Is anyone else following this bizarre Jason Arday story out of Cambridge University?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

It’s a crappy situation all round.

I mean, the guy obviously made some stuff up, but not all - he had, after all, had most of the jobs he claimed and some were just exaggerated a bit- and it wouldn’t have come to light without a witch-hunt from some pretty awful people. Most of the less believable stories aren’t relevant to the job, and it’s mostly the sheer number of unlikely claims that raise an eyebrow rather than any one individual claim.

No-one is going through other Cambridge professors’ PhD theses with a fine tooth comb looking for errors, but I’ll bet there are plenty. One of my own PhD supervisors told me a student friend of his put a line in the middle of one paragraph saying ‘If you read this, tell me and I’ll give you a bottle of whiskey’, brought a bottle of whiskey to the viva, no one mentioned it, so his friends drank it to celebrate him passing instead. Who has time to scour every word (except Richard Dawkins, apparently)? I’ve seen, in theses which have been accepted, illustrations clearly lifted uncredited from other sources where the caption doesn’t actually match, Olympic level jumping to conclusions and obvious misunderstandings of basic concepts, and I’ve only read a couple.

I don’t mean it’s OK to make stuff up (I’m literally writing this when I should be on the other computer writing my own PhD thesis, I would like to clarify that I’m not planning on making anything up), but I do wonder why he did. Is it a compulsive thing? Is it because he felt like he had to be absolutely totally extraordinary to be taken seriously?

Society does seem to be putting a real premium on coming from a background where you’ve overcome incredible odds lately. Watch any show where members of the public have been selected - for pretty much anything, competitor, participant, house makeover shows, whatever- and there’s someone who had cancer twice, someone who learned to walk again after being paralysed, someone who turned into a newt but got better…

Also.. it’s sociology. It’s always a good idea to have a diverse workforce, but for sociology research it’s pretty much essential, in a way that it isn’t with other disciplines. Imagine a couple of WASP men trying to find out how a law change impacted women’s lives in a rural Muslim community, versus a Muslim woman doing the same research. Which would probably be able to get a more accurate picture? It’s… not entirely unjustifiable, to me, to consider someone’s background for sociology, because the lack of diversity probably genuinely could impact research. It also sounds like Arday was extremely keen to increase participation from under-represented backgrounds, which is very tricky to do without falling into the tokenism trap or creating unfair expectations.

Academics are expected to mentor others, but I’ve personally heard complaints from Black academics that they often seem to be expected to mentor based on race, while others have their mentees selected based on research similarity, plus they’re expected to mentor more people. Having a star sociologist from a complex minority background with a focus on race and disability wanting to help solve the issue of under-representation in a place where that’s acknowledged as a major issue? Ideal! He did apparently have a reputation for being very helpful and supportive of students.

I can’t really blame Cambridge for hiring this guy. Who bothers checking if their new hire really ran 30 marathons? They would have known his previous main roles.

I will note there’s been a ‘star’ researcher working at a university near me who turned out to have been massaging the lab data and straight up making stuff up for decades, it came out last year. It’s not Cambridge, but it was also a 20+ year career and frankly dozens of people had to have been aware of some of it, mostly his underlings, who would be damaging their own career if they flagged it up. He got quietly let go, and I don’t think anyone outside of his sector and the local academic community even heard about it.

I’ve also certainly been quietly told before a conference talk that the presenter seems to be getting results no-one else can replicate, or isn’t actually involved in any of the work their name is on. Pressure in UK academia is pretty insane right now; those getting exciting results are the ones who get the funding… even if said results are more a reflection of what the researcher wants to see than what’s actually there. Those whose integrity means they report no impact when there is no evidence of impact can get skipped over.

22

Actually, I don’t think I said anything about Arday’s appointment not receiving “appropriate scrutiny”. I wasn’t on his hiring committee, and I don’t know to what extent the committee simply failed to do normal due diligence on his application, and to what extent Arday simply deceived his way around normal due diligence.

(Not that even extraordinary scrutiny would necessarily have uncovered any smoking guns. From what I’ve read, research practice irregularities in Arday’s work seem to have been mostly debatable and relatively minor, with a previous investigation into allegations of plagiarism in his dissertation concluding that the questionable stuff didn’t rise to the level of deliberate misconduct. And an academic hiring committee is not likely to notice, or much care about, a recreational runner telling some fish stories about how many marathons he ran or whatever.)

