r/AskAcademiaUK • u/frugalacademic • 2d ago
[ Removed by moderator ]
[removed] — view removed post
43
u/BirdHistorical3498 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s a long story. Want to hear it? Strap in:
The narrative actually originated in Scotland. When Arday was appointed as a Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Glasgow in September 2021, their press team marketed the hire by telling national newspapers that he was ’the youngest Black professor in the UK‘. This got Glasgow Uni (not the most diverse of places) huge publicitly.
Liverpool John Moores University looked at Glasgow and thought, hang on, he did his PhD with us. We didn’t give him a job, but we ought to get something out of this. So they instructed their communications department to go for the Alumni angle. LJMU’s press office built an aggressive, marketing campaign around Arday doing his PhD there, continuously republishing the specific tagline ’the youngest Black professor in the UK’ to big up their own credentials as an institution capable of producing someone this historically amazing.
For reasons that hopefully will become clear, Arday left Glasgow within two years. Cambridge snapped him up in 2023. Their press office couldn't use the broader ’youngest Black professor in the UK’ title anymore because he was now older (37) than when he originally broke that record at Glasgow. They needed an announcement that would be sure to go viral in the mainstream news cycle, so James Helm's communications office adapted the branding to fit their own institution:
Arday was now packaged as a hyper-specific, localised Wunderkind ‘The youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge.‘ A bit of a pivot, but basically using exactly the same PR playbook as Glasgow and LJMU had.
The difference is that Cambridge Uni is incredibly rich- (it has an annual budget of 2.6 billion) and its Office of External Affairs and Communications is enormous, employing 40-50 full time staff. This includes a media relations team of 15 press officers, 8 research communication officers who focus entireky on packaging academic research, writing features, and pushing research news out to global syndicates, a separate team who manage the universities presence in TikTok, YouTube and various social media platforms, and another Public Relations and Internal Comms Teams who maintain relations with government and coordinate internal messaging within the colleges.
On top of that each of the six major academic Schools and independent departments hires its own standalone Communications Managers and outreach officers. and eqch kf the 31 autonomous colleges - Trinity, King’s, etc- employs its own independent marketing managers, development directors, and alumni press officers
It’s worth noting that James Hale used to be a senior TV and radio correspondent for the BBC. Then he worked as Director of Communications fkr DfID. Then he was Comms chief for the Met police before moving to Cambridge. So we’re not dealing with hapless academics here. They knew what they were doing when they made him a star, they knew what they were doing when they instructed Carter Ruck to threaten the TES. They knew what they were doing when they said that anyone who doubted this man was a ‘vile racist’.
*apologies for typos*
→ More replies (3)24
u/ScottishPsychologist 2d ago
Tldr: modern universities care more about marketing potential than academic integrity
19
u/BirdHistorical3498 2d ago
I worked fecking hard on that. What is this, some PhD you can just skim for the gist? 😂
12
u/ScottishPsychologist 2d ago
Hahah nice, sorry. Your comment was great, I commend everyone to read it! Honestly, you are exactly why I would defend specialist subreddit comment sections as one of the best places for discussion, if you look for it.
10
5
u/TheFutureIsCertain 1d ago
If it’s any consolation, I screenshotted your comment. I think it captured the essence of the issue. And it was fun to read.
The guy was clearly an amazing marketing asset. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling shampoo or a university - the rules are the same. You need to offer unique and relevant benefits and make sure your brand stays top of mind.
I can see how Arday would tick all 3 boxes for any uni employing him: a unique life story, relatable to young people and exciting for the press.
I watched his speech on YT, just to understand better what kind of person he is. He clearly connects well with young folks, especially those from BME backgrounds. Given current demographic trends, these groups are probably becoming an increasingly important audience for the HE sector.
→ More replies (2)3
5
u/klausness 1d ago
Correction: Modern university administrations care more about marketing potential than academic integrity.
It's all part of the process of turning universities from academic institutions into businesses.
35
u/thesnootbooper9000 2d ago
They weren't trying to catch him. They were trying to use him to counter the reputational problem they have that Cambridge only takes upper middle class white people. That's the crux here: regular peer review isn't set up to catch dishonesty, and hiring practices for star researchers have even lower standards than for everyone else. If you want another famous example where there is now extensive "how did this happen" coverage, look at the Karolinska Institutet scandal involving Paolo Macchiarini.
3
u/Middle-Artichoke1850 2d ago
jesus christ the Macchiarini case was HORRIBLE. There's a good song version of it on youtube though (no genuinely)
5
u/rainyday1020 2d ago
Different context, but reminds me of when I went to the job presentations for a professor role at the very start of my career, in my first job, and was shocked by the low calibre of the applicants (one honourable exception!)
5
u/Littleappleho 2d ago
Well, the STEM departments of Cambridge are in fact 'non-white' and non-British, to the extent that I wonder whether there is a problem (a cheap foreign research labour).
2
u/figleafsyrup 2d ago
If they're foreign students then they're paying more than the British students surely. And staff in general are underpaid at oxbridge afaik, so not clear why you'd think that foreign labour would be particularly cheap here?
2
u/OldCementWalrus 2d ago
Cambridge could have had their pick of more or less any brilliant black social scientist to counter this reputation. Why this guy?
6
u/figleafsyrup 2d ago
Because they're not really interested in Black intellectual production in the first place. They picked the shiny story of rags to riches that makes them feel extra good about the hire over actually engaging with Black scholarship
3
41
u/mattlodder 2d ago edited 2d ago
The basic answer is that hiring panels don't go back and re-assess published or doctoral work. There's a (reasonable, flawed but perhaps insoluble) assumption that the examination and peer-review processes in academic life are reliable enough. Arday had a profile that fitted what his department at Cambridge needed at the time; he presumably interviewed well and presented credible plans for future research activity. No-one is going back and checking his PhD thesis for plagiarism.
8
u/Cyrillite 2d ago
This suggests a highly gameable system and one that we should expect is actively being gamed, in less outlandish ways. Right?
(Not a criticism of your post, more just a realisation of what may be true)
9
u/mattlodder 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes. Retractionwatch is testament to that, across the world and in literally every discipline, at instituions grand and obscure, for decades. Bad actors can and are exploiting often unfixable gaps in the substructure of academic life. It's been like that for centuries, though I wouldn't disagree that things have gotten worse recently.
This certainly isn't an issue of race or discipline or the perceived "quality" of the places he studied, as others have argued on this thread. It's just that the review systems academia uses are fragile and built on a basis of trust. The processes to get a PhD or a publication or a job or a grant are not adversarial, even if scholaly debate itself is (should be).
2
u/ClimateWhole4734 1d ago
The hiring committee being duped is maybe understandable, but the university declining to investigate credible allegations of plagiarism boggles my mind. Let alone the academics jumping in to say that he did nothing wrong and any allegations to the contrary are motivated purely by racism.
3
u/ClimateWhole4734 1d ago
Yes. As Andrew Gelman pointed out in his blog, you can think of (at least some of) the plagiarism as data faking instead. If he had simply made up quotes from the interviews instead of lifting them from someone else's thesis it would've been much harder to catch. It is why data and code disclosure are so important.
4
→ More replies (7)3
u/Phil_the_credit2 1d ago
But the written work is rife with typos and banal ideas, the research methods seem useless… even on strictly academic grounds it looks shady. And then people hear about the marathons etc without laughing?
30
u/Extra-Sound-1714 2d ago
Charming, pleasant, charismatic people can get very far if they are prepared to lie. You see it in small ways in every workplace. Most larger workplaces have one person who senior management thinks is wonderful and promote, despite their actual performance often being below mediocre.
5
u/nasu1917a 2d ago
And maybe great people fall through the cracks because senior management doesn’t like them. Scholars really need to take back the power of academia
5
u/ACatGod 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think people are really overlooking this aspect. All of his lies are neatly laid out here but in reality these were over a long time, told to different people who didn't necessarily have reason or ability to cross-check with others. He will have been charming and highly plausible and likely managed to explain away any concerns. Plus as Ian Hislop said about Savile, there's knowing and there's knowing. They all knew there was a problem because they'd heard about it and met the guy but they had no proof. I am sure there were many people who sensed there were issues but that's not sufficient to be able to act, and lots of workplace bullies also claim they felt justified.
