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

Assessment not exam - see post at 14.13, as I misremembered - but still awful. Just a different kind of panic.

The student (Roehampton) claims that when she queried her mark JA implied she was racist.

Students are sometimes seen to have more power nowadays as they pay large fees/are now seen as customers of universities/etc, but individual students often have very little power in that kind of situation.

There's now a fundraiser for his funeral that's raised £30k, and Trot / SWP aligned front Stand Up To Racism are going to hold a vigil

https://news.sky.com/story/jason-arday-fundraiser-launched-to-cover-academics-funeral-costs-13573605?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter

I imagine individual students have very little power when they’re up against the EDI machine and accused of racism (or transphobia etc) for complaining about the standard of their course.

I'm reading a lot on SM about the appalling racist attacks on Arday by "The Right" (never defined). One example amongst many: Jeremy Corbyn said "In the final months of his life, Jason Arday was subjected to a relentless onslaught of attacks and abuse". I ask in all sincerity; is this really true? What were these attacks, what was the nature of them, and who made them? I can't imagine that a few opinion pieces in the Times or Telegraph qualify. Can anyone offer any info here? Because this seems to have become the accepted narrative.

@TheFleeceandFascinator

“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".

This will be the lasting outcome, though, looking at it all? Yet when family annihilators kill their children, spouses and then themselves no-one start saying that employers have a higher duty of care and should consider NOT making a person redundant for fear that he may act this way ( Prof David Wilson identified 71 such cases between 1980-2012, so far more common than we imagine). Similarly, knowing that 400,000 people consider suicide and 100,000 actually attempt it due to debt and/or bankruptcy EVERY YEAR hasn’t led to finance companies being told to NOT call in debt (though there are now charities and support services that try to bridge the gap unfilled by corporate guilt).

In fact the main reasons that people commit suicide - even where debt and redundancy are the final triggers - are MH issues: and particularly bipolar and schizophrenia, which I’ve suggested above may have been the underlying driver for his behaviours all along and may be the reason he did not have the resilience to deal with the fallout this week.

The biggest tragedy here is that if indeed there was a clinical MH issue underlying all this, his family and the university could have publicly attributed all this to that diagnosis, come out with their unreserved support, and he could have been transitioned into in-patient care as it reached crisis point this week and everyone - and yes I mean everyone - would have been in his corner. He might have been alive today and receiving treatment. But instead, the GLP and others chose to play the race card in the face of the incontrovertible evidence that plagiarism occurred and fantastical yarns have been spun.

On one of the threads here someone described him as a boy!

I personally don’t believe the GLP care even now. They’re not moral people. They see an opportunity IMO.

Especially when set against the students' age and commensurate lack of life experience. It would require someone to have a lot of confidence in their academic abilities and achievements to publicly challenge the standard of teaching. I couldn't have done it. I would simply have quietly spent hours in the library to compensate.

In fact, come to think of it, that's exactly what I did for an A-level lecher lecturer who spent most of his lessons talking about the sitting US president, and about 5% on the subject!

And even less power when complaining about a university's 'star academic' whose appointment they don't want scrutinised.

I'm not convinced that suicide is always the cowards way out. I think that some people genuinely believe that their family/friends will not care if they die and that others genuinely believe that their family/friends will be better off if they are dead. Don't underestimate the power of psychosis.

I think that some people genuinely believe that their family/friends will not care if they die and that others genuinely believe that their family/friends will be better off if they are dead.

That might excuse the selfishness; it doesn't excuse the cowardice.

In any event, a criminal who commits a crime even if they genuninely believe the victims don't care or will be better off is not excused.

I imagine that severe psychosis would exempt a person from criminal responsibility.
I'm not looking to minimise the effect suicide has. There have been two in my family, one of them close family.

Really good article in the Atlantic:

https://t.co/nQxRITzVTd

Thanks - that's an interesting take. I slightly take issue with one aspect of it, which is that, although I agree Arday was fetishised by white liberals (that line "How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further" is painfully spot-on), and although I agree that there were people on the racist right and far-right who were gleeful at his downfall, I think there were probably a large number of us somewhere in the middle who are not racist, not gleeful at what happened to him, but simply dismayed at the way a prestigious university like Cambridge could make such obviously catastrophic misjudgements.

It's true that while it was ongoing, and before its tragic end, I did feel some amusement at the whole episode, but largely because of the ridiculous nature of Arday's claims, such as the marathons, the brain tumours and so on. It was ludicrous enough to be funny. But that's nothing to do with race.

I agree. The author is American, and I think he has viewed the situation through the lens of very polarised American politics, so has possibly missed some nuance.

LOJ is blaming the Guardian, on Twitter, for Arday's suicide.

He's also unblocked me... lots of people making the same point!

Here's Dr. P on the subject:

https://x.com/Psychgirl211/status/2088527148201951638

Rubbish
@mariellaf1
Jason Arday was a serial liar and a fantasist. He put a target on the back of every Black person with a qualification higher than a GCSE. I know this personally. I've spent 30 years dealing with the questions: "Are you a real doctor? Where did you get your qualifications?" (I literally got asked this just last week!) It is never-ending. Arday's actions set us all back a generation. Cambridge, and the entire academic establishment were complicit. And when the lies were exposed, he seemingly took his own life, leaving his children, widow, and parents to pick up the pieces Suicide is a tragedy that causes irretrievable damage to those left behind, and any premature death is to be mourned. But this tragedy wasn't created by a "pernicious media". It was created by a pernicious liar. And his enablers

I'm sure that a lot of what you say is true of some suicides (and of many threats of suicides and parasuicidal actions). But the generalisation to all suicides is cruel and baseless - forgivable only because it is presumably the consequence of an absolutely devastating experience that you have suffered.

There are very many suicides that are not acts of terror. There are very many suicides that aren't even selfish. Once you get to a certain level of pain you can no longer be expected to endure it to avoid other people's pain.

I also find it hard to imagine that many suicides are cowardly, though I guess some are, on balance. It must take a huge amount of bravery to perform some of the actions that cause death.

I don't understand how you can generalise so relentlessly. The person I knew who killed himself was in a state of terror and despair. I can't even conceptualise what it would mean to call him selfish and I would ask you to remember that there are very many different roads to the act.

Yes, he has his own history in academia which informs his view.

He misses a lot of what has driven the story in the UK - the perception of Oxbridge; the autobiography; the chattering classes networks...

And also his accusation that wanting a meritocracy means that we want all white male professors, whereas what we want is the best person in the job regardless of the colour of their skin or sex

"Boy" about an adult man and father?! That's incredibly culturally tone-deaf. Ye gods, was she posting out of the pages of Gone with the Wind?

It was jolly weird.

Not to be harsh, but he had a Currency?1.4m advance and his estate will receive the revenue from the book sales… why does his family need to fundraise?

There's now a vigil tomorrow in Trafalgar square as well

there's already zero chance anything other than "he was a saint hounded to death by racists" will be allowed as the official omnicause line. How do they not see the damage they do??

I hope someone does a skit on Mark Anthony's speech from Julius Caesar.