Not long ago I wrote about the bizarre tale of Jason Arday, a University of Cambridge professor accused of multiple instances of plagiarism as well as bizarre behavior and fabulism, involving stories about his background, appointments at other universities, physical feats, maladies, charity donations, and so on, all or many of them probably false. After the accusations mounted and Arday produced no evidence backing up his stories, he resigned his full professorship at Cambridge, admitting no wrong and blaming racism for the brouhaha.
But the tale isn’t done. On August 11 of this week, Simon & Schuster is issuing Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a book for which Arday reportedly got a six-figure advance (curiously, the publisher is no longer listed on the Amazon page but the publisher’s page is here).
So far there are only a couple of reviews of the book, and the main ones, from the Torygraph, Times of London, and the Atlantic, I’ve put below. All are archived so you can read them. Click on the screenshots to do so. I’ll put a brief excerpt of each review below the title.
The Torygraph:
Excerpts:
Earlier this year, shortly after it was announced that the publisher Simon & Schuster had bought the rights to Jason Arday’s memoir, the then professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University gave an interview to The Bookseller. “I always wanted to be a person who flew close to the sun,” Arday mused. “But sometimes I wonder: did I fly too close?”
On the evidence of his book – due to be published in the UK on August 27 – and all that has emerged about Arday in recent weeks, the answer is probably yes. Titled Great and Unfortunate Things, the memoir might have been more honestly named Great and Improbable Things. This week, suspicions were raised about whether Arday’s resignation letter, in which he announced his intention to leave his post at Cambridge, was written by AI; the casual reader of Great and Unfortunate Things might suspect the ghostly hand of AI too – although the book was apparently written in collaboration with the definitely human writer Eve Claxton.
. . . What is slightly unexpected about the book that Arday has actually written is that it is – at least on the surface – painfully, mind-numbingly dull. Anyone with a passing familiarity with LinkedIn will find much to recognise in its tone: gushing, earnest, slyly self-promotional, oddly impersonal. The book feels powered by a grim determination to inspire readers come what may, and to settle the debate once and for all about the absolute awesomeness of its subject, Jason Arday. Yet to do so it relies on a narrative that, with everything we now know about his habitual false claims, stretches credulity to breaking point.
. . . One striking feature is that the book is suspiciously stingy on detail: years, ages and last names are often withheld. Much of the kind of information, in short, that journalists and suspicious academics might have liked to be able to check is not included. The amount of money that Arday has raised for charity over the years, for instance, is kept ambiguous. Instead, the reader is fed platitudes such as “It was ingrained in me to devote myself to charity work whenever I could”, and “I’d taken part in all kinds of fundraising drives”.
. . . A more amusing thread running through the book is Arday’s almost impressive ability to draw parallels between himself and major figures from cultural history, all while ambiently stressing his humbleness and simplicity of heart. He was named by his mother after Jason and the Argonauts – a good thing too, he notes: “She couldn’t have known then that my life would involve so many trials, obstacles and tests of courage, just like that of my mythological namesake with his quest for the Golden Fleece.”
. . . Readers hoping to find vivid descriptions of some of Arday’s more colourful tales about his life will, alas, be disappointed. Arday has claimed that a severed pig’s head was delivered to his family home in south London, but the incident is not recorded here. Nor is there any mention of the bananas and bullets he has said he was sent in the post after starting in his role at Cambridge. The claim that a knifeman turned up at the university twice to threaten to harm him unless he resigned is also left out of the book, but would surely have made for absorbing reading. As would the car crash and subsequent three-month coma that he recounted in his initial proposal for the autobiography, but which didn’t make the final book.
We are treated, however, to regretful sermons about the scrutiny Arday has been subjected to because of the fateful combination of his skin colour and his success. When a professor implies that he might be cheating in his coursework (the cheek of it), Arday seizes the opportunity to note that “people who are Black or from other disadvantaged groups” commonly face such scepticism.
We are treated, however, to regretful sermons about the scrutiny Arday has been subjected to because of the fateful combination of his skin colour and his success. When a professor implies that he might be cheating in his coursework (the cheek of it), Arday seizes the opportunity to note that “people who are Black or from other disadvantaged groups” commonly face such scepticism.