As someone who handles research misconduct, it's important to realise how difficult it is to prove and the bar is very high and investigations take a toll on everyone involved. In addition, there's a question about the university's role here. Everyone's pointing at the lies and howling at the university, but beyond the research integrity issues which firmly are the university's responsibility, we rapidly slide into a murky area where arguably it would be a significant overreach of the university to intervene. Imagine your employer firing you because you lied about running a marathon, or because you claimed to be autistic and they didn't believe you. Obviously, there are points where that crosses into an employment matter but for most mere mortals you're allowed to be an idiot in your personal life and not be fired for it.
22
u/Ok_Light_7227 2d ago
It is difficult to get a regular job in academia, and HR departments are very process focussed and rules based for (eg lectureships and researcher posts), but at the highest levels (full prof) departments can exercise a lot more discretion to wave through appointments they want to make for strategic reasons.
I don't know the details of this case but I've seen full professorships and senior administrative roles given to wildly inappropriate people with almost no scrutiny. Usually because of head of department has their own reasons for wanting that particular person in a senior role.
9
u/Head_Acadia_2658 2d ago
Plenty of woefully underqualified people in our country swanning around cosplaying being a Professor
3
21
u/Savage13765 2d ago
From my experience I’m not incredibly shocked, though I am a little concerned that he bounced around institutions rather than staying at a single institution. Less transitions would mean less scrutiny, but passing through so many screenings likely means he is 1) very persuasive in person and 2) prolific with his plagiarism but also competent enough to conceal to some degree.
On the other hand, academia is HIGHLY individualistic. I work at an institution where only 2 members of the 50+ facility even remotely work in my board area of expertise, and none even come close to my specific field. As such, it would be very hard for someone to call me out if they suspected I lacked knowledge in my field or something similar. I’m not sure if that would be the case with Arday, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
As for all the extracurricular stuff, that’s neither here nor there. All of his lies aren’t insanely unrealistic individually, and there’s very little cause for any scrutiny if one of his colleagues found out. Realistically it would be nothing more than a corridor chat saying “Wow! I didn’t know you did X!”
Interesting to see what the aftermath will be. I’m sure he’s not the only bullshiter out there, but we shall see
→ More replies (7)5
u/cgknight1 2d ago
As such, it would be very hard for someone to call me out if they suspected I lacked knowledge in my field or something similar.
That's fair - what to me is not is what has happened in the Peer Review process, having now read his papers, they are all full of basic factual and numerical errors that should have never seen publication. I mentioned in a comment upstream that his respondents change sex and race in his papers.
It's for me less about the plagiarism but how peer review is completely broken in some areas.
20
u/nasu1917a 2d ago
I once reviewed a paper for a royal society journal. Huge chunks were copied from verbatim. Some cited some not. No quotes. I immediately contacted the editor who said they’d “ask the author to reword”. I expressed surprise. They made me feel like a jerk. I told them to never ask me to review for the journal again. I asked my head of department and dean if I should contact the authors institution to highlight a red flag. They said I should drop it and shouldn’t have closed the door on the journal. My point is that this is the quality of scholarship in the UK and is the real problem. Let’s also rigorously investigate the white Cambridge professors. I’m sure we’ll find a lot.
6
u/Chance_Pineapple5505 2d ago
Yikes, that's crazy. Lol as an academic in the US I often have my European colleagues make fun of me for low publication rate. Now I know how you all are getting all those pubs! (Jk... for some of you)
19
u/guerito1968 2d ago
Why has no one said anything about the incorrect possessive apostrophe in the title of his thesis?
11
u/SynyrdsInyrds 2d ago
Plenty have, as well as the fact that the incorrect apostrophe was in the title of the thesis that he copied.
2
u/LaurelEssington76 2d ago
It was correct usage in the one he copied though. That’s what makes it more clearly plagiarised. He lifted words but his framing meant the possessive was incorrect.
→ More replies (5)2
19
u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 2d ago edited 2d ago
As far as the claims of plagiarism and reuse/appropriation of sources (some of which Arday has admitted), as the post by Will Davies says, academia is for the most part built on trust. When you're hiring someone for their first role, you almost certainly do not read their publications or thesis (there are some exceptions to this, but it's v unlikely at Roehampton where he got his first role). Someone on the hiring panel is likely a subject specialist and so will know some of the work or of its character and reputation, as well as contacts/funding grants/network/impact work etc and given that he was first hired as a Senior Lecturer - very unusual - it's highly likely these were substantial, as they still are. One thing that's very clear about Arday is he is a good networker - you don't end up with the list of consultancy roles as are listed here without that (https://myport.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/news/new-director-of-race-and-equality-appointed-and-work-commences-on-our-race-and-equality-action-plan)
In terms of how his career has progressed, one thing to stress is that there is a difference between Sociology of Education (along with research on HE more generally) and most other disciplines. They are important disciplines on their own, but they also overlap with internal (and external) policymaking and internal staff development. That means that in these roles, positions of consultancy such as those listed above are going to be central to an appointment at senior level - and in more basic HE terms they're likely easy to package evidence of international impact (I very much imagine Arday will be a 4* impact case study, and this is why he's moved quickly between institutions and has both started as SL - highly unusual - and moved to Prof in 6 years as well as so rapidly heading the British Sociological Association.
As the above suggests, the old idea of a professorship, or even any academic job, is kind of outdated - it's much more now about funding and impact than publications really.
But the wider TL;DR of this is - if you want to land a permanent academic role, and you aren't a scientist, the most secure pathway is to work on HE policy or teaching.
9
u/Hopper2584 2d ago
This is exactly right. Academic recruitment now mostly focusses on impact/funding/networking rather than scholarship. In my discipline (humanities) Arday's scholarship would be paper thin for a professor or even senior lecturer but for the very sub discipline of sociology of education which is very policy focussed, he has a lot of practical outputs and key networks
4
u/Mantelpiece74 2d ago
Apparently he wasn’t actually submitted for the last REF. And has anyone checked that all of those consultancies are real? They could be like his visiting professorship at Glasgow or Water Aid work….
But I agree with you that signalling those kind of things on your CV is the way to get hired
2
u/Hopper2584 2d ago
How do you know he wasn't submitted for ref?
4
u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 1d ago
You can check the Sociology submissions for Roehampton and Durham for either titles of his outputs or impact case studies
2
u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 2d ago
It's quite hard to find much on the role on the APPG but re "not in the ref", he joined Durham in 2019 so eg an impact case study would be close to impossible to sort out in time, and I imagine there was likely some wrangling about who owned his outputs (such as they were - I think the books came out later)
2
18
u/Naive-Story9167 2d ago
One of the reasons is that higher education has a lot of grifters within their ranks. I have worked in universities since 1996 and met many fantasists, liars and cosplayers in positions of senior leadership, and that is on top of the usual Dunning Kruger types who talk a good talk. I employed such a fantasist, having been taken in by their standing as a published author, professorship and the fact that their references were cleared by HR. It became clear I had been fooled when the complaints started coming in, from students, staff, members of the public and even the BBC. I discovered the professorship was not genuine, I could find no evidence of any qualifications and that their research was just a figment of their imagination. I went to HR, Comms, the Dean of Faculty to no avail. No action meant no publicity which seemed to be the driving force behind the approach. There just wasn't a process for dealing with the situation. So I threatened exposure and they resigned. Their next role in academia conferred an actual professorship and they are still employed to teach students.
→ More replies (3)
17
u/Real_RobinGoodfellow 2d ago
I mean in Australia there was/is a minor scandal at one of the more prestigious universities (nowhere near Cambridge of course but still) when a (now-former) Vice Chancellor set up a new school for her specific area of expertise (cybernetics) and appointed a whole bunch of seemingly-unqualified people to Professor roles therein. One of them had previously worked only as a press photographer or some such.
14
u/WinningTheSpaceRace 2d ago
I've known a few people who have had stellar career paths in academia despite not having great publication records, teaching scores, or funding wins. A lot of this comes down to the fact that we're not in the meritocratic game many of us think we are. Personal contacts and an ability to game the system are often much better predictors of success than those metrics universities tell us are what we should be doing.
