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

How much had be given as an advance on the book deal? Wasn't it over a million?

The supposed threats by a masked man is not what is being referred to here; rather, we are talking about the report of harassment he made in relation to Jack Groves of the Times Higher. The investigation by the Guardian indicated that there were no complaints made by Arday or Cambridge University in relation to the supposed masked man with a knife (or other such events). One cannot be prosecuted for wasting police time, if one does not actually refer a matter to the police.

Most of what I know about Elizabeth Holmes comes from the TV dramatisation TheDropout, which portrays her as someone who genuinely believes she has a product that can revolutionise medicine. When it turns out that her prototype device doesn't work, she starts faking test results in order to secure funding

Anyone interested in the way Holmes spun a whole web of lies and obfuscation around her business empire should read the truly jaw-dropping 'Bad Blood' by John Carreyrou.
There are some fascinating parallels with the fawning support from powerful people/institutions, who seemed utterly mesmerised by Holmes and (literally) bought into her grandiose claims. Meanwhile, her actual staff were in despair because they knew none of it worked.

That’s why I said he’s lucky Cambridge didn’t call the police. And you can’t control what people are talking about. I can talk about whatever aspect of the story I want to.

https://x.com/NidaJafri_/status/2090180542155161985

Journalists at Novara Media have lost the plot. This is like a Maoist struggle session.

I've read Bad Blood, and this is the parallel that keeps coming back to me, though I think Holmes was a good deal smarter than Arday. But there were a lot of obvious similarities, one of which was Holmes's cultivation of her image: the emphasis on her youth, her adoption of black turtleneck sweaters in homage to Steve Jobs, the deep voice she cultivated. A black commentator on Twitter said that one of the reasons white liberals were so captivated by Arday is the long dreadlocks, and I think there's probably something in that.

With Holmes, there was a massive reluctance from people who supported her to accept they'd been duped. The Theranos board was full of impressively-credentialled people, but they swallowed her lies wholesale.

I think it's a pointed covering for Aaron Bastani who was unequivocal in branding Arday a conman. I was actually surprised how hard Novara went on JA.

Still they're used to mobbing, as anyone familiar with the Bloomsbury 10 letter would attest

On the question of criminality: Solrock is right that Arday appears not to have reported any of the alleged attacks to the police, so there isn't a criminal offence there. You could argue that there is some element of fraud in there when it comes to his appointments, yet when he was appointed to Cambridge, he didn't lie about the essentials. It's true that he had a PhD from Liverpool John Moores, and it's true that he'd previously worked at Durham and Glasgow. His stories about being non-verbal, raising millions for charities, having a brain tumour etc presumably wouldn't have been factors in his academic appointments.

If he was found to have fabricated data in his publications, arguably that would be fraud and therefore a criminal offence, in the sense that the universities that hired him were misled about his research achievements.

You could also argue that his publisher was duped into publishing a memoir that was largely false, though it seems quite clear from the difference between the original proposal and the published memoir that the publishers knew they were dealing with a fantasist. So no sympathy there.

You could also argue that his publisher was duped into publishing a memoir that was largely false, though it seems quite clear from the difference between the original proposal and the published memoir that the publishers knew they were dealing with a fantasist. So no sympathy there.

I think that's an interesting one. Clearly he was making money out of the publisher. But is it fraud? So, say you arrest someone for fraud for a very creative relationship with the facts in their autobiography. When you have them sat in the interview room they say to you "But the publisher contracted me to write an in interesting book about my life, and everyone makes details up in their autobiographies." Inventing jobs or plagiarising the work of others in your research is very clearly dishonest and deceptive, but making up material for one's autobiography would present a situation where it might be very hard to prove the dishonesty.

I was talking about the report he made to the police that was investigated for 4 months, but I guess that would be a low bar for criminality.

I am trying to figure out a suitable comparison to test the theory that he would have been treated more harshly in the public eye purely because of his race, as suggested by the academic below, as a reason for them not reporting him.

From what I can tell, you could use a white female fraudster because women are also treated more harshly than their male counterparts and would be more exposed to sexual/misogynistic abuse than a male in that situation, which would be a useful comparative tool. Raynor Wynn would be useful as it is recent, and she sold a book as fact and is now considered a complete work of fiction.

I also cannot think of a single male of any kind that has leveraged ill health/disorders in the same way that JA did, but there are plenty of females that have done that, such as Belle Gibson and Scamander (Amanda Riley).

