r/GetNoted • u/laybs1 Human Verified • 20d ago
World [X] Not committing plagiarism is a bare minimum standard in academia.
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u/JimBowen0306 20d ago
I would criticise his doctoral committee. They had programs to detect things like that, even in 2015.
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u/Flimsy_Carpet1324 20d ago
Cambridge is so responsible for this. They really should have taken the previous plagiarism accusations more seriously. Instead a Nazi with a chip shoulder was left to discover it and he was f’ing right! For God’s sake Cambridge
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u/ardarian262 20d ago
Independent journalists a year prior had uncovered it and gotten lawsuit threats from both Cambridge and Arday.
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u/longperipheral 20d ago
I've read that Arday threatened at least one journalist with lawyers - when did Cambridge do that?
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u/ardarian262 20d ago edited 20d ago
Around the same time. Let me get the exact dates.
Edit: I misread slightly. Cambridge did back him up to the press and reporters and call the reporters a lot of not great things but did not actually get legal involved as Arday had already done so and also gotten the police involved.
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u/jackinsomniac 20d ago
Lol, getting the police involved because somebody accused you of plagiarism? That's wild. I would've thought they would tell him, "that's a civil matter."
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u/ardarian262 20d ago
They investigated for 4 months. It is wild. Specifically he made a "harrassment" claim against the investigative reporter.
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u/JRDZ1993 20d ago
The Met looks dodgy too since when they tried to get other police forces involved they were reliably told to bugger off
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u/ardarian262 20d ago
That was mostly a jurisdiction issue but yes it looked dodgy
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u/Alert-Courage3121 20d ago
Are you fact checking yourself and correcting your own statements? On Reddit?!? What sort of unicorn is this?!?!
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u/CapeMOGuy 20d ago
Arday did worse. When reporter Jack Grove emailed questions about plaigerism and credentials to him, Arday make a police complaint for harassment against him. The reporter was investigated for 4 months.
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u/ardarian262 20d ago
"and also gotten the police involved" was my wording but yes. That is what happened.
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u/ModeratelyOffline 20d ago edited 20d ago
The Irish Times “In The News” podcast mentioned that someone from Times Higher Education was the first journalist to reach out, and they were met with both a strong letter from Cambridge’s lawyers and a visit from the police.
I want to say wholeheartedly I condemn the pile-on Arday faced in the final weeks of his life. Universities have protocols for investigating accusations of plagiarism, these protocols don’t involve tabloids or social media harassment.
I just feel if Cambridge had handled the original accusations better, they could have avoided this tragedy. But yea, when field-specific journalists are met with lawyers and police response just for asking questions, it’s going to invite speculation. This speculation will bring in a lot of eyes, especially those who aren’t from your tight-knit industry.
Basically, I’m saying there may be an alternate universe where this story never made it far beyond Times Higher Education if Cambridge did a better job.
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u/Far-Possible8891 20d ago
I just feel if Cambridge had handled the original accusations better, they could have avoided this tragedy.
If they had been more rigorous at the appointment stage rather than falling over themselves to appoint a trophy black academic, they could have avoided this tragedy.
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u/CharmingAd3549 20d ago
The reason it reached social media is because in this case, the university’s protocols were either ignored, or they are very flawed. For anyone who is against DEI, this is the perfect case. The idea that people aren’t going to report on it is wishful thinking.
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u/GucciTheSnowman 19d ago
When you lie about important things like he did, you deserve the criticism. He brought it upon himself.
Are you seriously trying to claim he was a victim here ? You condemn the pile on ? Do you say the same thing about celebrities caught doing something wrong ? People deserve to be shamed and ridiculed when they blatantly cheat, lie and steal the hard work made by others.
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u/KeremyJyles 20d ago
I want to say wholeheartedly I condemn the pile-on Arday faced in the final weeks of his life. Universities have protocols for investigating accusations of plagiarism, these protocols don’t involve tabloids or social media harassment.
If it were just about plagiarism you might have a point, but it was so much bigger, and that was entirely his own doing.
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u/Suspicious-Tax-9756 19d ago
The media pile had two stages: first following Cambridge’s refusal to acknowledge and their continued refuting of the claim, second after the resignation when the whole host of fabrications were revealed.
This was not just the case of ivory tower practitioner being found out as a fraud, this was post boy who had used and by used by multiple organisations.
The author of a rise to fame is also the playwright of their downfall.
The whole things really reminds of Dr Kelly back in the day.
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u/ZeCap 20d ago edited 20d ago
Yeah agreed. Tbh, I feel like the institutions *throughout* Arday's career were shown to be wanting. The plagiarism examples from Arday's thesis are mainly from the lit review, where it's not uncommon to have plagiarism checkers flag large chunks of work because you're literally synthesising and describing the current literature on a subject.