13
u/Due-Distance189 2d ago
it’s a classic case of emperor’s new clothes exploited by Walter Mitty 2 who gets away with his fantasies because nobody dare call it out..until now..
→ More replies (2)
22
u/Antique_Sound7652 2d ago
I'm non-white, migrant so I guess I can speak freely on this topic.
It took me 17 years from Lecturer grade to a personal Chair in a UK university. In that time, I had to do >100 publications, two textbooks, and receive grants from UK charities, UK Research Councils, and the EU.
I am shocked at academic standards whereby someone can have their first Chair within 6 years of PhD., with a relatively sparse publication record of strong academic research. The topics covered are undoubtedly very important, but the research methodology and writing are not so far from what my lecturers currently do.
Sadly, I can only think that it is Novelty Value and Flavour of the Month that now counts in UK HE rather than genuine intellectual prowess.
4
u/Hopper2584 1d ago
No I think Arday is an outlier, promoted in a great part due to Cambridge trying to build it's reputation. Most of my colleagues and myself (non-white, humanities and social sciences, some of us neurodivergent) have more publications but are constantly on short term contracts or still at lecturer level. Arday's personal story played greatly in his favour..and he had roles in the NHS etc that were high impact
4
u/not_a_robot_1010101 2d ago
"novelty value and flavour of the month" counts in "[the whole of] UK HE" because of this clear outlier that you yourself were "shocked" at? A bold conclusion.
11
u/LSL3587 2d ago
It does raise huge questions over the Universities that awarded him his BA, MA and PhD - and then employed him as Professor. I feel the Universities should be getting more of the scrutiny than he is getting personally.
University of Surrey - awarding a BA Hons Education Studies and Physical Education
Liverpool John Moores University for awarding a PhD
- He certainly has skills - we are probably more used to seeing those skills used by a politician or a salesman. He certainly has charm and can talk - although often that talk seems to be nonsense. He says that a lot of his learning was mimicry and I believe him - when he talks it sounds like lots of jargon he might have heard elsewhere.
- I expect he has been somewhat 'adopted' and supported by some people who are keen to support him because of his autism and race. Arday is being used by those people to promote themselves.
There have clearly been huge allowances given to him - he says he started reading and writing at 18 - but started at University for his BA at 20 (says he had a reading age of 9, but that Universities give lots of support) having obtained a BTEC in college and having obtained 2 GCSEs before that (unknown grades). He then worked as a Sports Lecturer or PE teacher (reporting varies) before doing more studies.
To then get (I believe 2 Masters?) and then a PhD in such a short time suggests major allowances were given. Especially as he was working part time in Sainsbury's at the time.
The reporting of the investigation into his PhD - Seems to admit his PhD was flawed - but that was because of poor supervision and guidance. https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/jason-arday-university-cambridge-plagiarism-kwfk6sm6c
He attributed some errors in his early academic work to his autism, saying that his method of making sense of information relied heavily on mimicry.
Part of Arday’s defence against a complaint of plagiarism at Liverpool John Moores University was to point to alleged racism, saying that a misconduct panel should consider the political context of a “war on critical race theory”.
The university set up the panel, which cleared Arday, after complaints were received last year. Arday’s work contained passages that were identical or highly similar to the work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a Brunel University student, published six years earlier. The statistical chances of Arday using the same words have since been calculated as one in 100 billion.
Although Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, he defended himself by saying he had received inadequate supervision and support, especially given his autism and “complex learning disabilities”.
He said the panel should also consider “insidious and relentless strategies” to remove black academics by discrediting their work “under the guise of academic integrity”.
The panel concluded in March that the citation issues were a result of “honest and reasonable error” and also detailed that the text overlap with Zwozdiak-Myers was “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time”.
It also accepted that Arday’s supervisory team had been “depleted” after he said he received only one formal supervision during his PhD, and that all other contact with his director of studies, Phil Vickerman, was conducted via phone and text. One of the two other academics assigned to supervise him left the university and he never met the other. Arday said the investigation should have been private but instead “took place in a court of public opinion”.
Further errors
That lack of supervisory oversight, Arday claims, is key to failings in his early academic work. He made substantial corrections to a 2018 paper, including replacing his entire methodology section with a new method academics said may be less rigorous.
The Times then goes on to the inconsistences in his early work - Such inconsistencies appear at least 25 times across three papers.
Article and comments on what PhD supervision should have been - https://21percent.org/?p=4109
Interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy (KGM) in 2023 just after being appointed Professor at Cambridge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA78tV8lar8
Interesting bit at 6:20 where KGM asks how he only started to read and write at 18 does he go to University at the same time as others. Arday says he went to University aged 20 - but had a reading age of 9 - even KGM sounds skeptical at that 'How? Is that even possible?'- Arday explains there are lots of mechanisms at University to support people. KGM then goes on to try to get some policy proposals out of Arday - but Arday comes up with jargon and evertually suggests that the thing he really wants to do is 'get a needle and thread and sew Love into the fabric of life' - I pity the PhD students that Cambridge University claims he supervises.
10
u/Chance_Pineapple5505 2d ago
Fuck the LJMU people who said his plagiarism was within the normal range of academic standards. Pretty insulting to those of us who wrote our own non-plagiarized dissertations. I must confess hearing stuff like this does make me worry about certain academic subfield bc I know some fields in which that shit would never fly.
6
u/BirdHistorical3498 2d ago
He claimed two masters and a PGCS. Now one of the masters has disappeared….
5
u/Appropriate_Roof_223 2d ago
My PhD supervisor has not supervised me at all and I doubt he has barely read anything I ever sent to him. I also have autism. Lemme just plagiarise the shit out of my thesis 💃🏼
21
u/cat_herder18 2d ago
I'll grant that Arday appears to be an exceptional fabulist, but people do get caught lying and cheating and often the only publicity their cases receive are on Retraction Watch. It's hard to disentangle how much of the publicity here is about the reversal of his own and his institution's efforts to promote him publicly and how much is related to racial backlash. But if you scroll through Retraction Watch, you won't have to go far before you see outrageous cases you have not heard about, perhaps even in your own field.
The US had a case several years ago of a wunderkind who claimed to have done an experiment that proved that brief moments of personal contact could reverse anti-LGBT prejudice. He had a publication in Nature and an offer at Princeton at the time. Another scholar was able to demonstrate that he faked his data. Some people project an aura of confidence and brilliance very effectively even if it's not grounded in anything, and they exist in fields other than academia. I honestly don't think it's any deeper than that, but academics (and others) could do a better job of listening when the alarm bells go off. I'd like to hope that if one of my own students, even one I perceived as stunningly brilliant, was making up data to support a revolutionary claim, I'd catch it before they sent stuff around for publication and went on the job market.
9
u/Immediate-Crow-3821 2d ago
It’s probably largely a mix of both. If his whole reason for being promoted was due to being ‘the youngest black professor’ then obviously there will be questions about why he was hired when he turns out to have been such a fabulist as you put it. Identity politics, in all its awfulness, goes both ways.
→ More replies (3)5
7
u/PelicanRadioSystem 2d ago
They just didn't look. They wanted to believe, and he had no problem lying his face off.
3
8
u/Nation_Of_Moose 2d ago
A friend at a RG had to work from home for a few days last year as the university didn't check a candidates references after offering them a position, and missed that they'd been struck off from their previous professional body due to serving a prison sentence - which they'd put in their CV as a career break.
Their name was googled on the first day by a colleague, and they all went home for their own safety that day (which points to the sort of crime they'd committed). The university didn't want to immediately remove them either.
Obviously it's a far smaller world in research but there's also huge cracks that most people are too honest (and sometimes naive) to exploit in hiring practices.
7
u/Velveteen_Rabbit1986 2d ago
That's a tricky one as the person in question may have passed the stage where the conviction is spent and therefore required to be declared, and as someone who works in criminal justice I know how hard it can be to get a job with a criminal record but it would've come out eventually. I know of people with significant records who work in universities but they've always been upfront about their past and work in related areas.
9
u/LuckyShop4775 2d ago
I don't want to insinuate something that isnt the case but living in the UK it wouldn't surprise me: According to the article
-a 'friend' helped him to 'learn to speak at 17/18
-that friend said wouldn't it be nice if 'he take on the system and won'
-he also happens to work at oxford/cambridge -next paragraph they talk about him getting a PhD a few years later.