Finally, Elizabeth Holmes used her "superstar unicorn" status as a female innovator in the tech world to shield herself from detection, much like JA promoted and used his race. It had a similar effect on the Liberal Elites to the way Elizabeth got almost evangelical support from all the powerful men on her board, to the point that Tyler Schultz, one of the whistleblowers, was shunned by his grandfather, who was on the board.

I think you would have to exclude both Alicia Head and Rachel Dolezal because they actually did uplift and promote the community that they were also defrauding, and JA didn't seem to do that in any way by running any charities himself.

It's interesting that Arday was able to have an experience of intersectionality, not in terms of being discriminated against, but as a way to advance in his career.

Well Bastani's own public self-denunciation was definitely a very Maoist move, so not very surprised others are following in his footsteps to prove their own unadulterated fealty to the cause.

Finally, Elizabeth Holmes used her "superstar unicorn" status as a female innovator in the tech world to shield herself from detection, much like JA promoted and used his race. It had a similar effect on the Liberal Elites to the way Elizabeth got almost evangelical support from all the powerful men on her board, to the point that Tyler Schultz, one of the whistleblowers, was shunned by his grandfather, who was on the board.

That's nuts - but it shows just how wedded people can become to a story they're invested in. I think we see the same with gender ideology. The more it becomes obvious you've been sold a lie, the more people defend that lie. You see the same with people who have been conned into marriage with people who want to steal their money. The psychology of it is fascinating. I wonder at what point Arday's defenders will admit that they got it wrong. Perhaps never.

I would also recommend the book; it is amazing, and the books about Purdue and how they defrauded the FDA in the US.

I suspect in academia it goes even deeper - it's a sector steeped in the idea of being right whether it's defending your thesis or arguing why your theory is right and someone else who disagrees with you is wrong. I remember reading about the reaction of an academic who'd found that newer research challenged his work, which was essentially "If this new research is right then my life's work is wrong!"

Throw in a propensity for RSOH views and you get a lot of people for whom 'being wrong' is very difficult to take.

Maugham's latest post on his Instagram has him snarling about The Times editing an article about Arday after his death. Gosh, stealth editing things eh Jo? You probably don't want to open that particular can of worms, considering you did just that to the letter of support which reignited interest in the entire mess.
He's obviously aware of the mockery he gets for doing the pointy finger thing because he starts off with his hands glued to the sofa. But he can't help himself from having a good jab once he's worked up a froth though 😁

He's one of those people that just gets funnier the angrier he is. God it's like all the worst supply teachers I remember struggling to control the class

He’s got a nerve. Didn’t he remove the donate link from all the Arday stories on the GLP webite after accusing Barbara Rich of lying about it being there.

https://x.com/jwomencount2/status/2090496332763177133

Yes, yes he did. There was also a graphic of the GLP website shown during the actual BBC interview with 2 'donate' buttons visible while he was lying about not fundraising via the Arday campaign. Absolutely shameless

"our friend, Jason Arday"

How many times did he meet him, if he only became aware of him on 25 July?

R.e. fraud. I would have thought the most obvious were his paid speaking engagements. He was claiming that he overcome various life barriers evidence suggests he did not.

As far as I'm aware Cambridge did not agree to investigate them, despite arguably it being bringing them into disrepute and him likely using their fame to get them.

From the Guardian:
"Simon & Schuster’s speakers bureau lists Arday as “an internationally sought-after speaker for industry conferences, corporate events, university lectures, and more, and has travelled across the United States for speaking engagements".

I'm struck by how often the word used to describe Arday by former students & colleagues is "kind" with many tributes to his "kindness". He seems to have had Clinton level charisma. Everyone was so charmed by his lovely personality that they overlooked.his scrappy academic record

I think he has a very loose definition of friend. He once described JKR as someone he was previously friends with, when they had only a couple of exchanges on twitter.

I think if I was as unpleasant as JM, I might struggle to understand the concept of friends, too.

Agree. This really came across in the Matthew Syed article too.

It's very hard, when someone is lovely and warm and gentle in real life, to grasp that they are a serial liar and con man. Which is the real Jason? The cold-hearted conman who reports a trade journalist to the police? Or the sweet guy you knew who was always ready to help people who needed it?

We've already talked about lots of parallels (Elizabeth Holmes, John Darwin etc) but I'm now put in mind of the spy cops saga - those undercover policemen who got into relationships with, and sometimes even had children with, female environmental activists before suddenly disappearing. Imagine how it felt years later to discover the relationship hadn't been genuine - that everything you believed was true was a lie. It would be devastating.