Or the resumes of black academics receive far more scrutiny before hiring. Which is, I think, what the originator of this investigation is trying to impose.
Perhaps i misremembered. I thought I’d heard complaints about his speeches.
I’m surprised by that, too. When i was hired in my second actuarial job, HR made me fill in a salary for every prior job I’d had. I didn’t remember, and told them so. They insisted. This was on my first day of work. I finally made something up to satisfy them. I learned later that they had looked up my actual wages as a college teaching assistant and told my boss I’d lied on my resume. My boss, knowing that that number was totally meaningless, if not how it got there, told them he didn’t care, and i only learned about it years later. But … Someone checked even the meaningless parts of my resume.
Statement from London Mayor Sadiq Khan on multiple social media platforms:
Dammit. 
And, even after his death, he is still Token McToken with this “youngest-ever Black professor” bullshit. At least the article mentions what he was professor of, if not, you know, anything at all about his actual work (or lack thereof).
To paraphrase the (former) head of the postgrad school where I’m based; the purpose of a PhD thesis is to demonstrate you can do research and interpret it to an appropriate level. It won’t be perfect. In fact, it will probably be the worst piece of work you’ll do in your career.
I’m surprised anyone’s surprised about the thesis review process not being perfect; you have a small panel of very busy people doing an in-depth review, unpaid, in their free time, of a 200 to 400+ page document, though they may be subject experts of only part of it. If it makes you feel better, it’s commonest for the dodgy bits to be in the introduction- background information- because that’s the most likely part to be skim read, and the part students are least concerned about, rather than the novel research bit which is most important.
There’s actually a move in the UK towards shorter more ‘paper style’ theses, which I believe is largely to reduce the time demands of reviewing. ‘Paper style’ is now compulsory at my university, and encouraged or compulsory at others.
Anyway, I’ve seen no evidence that this guy was doing anything malicious or any more harmful than the guy down the pub who joined the secret service and used to date Taylor Swift. I also doubt it would have been anywhere near as big news if he was white, rather than ‘Youngest Black…’
My guess is that this was a deeply insecure person who bullshitted because they thought they weren’t good enough otherwise. Maybe he would have got the roles he had anyway without the exaggerations and tall tales, maybe not, maybe just not as fast; I don’t know, neither does anyone else here. I’m saddened, but not at all surprised that he couldn’t face being an object of international ridicule, losing his high-profile job and having to try and restart a career as ‘disgraced lying former professor…’ I’d say I hope the witch-hunters are happy now, but clearly some of them are.
It’s not in their free time. It’s part of their fucking job. I agree that the panel doesn’t have time to verify every bit of it but their thesis advisor should be very familiar with the topic and be able to do at least some checking. It wouldn’t be that difficult to get something past even the advisor but they should do way more than skim read their student’s thesis and should have been involved with reviewing and editing the work through the years.
As an academic, I can be glad this this guy was caught. But as a human being, nothing he did merited a death sentence. And the people i’ve seen joking about it, both in this thread and elsewhere, disgust me.
He plagiarized. He made up stuff about himself. He lost his job. Fine, that’s an appropriate punishment. Hounding him to suicide was not.
He had two children. People laughing about this should be ashamed of themselves.
A lot of this is on Cambridge for not doing any due diligence when hiring him.
It is not.
Academics typically have their time allocated for specific projects. If they take on reviewing a thesis and doing a viva (or reviewing papers for publication) this is an optional extra, done voluntarily. It’s an expectation, but it’s often not part of their job or project description and unless it is, they do not get paid to do it. It needs to be done outside of their allocated hours, which, as it’s often not actually possible to do all the stuff which is in the job description in the time allocated, means doing it evenings and weekends.
This is actually a pretty major issue in research at the moment, as the demands for reviewing have shot up lately, as the time allocations have got stricter and stricter.
In the UK, PhDs are normally strictly time limited- often to 3 years, sometimes 4. There’s very little of the extra requirements than you have in the US system, you have a set time to do all the research, then you write it up, and it’s normal to do almost all of it at the end. A scramble to get it written before the deadline is the norm, so there may not be any work to ‘edit through the years’, maybe just a couple of posters for interval events and a lit review or a chapter plan.
I know some who submitted without even giving the last chapter or final discussion to their supervisors to read, due to getting a blinded trial un-blinded less than a month before the submission due date.
The rules here are very clear, it is not the supervisor’s responsibility to ensure the version submitted is correct, it’s the student’s decision. If they choose not to sent it to their supervisor at all before submitting, that’s their decision. If they choose to submit it even if their supervisor says they don’t think it’s ready, that is also their decision. The supervisor can flag up to the issuing university that they don’t think it’s ready, so if the student fails the viva it doesn’t blow back on them, but that’s all they can do.