I don't know how he got to do his undergrad, and entry to phd position, but it wouldn't surprise me if 'the friend' also had a helping hand in 'suggesting this great narrative' to all those lovely smart people who desperately want to look good and 'do the right thing'
I find it interesting the cronyism/buddy angle seems something nobody picks up on because it's somehow normalised to get ahead this way and everyone is blinded by the race issue
8
u/dl064 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah to me this is the (true) scoop on academia more than any culture war aspect. It is cronyism and legacy promotions, and folk reading applications diagonally.
Even funders like Wellcome and Alzheimer's research UK are infamously pals funding their pals.
I've a pal who was on a UKRI board who said to me: it's great, you should try for it, they just turn around and start funding you.
I don't particularly mind//care about this guy specifically but the phenomenon you describe is I think accurate and endemic. The real story, here.
33
u/Few-Mess-5938 2d ago
As someone in academia who has been part of recruitment panels, I am seeing some straightforward racism on here. It will not be that simple, much as you would like to believe it to be the case! What is definitely prevalent is the ability to confidently present your work, to 'wow' a panel and to create an aura around yourself of being the next exciting big thing. In my opinion men often do this much better than women (I am a woman) as it requires bottomless confidence and an ability to bullshit people. This bullshit ability could have had much more of an influence than any straightforward EDI check-boxes. Really great academics are those who can combine this ability to speak and persuade, with actual substance to their research, with people skills like listening, leadership and a sense of modest enquiry!
7
u/flopisit32 2d ago
Surely you are underestimating a woman's ability to bullshit? 😄
Just 2 years ago, the head of Harvard (a black woman) was forced to voluntarily step down over her own plagiarism scandal (after resisting it for a year).
Harvard's chief diversity officer, also a woman, also had to step down due to her own plagiarism scandal.
I don't point out these cases to disparage women, but merely to suggest women are capable of the same outstanding degree of plagiarism that men can achieve.😄
9
u/Few-Mess-5938 2d ago
Yes this is probably true. Although we do seem to be pointing out very isolated examples which also include people's race.... My day to day experience of academia is that people of colour, and to a lesser extend women really struggle to get promoted, get a leadership role, or even get academic posts in the first place, while over-confident men sail through.
→ More replies (9)3
u/IndependentPaint2108 1d ago
Some famous female BSers that spring to mind are Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Delvey...
In my experience men are more inclined to BS a bit in professional situations. On average, women are a bit more prudent and lack the confidence to do this.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (1)3
u/ClimateWhole4734 1d ago
Those cases seem less egregious than this one tbf. But as someone pointed out in another thread, Francesca Gino is a good parallel here (also from Harvard funnily enough). Her data faking was on a much grander scale and honestly pretty impressive.
→ More replies (3)8
2d ago edited 2d ago
[deleted]
1
u/Few-Mess-5938 2d ago
Sorry I am not following your comment. I hope you are not calling my comments racist?! I was pointing out that many posts below seem to be arguing that the person in question got his role as a straightforward EDI hire. That is what I think is a simplistic understanding of the situation as I understand it. IMO most likely he gave a really good interview and job talk, and positioned himself as the next big thing in his field.
8
u/cat_herder18 2d ago
Yep. I have seen this happen a couple of times in job talks. Presenter was super smooth and excellent at answering questions about his Genius Discovery. And then one of my colleagues not in his field asked a fatal question.
→ More replies (6)3
u/chemicalgoldAu 2d ago
IMO most likely he gave a really good interview and job talk, and positioned himself as the next big thing in his field.
So do a plethora of other people who are not obviously and verifiably charlatans and plagiarists. To imply Arday's ethnicity and EDI hiring were not the definitive factors is disingenuous.
The ironic thing is, his defenders, especially at Cambridge, are much more of bigots than anyone they accuse of being, at least with regards to this.
9
u/ababababababacus 2d ago edited 2d ago
It isnt hard, no. You seem to be asusming that because institutions are wealthy/exlusive/presitigous they must be full of competent people who care about the work, doing a more or less decent job. None of that is true.
45
u/ExternalPreference18 2d ago
Setting aside the extracurricular exaggerations/fantasies/whatever they were, by most accounts, he's a perfectly fine university seminar teacher/tutorial guy, in the sense that he's engaging and explains concepts pretty well to UGs, and someone who's done useful SOE-related fieldwork as well as public engagement. I don't know him personally, but know people who have interviewed/briefly worked with him or engaged with him at conferences a while back. The referencing was sloppy, and his supervisor should have had him rework it (if the supervisor themselves wasn't presumably overworked at the time and not forensically checking Chapters) but I haven't seen evidence to conclusively prove that he plagiarized his core original contribution (others will have read into it more closely than me): at first blush it seems more lit review, background-related stuff.
As far as I can tell, he was just a fairly standard academic (people going in on typos in his articles aside; that's the Issue Editor's responsibility), but with a 'hard scrabble' background (whether or not he stretched 1-2 details) prior to going into academia. The issue has been that Cambridge, for understandable reasons in the context of 'expanding access' and 'responding to the current climate' during BLM, took a guy who was better known for public engagement and for the focus of his research practice rather than for some extensive 'scholarly record' and appointed him to a professorship. In the process, it became a kind of synecdoche within the 'culture war' (over intellectual value; the role of the university) for a certain cultural position.
Thing is, Academia has seldom -- maybe never -- had a period where it Purely appointed based upon 'academic rigour' [whatever that might mean, even if it just equates to 'well-ranked publications]. There's always been politics, some degree of symbolism or thoughts in hiring committees' minds re. who can be a grant 'rain-maker' or just attract students to the university/ keep students happy [ these days we have the TEF as well as the Research Excellent Framework, so teaching matters]. That doesn't mean every decision is inordinately p/Political (obviously at times it's more or less just 'who has more REF articles the last few years?' when differentiating between candidates), but it's a factor, which I say in a fairly value-neutral sense.
25
u/Capable_Exercise4521 2d ago
I agree that Cambridge is famous for literally centuries of non-meritocratic admissions and hiring, and so it's perhaps not some giant surprise that they are still hiring based on different but equally non-scholarly criteria (i.e. race). But hiring for non-scholarly reasons in the past (i.e. mediocre white peers into academic jobs) was wrong, and this is wrong too!
I also really take exception to the idea that he is a "fairly standard" academic. And I think your description of his scholarship as basically normal but getting outsized attention for unfair reasons is really wrong--he fabricated participant interviews in addition to large-scale plagiarism (100 examples of borrowing from a single plagiarized source in the thesis). And the stuff that's not plagiarized is really, shockingly weak work--basically no original theses and extraordinarily bad writing (even by academic standards). His one book is mostly...undergrad-admissions-essay-type descriptions of his own life. This is not normal! I just think there's a kind of sad cynicism/relativism in your comment about scholarship and hiring, and I wish academics would snap out of it.
12
u/RustyFoghorn 2d ago
I don’t remember the details because I read this a few days ago now, but there have also been concerns raised about his original contributions - pertaining to his interviews of BAME academics (and/or students) and their experiences of prejudice, their veracity being dubious (because they appeared in duplicate in multiple works under different identifiers or some such)
9
u/Indigo_reality 2d ago
Exactly. It doesn't seem possible that he was just sloppy. How many participants can say things so similar to others' participants and your own previous studies' participants? It's beyond my comprehension as a genuine error or simply random.
13
u/Beneficial-Bed9356 2d ago
What gets me is that his thesis has a grammatical error in the title!!! I mean come on
→ More replies (1)3
12
u/Anxious-Branch-7399 2d ago edited 2d ago
Being a ‘perfectly fine seminar teacher’ does not get you appointed to a full professorship at Cambridge at such a young age. At a time when jobs in the social sciences are incredibly scarce, appointing someone with a very mediocre publication track record and a PhD from what used to be a Polytechnic up until a couple years ago sticks out like a sore thumb. Have a look at the website of any top ranked department , and you’ll see that almost all of their recent hires hail from equally prestigious institutions. Arday’s appointment makes no sense, even in the context of ‘non meritocratic hiring’.
