In short, he seems to be the DEI hire of all DEI hires, or else He Knew Somebody. The more I hear about it, the weirder and weirder the story gets. His credentials are sketchy at best, among other things.
no paywall here Cambridge academics reject university’s attempt to end row over Jason Arday | University of Cambridge | The Guardian
Even the Guardian article seems vague on the specifics of the underlying issue. Here’s a wiki on the subject of the controversy that is less opaque/cursory:
Lots of academics have plagiarized and falsified their work. What makes anyone think that this one in particular was a “DEI hire”?
I think it’s more the part that he basically made-up his whole background and no one bothered to check.
And like… made-up wildly implausible stories.
The part that baffles me is how people didn’t flag the ludicrous claims sooner. 30 marathons in 35 days? That should have been challenged immediately, on the spot.
Well, not really; dozens of established academics every year get exposed for misconduct involving plagiarism or other ethics fails in their research work. Scientific misconduct happens all the time, and that incident list isn’t even taking into account similar improprieties in non-science fields. (Nor is it including other forms of unethical behavior like abuse or harassment of students.)
Of course, tens of thousands of academics of all ethnicities and genders aren’t committing research misconduct, but it happens often enough that there’s nothing extraordinary about it. Same with physicians committing malpractice or executives committing fraud, for instance. What’s extraordinary here, besides the bizarre features of some of Arday’s self-aggrandizing anecdates, is only the exceptionally apt narrative framing of the perpetrator as a “DEI hire”.
Anti-“woke” conservatives are simply delighted to have such an opportunity to complain about “unqualified diversity appointments”, with a strong subtext of “see, we told you that Those People don’t really have what it takes for elite smart-people careers”.
Probably because he’s black, and also because of his claims of multiple disabilities that he “overcame” (such as being mute for many years, suffering a car accident that put him in a coma, etc.)
The whole “DEI” thing from my vantage point is exactly this: multiple factors, one of which is obvious and the others? They may or may not be true.
I don’t know what people in Great Britain call “DEI.”
? Ludicrous? I mean, it may be ludicrous for this particular person to have claimed to do them, I don’t know his race record. But there definitely are well-documented instances of people running, say, a marathon every day for fifty consecutive days.
Hell, with a not-too-extreme amount of training, even I could run 30 marathons in a 35-day period… for some definition of “run”. I’d be pretty beat up by the end of it, definitely, and I doubt I’d turn in any times less than about 6-7 hours (and most probably more like 8-10), but I could probably do it.
This guy, like a lot of self-promoters, seems to have claimed a whole bunch of things that were strikingly impressive but not obviously impossible, as exaggerated versions of various stuff he actually did do. (Like the running 600 miles in 6 days? Some ultramarathoners can in fact do that, but turns out that Jason Arday didn’t count rest days that made the full period more like 12 days rather than 6.) And consequently, most listeners weren’t expecting him to be lying, so the exaggerations got over.
No, a DEI hire is someone who is, on paper, unqualified but who gets opportunities because of minority status. If someone puffs up their resume convincingly then they’re just qualified, at least as far as anyone knows.
Connecting this with DEI is just racism.
I concur. He was hired as he “exaggerated” his resume, not due to his race.
Not necessarily.
OK, in what way is his race relevant?
I mean, hiring a strikingly impressive and inspirationally overachieving scholar from a very underrepresented minority group is a feather in any institution’s cap, sure. It attracts students and provides new perspectives. And it gets your name out in front of donors and funders, because if you have a faculty member who is both high-achieving and “unusual” in terms of their personal story, EVERYBODY is going to want that person for a discussion panelist, a conference keynote speaker, and so on.
But no, you’re not allowed to hire candidates specifically for their “unusualness”. There are very strong protocols in place to discourage that. (And also all the other academics who are—or who have mentored or taught or whatever—less “unusual” job candidates are watching very carefully to make sure that you don’t disregard academic qualifications for the sake of “diversity”.)
If applicants are outright faking their records, though, that makes selection more difficult. You don’t have the time or resources to screen out every possible lie that every candidate might be trying to tell you; to some extent, you’re just relying on the fact that most candidates don’t in fact lie.
Sure. I agree.