The review leaves out some of the incidents that have surfaced during the reporting of Arday’s fabulism, including the pig’s head, bullets, and bananas he said were delivered to his family’s home, as well as Arday’s claim, in his book proposal, that he was in a car crash that put him in a coma for three months.
On to the Times of London, which pulls no punches in its title:
Excerpts (the Times, like the Torygraph, calls attention to the fact that Arday describes detailed memories when he was young—well before age 11 when he was able, he said, to speak):
Maybe I should turn myself in to the nearest cop shop now, because this review is not going to improve Arday’s mood. Great and Unfortunate Things is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe. Extraordinary claims are made with no supporting evidence. Arday’s story — regardless of its authenticity — feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals.
One notable feature of the book is what it omits. Several of Arday’s more incredible achievements are either not mentioned or included in a softened form. His adolescent football career doesn’t figure, and nor does the 600 miles in six days challenge. His remarkable fundraising achievements are alluded to, but no definitive figure is given. Perhaps his co-writer, Eve Claxton, did a little judicious fact-checking.
. . . There are, however, some new additions to the Arday canon. The brain tumour, for example — treatment for which caused him to lose his memory just before his viva, so he had to relearn his whole thesis from scratch. He also writes that he was severely beaten at the age of 18 by four youths in an unprovoked attack, causing him to have lifelong seizures.
. . . Even for the not-notably-modest genre of the inspirational poverty-porn memoir, Arday lays it on a bit thick. He compares himself at various points with Rocky (driven, gritty), Forrest Gump (simple, wise) and God. Seriously: his mother apparently believed that “just because God wasn’t always visible, that didn’t mean he wasn’t there”, and held that the same must be true for Arday’s intelligence.
And that points to the ultimate cruelty of this story. Arday’s self-mythologising is very funny, but it has done real damage — most significantly to nonverbal children and their families. By promoting the medically unusual story of his own late-childhood flourishing, Arday is creating false hope. Parents will blame themselves, wrongly, for not living up to the impossible standard of Giff.
. . . And that points to the ultimate cruelty of this story. Arday’s self-mythologising is very funny, but it has done real damage — most significantly to nonverbal children and their families. By promoting the medically unusual story of his own late-childhood flourishing, Arday is creating false hope. Parents will blame themselves, wrongly, for not living up to the impossible standard of Giff.
. . . Nor do I have any sympathy for his publisher. Fact-checking works of non-fiction should be standard practice. Instead, as we know from The Salt Path, it’s often no more than an exercise in libel-proofing: reality doesn’t matter. Arday still has defenders who claim he is the victim of a racist stitch-up. In a post-truth world, audacity beats veracity every time.
My understanding is that publishers commonly make authors, in their contract, attest that what they wrote is their own work, is not plagiarized, and is factually true. (I had to do that with my trade books.) But publishers themselves do not have the time nor the money to do their own extensive fact-checking, ergo the contract. (Sometimes, if there’s a chance of lawsuits for libel or defamation against the publisher, they do a “legal read” using a lawyer. This may be why they changed two names in Arday’s book.)
Regardless of whether Simon & Schuster fact-checked Arday’s book, surely the University of Cambridge should have checked his credentials more thoroughly. When claims about Arday’s fabulism surfaced, Cambridge just sloughed them off, saying that investigations of plagiarism belonged to Arday’s Ph.D. university, not Cambridge. That is a dereliction of duty on the part of Cambridge. Only when the ruckus became more prominent did they launch their own investigation, whereupon Arday resigned.
I’ve found one book that was withdrawn because of factual inaccuracy, a memoir of an Australian police officer published by Hachette. Presumably Arday’s book could also be withdrawn if they find factual inaccuracies. But how can you check some of his claims if there’s no evidence one way or another. I could say “I flew up to the Moon and back yesterday, though nobody saw me,” and that is uncheckable. It’s unlikely, but how do you say it didn’t happen?
Another book, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, made dubious claims according to the Observer, but was not withdrawn.