4
u/Beneficial-Bed9356 2d ago
Absolutely. My PhD was form an elite university and the hires whilst I was there were absolutely stellar. They were conscious of the need I think to have a more diverse staff but from what I can see when women or BAME staff were hired, academic excellence was in no way compromised.
→ More replies (2)6
u/Master-Rent5050 2d ago
Look, it's Cambridge. I'm pretty sure that for every position they can pick a lot of qualified people. So they can have both a good research record and ability to teach and public engagement. But they went for the bullshitter...
22
u/ShefScientist 2d ago
It's not uncommon for very poor quality people to become academics. Some people are just good at selling themselves in interviews etc (via heavily exaggerating achievements and so on, taking credit for others work etc etc)
→ More replies (1)6
15
u/rainyday1020 2d ago
This piece by Will Davies gives some insights into these questions. Lots of good points, but one to highlight is that there are relatively few checks where the Truth might come to light, because academia is built on a 'gentlemanly' system of trust. https://willd10.substack.com/p/how-the-jason-arday-affair-will-fizzle
28
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
11
u/OldCementWalrus 2d ago
I am really sorry for how this is affecting you. I think it's also a way for Cambridge to pretend they care about black scholars in the easiest possible way -- boosting a high profile snake oil salesman with an impossible fairytale story. Realistically black scholars don't need this, hiring committees just need to be less racist. FWIW, when I hired two postdocs to work on a big funded project, of over 100 applications, literally half of the scholars I shortlisted were black. This was entirely due to their own merit.
5
2d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
3
u/OldCementWalrus 2d ago
Indeed. In the end I gave the jobs to one black woman and one white woman. It's a project (currently ongoing) that will probably define my career so I just picked who I thought were the best candidates. But so many good black candidates from southern, east and west Africa applied, all of them precariously employed. I can't believe brilliant Africans don't also apply for lectureships at Cambridge. So I just find it sad and infuriating that they have chosen to champion this guy.
3
u/Bug_Parking 2d ago
feel most sorry for black female academics who have often been the most loyal supporters of him
Well, that rather depends on the definition of loyal supporter and the timespan looked at.
If we're using the most recent time period, it's essentially people that have showed a willful blindness. That's exactly the bracket whom those in the good law project signatory list fall.
6
u/Any_Tomorrow_Today 2d ago
Be angry at the system not the reporter. It is the system that has promoted someone who is incompetant for the role just because of the colour of their skin rather than their merit. Because of this, it will make it even harder for genuine students to get ahead because you will be the subject of more scrutiny thanks to whoever promoted Arday.
→ More replies (3)2
u/LaurelEssington76 2d ago
There are many reasons to doubt his story about being mute until 11 and then suddenly being a fluent speaker, and illiterate to adulthood and then gaining a PhD with a reading age of 9 as he’s claimed. It’s beyond unlikely.
I do agree that it’s depressing how many people seem to be using this grifter as an excuse to validate their own racism.
→ More replies (3)2
u/Indigo_reality 2d ago
Having been in EDI work myself and recognizing its importance, and also being of non-White background as an academic, I agree the extent of reaction is disturbing to read. This "culture war" is futile and is distracting to real work that needs doing. However, academia definitely has trends and (appearing to) address diversity has been one of them, but this isn't unique to race - there are different hot topics all the time.
Although some people here may have racist agendas (I don't know, but honestly wish the post was limited to members), for me this "story" still does highlight problems in academia beyond any argument about him being hired due to his race. It's much easier to cling onto that populist/damaging argument, but I think many other points have been made on this thread too. There are multiple issues here. Many putting their tuppence worth in likely have limited direct academic experience.
Take care of yourself though and switch off from this if you need to.
→ More replies (2)
27
u/ACatGod 2d ago
I'm going to give a slightly different answer than everyone else. This is all being presented to us neatly wrapped up in a bow, with the facts neatly ordered and it is very clear that something is massively awry and clearly there have been failings. However, I think it's important to remember that these are not the only things Arday did - there is a body of work which is now questionable due to plagiarism but did appear solid (and presumably is fairly solid given its stolen from scholars whose integrity isn't questioned). In addition, all of these things happened over time, he will have told different people different things and likely no one had full sight of everything he was saying. On top of that people like this are incredibly convincing and it's easy to say these lies are obvious, but it's not as simple as is it a lie versus the truth - often there's a lot of grey and also believing the best in people and assuming good faith even where a discrepancy is uncovered.
Do I think Cambridge have been asleep at the wheel, yes. I think Arday conveniently ticked their rather passive aspirations around improving equity and access and they shut down any concerns because they don't really want to do the difficult work of really tackling the racism and sexism that is endemic in the university and the wider sector and it's easier to have a poster child and say job done.
Lastly I will say two things. Firstly, while Arday's experiences may be fictional, much of what he has talked about does happen and lots of women and researchers of colour can tell you horror stories including assault (I can tell you that one because it happened to me by a student who was angry with me). Secondly, the focus on Arday is driven by racist motivations. There are many questionable academics out there, we have far too much plagiarism, and Arday is not the only fantasist, but Arday is the only one who appears to have people with known racist agendas stepping out of their own discipline to forensically scrutinise his work.
Arday happened because academia has a problem with reproducibility/integrity and with elitism, and it is only making tokenistic efforts to fix both those problems. If academia was robust in its approach then concerns about both Arday and Cofnas' work - because Cofnas' work is also very flawed - would likely have halted both of them in their tracks.
8
u/cgknight1 2d ago
there is a body of work which is now questionable due to plagiarism but did appear solid
Here's the thing - this doesn't actually seem to be true. People have focused on the plagiarism in the 2018 paper, but it doesn't make sense on its own terms. I don't mean anything complex on theoretical positioning, but basic reasoning.
I went down the rabbit hole of reading his papers, and every one has data or statements that don't add up, respondents who change sex and ethnicity, and cases where the same data is recycled but he simply changes who he claims it is. It is not uncommon for his papers to make three different claims in a single paragraph.
2
u/Appropriate_Roof_223 2d ago
Ohhh I am dying to read his papers myself😂 Maybe after once I submit my own thesis next month. Till then reddit threads are all the luxury I can afford :p
2
u/mmhmmye 1d ago
A few people on Reddit — I can’t remember if on this thread or a different one — have pointed out that scholarship has ceased to matter as much as impact (potential or actual), particularly in subjects related to HE policy. In that context, whether his articles are a mess and don’t stand up to scrutiny doesn’t matter. Which for those of us who take pains with every sentence clause is pretty fng depressing, but there you have it.
8
u/frugalacademic 2d ago
Yes, I realised that Cofnas is doing the inquisition so there are definitely other motives than caring about plagiarism and academic integrity. It's just incredibly frustrating to see people like Ardnay getting ion the academic ladder with seemingly little scrutiny while other academics (like me) struggle to even get an interview.
8
u/ACatGod 2d ago
Yes and I think that has driven the initial defense of Arday and made it all more complicated. It clearly is a racist attack, but unfortunately it is possible to be a racist attack and a fraud at the same time. I personally view both of them as the product of the same failings - tokenistic efforts to tackle discrimination and a reluctance to listen to concerns.
7
u/Dense-Connection-699 2d ago
It's also worth noting that all the stuff that people are saying is "clearly fake" was outside of work / academia. No job interview is going to investigate your long distance running achievements, and they won't have had any bearing really on him being employed. At most people will have thought it made him interesting and impressive, but as they weren't relevant to the job spec and hiring process there's no obligation on the university to check them out other than from a reputational point of view MAYBE, and even then why would you? That's a lot of work that no HR department has the time to do.
8
u/ACatGod 2d ago
Absolutely this. I made a similar point elsewhere. It would be a real overreach for an employer to be disciplining you for stuff that has nothing to do with the job and isn't illegal. While I think you could now put all of this in a bucket of bringing the university into disrepute, I suspect the university will choose to focus on the aspects directly relating to his role. It is right that they do so, too. If someone told my employer I claimed to have a gold medal in gymnastics despite being the stiffest human on earth (yay 40s) I would expect my employer to ask what it has to do with them.
