Your chart on how the national press covered the story is interesting as is how the Socialist Worker covered it. The SWP completely ignored this story until he ended his life. I assumed that they'd got the good sense not to pin their colours to this particular mast but now he's died, they're full of it. This particular story claims that exposing Arday's massive overpromotion, his plagiarism and his huge and fantastic lies are somehow comparable as newsworthy with various professors trying to shag their students. The argument that the Unis covered up these particular crimes because the profs were white seems to ignore the fact that Cambridge tried desperately to cover up for Arday and only acted when his claims of being a visiting prof at other universities was exposed as fiction.
Thank you. Yes, the instinct of universities is to hide anything negative, whatever the cost to integrity, unless the Administration doesn't like the person in question and wants an excuse to get rid of them.
I read that article and the other nonsense they published, including coverage of the stupid people who gathered in their thousands for a 'Vigil for Jason'. It is simply unbelievable how gullible some people truly are. BTW the Socialist Worker has always been a vile rag. My dad was a coal miner, committed to improving the conditions of himself and his workmates, but he deplored the socialist workers' articles. One day, he went up to some of its sellers at the pithead and asked if they had jobs, since there were vacancies for more miners down the pit. They disappeared and were not seen for a long time – presumably afraid of having to do some real work!!!
I'm sorry that your dad had such a poor experience with them Elizabeth however in the 1970's I was a member and most of my fellow members had jobs.
Please don't fall into the Leftie trap of calling those that you disagree with "vile". If you remember, the Left initially called the claims of The Prof's plagiarism "vile".
I feel so angry that so much fuss is being made to divert attention… it smacks of propaganda. Something my father loathed. Maybe all the jobless sellers of Soviet Worker congregated at pitheads in the West of Scotland?
Hehehe. Or maybe your dad just thought they were jobless? Or maybe they were? What I do know is that most who weren’t studying had jobs. There’s lots of things to criticise the 70s SWP about but laziness isn’t one of them. Even then, they were head and shoulders above the shower that currently occupy that party.
Even then, they were head and shoulders above the shower that currently occupy that party.- certainly, that is true. These guys claimed to be unemployed and in need, but when my Dad suggested they apply for the genuine jobs that were available, they conveniently scarpered. I also remember people who stood outside Glasgow Uni. Building every day in the early 70s, selling Socialist Worker – I assume they were students. But they seemed to have a lot more spare time than my friends and I ever had.
Nobody sold the Socialist Worker every day. It was a weekly paper. Perhaps you're confusing it with News Line which was a daily Trot paper produced by the Workers' Revolutionary Party and funded by Gaddafi and the Redgrave acting family?
I'm quite soft spoken with ordinary people, but when someone is vile, call him vile. The Lefties call everybody vile, which is morally wrong and rhetorically short-sighted; 100% of people are racist by now, according to them.
I bet some individual or committee made the strategic decision to exploit Arday's death and emphasize Cofnas and The Guardian. I do't know British politics. Would it have been the SOcial Worker's Party? Someone in Labor?
I don't think the liberals and lefties work like that Eric. It's like an automatic reaction rather than a coordinated approach. It's knee jerk to any criticism of anyone who isn't white and straight with them blaming that criticism on racism etc.
Now the liberal lefty Guardian, one of the papers that first exposed this fraud, is trying to cover its back. Rather than link the actual piece it's far funnier to watch Megyn Kelly destroy it. 🤣🤣🤣
The wonderful Substack by Paul Embery published this.
Powerful statement from Professor Richard Dawkins today. Very difficult to argue with it.
I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday.
If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence.
The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin?” , but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?”
Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism.
As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope.
In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.
This, posted by JK Rowling today, is absolutely spot on:
The more nonsensical and obviously absurd a belief is, the more people who hold it (or pretend to) will resist recanting. The potential for humiliation rises in direct proportion to the ridiculousness of what they've publicly swallowed. They see no choice but to double down.
The left-wing ‘Your Party’ MP Zarah Sultana has said: “If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic, he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was.”
Well, I'm willing to wager that if he were a white middle-class academic, but with precisely the same ability and credentials, he would almost certainly not have been appointed in the first place.