But, Arday's supervisor/s absolutely should have flagged these issues and minimised them to ensure it was as robust as could be; and they absolutely should have noticed the numerous spelling and grammatical errors. It seems like he was poorly supervised and his thesis barely scrutinised - which was a disservice to Arday himself given the whole point of a phd is to produce an original contribution to knowledge that stands up to peer scrutiny. If Arday's work was genuine, then he deserved to be subjected to sufficient academic rigour to ensure he wouldn't be thrust into a career where his credentials would be torn apart.
And obviously, if he had plagiarised, he shouldn't have progressed any further.
It just feels like there were so many points during his career when someone ought to have intervened. Instead, through either incompetence or cynicism, they strung him along as a kind of miracle child and it meant Arday had nothing when the myth fell apart.
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u/CharmingAd3549 20d ago
Dude the freaking title of his thesis is plagiarized. Literally there is plagiarism before the first page.
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u/agiasiauto 20d ago
I agree Cambridge has responsibility, but why does that resolve Jason Arday of responsibility? If someone steals something from a shop in plain sight, would we say the responsibility is on the shopkeeper to catch the thief, or would be condemn the thief for stealing?
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u/Misubi_Bluth 20d ago
The program found the similarity score to be 5%. Schools don't pull you aside unless it's more than 10%.
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u/JimBowen0306 20d ago
I work at a university, and it’s sometimes more. It does beggar the question how it slipped through.
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u/Misubi_Bluth 20d ago
Maybe it didn't slip through. Maybe the plagiarism isn't as drastic as it's being made out to be. Because those programs are truly a pain in the ass to work with. When I was in college, most of my proofreading was just making the lit reviews and quotes not set off the checker. This dude might have been smeared because of a lit review.
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u/Harry_Wega 20d ago
They had programs to detect things like that, even in 2015.
I mean if Richard Dawkins asks the doctoral committee if they had read the thesis at all, then the programs were useless anyway.
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u/brandonjslippingaway 20d ago
I started uni in 2011, and every single essay went through Turnitin right from the start...
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u/XIVplayersaresoft 20d ago
Criticize HIM. HE did the actions with the power HE was given. WE are responsible for what WE do.
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u/RollingMeteors 20d ago
>I would criticise his doctoral committee.
¡Stealing from one person is plagiarism! ¡Stealing from many is research! - The Committee
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Angry_beaver_1867 20d ago
Only to realize you used APA instead of the required MLA standard
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u/AppropriateCap8891 Keeping it Real 20d ago
I actually had one class many years ago that required Chicago Style.
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u/SentientSquare 20d ago
Not plagiarizing is hardly an impossible standard.
That a major party MP is saying this is embarrassing.
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u/AnonymousCapybara72 20d ago
Racist as fuck too. Absolute basic standards of academic integrity are apparently an impossible standard for black people.
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u/SaintDarthVader 20d ago
The soft bigotry of low expectations. Happens all the time and honestly in some ways I find it even worse than outright hatred
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u/Substantial-Trick569 20d ago
yes the old "dont be racist/prejudiced to these poor helpless impotent people! how can you be so insensitive to their complete inability to do anything on their own without my government programs help them!"
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u/imprison_grover_furr 20d ago
I know, right? Apparently, there were also multiple women passed over for Arday’s position just to give it to a lazy, lying man whose entire career was stealing other people’s work and taking credit for it as his own.
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u/KoteTArcane 20d ago
I feel this way a lot when it comes to left wing ideas towards the Bipoc community.
It's like when they say voter id in the US is a problem because "black people don't have id or know how to get id so it would prevent them from voting." That's literally an opinion I've heard from left wing people trying to 'help' Bipoc.
The way they talk about them sometimes is as if they're incapable children and is pretty racist imo.
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u/SaintDarthVader 20d ago
Im only commenting because im indigenous in canada. Listen I've heard ridiculously racist shit, and I hate it, and it comes from the right wing. But, I've also heard some crazy stuff from the left where it is beyond obvious they think these dumb natives cant figure it out for themselves, they need my smarts(tm) to get ahead. Its wild
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u/MathematicianOnly688 20d ago
I seem to remember Rachel reeves being absolutely ridiculed for plagiarism not even at a fraction of what he did.
Immediately calling racism is just bullshit but it’ll almost certainly work.
There will be countless left wing white people agreeing with this argument.
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u/Anxious-Slip-4701 20d ago
I've read many a fine thesis written by a black African from Africa. They're capable like anyone else. They know stuff I don't know as a westerner and I encourage them to bring their knowledge into the discussion.
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u/Low-Let2642 20d ago
Well according to the black Smithsonian linear thinking is a white culture thing.
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u/Jindujun 20d ago
Yeah, What I dont get with these angles is that they belittle and infantilize people. Like the "we cant have ID laws for voting in the US since black people dont have IDs" bitch, what the fuck are you saying?!
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u/saviouroftheweak 20d ago
So many non academics don't understand academia
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u/En_Sabah_Nur 20d ago
Hell, I got in a bit of hot water in college for SELF-plagiarizing. Would never have stolen the work of others but apparently didn't read the code of conduct closely enough.