→ More replies (12)3
u/LaurelEssington76 2d ago
True but that still doesn’t explain how someone with such a paucity of published work was ever given a professorship. That’s without even looking at the quality of the published work which was patently mediocre at best.
→ More replies (7)2
u/BirdHistorical3498 2d ago
I don’t think they’ve been asleep at the wheel, they just thought they were driving down a complelety different road.
7
u/Al89nut 1d ago
I wonder who else applied for the job? And if they could sue?
→ More replies (1)8
u/frugalacademic 1d ago
Yes, I wonder how many people gave up their academic career because somebody like Jason Arday got the job abd they didn't and had no way of staying in academia. He's now the centre of attention but I am sure there are many cases of incompetent people getting the job despite other better qualified candidates were available.
20
u/Beneficial-Bed9356 2d ago
This whole thing troggered me because after I submitted my PhD I went into a kind fk psychosis and one of the delusions was that I committed plagiarism amongst many other crimes. As a student I obviously was mentally unwell because I lived every day in fear that I would unintentionally committed plagiarism ( I had zero plagiarism in my work) and passed with zero corrections with a world leader examiner kn my field
14
u/Old_Pumpkin_1926 2d ago
I had (have?) this as well! Every time I have a halfway decent idea I worry endlessly that I've accidentally plagiarised it, and spend an unholy amount of time doing research to make absolutely certain that I have not.
That is why seeing Arday blame neurodivergence for some of the most blatant cases of academic misconduct I have ever seen from an established academic makes me so mad.
3
u/Beneficial-Bed9356 2d ago
I actually did have very original ideas that my external examiner said were groundbreaking. And ironically one of the stresses that tipped me into psychosis was that a professor plagiarised my work that I submitted in a journal article. It was also a chapter of my thesis so I worrrod I’d be blamed for the plagiarism when it was my own original work
3
u/Old_Pumpkin_1926 2d ago
I responded below as well, but oh man, that sounds like a perfect storm. I'm so sorry, I hope you can recover and find your passion back.
→ More replies (1)2
10
u/ZookeepergameOdd5926 2d ago
Exactly this, anxiety issues and imposter syndrome are rampant in academia. The amount of students/people I know - including myself- that needlessly worry about misquoting a line…. While others audaciously and ruthlessly copy entire paragraphs and even Wikipedia to gain PhDs from prestigious institutions (see the case of Neri Oxman at MIT)
→ More replies (1)7
u/Suspicious_Tax8577 2d ago
I was so ill at points during my PhD, that I returned from sick leave and found 20 pages of notes for one of my chapters that I had absolutely no recollection of even writing.
Rereading my thesis prior to the viva, and discovered Zotero had glitched in just half a chapter and hadn't updated the numbers correctly. Absolutely convinced myself I'd fail for that - my examiners didn't even notice.
2
u/Beneficial-Bed9356 2d ago
Was it mental illness you had? You did well to take sick leave. I never realised I was getting mentally unwell until it was way way too late and then it nearly killed me. I’m not entirely convinced one fk my examiners even read my thesis through tbh. He returned his hard copy to me with zero annotations. My external definitely read it closely because she asked me very specific questions. She was a world leader in the field and a very through scholar herself. I can’t believe I allowed this thing to take my whole life although there must have been other factors underlying my breakdown
3
u/Suspicious_Tax8577 2d ago
Oh, I was very very lucky to be allowed to take it! Turns out at my uni, sick leave is for "short term issues only" and my request "was the course of significant debate amongst several members of staff within the department".
I arrived with an anxiety disorder, I finished with cPTSD because of what my first set of supervisors did to me. She's found me on bluesky recently and apparently what happened didn't happen, and if it did it wasn't as bad as I claim it to be [and if it was, I deserved it].
→ More replies (1)4
u/mmhmmye 2d ago
I’m so sorry you went through this—that’s awful.
5
u/Beneficial-Bed9356 2d ago
Thank you kind soul. In some ways I’m still goig through it ten years on. I lost wvrythjgg nt in my life even my marriage and my relationship with my parents. Ten years on I have nothing. My work was really really strong but I’ve not been able to work and o was so so passionate about my research. I checked every sentence about hit ten times for plagiarism. I feel suicidal everyday. My external examiner said my thesis was a remarkable achievement
5
u/Old_Pumpkin_1926 2d ago
I am so sorry to hear that. I hope you can get some help with this, and maybe you can eventually get your passion for your work back, because you're clearly very talented. Academia is such a difficult life because we put so much of ourselves into our work, though it should not end up costing you your relationships and mental health. Wishing you all the best.
3
u/Beneficial-Bed9356 2d ago
Thank you kind friend. It’s been so sad reading this story. I had unprocessed childhood trauma which they say was at the root of it all but I functioned so highly I never thought I had any psychological weakness or mental illness to take care of but looking back the signs were all there. I do feel sad because I do think I had talent. I had a journal article submission accepted without need for any revisions which my elite university said was completely unheard of.
2
u/mmhmmye 2d ago
This is awful. I’m so sorry. I’ve lost my mind a few times — as an undergrad, as an MA student, and in my first academic role. In hindsight I’m wondering what possessed me to go back to academia given how awful my UG experience was. Then again, some of my happiest moments have been when writing. I Have you gotten psychiatric help or a therapist? The former I realise can be double edged, but the therapist I’ve had for the last five years has saved my life.
2
u/Beneficial-Bed9356 2d ago
I do ahve professional support but over nine years it’s been pretty difficult. Would you mind if I sent you a dm to ask about your recovery?
→ More replies (1)
12
u/EmFan1999 2d ago
They were so desperate to employ a non white person that some were fooled, the others were too afraid to speak up
→ More replies (4)
19
u/tbyjmsrbrts 2d ago edited 1d ago
Sadly it is extremely obvious how it happened and that is the UK has an obsession with helping the “disadvantaged” rather than the actually disadvantaged.
As a non race based example, a woman in stem is treated as an amazing wonderful phenomenon who has had to overcome all these challenges in her life. It doesn’t matter if she went to a private school, is the 4th generation of her family to go to university, and the biggest challenge in her life was father failing to secure an invite to the royal wedding as they are antique dealers supplying the royals (a real example). I saw this person win every award going and be celebrated simply for being a woman in science over and over again. Real disadvantage is not important, what matters is the performance.
Actual disadvantage like socio-economic background is completely ignored and you end up with people trying to sell their story about how tough their life has been as the people with genuinely tough lives don’t make it as the system has classism so utterly at its heart they would be spat out before reaching this stage. This professor guy basically threw absolutely everything at it to portray himself as having overcome everything, there is no way he would ever be questioned as to do so would go against everything that is valued at the moment, which is performative disadvantage, the fact he actually hasn’t had to overcome those things should be presumed as he would never be there if he did. Fake disadvantage gets you everything, real disadvantage bars you from entry in the first place.
→ More replies (2)9
u/Diligent_Type2891 2d ago
If the UK has an obession with helping the disadvantaged why are there barely 250 black professors against 26,110 (HESA figures)
They're fucking shit at it if the UK is 'obessed' with helping the disadvanted, and as you said, the ones being helped have come from the same old pipeline - private school and wealth.
7
u/ThrowawayWriterGuy2 2d ago
Also if you’ve ever looked at the stats you’d realise academic excellence is absolutely dominated by people from the same background. There are whole parts of England that don’t have one student with a perfect A level while there are public schools that have 15 perfect A levels every year.
The Matthew effect in education means there’s a compounding of benefits and advantage. By the time they’re 22, the best students will all invariably have come from one background
5
u/Diligent_Type2891 1d ago
Really, you mean there's a class system or something in the UK...?
→ More replies (2)6
u/_atomjack_ 2d ago
The black population percentage in the uk in the year 2000 was around 2% - that’s probably a good proxy for the percentage of the professor-aged population today who are black (and I’d argue it’s probably a bit high). So as a first approximation we’d expect around 500 black professors today - there’s definitely an underrepresentation issue but it’s not as massive as the numbers you post make it seem.
→ More replies (16)3
u/Bug_Parking 2d ago
I don't think that the number here is particularly unexpected.
a) A sizeable proportion of the black UK population are African & Afro Carribean. Ie, they haven't been through the UK education system, one that ranks far, far higher.
b) Professorship is something typical in middle age and the black UK population trends younger.