The Atlantic has perhaps the most extensive take on the book, but also gives it a thumbs-down:
Excerpts:
. . . A year later, [Arday] set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”
Arday’s claims have now fallen apart, of course, and Cambridge should be embarrassed. The Atlantic made inquiries:
Arday did not respond to questions from The Atlantic, but he told The Timeslast week that he is not a “liar” or a “fantasist” and that he’d been given insufficient supervision as a graduate student, especially in light of his learning disabilities: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake, there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” He also seemed to address such allegations at a conference in April for the British Sociological Association, where he gave a talk about pervasive efforts to discredit Black scholars including himself. “These people are brilliant, perversely brilliant,” he told his colleagues. “There are times when you look at what they’re doing and you say to yourself, Well done, well played, very good. You’ve caught me [in] a thousand knots—how do I get myself out of this situation?”
. . . Great and Unfortunate Things, which Arday co-wrote with Eve Claxton, is still scheduled to come out next week from Simon & Schuster. The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent. But the book is also, in a way, very honest and quite telling: It provides a vivid portrait of a man who was always manifestly ill-equipped for academia yet found a way to reach its upper levels. This is not someone else’s cruel assessment of Arday’s tragic and improbable career. It’s his own.
The reviewer, Daniel Engbber, recounts the now-familiar obstacles that Arday faced and apparently overcame. Here’s one that the Atlantic tried to fact-check, but failed:
The book sticks mostly to this frantic register, and coincidence abounds. Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.
Is that really true? I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. Even asking that question places me on the wrong side of Arday’s moral ledger. Again and again, the book acknowledges his “impossible” success, yet his indignation at anyone who ever doubted him remains a running theme throughout the book. These are Arday’s villains—the Ivan Dragos and the Clubber Langs of academia, who dared to wonder whether his work was really so original, or questioned whether he did it on his own. He swallowed his “feelings of offense,” he says in reference to one lecturer who insisted on drilling him about subject material in person, “but I have never forgotten them.”
. . . But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.
Could that be due to legal fact-checking? Who knows? And Arday cannot be sued for what he claims in the book proposal but not in the book. But he and the publisher can be sued, and the book withdrawn, if the book does contains factual claims that are false.
As a publishing veteran told me, “If this guy applied for a job with our company, we’d check his references. Did Cambridge?” In the end, the damage is mostly not to Simon & Schuster, who may make a pile, or to the reader, who may like a good tale even if it’s false, or even to Arday himself, who simply cannot believe he did anything wrong, and also got a tidy sum for his book. The real damage is done to Cambridge University for apparently hiring on background rather than merit, as well as to black scholars of real quality, who are now subject to being denigrated as “DEI hires”. I often wonder if Arday believes the tales he tells, in which case he is mentally ill, or is he simply a grifter getting by on outrageous tales, with doubts dispelled by his accusations of racism. Who knows?
But I’d be remiss if I didn’t call attention to those who defended Arday and echoed his claim that this affair was simply a racist witch hunt. Here’s one article from The Guardian, which, in other articles, did a lot to call attention to Arday’s unbelievable claims (click to read):
This article doesn’t defend Arday so much as criticize the people who brought him down, and even implies that Arday’s fall wasn’t so bad because “there’s lot of people who don’t deserve to be where they are.” If that’s meant to defend Arday, it’s shameful. (“Andrews” below refers to “Kehinde Andrews, who was the first Black Studies professor in the UK but was recently made redundant from Birmingham City University.”)
A quote:
“It’s not just about Black people – any minoritised group, our success is generally seen as not being genuine,” said one academic, speaking anonymously.
“[The row] will make the small number of Black people in the field feel much more vulnerable. It will give licence for a while to people who don’t want Black people in the academic space and it may give pause to people who want to redress the massive [racial] imbalance in academia.
“But it’s a mistake to think of any of this as a meritocracy – there’s lots of people in academia who don’t deserve to be where they are, and there’s lots of people who should be more advanced in their careers than they are.”
Andrews said he was setting up an independent Black Studies centre, describing the university sector as “toxic”.
“Academia is set up so that there’s these few places and we’re all fighting over scraps to get into these places,” he said. “It might just be time to say, let’s do it ourselves and let’s not keep relying on these institutions.”