Follow Paul if you can. He's the most sensible trades unionist we've got
The problem, I think, is that the rot is too deep. If you remove the dozen or so named people who appointed Arday to his Cambridge professorship then their replacements are going to be of no better quality. That applies to more than just Cambridge of course; it would be interesting to figure out who was in the committees at Durham and Glasgow who hired him in the years before his move to Cambridge.
And of course there's the academic midget Phil Vickerman who supervised his PhD. If Vickerman had done his job Arday would not have been awarded a PhD, but then it isn't clear to me that Vickerman is any more academically qualified than Arday. I wrote some more about this in my substack - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/death-of-a-fabulist-race-grifter - but the TL;DR is that Vickerman is an academic non-entity who is sufficiently unprofessional that his official website has a typoe in it, and has had that typoe for, as best I can tell, several years now
Vickerman is at a no-name college, so he doesn't matter.
You're right that reform is difficult. Entire departments need to be axed. Lots of professors are opportunists, though, who will change their politics depending on the top leadership.
This is an excellent read. Thank you Eric. And thank you for citing my letter.
I have to admit when I first read your exposure I was in two minds for all the worries you answer. After a lot of thought I posted a comment that I thought it was one of the best things that could be done. I was seriously conflicted because of the danger of supporting a mass pile-on. Of encouraging harassment. But I went ahead anyway. Why?
My sense was the case was spiralling out of control and someone could get harmed in some way, in particular Jason Arday. Because of this I wanted to write to those responsible and raise my concerns with them. It was obvious to me that writing to the VC or any of the other prominent names in the public domain at the time was not going to work. I needed someone who was answerable, who feels the weight because of their direct involvement and who might look at my email address and think “I’ll take a look at this.” Hence I was on the search for exactly the same information that Eric provided. Eric’s action lowered those search costs for me dramatically. I actually was on the verge of giving up when his posting appeared.
Despite the obvious risks that were associated witidenh Eric’s posting, on balance I thought it was important because it switched the focus from Arday to the institution, thereby redirecting the costs of the decision to where they actually belong. And by doing this, it might incentive those responsible to take remedial action to contain the situation. It was becoming clear that the media pile on was escalating to unbearable levels for Arday and by redirecting the flow of attention to institutional enactors would shield him and they themselves would need shielding this would incentive the university leadership to “internalize” the affair as soon as possible. I then decided to use this publicity mechanism to encourage others to write to the electors in a similar fashion as I. I assumed that as full professionals they would be able to sort out the sincere from insincere emails. In this regard, I had an exchange with another Cambridge professor who later went public and he acknowledged that I had made a constructive contribution to his thinking about how to proceed. In particular he appreciated my argument for pointing to the distinction between academic misconduct, which included both the plagiarism accusations and the lack of due diligence, from the DEI/EDI issues.
As the situation was scaling up, I considered the posting as a “means of last resort”. All the evidence was that the Cambridge leadership was doubling down and that this was not going to hold. At some point its support for Arday was going to break and they would publicly abandon him—which is what they did. That was wrong. By naming the electors, they would have to face the public and by admitting their wrong-doing they could be shielded by the University and at the same time the focus shift away from Arday.
Finally, I thought that the affair was a wake-up call for the academy as a whole. DEI/EDI was getting out of control. I was starting to experience very mild versions myself at my own university where I had come under criticism for a totally trivial matter. I was part of a faculty committee to develop our “sustainability strategy”—whatever that means. In the discussions my colleagues suggested that we needed a mission statement and that turned to the idea that sustainability should be defined in terms of “diversity” (absurd, I know). The argument was that “diversity is our strength” etc. So suddenly “diversity = sustainability”. I commented at the time that if we continue with this we will set a precedent that everything is diversity and we will end up doing this in appointment committees. I was watching a “cascade effect” in slow motion, especially when one colleague asked “what’s wrong with that?” My answer was “everthing!” and then retorted “try defending that to the general public!”, to which I was told that in no uncertain terms, that the general public are not smart enough to understand, etc. I felt I was in a cult. This was more than a year ago and it has preoccupied me ever since. My conclusion was that the DEI/IDE ideology has to be subject to public scrutiny and each and every one promoting it must now defend it in public. It’s not a matter of naming and shaming by Eric but rather being forced into public to defend an ideological stance that is having grave effects on our profession as a whole.
