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

More white saviour bullshit, if only Peter Jukes hadn't gone on holiday then JA would still be alive...
Do these people even believe their own mince?

I don't think this is necessarily true. The issues about lack of rigorous assessment/investigation of a plagiarised thesis, incompetent appointment peocesses, the distortion of diversity objectives to serve corporate PR, etc., etc., all need to be tackled by the institutions themselves. It is an illusion to imagine that a media narrative (or, more excitingly, a social media narrative in which we can all be actors) has a central part to play in all of this.

In fact it is our cultural obsession with media, with narratives, that caused this mess in the first place. Everything that should be quietly technical, evidence-based, expert, detailed and hard - such as recruiting the best possible professor from a pool that was maximally open to all of the best possible candidates, regardless of race, sex, disability - is treated as a public-facing performance of virtue, and of the kind of happy-ending tragic narratives that are spun for us in every episode of a million reality-style TV competition shows.

The solution isn't for Cambridge, Liverpool, etc to be 'held to account' via the BBC, Twitter, etc. It is for institutions themselves to stop being performative parodies of themselves - sending themselves out as avatars in the pretendy world of media narratives - and go back to the boring work of doing their work properly in accordance with technical standards of adequacy.

I don't mean they shouldn't be subject to appropriate, informed scrutiny by specialist journalists such as the TES journo that Arday tried to shut down. I mean that the frisson of coverage generated over the last couple of weeks is a pantomime - the same as the pantomime that Cambridge laid on by appointing someone with the objective of acquiring a poster boy rather than a seasoned intellectual expert.

The pantomime is laid on for us - the overly online consumers of facile narratives. If we all stepped back a bit from our virtue-signalling consumption and embellishment of these narratives then perhaps institutions, too, would get better at becoming themselves again, instead of making hollow performances.

I had to google who Peter Jukes is but I'm still unclear why he thinks he could have saved JA.

The Arday scandal wasn't one thing. It was many different things going on at the same time. This means that grifting entities like GLP can pull out threads that fit in with their own goals while ignoring ones that are inconvenient.

Take for example the "racism" thread. Have some people charged into this because they're at least partly motivated by racism against Arday? Of course. Was it about racism? Well, in terms of those wanting to expose the scandal to open discussion, generally not. But one can argue that Cambridge, feeling they needed to present more "diverse" faces, elevating Arday in the way they did definitely do have questions to answer about dehumanising Arday into a convenient object.

I've no idea who Peter Jukes is either, and I assumed this was sarcasm/irony about the 'victim hounded to death' trope, as in the OTT 'the horror they committed'
He didn't mean all that seriously, did he? I suppose the 'hounded to death' line has gained such momentum that maybe he did...

Did Arday really get appointed as a Senior Lecturer straight after his PhD? This is just not possible at the university where I work. The mechanics of his rapid academic rise really do need to be looked at, in the way that it's now acknowledged that sending a precocious 12 year old to Oxbridge just because they ace all their A Levels early is not actually in their best interests long term.

I experienced a charismatic professional bullshitter in my first job after university. Nobody bothered to check his references, and it transpired he'd faked his qualification certificate and been sacked from his last employer for the two biggest crimes in the TEFL world (timesheet fiddling and shagging a student). It was a very important early lesson in the value of cynicism when everyone around you is enthralled. Interestingly, the only colleague who sussed him from the start had a military background, but no higher academic qualifications himself.

Jukes came to prominence during the phone hacking scandal. He might have by the original crowd-funded Tweeter who would report from court or other hearings.

However, while that was a good thing at the time, if you look at where those actively campaigning about phone hacking have gone since, you'll find a bunch of sanctimonious authoritarian-minded individuals who view themselves on The Right Side of History.