But while Arday’s case – and cuts to the humanities – negatively affect morale, many academics emphasised the proud history of Black scholarship, insisting the Arday affair must not be allowed to tarnish it.
“Black British academics – like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby and Isaac Julien – punch way above their weight globally. The idea that this one incident in some way reflects Black British academia in general is bonkers,” one academic said.
“There’s a bunch of people out there who think Black people are less intelligent than white people, and that the only way they can get anywhere is by being forced into situations that they are unqualified for. For those people, being Black is the definition of being unqualified. It’s an old racist wine in a new bottle.”
That’s fine: Arday’s fall should not in the least affect other black scholars. But it’s weird that the author uses the fall as a reason to call out academia for racism.
Finally, Richard Dawkins has an interesting piece in UnHerd (click to read) arguingthat Arday’s prose is obscurantist and stilted: a sign that he didn’t have much to say:
One short excerpt:
Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects travelling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language? Look, for example, at the following passage from Arday’s thesis:
“An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognised that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”
I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination.
There’s more at the site, and stay tuned as other reviews of Arday’s book appear. Will I read it? I don’t think so. I’ll let others do that job, as three reviewers above have kindly done.
“And so the dialectic continues.”
-Delgado and Stefancic
Critical Race Theory – An Introduction, p.66, 3rd Ed., 2017
“progresses” p.58 1st.ed. 2001-> “continues”
“We cannot repeat too often that men do not lead the Revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men.”
Joseph de Maistre
Considerations on France
1796
Comment by Greg Mayer
“And so the dialectic continues.”
You post this as a comment frequently, but if you’ve ever explained what you mean by it, I’ve missed it.
GCM
Off the top of my head : In Kant’s treatment:
Thesis (Thing)
Antithesis (Thing in Itself) … I think)
Synthesis (some higher understanding of the Thing)
Hegel’s treatment :
Abstract
Negation
Concrete (Aufheben)
It apparently originates with Plato and “continues” to this day (e.g. 2017).
It is an endless literature – Stanford’s entry is good :
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/
How does it connect here?
E.g. “disruption”, “transformation”, etc. – that’s the game of dialectic.
I think one could also point to the the Hegelian view of the dialectic starting with the conflict of ideas and then progressing through the Marxist view of the dialectic as applied to economics with bourgeoisie vs. proletariat, and then to the leftist oppressor vs. oppressed. Therefore, the modern (or postmodern) left expands upon the Marxist class struggle into social justice.
The continuation of the dialectic then becomes the ongoing quest for the synthesis of the oppressor vs oppressed dynamic, leading to social growth via reform, transformation, and “progress”. This cycle never ends though, as new power relationships are constantly discovered via continuous application of the Hegelian method. At least that’s how I understand it.
Directly relevant for the Arday story :
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s development of this theory of social change is Intersectionality.
Intersectionality was used by Sylvia Duckworth to produce the Wheel of Power and Privilege (many versions exist):
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364109273/figure/fig1/AS:11431281096429080@1668150707915/Wheel-of-Power-Privilege-and-Marginalization-by-Sylvia-Duckworth-Used-by-permission.png
Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color
Kimberle [sic] Crenshaw
Stanford Law Review
Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241-1299
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1229039
As an effort to give a better reply – I now just happened to get this book in again – just for this reply! – an abbreviated-as-much-as-possible addendum :
“Noam Chomsky once remarked to one of us, who accused him in a conversation of being insufficiently dialectical, that he despised the term and that in its best sense dialectics was only another way of saying “thinking correctly.” ”
And – a spoiler :
“[..] where the Cartesian program has failed to give satisfaction, we hear more and more calls for an alternative epistemological stance. [..] there has been another active and productive intellectual tradition, the dialectical, which is just now becoming widely acknowledged.”
From the Preface of
The Dialectical Biologist
Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 1985
Even the title of Arday’s book is plagiarised (together with some premonitions about his future) from a schlocky TV show: https://archive.ph/Wf7p2
Thx for that reference JezGrove, I read it.
I find this topic to be fascinating and hilarious.