These electors were electors at a world renowned university: they carry responsibilities for the entire profession. This is something they were blissfully unaware of, or if they were, did not care. Now they have to answer for their actions then and now. Just think what would have happened if the whole board of electors had quickly gone public and said: here we stand, this is our responsibility now we will take care of it and sent a credible signal that they would do so.
", I had an exchange with another Cambridge professor who later went public and he acknowledged that I had made a constructive contribution to his thinking about how to proceed. In particular he appreciated my argument for pointing to the distinction between academic misconduct, which included both the plagiarism accusations and the lack of due diligence, from the DEI/EDI issues."
How heartening! Often with just a little push, people will do the right thing. Of course, often they won't, but you can't win all the time.
Well yes. And as a result I also became aware of just how incipient the DEI/IDE policies were entering our university. I raised it with a dean today and the reaction was more or less: not going there … My sense is that what started out as reasonable requirements on equal treatment has changed the mission of universities from “halls of learning” to “societal change agents”. An email today addressed me in my capacity as the Equal Opportunities Officer as “equity advocate”. There we have it! I have work to do.
Your chart on how the national press covered the story is interesting as is how the Socialist Worker covered it. The SWP completely ignored this story until he ended his life. I assumed that they'd got the good sense not to pin their colours to this particular mast but now he's died, they're full of it. This particular story claims that exposing Arday's massive overpromotion, his plagiarism and his huge and fantastic lies are somehow comparable as newsworthy with various professors trying to shag their students. The argument that the Unis covered up these particular crimes because the profs were white seems to ignore the fact that Cambridge tried desperately to cover up for Arday and only acted when his claims of being a visiting prof at other universities was exposed as fiction.
https://socialistworker.co.uk/womens-liberation/how-white-academics-are-protected-by-a-racist-system/
Thank you. Yes, the instinct of universities is to hide anything negative, whatever the cost to integrity, unless the Administration doesn't like the person in question and wants an excuse to get rid of them.
I read that article and the other nonsense they published, including coverage of the stupid people who gathered in their thousands for a 'Vigil for Jason'. It is simply unbelievable how gullible some people truly are. BTW the Socialist Worker has always been a vile rag. My dad was a coal miner, committed to improving the conditions of himself and his workmates, but he deplored the socialist workers' articles. One day, he went up to some of its sellers at the pithead and asked if they had jobs, since there were vacancies for more miners down the pit. They disappeared and were not seen for a long time – presumably afraid of having to do some real work!!!
I'm sorry that your dad had such a poor experience with them Elizabeth however in the 1970's I was a member and most of my fellow members had jobs.
Please don't fall into the Leftie trap of calling those that you disagree with "vile". If you remember, the Left initially called the claims of The Prof's plagiarism "vile".
Much better to argue the real issues methinks
I feel so angry that so much fuss is being made to divert attention… it smacks of propaganda. Something my father loathed. Maybe all the jobless sellers of Soviet Worker congregated at pitheads in the West of Scotland?
Hehehe. Or maybe your dad just thought they were jobless? Or maybe they were? What I do know is that most who weren’t studying had jobs. There’s lots of things to criticise the 70s SWP about but laziness isn’t one of them. Even then, they were head and shoulders above the shower that currently occupy that party.
Even then, they were head and shoulders above the shower that currently occupy that party.- certainly, that is true. These guys claimed to be unemployed and in need, but when my Dad suggested they apply for the genuine jobs that were available, they conveniently scarpered. I also remember people who stood outside Glasgow Uni. Building every day in the early 70s, selling Socialist Worker – I assume they were students. But they seemed to have a lot more spare time than my friends and I ever had.
Nobody sold the Socialist Worker every day. It was a weekly paper. Perhaps you're confusing it with News Line which was a daily Trot paper produced by the Workers' Revolutionary Party and funded by Gaddafi and the Redgrave acting family?
I'm quite soft spoken with ordinary people, but when someone is vile, call him vile. The Lefties call everybody vile, which is morally wrong and rhetorically short-sighted; 100% of people are racist by now, according to them.
Nope. That just descends into name calling. It's always best to deal with the arguments
I bet some individual or committee made the strategic decision to exploit Arday's death and emphasize Cofnas and The Guardian. I do't know British politics. Would it have been the SOcial Worker's Party? Someone in Labor?