23

This story came to my attention because of a post on Retraction Watch, which has a detailed account of Arday’s questionable activities and the documentation of plagiarism. The focus of their account is how an apparently threatening letter from Arday’s legal representative(s) caused Times Higher Education to pull a story they had been planning to run.

This story first cfme to light because of an investigation by an academic who purportedly has “controversial views on race” but seems to have done impressive detective work on Arday.

Cambridge’s swallowing Arday’s story whole when hiring him, denying there was any plagiarism and lashing out at “vile” criticism of their star doesn’t cast the institution in a good light. As with a number of these cases, inaction and/or coverup just increases the news value of the scandal (noting that Cambridge has since backtracked).

Seems to me that the bigger issue here than an alleged “DEI hire” is academic institutions not taking instances of major plagiarism seriously and ignoring their duty to sanction those responsible.

As for Arday’s “30 marathons in 35 days” claim, the cited individual who accomplished this sort of thing was a trained ultramarathoner, which Arday hasn’t been shown to be
.

24

OK, was George Santos a “DEI hire”? It looks like this guy was about the same sort of liar as Santos. But if it’s possible for a guy who happens to be white(ish) to like like this without being a DEI hire, then it’s also possible for a guy who happens to be black.

And, as mentioned, dishonest academics aren’t all that rare. If this guy is actually the first black dishonest academic anyone has ever found, that means that either black academics are overall much more honest than white academics, or blacks in general are extremely underrepresented in academia.

25

Sorry, I misinterpreted you, my fault.

I believe that was the initial view, but from what I’ve seen a number of people who took that stance have since retracted it in the light of details as outlined in the Retraction Watch piece @Jackmannii linked to.

Indeed, one of the more damaging aspects of this is the open letter signed by a number of liberal/left-wing academics which stated that what Arday was accused of was more or less standard in academia and not worthy of censure, which argument really sells the pass vis-a-vis right wing arguments that humanities are all a fraud.

26

He’s certainly not the first, but I haven’t heard that plagiarism is committed more commonly by members of any particular race.

*noting that the wife of one of Claudine Gay’s harshest critics, Bill Ackman, was found to have committed plagiarism in her doctoral dissertation.

27

Well, I think there’s a difference between just dismissing the accusations as pure racist pathologizing of trivial errors—-which I concur is a take that probably should be retracted—-and considering the extent of misconduct relatively minor. But yeah, anybody who simply shrugged off the allegations as mere racially-motivated besmirching should be rethinking that stance.

And while I’m nitpicking, sociology is technically a subject within social sciences, not humanities.

28

Yeah, fair point, I was trying to find a way to say the right wing dismissal of anything other than hard science or MBAs as some sort of woke fraud perpetrated on the taxpayer.

This is the kind of stepping back from initial full-throated defence that I’m thinking of, as well as various academics taking their names off the open letter of support.

29

In terms of why this story made the news,it is notable that this very similar tale of plagiarism didn’t generate anything like the same number of headlines

30

Do you really need anyone to read your PhD thesis and tell you, “Not bad, but I do not like the bit where you plagiarized half of it and massaged it with a cheap A.I. model, consider re-working that? Also, the part where you have falsified all the data?” You are absolutely personally responsible for anything you end up writing, not that your supervisor will ultimately escape any blowback.

I also recommend making sure your published work does not contain any errors, at any stage of your career.

31

It’s reported there are five different universities* at which he claimed to have held positions of which those universities have no record.

Why should there ever have been any cause for a “witch-hunt”? Is it not normal that a university (Cambridge) offering a distinguished professorship checks a candidate’s employment history? Is it routine for them to say “No point in making a few phone calls - let’s just accept all his remarkable claims as true.” ?

Arday is just another in a long line of grifters. The real issue here is why Cambridge enabled his grift.

*Birkbeck, Ohio State, Durham, Nelson Mandela, Glasgow

32

FWIW when I was at university - which is going back more decades than I care to mention - there was a big scandal when one of our senior academics was revealed to have jazzed up his CV with fake roles, and when this came out there was a small domino effect where a few others were caught. So it should be normal, and might well be, but it’s not unknown for people to skip that step.