We haven’t seen such a case of phoniness since Holden Caufield shot John Lennon. 😉
best regards,
D.A.
NYC 🗽
Comment by Greg Mayer
Brian Leiter points to some remarks on the Arday affair by Ato Quayson (Stanford), calling them “sensible”. Excerpts:
“The real damage is done to Cambridge University.” Yes for sure the damage to their brand is bad, but I think I agree with Sarah Ditum that the worst effect of this whole affair is on actually autistic kids (and their parents) who can’t arise Lazarus-like and learn to speak and read and write and become university professors. Like the controversy over facilitated communication, the story of Arday is one big instance of gentrifying disability.
Anecdotes on twitter suggest that Arday himself was a normal chatty schoolboy, not a mute autist. Knowledge that his most important biographical detail is untrue tends to suggest he’s a liar, not simply a fabulist or a passive Chauncey Gardner-like character in his own life. I think this makes him more culpable for misleading parents of autistic kids, and distorting other peoples’ expectations of what a profoundly autistic person should be able to overcome or achieve.
A close second would perhaps be Arday’s many disappointed students who paid tuition to sit in his lectures, got ~nothing in return, and were called racists for noticing this.
From one of those students…
https://archive.is/20260810062526/https://unherd.com/newsroom/jason-arday-taught-me-heres-what-i-learnt/
For those of us who are parents of children with real disabilities, the use of fake disability claims by grifters appears particularly disgusting. In a way, the whole
enterprise of identity-mongering, complaint about “minoritization”, and the self-ID fad encourages grifts of this sort.
I see Arday very soon among Temptation Island (or Temptation anything else) contestants. Then Politics…
I watched the Hilary Cremin BBC clip and peripherally wonder about Sandro Sandri, the sports lecturer at Merton College in South London who is reported as having helped teach Arday to read and write at age 18. Did he not know what was going on?
The review in The Guardian conveniently overlooks the fact that Arday’s Cambridge colleague Priyamvada Gopal, professor of postcolonial studies, has decried the “massive reputational damage” and is demanding an independent inquiry into the mess.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c05q0nznq24o
I was talking to a Cambridge grad I know lately, JezGrove and I told her Jason A. was the 2nd most horrible Cambridge denizen.
Ms. Gopal is one of the most poisonous creatures I’ve ever encountered. Consider I’m originally Australian: I KNOW dangerous animals.
She’s also quite litigious so the fact I am in the US makes me running her down online even more precious!
best
D.A.
NYC 🗽
I bow to your superior knowledge. The fact that even Gopal is no longer backing Arday is priceless.
OMG. LOL.
He claims to have had a further two brain tumours since then, although I can’t remember if they made it into the final manuscript of his book.
So. My father had (and died of) a brain toumour. They shaved off half of his hair. Are there any photos of a half bald Jason Arday?
Surely a whole classroom of quondam primary school children can be found who will testify that he could speak? There must be teachers who remember him as well, but they are probably not allowed to say so for fear of losing their licenses.
This piece in the London Times (sorry I don’t know how to produce a free archived copy) is exactly what I experienced when I encountered Arday at a Cambridge student outreach seminar (see other thread). https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/jason-arday-student-feedback-r9n9bpds0
There’s an archived copy here: https://archive.ph/nb1NM
I shall wait for the book to appear in the remainders pile – and walk smartly past.
What I’d like to read, appropriate for a Cambridge Professor, the highest research-merited rank, is a memoir of one’s intellectual development. Okay, there can be a few formative backstory chapters, but then the book should be about the development of ideas–how one’s scholarly thinking evolved towards producing new and original work.
Steven Pinker also wrote an article about the affair. But I can’t find the link.
Ohhh I’ll try to find that. It’ll be excellent!
thx Mark.
D.A.
NYC
Even though the omission of facts, dates, and names makes it impossible to check the truth of Arday’s most outlandish claims, you’d think that at least some of the unnamed people who were involved would speak out voluntarily. For example, the two youths who were so moved by Arday’s refusal to have them punished would surely be motivated to exonerate him of the charges he’s lying by identifying themselves and testifying that he was telling the truth about the incident and the wonderful effect it had on them.