I don't think the liberals and lefties work like that Eric. It's like an automatic reaction rather than a coordinated approach. It's knee jerk to any criticism of anyone who isn't white and straight with them blaming that criticism on racism etc.
Now the liberal lefty Guardian, one of the papers that first exposed this fraud, is trying to cover its back. Rather than link the actual piece it's far funnier to watch Megyn Kelly destroy it. 🤣🤣🤣
https://youtube.com/shorts/qstKeqR-PwE?is=DNdJmyqOQkic3ln8
The wonderful Substack by Paul Embery published this.
Powerful statement from Professor Richard Dawkins today. Very difficult to argue with it.
I am bewildered, and not very impressed, by the visceral, naked, irrational hatred spat out by some defenders of Jason Arday.
If a Cambridge professor is accused of being an unqualified charlatan, the accusation might be racially motivated. On the other hand it might not, depending on the evidence.
The correct question to ask is not, ”What is the colour of his skin?” , but “Is it in fact true that he is an unqualified charlatan?”
Please examine the evidence before leaping to the assumption of racism.
As for the idea that journalists “piled in on him” and “hounded him to his death”, most attacks were against Cambridge University. Jason himself was widely regarded as an unfortunate victim of foolish promotion way beyond his ability to cope.
In appointing him to a professorship for which he was manifestly unqualified – in ludicrously describing him as “the best in the world” – certain senior members of the university showed a level of patronising condescension towards black people that could fairly be described as racism, while at the same time making him tragically vulnerable to such attacks as came his way.
https://substack.com/@paulembery/note/c-317953040?r=xuwz6&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
And his JK Rowling quote
This, posted by JK Rowling today, is absolutely spot on:
The more nonsensical and obviously absurd a belief is, the more people who hold it (or pretend to) will resist recanting. The potential for humiliation rises in direct proportion to the ridiculousness of what they've publicly swallowed. They see no choice but to double down.
And this cracker also
The left-wing ‘Your Party’ MP Zarah Sultana has said: “If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic, he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was.”
Well, I'm willing to wager that if he were a white middle-class academic, but with precisely the same ability and credentials, he would almost certainly not have been appointed in the first place.
Follow Paul if you can. He's the most sensible trades unionist we've got
There's a lot to be said for making an example of a sacrificial victim. Highly motivating for the survivors!
"Pour encourager les autres" as it were
Name and shame: right with receipts.
The problem, I think, is that the rot is too deep. If you remove the dozen or so named people who appointed Arday to his Cambridge professorship then their replacements are going to be of no better quality. That applies to more than just Cambridge of course; it would be interesting to figure out who was in the committees at Durham and Glasgow who hired him in the years before his move to Cambridge.
And of course there's the academic midget Phil Vickerman who supervised his PhD. If Vickerman had done his job Arday would not have been awarded a PhD, but then it isn't clear to me that Vickerman is any more academically qualified than Arday. I wrote some more about this in my substack - https://ombreolivier.substack.com/p/death-of-a-fabulist-race-grifter - but the TL;DR is that Vickerman is an academic non-entity who is sufficiently unprofessional that his official website has a typoe in it, and has had that typoe for, as best I can tell, several years now
Vickerman is at a no-name college, so he doesn't matter.
You're right that reform is difficult. Entire departments need to be axed. Lots of professors are opportunists, though, who will change their politics depending on the top leadership.
I really like this from Rainer Hegselmann as quoted by Matthew Braham though:
the university effectively makes itself the accomplice of a fraudster
That is the key point. Arday was a fraud. The universities enabled his fraud
Yes. And when potential fraudsters know this, they are incentivized.
This is an excellent read. Thank you Eric. And thank you for citing my letter.
I have to admit when I first read your exposure I was in two minds for all the worries you answer. After a lot of thought I posted a comment that I thought it was one of the best things that could be done. I was seriously conflicted because of the danger of supporting a mass pile-on. Of encouraging harassment. But I went ahead anyway. Why?