Oh, and supervisors often don’t get paid for supervising students either. My studentship is unusual in that it does; I believe my primary one gets one allocated hour per week. I got a supervision meeting record approved by one of my supervisors after 11pm on New Years Eve.
You’ve decided it didn’t. He may have decided it did.
Wow.
Yeah, I can say that it’s good that he lost tenure. I can’t say that it’s good that he committed suicide.
If their allocation doesn’t include mentoring graduate students, reviewing other researchers’ work, and serving on thesis committees, then they have allocated their time wrong. All of those are part of the job, and need to be treated as such.
Thinking more about it, my experience is in the US and it’s not valid to how it’s done in the UK.
My experience is also in the US. My husband has a PhD, as do many of my close friends. I watched the process a lot. I also have friends who now supervise PhD students.
Let’s just said the process in the US is different. Also, professors in the US spend a huge amount of “evening and weekend” time on their job. That’s often when they do a lot of their grant work, which is sometimes the single most important thing they do. And they aren’t explicitly paid for any particular hours, they are salaried and have stuff they need to do. They are given a certain number of instructional hours, which is sometimes negotiable. They may be working “60% of their time” on a particular research project, which i guess is a number of hours, but that’s not how any of my friends talk about it.
All my friends needed the approval of their PhD advisor before they were allowed to submit their thesis. Once, as the friends waited an unusually long time after the thesis defense, before the committee came out to publicly congratulate the new PhD, the gossip was, “what could they possibly be talking about? It’s the responsibility of the advisor to make sure it’s acceptable before he was allowed to present.” (Eventually, the youngest member of the committee came out to tell us the senior member was lecturing the soon-to-be-official-phd in how to write German letters.)
Anyway, what you say is sad, and sounds like a bad method for granting PhDs.
Yes. 43 marathons in 51 days.
You can do part time as well. There was a postgrad who worked part time as a labtech at my uni. She was in year 8 of her PhD. Funding had stopped, hence the working as a labtech to make ends meet.
The people I work with, mostly pure research, few if any teaching hours, don’t get a say in it- they work on costed projects, and everything they can claim hours for needs to be signed off by the funder as furthering the project. It used to be that the system was much more flexible, so they could allocate hours for stuff like mentoring and reviewing and all the other bits of academia, but it’s been squeezed and squeezed and at this point it’s basically only long enough to do the absolute basics of admin.
UK universities are having mass redundancies right now, the pressure was always pretty high in academia, but it’s gone insane. Both research and educational funding has been chipped away for years, and now it’s only functioning if people basically work for free.
It’s very rare to submit against supervisor’s advice- the only times I’ve come across it is when a student’s funding is tied to a specific supervisor but there’s been a complete breakdown of the relationship. A friend’s wife did, a few months ago. Her supervisor basically started making completely unreasonable demands for her to repeat basically a year’s worth of research to get a bigger sample size, even though her funding had run out and the project had already been published as a paper and accepted in freakin’ Nature. He then refused to arrange the viva as a protest. This was very annoying, but actually ended up quite helpful for her, as it meant people believed her about the difficulties of working with him.
She passed with minor corrections, when it eventually happened, and last I heard he was having trouble finding any staff willing to work with him.
Regarding the short length of time in the UK- well, you’re normally expected to have done a master’s degree before you start, so it’s largely just splitting those into two rather than combining them and you’re often applying for position with a supervisor, you’re applying for a project, with its own funding. Less flexible in some ways, but the student can have more autonomy. It varies a lot; in some supervisor(s) are more there to advise, in some the student is working directly under them, but running their own project.
Thesis defences here can go on all day, but there’s not always even a public component at all universities, which I find a bit sad. Mine does at least include a public talk, before the main defence, which is a long private discussion where they decide if you pass, which can go on hours. We did have a student fail it not long ago. His supervisor hadn’t even flagged up any issues… 
The system itself hasn’t really changed in yonks, it’s just funding that’s gone crazy, so it’s just not working anywhere near as well as it used to. Doing a viva used to be more of an honour, now there’s just no time.
It seems to have been forgotten that a journalist for Times Higher Education doing his job, was the target of a four-month police investigation that Arday initiated. Arday also hired a high-powered law firm to intimidate the publication into dropping their planned story.
In most academic departments in the U.S., if the thesis supervisor themselves refused to sign that they accept the student’s dissertation, it would simply not be accepted by the university. And, yes, I do know someone who graduated from Stanford who got the demands to redo/change an experiment; it was nothing to do with the sample size but it was still frustrating as hell to deal with, and moreover that supervisor was legendary for making unreasonable (really unreasonable) demands of their students.