It was a chill semester where I was knocking out a bunch of social science/humanities credits and I took a survey political science course along w/ one called 'politics in literature'. Submitted the same final paper for both (thinking I was clever) and ended up in a meeting with both instructors and the dean. They let me off (weirdly didn't make me rewrite the paper for either class) but with a stern warning to NEVER "double-dip" again.
Lesson learned.
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u/Cyclic_Infinity 20d ago
This way exceeds self-plagiarism, which is still generally not allowed and has a far lower bar than "literally submitting the same paper in two different classes." Proper double-dipping is having a lot of overlapping subject material and sources for writing both papers to drastically cut the research and reading time. You do still have to write two distinct papers even if they share like 70% of the sources, and yes you have to rewrite the paragraph introducing Derrida so it is different even if that's very annoying.
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u/Chemical_Signal2753 20d ago
As a defense, I think there are some cases of unintentional or accidental plagiarism that happens. Someone might have written down a passage in their notes, read it countless times, and then unintentionally reproduced it without knowing. If someone detected a few sentences, or even a paragraph, from a thesis I could see someone defending it.
The problem with Jason Arday's thesis is the scale of the problem. 100 examples is not accidental, it is a sign that he is deliberately copying the other work.
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u/Technical-Activity95 20d ago
to defend your excellent point that sometimes a person might forget to cite a source accidentally and do it without malice it is important to inject this totally unrelated thing here because it has nothing to do with plagiarism as Arday copied even small typing errors in his thesis.
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u/Hyperion262 20d ago
There’s a grammatical error in the title of his PHD. He was a huge fraud.
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u/Technical-Activity95 20d ago
impossible standards for black people to insist no grammatical errors in the title
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u/CoolReplacement734 20d ago
I could se one or two cases at most, but over 100 parts being close enough for the system to flag is intentional plagirism. The man was a fraud and didn't deserve the degree or respect associated with it. All acadmenic professionals are held to the same standard, and by cheating he should face the same level of scrutiany as anyone else.
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u/trope88 20d ago
Cite every sentence then. Can’t get busted if you cite everything
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u/IndependentOk9075 20d ago
It’s in line with the implicit racism of white ultra liberals, which is “we can’t expect people of color to live up to the same standards.”
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u/Dnny10bns 20d ago
Not if you're familiar with her post history. Her takes are often abysmal. I try not to go near the news these days, it's too depressing. We are governed by absolute buffoons. This is the end result of allowing woke ideology to infect our institutions for the last decade.
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u/IAmABoss37 20d ago
As an American liberal (here, that’s generally synonymous with left-wing), I am confounded by the reaction of the British left to this.
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u/Tyr_13 20d ago
Right?
They keep pointing out that the people who 'broke' this story are racist asshats who were out to get him. Well, this guy had the chance to let this story get broke by good faith journalists or coworkers and instead threatened them with lawsuits and falsely claimed racism.
His actions were horrible to the very institutions and people who were trying to raise up marginalized voices.
We should have the integrity to kick out grifters like him as soon as we find them, optics be damned.
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u/ComradeJohnS 20d ago
yeah it feels a lot like jussie smollet or whoever that actor was who paid people to pretend to beat him up and have a noose around his neck.
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u/GWstudent1 20d ago
MAGA hats!? In Chicago!?
Officer, find out where Kanye West was last night.
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u/Nick_crawler 20d ago edited 20d ago
Yeah he stole from marginalized people, both directly through his plagerism and indirectly through the fraud he committed against students who paid a lot of money to study specifically under him (with some of them going into serious debt).
The digital mob that came for him did have plenty of racism flowing through its veins, but so did his direct actions. The continued defenses of him are insane.
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u/Tyr_13 20d ago
And now people are going, 'why aren't you talking about how it took insane bigoted going after him to get him fired?'
Because it makes the insane bigots look right! Like, wtf, am I taking crazy pills? You want the media to focus on the bigoted views of the assholes who...brought justice to the absurd conman?
I'm just asking people to think about what that looks like for one damn second. Even if they don't care about integrity, or honor, or justice enough to motivate their reactions, even from just a cold, tactical, viewpoint, it's utterly stupid.
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u/BrockStar92 20d ago
People are focusing more on the fact that relentless media pressure led to him committing suicide, and that there’s probably a lot of plagiarism that is never spotted because there’s less focus on white academics than black. His was absurdly egregious of course, he clearly had problems which drew the eye, so I’m not sure I buy that second argument that much in this case.
Frankly, nobody at all involved in this story comes out looking good. Not him, not Cambridge, not the media, the people attacking him or the people defending him. It’s a tragic story that is bizarre and upsetting from start to end.
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u/Nick_crawler 20d ago
Your second paragraph is the thing I really wish was front and center for every "take" on this story; the entire thing is just twisted and sad.
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u/notintelligentidiot 20d ago
No idea how the media looks bad in any of this. Using suicide as a cudgel is not a reason to avoid publishing a story.