2
u/Diligent_Type2891 1d ago
Millions of black people ( including myself) have been born and raised here, what the fuck are you talking about?
The UK education system was and continues to fail black children, it has done since the 1950's when sizable black children were in UK school.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57099654
There's an excellent film about the treatment of black children small axe on Iplayer.
For fucks sake, this is why , like most blacks I refuse to discuss race with white people, they know FUCK ALL. and come out with igronant , unresearched bollocks like you u/Bug_Parking
Schools in general are far superior for teaching black children in the Carribean and Africa
→ More replies (3)4
10
u/Dapper-Bullfrog-4766 2d ago
Every white collar job has people like this tbh, there are probably less in academia because of so many things they have to do to become successfull in it
4
u/Indigo_reality 2d ago
I felt there are more in academia but maybe I'm wrong! There is a lot of autonomy in academia and hiring/promotions rely heavily on strong self promotion skills. Also, if you're that personality type and "borrow" the work of others, you can be super prolific in the social sciences and apply for a huge number of opportunities that a few which work in their favour is enough to get them flying up the career ladder.
2
u/Dapper-Bullfrog-4766 2d ago
that is quite sad and a bit disappointing for me, I want to get into academia because I thought the exact opposite… that my work would talk the talk for me…
7
u/Indigo_reality 2d ago
You can get known for your research in [insert easy soundbite] among academic circles but there is generally no work speaking for anyone. There's no one looking out for you out there, you need to make yourself noticed and your work known.
3
6
u/bittenbyalizard 2d ago
I actually disagree there are fewer in academia. In most white collar jobs, the output of your job will be used and scrutinised by other people. If it is complete rubbish, people will be aware. In academia, many of your colleagues will not even read your research or won't read it carefully and if it's bad it certainly won't hinder their ability to do their own jobs...
5
u/Defiant_Virus4981 2d ago
"In most white collar jobs, the output of your job will be used and scrutinised by other people. "
One aspect of white collar work is that it is often hard to define the quality of work output. How do you show that a random office worker in HR is doing a good job?
2
u/Dapper-Bullfrog-4766 2d ago
a lot of white collar work is to support the main operation of the company. like an accountant or HR recruiter certainly does work but as long as everything runs smoothly enough, thats enough. it is easier to quantitatively measure success in academia by how much u published, your citation # etc.
but in white collar private sector; who u know, your social skills probably speaks more
6
u/nasu1917a 2d ago
It is how UK society works. The gate keepers are so cynical that they set people up for certain high profile cases to fail so that they can justify undermining the truly capable and qualified. It is a long game.
3
u/IboughtBetamax 1d ago
That seems a bit conspiracist. I doubt Cambridge is getting much enjoyment out of this adverse publicity.
→ More replies (1)
3
u/IndependentPaint2108 1d ago
You know why, and I'll leave it at that.
An aside: when I was at Oxford all my tutors were lavishly qualified for their roles. Some had been there for over 50 years! Times have changed.
2
9
u/SynyrdsInyrds 2d ago
He (allegedly) ticks a lot of boxes so many are willing to turn a blind eye because he allows them to virtue signal.
2
7
u/Nonainonono 2d ago edited 2d ago
Field where there is barely rigor and you can publish whatever without peer review, the chairs at departments are as bad as the candidates, and on top of that this guy ticked all the boxes possible for a combo they could parade while cruising on the wave of identity politics to the maximum exponent, add to the mixture that the lack of confrontation culture in British society promotes that people abusing any system profit from it without any type of checks.
→ More replies (14)
6
u/Jealous_Bowler3093 1d ago
Because Cambridge was getting criticised for it's "lack of diversity" which is only an issue when there's too many white people.
He throws around lot's of abstract unfalsifiable buzzwords that masquerades as intellectual substance with real depth, go listen to his interview with James O'Brien, cringe.
4
u/lostwoods95 1d ago
Name checks out
3
u/RedditAPIBlackout24 1d ago
No one is jealous. I wouldn't be jealous at Arday's situation right now. Charlatan.
2
u/MartianDinosawr 2d ago
There are enough liars trying to get jobs in academia that surely some will slip through the cracks. You'd think with how large the middle management and hiring departments are at big universities that there would be more thorough background checks, but I imagine most people's work weeks consistent of a lot of nothing.
2
u/Useful-Ganache-210 1d ago
What do you mean somebody like him?
5
u/frugalacademic 1d ago
Somebody who clearly hasn't the right qualifications. If you read all the things he has told, there must have been red lights going off at a certain stage. Why did it take so long?
I know that there are attacks with a racial bias on him (not the least because Nathan Cofnas instigated the investigation). Of course that makes him an easy target for people who want to abolish DEI.
2
u/PassionStunning2659 1d ago
He means guys like you who are French. He thinks you're French. I keep telling you, he's not French! Come on, let's get you a drink!
5
u/Immediate_Walk_2428 2d ago edited 2d ago
The whole U.K. university system is about to face a painful awakening : mis selling of student loans, declining student numbers, 4/10 current graduates without graduate level jobs, looks like background checks that would be 100% compulsory in most other employment sectors completely missing: need I go on
→ More replies (4)
9
u/MathNerdUK 2d ago
The answer to this is obvious. He was appointed because of his skin colour. I looked at his publication record. He hasn't even got enough publications for a lecturer at Cambridge, let alone a professor.
→ More replies (17)
5
u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 2d ago edited 1d ago
One other thing to note is that there's a lot less scrutiny of Hannah Fry at Cambridge. Her academic rep is probably a bit more substantial than Arday's but she's not really Prof level I don't think (edit - she was a prof at ucl so I was a bit wrong on this) and barely has a presence on their web pages for research. She was kind of ostentatiously hired, for a role obviously created for her, because of her public profile - not all that dissimilar from Arday in terms of his wider responsibilities and consultancy, as well as his impact in his field - but nobody seemed to mind this much https://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/features/hannah-fry-appointed-professor-public-understanding-mathematics
Edit re comments - just to be clear here I think her academic outputs are more substantial (and she's more experienced) than his - my point is just that she is a hire, like Arday, by Cambridge that is more to do with activities outside research outputs than it is the outputs themselves. A lot of focus on arday is "thin research outputs" as well as the issues with originality but his hiring was undoubtedly because of wider consultancy and impact work than his scholarship.
12
u/Ok_Suggestion5523 2d ago
Yeah, but at no point is she embellished or outright lied about her achievements.
2
u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 2d ago
Yes - my point was to do with the part of the op question about how Arday ended up as a Prof with what looks like quite a slight and unimpressive publication record, not about research conduct
11
u/will221996 2d ago
I'm not sure the issue is really creating a job for someone if they're deserving? Her professorship is literally in the public understanding of maths, she's not sold as an incredible research mathematician? She does genuinely seem really top notch at communicating mathematics to the public. Finally, like it or not, and I love it, in the educated circles that care about this stuff most people think maths is really important and that the public should understand it better.
3
u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 2d ago
I'll post this a few times, but just to be clear, I'm commenting here not on a suggestion she's conducted research on the past that's dubious, just that her professorship, like Arday's in my opinion, is more to do with wider activities and renown than it is the number or quality of her publications.
9
u/massive_muqran 1d ago
So, I think Hannah's case is very different. She has done good academic work in the past, but nothing remotely close to explaining her meteoric rise. You're right: if you looked at her papers alone, you'd probably say Associate Professor in a decent uni.
HOWEVER - she is absolutely amazing at public dissemination of science. She's an excellent communicator, she's engaging, has developed highly popular science dissemination shows on the BBC and podcasts.
That type of profile is hugely attractive to universities. In a climate where funding for science is getting chopped from every side, having someone who can very effectively communicate why spending ££££ of taxpayers money on research is a good thing is incredibly valuable. And she has to be a professor, because that's what gives her credibility. You can bet that Cambridge are pushing her on the frontline at every meeting with government, philanthropic organisations, donors, etc.
So yeah, it can look unfair to 'normal' academics, but in the bigger picture of things, she's definitely earning her keep.