My sense was the case was spiralling out of control and someone could get harmed in some way, in particular Jason Arday. Because of this I wanted to write to those responsible and raise my concerns with them. It was obvious to me that writing to the VC or any of the other prominent names in the public domain at the time was not going to work. I needed someone who was answerable, who feels the weight because of their direct involvement and who might look at my email address and think “I’ll take a look at this.” Hence I was on the search for exactly the same information that Eric provided. Eric’s action lowered those search costs for me dramatically. I actually was on the verge of giving up when his posting appeared.
Despite the obvious risks that were associated witidenh Eric’s posting, on balance I thought it was important because it switched the focus from Arday to the institution, thereby redirecting the costs of the decision to where they actually belong. And by doing this, it might incentive those responsible to take remedial action to contain the situation. It was becoming clear that the media pile on was escalating to unbearable levels for Arday and by redirecting the flow of attention to institutional enactors would shield him and they themselves would need shielding this would incentive the university leadership to “internalize” the affair as soon as possible. I then decided to use this publicity mechanism to encourage others to write to the electors in a similar fashion as I. I assumed that as full professionals they would be able to sort out the sincere from insincere emails. In this regard, I had an exchange with another Cambridge professor who later went public and he acknowledged that I had made a constructive contribution to his thinking about how to proceed. In particular he appreciated my argument for pointing to the distinction between academic misconduct, which included both the plagiarism accusations and the lack of due diligence, from the DEI/EDI issues.
As the situation was scaling up, I considered the posting as a “means of last resort”. All the evidence was that the Cambridge leadership was doubling down and that this was not going to hold. At some point its support for Arday was going to break and they would publicly abandon him—which is what they did. That was wrong. By naming the electors, they would have to face the public and by admitting their wrong-doing they could be shielded by the University and at the same time the focus shift away from Arday.
Finally, I thought that the affair was a wake-up call for the academy as a whole. DEI/EDI was getting out of control. I was starting to experience very mild versions myself at my own university where I had come under criticism for a totally trivial matter. I was part of a faculty committee to develop our “sustainability strategy”—whatever that means. In the discussions my colleagues suggested that we needed a mission statement and that turned to the idea that sustainability should be defined in terms of “diversity” (absurd, I know). The argument was that “diversity is our strength” etc. So suddenly “diversity = sustainability”. I commented at the time that if we continue with this we will set a precedent that everything is diversity and we will end up doing this in appointment committees. I was watching a “cascade effect” in slow motion, especially when one colleague asked “what’s wrong with that?” My answer was “everthing!” and then retorted “try defending that to the general public!”, to which I was told that in no uncertain terms, that the general public are not smart enough to understand, etc. I felt I was in a cult. This was more than a year ago and it has preoccupied me ever since. My conclusion was that the DEI/IDE ideology has to be subject to public scrutiny and each and every one promoting it must now defend it in public. It’s not a matter of naming and shaming by Eric but rather being forced into public to defend an ideological stance that is having grave effects on our profession as a whole.
These electors were electors at a world renowned university: they carry responsibilities for the entire profession. This is something they were blissfully unaware of, or if they were, did not care. Now they have to answer for their actions then and now. Just think what would have happened if the whole board of electors had quickly gone public and said: here we stand, this is our responsibility now we will take care of it and sent a credible signal that they would do so.
", I had an exchange with another Cambridge professor who later went public and he acknowledged that I had made a constructive contribution to his thinking about how to proceed. In particular he appreciated my argument for pointing to the distinction between academic misconduct, which included both the plagiarism accusations and the lack of due diligence, from the DEI/EDI issues."
How heartening! Often with just a little push, people will do the right thing. Of course, often they won't, but you can't win all the time.
Well yes. And as a result I also became aware of just how incipient the DEI/IDE policies were entering our university. I raised it with a dean today and the reaction was more or less: not going there … My sense is that what started out as reasonable requirements on equal treatment has changed the mission of universities from “halls of learning” to “societal change agents”. An email today addressed me in my capacity as the Equal Opportunities Officer as “equity advocate”. There we have it! I have work to do.
Name and shame publicly. It’s a public institution (they take public funds).
Anything less will produce no results.
Among other things, there had already been so much lying, and no one had been held responsible for any of it, by the time outsiders had seen anything.
In fact several people did do what Professor McMillan suggested. They were ignored or occasionally had the police called on them.
Thanks — and this was really thoughtful, and a bit heartwarming.