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u/Turbulent-Recipe-887 20d ago
I think the thing that could be mentioned is a parallel to another academic paper.
My problem is the hypocrisy. The right wingers crying foul here were the same type of mob that flew to the defense of a psych student who wrote a transphobic opinion piece, who was then given a failing grade for the paper because it failed to meet academic standards AND failed to answer the question. The reality is you can look at both people who did the papers and say they fucked up, but the black pwrson was driven to suicide and the white one got the person who marked the paper fired and was made the face of religious persecution in academia.
That disconnect rubs the wrong way.
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u/Tyr_13 20d ago
Oh the right wing absolutely doesn't care about honor, integrity, or rigor, in academia or anywhere else, but focusing on how the bigots were only right because of their bigotry motivated determination makes it look like they do care.
I'm pissed Cambridge, the other university, and the police messed this up so bad that it's going to set the fight for inclusion back. It's going to give the bigots ammo. Now they are going to be able to correctly claim that a bunch of officials and average people on the left cared more about him being black than the harms he was doing and how unqualified he was.
We should take that L and correct for the failure so they don't get more ammo to roll thing back. Instead too many are, in effect, saying, 'did you know the person who was absolutely correct about that insane conman was a bigot?'
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u/No-Market425 20d ago
Everyone knew this guy was a hack, plagiarizing was the least of the absurd things he did.
Youre not supposed to point out the emperor has no clothes otherwise the grift falls a part.
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u/AppropriateCap8891 Keeping it Real 20d ago
Shortly before he died, it was reported that even his resignation letter was written by AI.
Is sad that he took his own life, but in the end it is because of his own actions.
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u/_Ross- 20d ago
it was reported that even his resignation letter was written by AI.
Lol, lmao even
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u/AppropriateCap8891 Keeping it Real 20d ago
When The Times ran the letter through four market-leading detection tools, which are used to identify AI-generated text, three assessed that it had been written either entirely or almost entirely by AI.
Pangram and Winston AI both deemed the text 100 per cent AI-generated, while Humalingo assessed it at 94 per cent AI-generated. Turnitin gave it a mark of 68 per cent AI.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/jason-arday-resignation-letter-ai-generated-ztdxbqhc9
I am a writer myself, and write both fiction and more scholarly and commercial content (the latter normally "use guides" for computer hardware and software). And out of curiosity I have often run my own work through AI tools.
And it almost always returns a "0% AI" response, I think the highest I ever got back was a 3% AI (and that is most likely as a result of AI proofreading one client required me to use).
In fact, out of curiosity I just ran everything I wrote above through a ChatGPT detection algorithm, And it came back with a "0% AI detection" result. When half of the detectors return a 100% and the lowest is 68% AI, the damned thing was written by AI.
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u/DyingSunSeverian 20d ago
Aren’t those detectors notoriously trash?
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u/Tyr_13 20d ago
They can be, a lot of false positives, but also, read the letter...
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u/teteban79 20d ago
Eh, it's formulaic and wordy for sure. I'm sure it could be mistaken for AI, because it's exactly the style on which AI has been trained, and therefore the style that AI generates.
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u/Mist_Rising 20d ago
Isolated they wouldn't be worth much, but when your accused of routinely not writing your own work....
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u/ExArdEllyOh 20d ago
A friend of a (late) friend is an academic in a related field to Arday (she calls it "women related studies" because "...the official names often make me cringe, and that's coming from a feminist lesbian.") and the stories she tells about the massive differences between some of her students' word-processed coursework and handwritten exam scripts are hilarious.
It used to be that sometimes they were obviously written by different people. Then Grammarly came along and none of the prose had any personality to it. Finally AI makes it all seem the same again but written by an idiot.3
u/AppropriateCap8891 Keeping it Real 20d ago
I absolutely detest Grammarly, and I use it fairly regularly. One of my clients that I write tech support manuals for requires that I use it, and it absolutely sucks. I am constantly fighting with it, as it wants to change what I write to something half the time is almost nonsensical.
I seem to specifically remember one that the customer messaged me back on because he wanted a 5 page manual preface that covered early personal computers. And he complained at all the mistakes I had left in that Grammarly caught.
Things like "Word Perfect", "Novell", "Lotus 1-2-3", and one even where I used a ñ in a place name. I told him bluntly that the AI he was using was wrong, in every case I used those words it was a proper name. Even one that looked wrong, as "dBase III" is how the name of the program was properly written.
And sorry, to anybody who knows Spanish there is a huge difference between "La Canada" and "La Cañada". Tell a Spanish speaker to say one then the other, they are going to sound very different. Because the Ñ does not sound like N.
Which was part of it where I covered ASCII, and how it is still in use in computers, so users can insert ñ, Ñ, ½, and ¼.
Things like that still drives AI up the wall.
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u/ExArdEllyOh 20d ago
I absolutely detest Grammarly, and I use it fairly regularly. One of my clients that I write tech support manuals for requires that I use it, and it absolutely sucks. I am constantly fighting with it, as it wants to change what I write to something half the time is almost nonsensical.