Also, marathons are organized by people and records are kept of the participants and their times, etc. If it was true that Arday ran in all the marathons he claimed, the organizers of at least some of the marathons would surely want to speak out to confirm they had a record of his participation.
But nada, zilch. The silence is deafening. It seems that the only witness to any of Arday’s trials, tribulations and triumphs was Arday himself.
Arday is indeed a fabulist. I honestly think that that somewhat exonerates him. Although he certainly benefited from his lies, he would have lied about himself even if he didn’t. Fabulists can’t help themselves.
The fault is on the people who were so eager to believe his lies.
Yes this is what I don’t understand, Brooke. MOST of his boasts and lies are pretty easy to track down, particularly now the scandal has broken (like a fever!).
I get why a lot wasn’t discovered earlier – as PCC(E) says, even large publishers don’t have much time/money/effort in the game to bother verifying stuff.
But this dude’s claims were so OUTRAGEOUS! I have a theory the length of his Ibrahim X. Kendi style dreadlocks had a lot to do with his “success.”
But (thinking like a defense lawyer) almost all of his lies are pretty easy to verify or deny.
best regards,
D.A.
NYC
“Also, marathons are organized by people and records are kept of the participants and their times,”
He organized the marathons himself along with his sponsor the charity, and he was the only runner. Do you really think there would be 30 marathons in 35 days he could get to in time?
The evidence is pretty strong this event actually happened. Whether he cut corners when no one was looking, well, we don’t know for sure about that.
Could you provide the “strong evidence” that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, as well as the last 15 with a leg fracture?
A few thoughts. If Arday’s claims of being non-verbal until 11 are not true, there will be classmates who know this and probably one will come forward.
Regarding whether the examiners read his thesis carefully or not – they certainly should have, in my view. At my viva, my external examiner had post-it notes on almost every other page of my thesis, which dismayed me a little when I went in to the exam; with hindsight, I am glad he gave me a thorough test, so I myself have no doubts that I earned my PhD. That said, I remember my supervisor heading off to examine a student and she was planning to read the thesis on the flight, which was only a short hop across the North Sea; I suspect that she may not be the only examiner who hasn’t given a thesis the attention that it deserve, but I could be wrong.
Just out of interest, I put a random page of my thesis through a couple of plagiarism detectors. One found “significant problems” (I had to take out a subscription for more details) while the other found it plagiarism-free. Both said it was largely written by AI even though it was written in 2002. The latter surprised me a little as more than one person told me during my brief academic career that I write quite well.
That’s not good at all to learn that plagiarism and AI detectors are so unreliable.
Strip away the fabulist nonsense. Focus on the intellectual rigor and the reflexive ideology. How many Jason Ardays have populated our institutions—both in academia and in government—during the last decade plus of progressive culture war?
It’s all fun and games while it’s the silly sociologist or the inept education professor. What about our doctors, lawyers, public health officials, judges, and the faceless bureaucrats dictating the rules that they compel us to live by?
How many of us will respond no differently from the Cambridge academics and administrators who told us how nicely dressed the emperor was? Which of us would dare be anything other than “kind”? Which of us will swap difficult truths for the comfort of our team?
Doug, I’ve tried to do this at my university. It’s hard to get any traction. I was part of a university-wide committee charged with developing ideas and policy on disability accommodations for graduate students (including “neurodivergent” folx like Jason Arday). I tried to very gently suggest to the group that there might be some disabilities that just can’t be accommodated because they prevent a person from doing high-level scholarship, and that many faculty members would not be on board with accommodations that required significant compromises of scholarly excellence. The leader of the committee, a humanities scholar (they/them) called such colleagues “dead branches”, and said she had learned long ago not to water the dead branches in her garden. All of my subsequent contributions to that committee were similarly ignored.
The universities are lost. The woke leadership is ~universal, and it directs the process of replacing its own members so it is self-sufficient. Universities can’t be reformed from the inside. Only external agents (especially government) can force real change.