Sorry I should have added a bit more info about him but @nauticant 's post is spot on. He used Arday's death to have a pop at terfs in general (and one woman in particular) then was up tweeting mea culpas into the small hours 🍷

@MarieDeGournay Sarah Ditum brought up Donald Crowhurst too (Kate Clanchy said the analogy was 'superb'). Told you, great minds...or she's plagiarised us, there is a lot of it about 🤨😁

Eta The people coming out of the woodwork to mea culpa that they could have saved Jason Arday if only...none of them, afaik, have said 'if only I'd used our friendship to call him out on his nonsense'. A pinch of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Is that contrary to the general movement of lecturers at universities? Do they normally get shuffled around place to place or do they stick where they are and get established?

Far right eugenicists? What is he talking about? I mean, sure the guy who published this on his Substack, the one who said that on the basis of merit there'd be no black people in academia - is a screaming racist IMO, but the idea that the idea that this came about because of some shadowy network and everyone who criticised Arday is a far right eugenicist is hyperbolic bullshit straight out of the TRA playbook.

I spotted the Donald Crowhurst reference in Ditum's piece too - I would put money on Sarah either having read this thread or (shock) posted on it.

Well, that's going on the CV!

Possibly quoted (unattributed) by Sarah Ditum

<happy sigh>

Interesting parallel with Donald Crowhurst (the film is haunting - there’s also a very good and tragic book). Somebody on one of the other threads mentioned the story of Professor Michael Briggs, and the memoir written by his daughter Joanne (who's an ex-barrister).

She grew up believing that he was a brilliant and distinguished scientist who worked at NASA and advised the WHO. He held a senior post at a pharmaceutical company that marketed a drug called Primodos, which was given to women for pregnancy-testing. But he had a habit of switching jobs, and even countries, with bewildering suddenness, leaving everything behind and starting again. He left his wife and young family for another woman and re-settled in Spain, then died young.

Years later, Joanne managed to retrieve the bound copies of his PhD and higher doctorate - the proof, she'd always believed, of his scientific credentials - and discovered that they were faked. He didn’t appear to have anything other than an initial university degree; everything else was spin and obfuscation. But perhaps worst of all was that some of the women who'd taken Primodos after being assured it was safe had babies with terrible birth defects and disabilities, and there are still claims out there that its safety wasn’t properly assessed.

You hit the nail on the head

This movement is unusual in the STEM area which I administer. Constant moves don't help young academics establish research groups with PhDs, postdocs, and a healthy mix of Research Council and industry funding.

But had Grove at the THE been allowed to scrutinise, then this may have been dealt with quickly and quietly - it was JA/his team that played the race card, lead to the GLP et al joining in, and this made this into a media circus.

You can’t have it both ways - it was either about him/race and he was centred; or he should have been open at the outset to professional scrutiny and allowed the normal processes of academic investigation to resolve this quietly.

Fully agree.

He’s an insufferable, loathsome wanker and the “Byline Times” is a source of frequent misinformation while claiming to be the opposite.

Press regulation advocates have used it to renew calls for Leveson 2, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Arday had already used the law to suppress journalism. Authoritarianism is in the air.

In Sarah’s piece she references Matt Haig’s call for journalists to be personally held liable/accountable for the impact of their reporting. My god. A world in which it is hard enough to hold corporate executives and politicians accountable for their daily and lethal activities but he wants to go even further?

Because it’s largely a country’s independent press, however imperfect and malicious it can be at times, that holds the thin edge of the wedge against authoritarianism. Yet Haig wishes them to be silenced by fear even more.

I can see why Fox basher setting up another open letter gives him Something To Do as a distraction from any awkward questions he might have about how he interacted with Arday.

I'm assuming he actually spoke to him? Stand Up to Racism are now taking charge of the vigils for JA. I remember when the Anti Nazi league/SWP took charge of the protests over the murder of Stephen Lawrence, and the news had a shot of family members remonstrating with the vigil organiser trots telling them to please go away

I have zero sympathy with the publishers as they choose to give him a book deal without doing due diligence and didn't ask questions even after his story changed multiple times between the premises and the final manuscript.
Buyer beware comes to mind

Double posted again

I think there are an awful lot of people trying to distract from the fact that they were totally taken in by someone because it fitted their world view or what they would like the world to look like.

She also said he sicced his followers onto her once when she gave him a bad review.