I mean, if you get all the way to the bottom of my CV you’ll find reference to my degree, but no employer has ever asked to see the certificate that proves I have it. A lot of this is taken on trust because checking one person involves a negligible amount of work, checking everybody rapidly becomes a resource drain.

33

Yes, but a PhD is a qualification from accredited examiners which should in theory and practice involve a degree of rigour on behalf of the the awarding body - otherwise what exactly is being awarded here?

34

As I understand it, those claims were mostly along the lines of ”and I’m still a Visiting Fellow or honorary lecturer or whatever at University X where I had a previous appointment”.

Those kinds of “positions” are generally uncompensated, and more about building academic networks than about formal employment. It’s still wrong to exaggerate or lie about them, and a pattern of lying about them should be a red flag, but it’s not quite like literally making up a salaried primary appointment that you never actually held. (Not that I could swear Arday didn’t do any of that as well, but I’m pretty sure at least some of those “unrecorded positions” he claimed are that secondary/honorary sort of thing.)

And it’s even possible to make honest mistakes about them. I personally could not tell you off the top of my head exactly which academic depts/programs at my institution I’m an “affiliated faculty” member of, though I know which one actually assigns me the work I’m primarily employed to do. Nor could I say with absolute certainty which institutions where I’ve had temporary fellowships still consider me some kind of “inactive member” of their institution and which would be like “Kimstu who? I don’t know her.”

The difference, of course, is that if I’m sending in my CV somewhere for a grant application or similar, I make damn sure to check all those nebulous recollections of affiliation and get the facts straight on who actually recognizes me as having some kind of a “position” with them and who does not.

35

My career in academia was mercifully short but in industry background checks are routine and handled by a third party. I wouldn’t expect anyone to review his thesis for plagiarism but I would expect them to hire one of those firms (or have one on retainer) to check previous employment history even if it was one of those arcane fellowships mentioned above as well as things like a criminal background check.

Is that not how they do things in the ivory tower? What if they were hiring an accountant in the administrative office?

36

I was thinking something along the same lines. Giving a pass to puffed up self-reported credentials is not an uncommon phenomenon in any field of endeavor, and it’s more notable when the puffery crosses over into too-good-to-be-true excess and the reward is especially prestigious.

But this also goes to the point of how the term itself “DEI” was allowed to be debased. As a basic concept, “DEI” would mean that when looking for candidates of equivalent potential you will seek to make a deliberate outreach to find them in underrepresented groups, to consciously avoid biases in selection, and to take into account socially inbuilt disadvantages that may induce deficiencies that are no fault of the candidate and can be corrected in class. Instead it has been allowed to be labeled in common public opinion as

and as they pointed out, this is in turn grabbed onto from the same racist angle as “Affirmative Action” once was. That anyone Black (or, female, or disabled, or etc.) in a prestigious position can’t possibly really have merited it. Yet as pointed out by others, just because the worst people you know are making an accusation for the worst reason you can think of, doesn’t mean you should just wave it off.

(One wonders how aware is the public that many institutions and organizations (public and private, for- and non-profit) are working on a tacit or explicit “honor system” based upon “IF, AFTER we hire/admit/award you we find out you lied, THEN we’ll kick you out and may take you to court.” Because it’s troublesome and expensive to conduct a full background check on everyone, every time.)

37

He apparently had some affiliation (though not what he’d claimed) with two of the five universities; none with the other three.

38

That’s definitely a good piece. The rightwing critique of DEI is so misguided, inaccurate, and racist that it’s tempting to respond with a full-throated and uncritical defense of all DEI programs. But programs are implemented by people, and people are fallible, and “fallible” is real charitable. It’s perfectly possible for a DEI decision to be made in a stupid way, and also for the rightwing critique to be real fuckin stupid and irrelevant.

39

It is well documented that Martin Luther King, Jr. plagiarized parts of his PhD dissertation and som other papers.

40

Why thank you, I was planning on shoving everything absolutely chock full of errors, before this helpful suggestion!

People make errors. Sometimes because they stuck a bit in they meant to go back and fix, sometimes because they don’t understand it as well as they thought, sometimes because they’ve been staring at the same sentence for three days and it doesn’t make any sense any more.

There’s errors which are understandable, and there’s fraud. Everyone lets the odd error in sometimes, but fraud is intentional.

His thesis was published in 2015; if he wrote that using AI models I’m honestly impressed.