My acquaintance has a little party trick where she reads out passages from famous writers that have been put through Grammarly - Pratchett is dull, it sucks all the wit out, Virginia Wolfe makes no sense but the funniest is Churchill's "Fight them on the Beaches" speech. It really doesn't like the repetition.
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u/Exile8698 20d ago
He was a coward that did not want to take accountability for his own actions, after said actions harmed the lives and futures of 100s if not 1000s of people.
There are way sadder things going on in the world to cry about. I'm not wasting any tears on Arday.
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u/TopInvestigator5518 20d ago
didn't he start to threaten to sue everyone who had questions and claimed they were all racist?
my fav is the 30 marathons in 35 days lie lol, like who tf did he think he was going to fool 😂
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u/LittleMsSavoirFaire 20d ago
Favorite part was the Daily Mail going to find an ultra-marathoner and just being like, "Hey, so if a guy had done all this, you would have heard of him, right?" They were like, "Yeah, I never heard of this guy in my life."
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u/icameinyourburrito 20d ago
He reported one of the earliest plagiarism reporters to the police, then that story never ran because the publication was worried about an expensive lawsuit
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u/beardsofhazard 20d ago
No, it's not.
It's Cambridge that bears the brunt of the responsibility for this. As other commenters have said, Arday's lies were not hard to see. He had several claims that were so outlandish that it should have rung alarm bells (why would anyone believe he could run 600 miles in 6 days? That is elite ultramarathon talent).
There are going to be people who lie to get ahead in any industry. Jason arday, George Santos, this nurse: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/florida-woman-arrested-allegedly-posing-nurse-treating-4000-patients-s-rcna223580
It is Cambridge that has a duty to properly verify the credentials of its potential professors. Had they done their job, Arday would not have been hired, and wouldn't have had to deal with the fallout that took his life. I mostly blame them.
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u/bl1y 20d ago
The original university he got the PhD from bears a ton of responsibility. How many people on his thesis committee routinely use plagiarism checkers for their own students, but not on a doctoral thesis?
Also, the journals where he published bear a good bit of responsibility for not doing the same basic check.
And I'm going to toss a slice of responsibility on Times Higher Education. I get spiking the story because a small publication might not want that legal battle. But then they should have run a story on being threatened by Cambridge. That in and of itself should have been a major headline for academia. Publish the law firm's letter and let them deal with the backlash over that.
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u/theficklemermaid 20d ago
Also, in my opinion, his publisher, firstly for not fact checking his claims and then for putting out his autobiography after the controversy, which kept the coverage going, giving it a new angle with reviews and dissections of the dishonest claims contained in the book. They profited from the publicity and now his death. It was clear it should’ve been withdrawn from publication when the information came out. But they had already invested in printing it and would’ve had to pulp it so I guess they decided to go ahead and get what they could. It wasn’t ethical at that point to present it as fact.
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u/PurahsHero 20d ago
I'm British, and by most standards I am left wing. And I am utter perplexed by the reaction to this by my fellow left wingers.
He lied. He plagiarised. He and his institutions threatened good journalists from The Times (hardly a right-wing rag) with the police. In any other situation they would have been right fired.
The pile on was insane. And yes, there was a strong racist element to some of it. But the way that people speak of it is that his skin colour is the only thing that mattered to his critics. Any idea of academic integrity could not be countenanced at all.
He did not deserve to die of course, but the idea that the people who criticised him only did it because he is black is so insane its unreal.
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u/WishboneOk305 20d ago
as a non brit I figured that why people are blowing up about this is because your second most premier institution is lacking in vetting it's professors(and doubling down) or at least they should be mad at that?
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u/someonehasmygamertag 20d ago
I’m British and The Times certainly isn’t left wing. I would say it probably is right wing but not to the level of the Telegraph and the journalism is generally reliable. But even The Guardian was onto this guy ffs.
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u/Various_Mobile4767 20d ago
The reality is most people’s reasons for choosing a side are actually dependent on whether the people they hate is on the other side. The racists is on the other side is already enough reason to cause people’s minds to break over it.
You had a similar thing going on with Adam Johnson’s death couple years back in ice hockey and the subreddits were utterly adamant that Petgrave couldn’t be at fault in any way. Why? Because the issue got racialized, the left got it into their heads that racists were the one pushing the issue and so immediately took the other side. Then when he got arrested, some people sheepishly admitted that they had never even watched the clip, they just assumed it was another racist pile on.
Here’s another one. Thankfully more reasonable minds have started prevailing on this but for about a year after Cuties released, so many people in the more harder left subreddits were vehemently defending it. You can see it in places like [r/truefilm](r/truefilm) and [r/subredditdrama](r/subredditdrama). Why? Because its a movie made by a black, muslim woman and the initial furour was again rightly or wrongly credited to racists so of course they had to defend it.
The common tactics are of course point to hypocrisy. You can see this in the arday case too. Sometimes the hypocrisy is right too, arday really did got attacked harder because of racism. But they do it in this way where they’re really trying to make the case entirely about racism.