It’s relevant because Cambridge University was under fire for being a “bastion of white privilege”.
Jason Arday seems to be a bit of a Walter Mitty who might have done well even without the stories and the plagiarism.
There’s a good opinion piece here on how Arday’s appointment -without, as you say any of the appropriate scrutiny - does reflect tokenism on the part of Cambridge, and that this tokenism needs a serious left-wing/progressive critique precisely because it does play into right-wing “DEI hire” attacks on racial equality.
I am not privy to the hiring process for a professorial chair at Cambridge. I do not know exactly why and how Arday got the job or who else was in the running. But what happens when an academic’s story is sold through him being the “youngest black ever” (sitting alongside familiar monikers such as “the first black” or “black excellence”) and asterisked by a tale of hardship? You are not encouraged or invited to engage with the substance of their scholarship; instead, you are invited to clap. Instead of his appointment conjuring the question “what new opportunities for research will this lead to?”, it was “doesn’t this make you feel good?”
What this means is that Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race: too few black students (in my cohort at Cambridge matriculating in 2015 there were only 15 black males out of 3,449 students); single-figure black academics (which is still the case); allegations of institutional racism. Independent of the merits or pitfalls of his own scholarship, what success looked like for Arday in this role was limited; what accountability could look like if misconduct occurred was constrained by him being a vehicle for Cambridge to signal its institutional progress.
The mass investigation into Arday’s PhD may be presented as the pursuit of public and intellectual integrity, and yet the origin of this is grievance politics from those who feel diversity has blocked their own advancement. It comes with that malign charge of being a “DEI hire” or being in your position to “fill a quota”, the accusation that so often stalks black people elevated to senior positions. And so with Arday as an avatar for the black colleague who was promoted over you, the black child who was made head boy over your son, that process turbocharges.
In Arday, those on the right feel that they have found what they are looking for; that is why every drop is being wrung out of this story. His resignation will not end that. The next step will be to make this single case bear the weight of the ideological arguments they pile on it.
How do you resist that? By embracing and learning from the mistakes that were made here, not avoiding them out of discomfort. That means advocating for diversity without tokenism, the celebration of excellent black scholarship without the need for exceptionalism or academic celebrity. If we let only our opponents tell the story, then it becomes a parable about the hazards of striving for progress and equality, rather than about the institutions that reduced equality to a mere PR exercise.
So there are two aspects to this.
The first is academic malpractice. He’s been accused (fairly convincingly) of plagiarism in his PhD, and also of faking research. These are the things that academia is meant to be able to identify and weed out as a matter of course and so it is bad - but not unheard of - for this to slip through. As far as the PhD goes, the fault here does not lie with Cambridge but with Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded the PhD, and which had conducted an investigation clearing him of anything more than “honest error”. It is actually fair enough that Cambridge should accept the PhD at face value.
Related to this, are claims to hold or have held academic posts that the relevant institutions have no records of. Easy enough to check, easy also to take at face value.
The second part is Arday’s apparent general tendency to exaggerate and invent stories about his life. This is a man who by his own account:
Was non-verbal until 11 and illiterate until 18, before becoming a full professor less than 20 years later.
Ran the last 9 of his 30 marathons in 35 days on a broken leg.
Raised £5 million for charity before attaining even academic celebrity, but can’t give the details because the charities made him sign non-disclosure agreements.
Volunteered abroad for a charity that doesn’t send volunteers abroad.
Been threatened by a masked knife-wielding assailant who doesn’t appear on CCTV and whose presence he reported to neither the police nor his colleagues.
Defended his PhD dissertation after having a benign tumour removed and subsequently forgetting the whole content of his work, which he had to relearn in a matter of days.
Strictly, none of this is academic malpractice, although the publishers of his forthcoming autobiography might have some questions to ask themselves, but it is a series of fairly astonishing claims that might have led people of an inquiring turn of mind to probe further.
It must be true that “Few people could care less about what academics get up to.” Hence, the the phenomenon of building name recognition. It is not merely about enjoying reading about yourself in the newspapers, though, or being the first person journalists and movers call on for comment or consultation. Even if you are good, if academics in your field do not immediately recognize you, how can you advance in your own career?