Never mind.
I suppose it does go without saying, does it not :þ
What I mean is, ideally you will receive feedback in advance, but if one does make an honest mistake, you cannot be sure anyone will catch it for you, and it will be, in the best case, embarrassing when it inevitably surfaces later. So, better triple-check your work.
Intentional fraud will be caught too, which is why I wonder at the thought processes of the multiple people committing academic fraud who, presumably, honestly thought they could get away with it.
You could until relatively recently but in the last 25 years, yeah.
Witch-hunt? He didn’t just fudge a few things, he made up some absolutely astonishing claims. Claims that even journalists would have eventually sought out - they are just too tempting not to investigate.
Yeah, like many compulsive liars, his undoing was that he took it too far. If he said he’d run 150 miles in 6 days instead of 600, that would have been believable. Too many of his fibs were of a verifiable/debunkable nature. If he had claimed he raised 200,000 pounds for charity instead of 5.5 million…
If this is the open letter in question, it looks like few academics signed onto it.
To the extent that Cambridge and academics elsewhere deny or minimize plagiarism, it sends a terrible message to students, some of whom aspire to positions at universities.
When good people drop the ball on such matters, it opens the door for “pretty awful” people to take advantage.
This tidbit supples an ironic punchline for the affair.
Why, kick a man when he’s down, Times… 
Writing a resignation letter with AI actually makes a lot of sense to me, particularly when resigning under a cloud. My resignation from the Navy is the hardest thing I’ve ever written. I honestly feel like I now have some insight into why people tend not to leave a suicide note, having written that resignation letter.
At least he didn’t plagiarize someone else’s resignation letter.
That we know of.
Doesn’t AI plagiarise everyone’s resignation letter in order to compose its own? It can’t collocate words that someone hasn’t collocated elsewhere first.
You know what they say: to steal from one is plagiarism, to steal from many is research.
You know, saying a minority is a “DEI hire” without any evidence is a MAGA trick.
Plagiarize
Let no one else’s work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don’t shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please “Research”
- Tom Lehrer “Lobachevsky”
I think that’s what the signature list looks like after the various retractions.
Cambridge - and British academia generally - have put themselves in a corner through the following strategy.
Spend a couple of hundred years erecting and maintaining barriers to non-white academics getting senior/prestigious jobs.
Spend a further two or three decades if not actively reinforcing those barricades (well, maybe a bit, quietly), at least passively leaving them standing and not being too fussed if anyone makes it past or not, while pointing to those who do at great effort as being evidence all is well.
Suddenly realise that the faculty photos still look pretty damn monochrome and this now reflects badly.
Also realise that fixing this properly means a good decade or so of culture change, systemic reorganisation and the patient development of early career academics over time.
Come up with the bright idea that you can try and shortcircuit that by finding a media-friendly academic of colour and making them into a mascot, paying more attention to their media-friendliness than to the depth and rigour of their scholarship, so as to have someone to point to if there any awkward questions.
This last point is terrifyingly close to the right wing critique, because the decisions are made by people who don’t actually believe in the principles of DEI (EDI in the UK, but same thing), but are dealing with the pressures it creates in the most superficial way possible.
People will take low cost, superficial and ultimately counter-productive approaches to ticking DEI boxes unless carefully watched and held to account is of course a left wing critique of DEI.
Yeah, but they’re literally down to complaining about his use of apostrophes in his PhD thesis, in which the evidence of him making up the research appears to be one quote that was attributed to two people, which could easily just be a mistake. The plagiarism was originally claimed as a ‘big chunk’ copied from elsewhere, but appears to be a couple of paragraphs.
I’ve come across a few students who copy quotes into their writing then go back and paraphrase them. There was a bit of drama at my previous uni when one got dinged in a masters project for doing exactly that- she copied a table from another student, with the intent to reuse the really nice formatting but forgot and submitted it with his data still there (which was very obvious, as the topic was different). She just had to rewrite with a grade penalty for that assignment and got a bit of a talking to about being more careful.
Like.. I’m not saying it’s fine to lift paragraphs straight from another work, of course you should definitely not do that, but if it is half a page in a 200+ page thesis which he plonked in with the intent to go back and paraphrase and forgot, that would not normally lead to a call to invalidate a doctorate, never mind get international attention.
This guy seems to be a fantasist, but the evidence of fraud in his research seems a lot more flimsy, and pretty much explainable by the sort of sloppy errors and shortcuts that are, I think, a lot more widespread than people would like to admit. I suspect a thorough investigation into every single Cambridge professor would turn up a lot of similar stuff, but as they’re not claiming to have run multiple marathons on a broken leg no-one’s checking.
I guess I’m a little sympathetic as I had a school friend who constantly made up bizarre, readily disprovable claims about her life. It was due to deep insecurity and a feeling that everyone else was more interesting than her; once she actually did something she thought was exciting and worthwhile, she stopped making shit up (though she never admitted she was lying earlier). It never bled over into her classwork that I remember; she wasn’t a cheat, just a fantasist.
It’s not a good month for Cambridge:
A University of Cambridge whistleblower who alleged bullying of female staff inside the university’s Institute of Astronomy has won a tribunal against his employer.
Prof Wyn Evans told a tribunal hearing in June that the institute suffered from “a bad history of misogyny”. He claimed that one woman in the department had been “hounded out of a job”, another was “left a frightened woman”, and a third had faced “aggressive professors” at the institute.
The tribunal found that after raising concerns, Evans was “subjected to a prolonged nearly two-year investigation by the university”, even though the allegations against him “contained scant particularisation, and no evidence to support them”.
On a side note, why is Arday so shiny in all of his photos? Is he smearing on some sort of face gel?
Not necessarily, and yes, it can.
Sure, they’re complaining about his use of apostrophes now, but it was his other claims that brought the heat. If you are going to lie, don’t get caught.
I was once pulled over for speeding. I explained to the cop that other people were speeding too. I still got the ticket.