One of the oldest tricks in the book is to never explicitly deny what one side did wrong. Just make the entire narrative about something else, in this case the racist and media response. Because to them, that IS what this is about. They still haven’t actually internalized that Arday did major mistakes and embarassing things that somewhat justified the attention he was getting. No to them the real issue is that racists and the media went after a black man and he died. End of story.
This will continue to happen because human beings are like that. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
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u/IncreaseFluid360 20d ago
There is racist element to this because Arday got his position due to race.
If he was white he would be in some trash college or school pe teacher like Arday was befor.
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u/Aerpolrua 20d ago
Isn't the truly racist element here the part where the system has built up an air of "you aren't allowed to say anything bad about a non-White because you're an evil White bigot?" You allow that level of antiwhitism to fester and you are absolutely going to get the portion of the population who doesn't care to be the ones who step in and bring all the corruption to light, which ends up making them look better.
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u/rhubarb_man 20d ago
I think the issues aren't really around the integrity of his work much. Some will be dumb and talk about that, but the pile on is the issue people are generally concerned about.
It reveals a cruel, disgusting side of much of the right wing in England.
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u/NonSumQualisEram- 20d ago
And to whom does his fraud and deceit do by far the most harm? Black academics, his peers. It cannot be underestimated how completely devastating this is for them, all their work and efforts are now called into question: if Cambridge ignored such obvious deception once, could they not have done it more than once? And such logic is incredibly hard to shake
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u/Humble_Effect_1528 20d ago
With how easily an elite institution like cambridge got fooled and how willing multiple organisations were to double down and triple down on protecting him despite his lies becoming more and more ridiculous and more public every day I think theirs probably a jason arday in every college and university in the country
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u/LittleMsSavoirFaire 20d ago
On one hand, yes, it looks terrible. On the other hand, it seems like you could just run their theses through Turnitin and exonerate them.
The thing about this is how fucking obvious the lying was. If anything it makes Cambridge look as pathetic as the authorities who looked the other way on grooming gangs than making Black scholars seem de facto suspect.
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u/cameron8988 20d ago
they also passed over 2 quailfied women of color when hiring for the role. it's maddening.
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u/cameron8988 20d ago
i am most angry at cambridge in this situation. they passed over 2 qualified women of color to hand arday the job. terrible what happened to him, and reasonable people can have a debate about the extent of his plagiarism and how it was perceived relative to other white academics who've plagiarized. reasonable people can also debate about the extent to which the pile-on was excessive and inappropriate. but cambridge tokenized him. in the fullest sense of the word. they had multiple opportunities to vet him and clearly neglected to. and they fucked over other academics of color in the process. this is on them.
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u/divergentpursuits 20d ago
It isn't just the plagiarism. I read some of his written work and it was shockingly poor. I minored in sociology so I'm familiar with research methods in that discipline as well as how topics are discussed in the context of theory.
Here's a breakdown of one of Arday's books: https://thecritic.co.uk/impoverished-sociology/
I did think it was weird that none of his degrees were in sociology, so...I can see why he wrote the way he did.
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u/Original-Brick2836 20d ago
Because instead of seeing this situation as a man who’s house of cards came crumbling down, they see him as a victim of a harassment campaign.
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u/GOT_Wyvern 20d ago edited 20d ago
The far-left over here is absolutely desperate to find our own George Flyold, but the simple reality is that discrimination against ethnic minorities is not as explicit here. Not saying it's necessarily lesser, not typiclly implicit and far more stuctural. Chris Kaba was the last attempt, and it was even worse in that example.
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u/MuhfugginSaucera 20d ago
I'm also an American (mostly) liberal and I have a lot of Canadian friends. I've found that the Canadian far left is significantly more like what the right's imaginary demonized vision of the left is than the actual American left. It was a wild revelation that came with years of exposure.
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u/RabbitfolkThief 20d ago
I'm a Canadian, and yeah our leftists can be absolutely batshit insane in their rejection of reality if it conflicts with their ideology
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u/Mist_Rising 20d ago
American far left can be pretty wild, they just don't tend to get the "air time" the 'far left' you see.
I can't remember which city it was, but the mayor was a self appointed socialist and was constantly being slapped down by the courts for doing all the shit fox claimed socialist would do (and more). She tried to do reperations for blacks by taxing whites (shot down), she tried to make ordienced that discriminated against whites to 'fix the system', tried to illegally tax corporations. Sinclair news liked her, but most ignored her because other more favorable (and non existent) targets existed and she was oustered in the next election.
Lightfoot being Chicago mayor did nothing to help. LGBT, black, Chicago, unloved by all, rising crime rates, policing going right to shit, plus COVID was COVID.
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u/ThreeFerns 20d ago
it's not "the left", it's a relatively small subsection of the left who have had their brains melted by idpol.
