being subject to an unjustified and racist pile-on. Arday was happy to garner a good deal of public attention – and use Carter Ruck and the police to silence those questioning him – and is a terrible figurehead to make some (often reasonable) points about racism in the United Kingdom.

Finally, it is interesting that Professor Baron-Cohen is named in GLP's latest letter, although not currently in the (publicly-available) list of signatories. Maybe he should have thought about the optics of signing the first letter, then having his name quietly removed.

Me too.

this whole horrible Greek tragedy is a lightening rod for so many things

tokenistic EDI so universities like Cambridge can give one token working class youngish black person with ND a professorship & wheel him out at every opportunity to show how incredibly diverse they are rather than tackle the ongoing deep rooted challenges they have around class & race. All too time consuming & hard to do that.

institutions that the public are already losing faith in (for different reasons) like universities & BBC shown to be completely open to believing any old easily disprovable 'fact' just because it's said by someone they in their infinite middle class wisdom have allocated 'victim' status to. See also BBC need to platform drag queens at every opportunity. It makes them look unbelievably stupid and gullible and they are exactly the same class of ppl parroting TWAW. Ppl are tired of being lied too

the relationship to the omnicause where ppl are horrified by the treatment of Jason Arday because he ticked their boxes - black, working class, ND but were happy to go along with the hounding and monstering of ppl who they did not agree with eg Kathleen stock because she had the 'wrong' views

this sad sad affair is bringing all of this into the open but I very much doubt it will change anything :/

This. Allowing people to take on responsibilities for which they are not equipped is not fair to them, nor to the person who could have done a better job but didn't get the chance, nor to the people who will be reliant on the quality of the service that they give.

People are tired of being lied to

I agree, Eyeballs - but I'm also fascinated by how many comments I've seen to the effect of "It doesn't matter that he was lying because we feel sorry for him".

As with gender identity, people know that there is a lie at the heart of it, but prefer to focus on how sad or uncomfortable it would be to insist on the truth.

And this seems to have been why the Arday situation arose in the first place, feelings over facts.

It blows my mind that truth has become such an irrelevance.

My impression from listening to the BBC since Friday night is that a message has gone out to establish a suitable containment narrative for this scandal.

There seems to be an emphasis to promote it being about plagarism, which then provides a great pivot to "his PhD was checked and no intentional plagarism was found". The less convenient, and to my mind more significant, parts of the story are being minimised. He's being built up as a heroic and tragic figure destroyed by people motivated by hate.

Yet again, the BBC in looking to protect their own interests are failing to go to the facts and to present a full and objective account to their audience.

Me three! For some reason I’m generally doing French, rather than my degree subject, and I’m not going to be able to finish my written coursework (it all seems to be written!) and I know I need to do a whole course worth of work to graduate and I’m not going to.

Yes I’m getting that too. He’s being compared to other plagiarists and people are saying “white men doing that wouldn’t have got this much attention, it’s nothing”.

And I’m not getting it from the BBC but I suspect second hand I’m getting the official line. Take a look at some of the other threads here.

I have very little respect for universities who have encourages the trans nonsense.

This is just another nail in their coffin.

Yes, I've seen similar activity all over the place. I was just hoping that the BBC, once the jig was up, would have thought "maybe objective news reporting from now on" rather than "but the King was wearing clothes, it's just that he took them off before he turned that corner which is why he's naked now".

I have no respect for people who take their own lives. Quite the opposite.

Of all the things JA might or might not have done wrong during his life, plagiarism, fraud, or whatever, they pale to insignficance compared to his moral culpability in the way he ended it. I think less of JA - very much less - for doing so than I ever would have done even if the other allegations turn out to be true.

Why is it bad to commit suicide? And, even if you regard it as bad, how is it that you can have no respect for people who kill themselves? I can understand feeling traumatised and furious if someone important in your life kills themselves, but to generalise in that way? I find it very hard to understand that, or to avoid being upset by it.

But it's not just Cambridge.

According to wiki - he was appointed as a senior lecturer at Roehampton just after finalising his PHD. Then there were posts at Durham and Glasgow in quick succession. It looks as if lots of allowances were made for his non-standard route into academia, and nobody ever questioned the Emperor's clothes.

And me. English A-level exam - which was the door to my university course - and I go in and haven't revised.

One of the accounts re Arday included students realising with horror that the lectures they have attended given by him (not Cambridge) haven't resulted in anything like sufficient notes/info to revise for their exam. Poor kids.

Why is it bad to commit suicide?

Because committing suicide is the most selfish & spiteful action possible with no thought for family & friends who are left behind.

This account, from the Times, of one of his Roehampton students, is pretty damning: https://archive.ph/GkS6w

Its the cowards way out

Thanks - that was what I was remembering. I thought they were talking about an exam not an assessment, but point stands:

"When it came to our assessment Arday recommended we answer one of the two essay questions — there were four options — that mentioned ethnicity. This, after all, was the only thing he’d talked to us about. I remember one young, black, female student coming to me in the library as we began to draft our essays and saying: “I don’t know what to do, I’ve read my notes and there is nothing there I can use!” She wasn’t the only one and I offered advice as best I could, writing my own essay using the online resources Arday’s predecessor had left."

That is awful.

The script writers of the Black List put it very clearly in a monologue delivered by Raymond Reddington (in season 3 episode 19), suicide is an act of violent and destructive terror directed against everyone who loves you, or has ever cared for you. The damage is permnent and the people most damaged by it are those closest to you; meanwhile the waves of destructive power ripple outwards into other lives diminishing as they get further and further away.

I have witnessed the destructive power of a suicide on a family. It might as well have been any of a number of other violent crimes given the life-long effects on its victims, and if it had been one of any of those other violent crimes the perpetrator would have been subject to punishment and condemnation.

Suicide is violent and destructive and selfish and cowardly. I have no hesitation in condemning those who engage in it.

Social media discourse is now describing JA as "young", which in my opinion just goes to show that the problem was not JA, the problem was all the wilfully blind academics in senior positions who over-promoted him.

Young? When would a 41 year old woman be described as young? Why is an adult man being infantilised, and to what extent is this infantilisation being driven by these idiots' own unexamined racism?