[and sorry for over-commenting]
It isn’t just wokeness that drives this. It is also the transformation of the university from educational institution to a business model where making money is the priority. Thus, more bums on seats, keep the kiddies happy, objective tests and lectures presenting complex material are deemed “old school” because the kids complain, etc. This transformation is one reason I retired from academia.
Is this also happening in the sciences and engineering?
Yes well lots of fun there. You get the same false positives in dodgy software warnings from checkers. However it does not detract from the case against JA,
The fabrication is way more important than the plagiarism and that can be established by inspection. You do not need tools they only might be needed
to tell you what to check. Again if you look side by side he even borrows a whole
section heading from PZW thesis not just the text and the order of the passages
lifted and amended is I think the same order of appearance as the original. In my experience of nearly 40 years in academic work, the type of plagiarism and some other facts suggest potentially someone else may have written the work. I have
found that to be the case in bought works- someone paid someone to copy for them. The fantastic usb stick case at Liverpool JM may be one such. I am baffled
why only the CPS website covers that and not newspapers. Its amazing
.https://www.cps.gov.uk/mersey-cheshire/news/man-jailed-online-exam-fraud-made-him-thousands-poundse
If you had power and wished to reform Cambridge, this would be an excellent moment. Suspend every single person who signed the letter supporting him, or was in any way involved in interviewing or hiring him. He’s so transparently obviously a complete idiot that anyone who didn’t notice this in 5 minutes is highly suspect, and anyone who signs letters without spending 5 minutes is also unfit for intellectual work.
Treat it like a plane just flew into the hillside and 100 different people failed to report that the wings weren’t bolted on. All of them, and everything else they touched, are suspect.
Grill them all for plagiarism or low standards in their own work, in public. Fire as many as possible, possibly closing whole departments. Demand a review of anyone else whose hiring was touched by any of the same people. Impose strict measures on all soft subjects, like demanding that students who aren’t required to study math must pass ancient greek instead.
I think the public would probably back all of this, and that it would improve Cambridge’s reputation. But I am sure none of this will happen.
YEs Pawel. I like the cut of your jib on this one: it is a PERFECT opportunity. I thought that the Claudine Gay scandal would shunt this kind of nonsense into reality and accountability.
But she got a PROMOTION!
And let’s see if JA isn’t offered a position at Berkeley or Yale: just to troll us normies. (sigh. Makes me happy I never worked at a university).
best regards, and sympathy to our legitimate academic friends here at WEIT.
D.A.
NYC
Kathleen Stock has a very good interview with Unherd. She makes some very pertinent points in it about the education system trying to accommodate the neurodivergent or whatever intellectual ailment afflicts the students is a complete farce.
https://unherd.com/watch-listen/the-jason-arday-scandal-explained/
An amazing story. DEI is such poison.
Fact checking is interesting in the media. In my own column which is syndicated but not widely, only one publisher actually fact checks – and has pulled me aside with some date errors I’ve made. Sloppy me. But most don’t.
As PCC(E) says, they rely on honesty. Which is fine but doesn’t account for or catch “free riders”.
D.A.
NYC
The reviews in the newspapers tear the book apart but I can’t give them any credit for this because I suspect they would have written gushing reviews if the book had been published just a few months earlier.
Having just read Arday’s text “Being Black, Male and Academic: Navigating the White Academy” (*, I now see clearly why he perfectly fits the job description of a professorial pop idol of the woke left.
(* Arday, Jason. “Being Black, Male and Academic: Navigating the White Academy.” In Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy, ed. by Jason Arday & Heidi Safia Mirza, 161-174. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.)
There are people in the social sciences who do it properly, who design experiments and analyse the results, who try to do the science bit as well as they can.
We had two people at my University who did good work and were very helpful whenever I asked for help on “softer” methods, questionnaire design and so on.
They got made redundant last year.
(This was caused by capitalism rather than wokism, though).
Doonesbury’s Red Rascal comes to mind.
Professor Hilary Cremin should be sacked for ruining the reputation of Cambridge University, failing to investigate the legitimacy of Jason Arday and being the most naive person in academia, as well as undermining all current black professors.
If Simon & Schuster don’t rename his book to ‘Girl You Know It’s True’ then comedy is dead.