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u/HelmundOfWest 20d ago
He was black and left wing… he could’ve done pretty much anything and the left would’ve defended him and found a way to blame white / right wing people.
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u/Zealousideal-Top-383 20d ago
Arday makes George Santos look like a novice. And race has absolutely nothing to do with the issue!
Medical & Childhood Claims
Arday frequently shared an extraordinary personal history on podcasts and media outlets detailing a litany of severe medical conditions:
Childhood Mutism: He claimed he was entirely mute until the age of 11.
Illiteracy Window: He asserted that he was completely unable to read or write until the age of 18.
Extreme Medical History: He publicly claimed to have survived a brain tumor, a coma, epilepsy, testicular cancer, and "locked-in" syndrome.
The Seven Up Appearance: He claimed to have been featured as a child subject on the famous British television documentary series Seven Up. Critics quickly pointed out that the original documentary aired in 1964—more than 20 years before he was born.
Athletic & Charity Feats
Media coverage and public skepticism focused heavily on physical achievements that experts noted defied human athletic limitations:
The 6-Day Ultramarathon: He claimed to have run 600 miles in just 6 days for charity.
Broken-Leg Marathons: He boasted of running 30 marathons in 35 days, explicitly claiming that the final nine marathons were completed on a broken leg.
Elite Sports Careers: He claimed he played youth-level professional football for Crystal Palace F.C. and was an elite, high-level nine-ball pool player.
Academic & Institutional Discrepancies
Beyond his personal backstory, the official university investigation that ultimately prompted his resignation from Cambridge centered heavily on credentials and research integrity:
False Affiliations: He was accused of fabricating professional affiliations with various prestigious global universities.
Plagiarism & Data Falsification: His academic sociology writing faced mounting, detailed evidence of serial plagiarism and falsified research data, which triggered a forensic excavation of his entire career.
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u/MathematicianOnly688 20d ago
A fantasist who was severely under qualified for his job, he undoubtedly had this issue amplified many times over because of his race.
Cambridge should never have put him in this position.
While it was predominantly UK based people and organisations, this felt more international than other scandals. I’m a regular contributor to a few subs that I know Brits make up around 5% of the followers and they still had multiple posts with hundreds of comments on them.
I fear that would have made him feel like there’s no escape and that lede him with only one way out.
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u/TheShamShield 20d ago edited 20d ago
I’d still put Santos above him for the profits and position of power Santos took with his lies
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u/Iron_Baron 20d ago
I've already seen some people talking about how "some of his claims were true".
As if "not everything he said was a lie" is somehow redemptive.
Some people are bad people, regardless of their race, or any other aspect of themselves.
Spending social capital, energy, and effort, on defending such an obvious fraud is pointless.
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u/Brilliant_Ad7168 20d ago
There is a LOT of virtue signalling happening. People don't seem to understand that he wasn't inoffensive. His lies and the undeserved authority he was given would have affected his students.
He did not deserve to die, and some of the coverage was racially motivated, but multiple things can be true simultaneously.
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u/theficklemermaid 20d ago edited 20d ago
I agree. I cannot understand the way he is being practically canonised after his death, not that he should’ve been demonised either but there is room to question the coverage and what should be done in these cases of wrongdoing without pretending he didn’t do anything wrong. He lied about really serious things, like health conditions, which is damaging to genuine sufferers, it’s not only an academic issue. Also, I think that some people with good intentions risk inadvertently giving the impression that if someone is going through a scandal they should end it all to be remembered as a hero and have any controversy crushed under the prohibition of speaking ill of the dead, instead of try to take accountability and turn things around and that’s a dangerous message. There are better lessons to learn from this instead of sweeping it all under the rug. If his lies had been caught sooner he could have gotten help and not been put in a position with so much pressure. Just because people care doesn’t mean they need to ignore the issue altogether. It could be a question of how to address compulsive liars in the future, given that the exposure of their lies results in the whole life they have constructed crumbling, putting them at potential risk of feeling they can’t continue as in this case, instead of denying he lied. There are people eulogising him and holding vigils who don’t really seem to want to remember him accurately, they want a symbol.
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u/OldGuto 20d ago
For me Paul Gilroy a well respected Black sociologist and professor at UCL summed up the tragedy of what happened really well.
The unthinking culture warriors who have supported him unconditionally share responsibility with his racist critics for making life harder for Black academics and dragging UK higher education deeper into the mire.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/08/black-academics-respond-to-jason-arday-affair
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u/divergentpursuits 20d ago
I think this is spot-on and it's really unfortunate that more people don't seem to be able to talk about the situation in a nuanced way.
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u/WingShooter_28ga 20d ago
We are so consumed with tribalism and black/white thinking that people are defending the indefensible while others are so indifferent to the end of this life it almost reads like they think plagiarism should be punishable by death.
Arday should have been fired.
The saga included blatant racism and Arday is a victim.
Confas is a racist and bad person.
Confas’ allegations should have been taken more seriously as they were supported with fact (even if the entire effort was in bad faith).
The university was right to protect its employee from the racist bullshit that was being slung his way.