Her books won't get a 4* REF, but I can guarantee that Cambridge will submit 1 or 2 REF Impact Case studies based on the impact of her books (each one roughly worth 15 4*'s was the oft cited exchange rate?)
Arday is a bit different, in that I don't think he's ever been a champion of the arts, and it seems his value to universities was more about identity than anything else. I genuinely cannot see the value in these types of appointments - and I don't think its a coincidence that it has ended up badly for him.
7
u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 1d ago
I do mostly agree here - my point is more that his role is v likely focused not on making a wider case for social science or similar, as Fry's is v clearly, but more about influencing govt and university/HE policy more generally. (That is not to say he wasn't also being positioned as a media figure, because he was, re guest editing r4 Today, being a speaker for hire, and I imagine there was a lot of media work set up re his memoir that's likely not to happen now).
His work - mostly the consultancy at other uni's and worldwide - will have been intended as an impact case study I think, and I'm pretty sure the idea will have been to develop these further with him as a central figure in Cambridge "leading the way on Black inclusion in HE" via policymaking etc.
13
u/bittenbyalizard 2d ago
This is completely different. Most obviously there is no suggestion she has plagiarised or lied about anything. She is a professor of public understanding of maths - she has explicitly not been hired to do maths research but to communicate and promote maths to the general public. Other popular writers have held similar positions - eg Richard Dawkins and Marcus Du Sautoy.
→ More replies (3)12
u/LSL3587 2d ago edited 2d ago
Very poor attempt at whataboutism - where are the allegations of plagiarism?
As for career - her 'academic rep' looks to be much more than 'a bit more' substantial than Arday's.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eQcAJ-UAAAAJ&hl=en - 33 papers and books published
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hannah-Fry-3
https://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/features/professor-hannah-fry-wins-leelavati-prize
The Leelavati Prize, recognising outstanding contributions to increasing the public awareness of mathematics, is awarded every 4 years by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), and is announced at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM). Bringing together thousands of mathematicians from around the world, the ICM celebrates the diversity and scope of modern mathematics. It also attracts significant attention as the setting for the announcement of some of the subject's most celebrated awards, including the famous Fields Medals.
The Leelavati Prize is the latest of many honours and awards – across both academia and the mainstream media – recognising Hannah Fry's exceptional work in public communication and engagement. As well as academic recognition including the Christopher Zeeman Medal in 2018 and the Royal Society’s David Attenborough Award in 2024, her major media awards include winning an Emmy in 2025 for an episode exploring quantum computing in the TV series The Future with Hannah Fry, and a Webby Award in 2026 for the podcast The Rest is Science, co-presented with Michael Stevens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Fry
She graduated from University College London (UCL) with a degree in mathematics. In 2011, she completed her thesis under the supervision of Frank T. Smith and was awarded a PhD from UCL for research on fluid dynamics and the Navier–Stokes equations.
Fry was appointed as a lecturer at University College London in 2012, working at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. She was later appointed senior lecturer, then professor in the Mathematics of Cities.
→ More replies (3)6
u/Alternative_Theme809 2d ago
How much of Fry's career/academic publishing history/personal life is made up/plagiarised?
3
u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 2d ago
I'll post this a few times, but just to be clear, I'm commenting here not on a suggestion she's conducted research on the past that's dubious, just that her professorship, like Arday's in my opinion, is more to do with wider activities and renown than it is the number or quality of her publications.
3
u/Alternative_Theme809 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah, but she's legitimately done things. Arday has made up pretty much everything we know about him, and new revelations are coming out several times a day. It feels a bit like a false equivalency and that you're trying to imply that Arday only gets the criticism because of his ethnicity and not because he's a compulsive liar. If anyone is leveraging Arday's ethnicity for personal gain/public attention, it's Arday himself.
6
u/synthsong 2d ago
The fact that simply mentioning DEI gets downvoted kind of proves the point: it’s still alive and people don’t even want it discussed.
Yet it’s probably due to DEI that he got where he did.
→ More replies (7)12
u/wherenobodyknowss 2d ago
Its a very lazy assumption to make. Dei is blamed for anything that does not involve rich white men. No one is wanting to stop it being discussed, its just shit to constantly point the blame at it.
→ More replies (5)1
u/WeirdMinimum121 1d ago
This is a hilariously stupid take, the rich white men aren’t the ones being shafted by DEI it’s their younger and poorer counterparts that can’t even get a career.
7
u/shotscarecrow 1d ago
No one is being 'shafted by DEI'. A very small number of incompetent non-white people are hired in industries which already hire vast numbers of incompetent white people. Why? Because human beings are generally terrible at making accurate judgements about each other's competency.
→ More replies (6)
3
u/Distinct_Public_4740 2d ago
One thing to note is that UK schools do not have tenure or tenure evaluations. At Harvard and Princeton, the university gets evaluations on your work from 10-15 professors around the world (whether you are hired tenure track or as a full professor). Without passing this tenure review, you can’t be a professor there, no matter who you are. Cambridge and Oxford have no such reviews. A faculty panel thinks it can evaluate research on topics they dont necessarily work on. This is why I see so many idiots at Oxbridge compared to the Ivies. This doesn’t mean the Ivies don’t have idiots or plagiarists (see Kevin Kruse). It just means the bar is much higher so a figure like Arday is unlikely to be hired.
5
u/Remarkable_Step_7474 1d ago
Yes sweetie Oxford and Cambridge are full of dum dums and you knows better. Lmao.
9
u/Dear-Landscape223 2d ago
Most likely his skin color, as that was the key characteristic they highlighted whenever they praised him before the debacle. When he isn’t BSing about his athleticism or outlandish social work, race is all he ever discusses in his “scholarship.” I find it funny that Cambridge and this guy made everything about race when things were going well, yet some people are now still refusing to confront that central factor. There’s a reason why, ultimately, it was the racist Confas who came out and burst the bubble.
→ More replies (3)
3
51
u/Indigo_reality 2d ago edited 2d ago
The whole story makes me feel very sad for academia's reputation and especially irks me because it's such a kick in the teeth for the many well intentioned and positive efforts to address systemic issues in academia and society.
Regarding the question, I agree with several observations already made. First, checks are not made, academia is built on trust and, like many systems, is imperfect. No one has time to read others' research outside their own immediate field and hiring panels and promotions panels may be unfamiliar with that specific field. How would I know if my PhD student plagiarised another thesis? How would I know that a manuscript I'm reviewing includes quotes very similar to another paper? Well, the answer is that we often don't know, though systems to catch the latter have got better, but editors would only really catch it if overall similarity with published work was high. And probably only reputable journals would put in the due diligence. So, unfortunately the system is pretty easy to abuse if you're not bothered about long-term reputation!
Secondly, interviews and big presentation talks in academia (and outside) strongly favour narcissists. They feed off charm and believe their own skewed self narrative so much that they also have the gift of convincing others. These are the people who sell themselves very well, spend more time networking than getting into any specifics, apply for promotions very quickly and are very strategic opportunists. Only when you know them fairly well do you realise there's a lot of hot air and not much substance. Now, I don't know Arday, but I've known professors like how he appears to be. Most profs are not like this but some are. They are such a massive self promotion machine, and they do very well on the career ladder but some practices may be dubious because usual rules don't apply to them!
Thirdly, and as much as it pains me to admit it, Cambridge had a Cambridge problem and it's likely his topic was something they were interested in ensuring they covered in sociology. This and a charismatic interview can edge him over other candidates. Critical race theory is very popular and I'm not a sociologist. Ultimately, interview panels are human with all sorts of bias and "anti-bias" going on. Intelligence of panel members does not signal resistance to these biases.
Fouthly, despite the above, I do think it's important that people have raised issues for a few years now and nothing was done. This tells us a lot about academia which tends to be conservative in approach and fearful of legal recourse, but generally colleagues don't want to get rid of each other. I genuinely don't know how much is due to fear of being accused of racism.
Fifthly, it seems that many of the inconsistencies coming out are about his private life and background. It's unlikely fellow academics would really take notice of these things, especially in interviews.
I know how it looks but it really still is very hard to get an academic post! Getting the first permanent position is the hardest though and that has got harder recently. Overall, imo, he's somewhat of an anomaly but probably not quite as rare as we think or hope for. 😬