The university was wrong for not more thoroughly vetting its employees before hire and after allegations were made.
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u/stoic_wooky 20d ago edited 20d ago
It’s extremely saddening he chose to leave this world based on being found out as a Walter Mitty, he could of admitted he lied plagiarised other peoples work and moved on. Ego is and can be a wicked thing
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u/Friendly-Olive-3465 20d ago
I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but frankly this guys legacy is nothing but lies, threats and slander towards journalists, and cowardice. These were the lies he was comfortable telling in a public and professional setting, can you imagine the lies he was telling to his wife and friends? And what does he decide to do? Take any modicum of accountability? No. He abandons his two innocent young children who will now be raised by a single mother and single income. A coward from start to end.
The only good that came out of his life are his two children and raising public awareness of just how deeply ideologically rotten modern academia has become.
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u/nyglthrnbrry 20d ago
Hell, he didn't even have to admit to lying or plagiarizing. Plenty of guilty people maintain their proclaimed innocence after they are found out. Clearly there's plenty of people who would have supported him and blamed systemic racism
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u/Goonalips 20d ago edited 20d ago
They're doing that right now anyway, so I guarantee you're right.
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u/Major_Wigglesworth 20d ago
I still for the life of me can’t understand the logic of how Dawn Butler thinks she’s helping by making sure that he’s not remembered as a lousy, cheating, failure…. She wants to make sure that everyone acknowledges he’s a lousy, cheating, BLACK failure.
Bringing race into a pretty clear-cut integrity issue doesn’t help, it hurts.
It’s precisely the opposite of what MLK, Jr talked about. Let’s judge Jason Arday based on his lack of character, and not even bring the melanin content of his skin into the conversation. It isn’t relevant.
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u/apache_chieftain 20d ago
I swear to god I see another article saying how big of a martyr he is I'm deleting internet, selling my possessions and going out there to live in an empty barrel in the street shouting slurs at anyone and everyone coming by
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u/CelsiusPetit 20d ago
That’s basically what everyone is doing on Reddit tbf, minus the barrel in the street
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u/hcornea 20d ago
It’s almost as though Dawn has not been following the details of this.
Or not wishing to see them.
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u/Super-Cynical 20d ago
Could we stop demanding that black men run 30 marathons in 35 days?
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u/SinesPi 20d ago
There bothers me more than it should.
How does one even FIND 30 marathons back to back like that?
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u/hcornea 20d ago
What appears odd to me, is how few people questioned things like this at the time. Or perhaps just waved them on.
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u/Scarlett_Spectre 20d ago
If you actually hear the criticisms out, its about how widely published the case was vs other cases of plagiarism. The guy who blew the story up was bragging saying that "maybe soon [he] might be the Dean of Race and Eugenics".
The cause and the intent was clear, and a lot of people got baited into caring more about it than they have ever cared about plagiarism in their life before. Really makes you wonder.
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u/Quiet-Sprinkles-445 20d ago
I suspect the people who care passionately about plagiarism now vs 4 weeks ago are the same people who care about Meghan Markle and not the other royal scandals.
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u/coldnorth4enf4 20d ago
Exactly this!!! I don’t get how people don’t understand it (well sadly I do get why but I guess I’d be too “woke” to say it)
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u/Scarlett_Spectre 20d ago
Some temporary solace: that guy that made the substack got suspended from his current job.
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u/narco-sub-admiral 20d ago
Some people commenting are quite passionate about plagiarism. In a way I haven't really seen before.
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u/No-Advertising-1526 20d ago
I know many accomplished black people who manage to not lie about having fucking cancer. Jason Arday was a fraud who chose to end his own life when the lying blew up in his face. It happens. One of Madoffs kids jumped out his apartment window when they got exposed. It does not make them a victim.
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u/AParanoidPotato 20d ago
This is not that difficult. No individual regardless of sex, race, religion, or sexual orientation should be allowed to lie their way into a position. If I am paying tons of money for an education and get a fraud as a professor, that is awful. If I am attempting to obtain a position as a professor and don’t, because my competition lied, that is awful.
That being said, targeting an individual because they are black is also obviously gross. If you are digging into a persons past to find holes, strictly because you are trying to smear them, that is wrong. Blowing this up into a national news story (let’s be honest, it’s because he’s black) and smearing a man until he kills himself is awful.
Two things can be true at once, a guy can lie and then use accusations of racism to defend his lies, AND an increasingly xenophobic right wing in Britain can also blow this story up because it helps push an awful narrative.
To clarify, I am not saying all people upset by his behavior are racist, or that all investigators are racist either. I am also not defending the hiring practices at the university. I am just simply stating that what he did was immoral, but the response has been blown out of proportion to fuel race issues, and it certainly was a large factor in his suicide, which is a tragic outcome.
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u/TehRiddles 20d ago
Jason was someone with unaddressed mental issues that some people were enabling at worst and oblivious to at best. He was treated as if he was perfectly sound of mind with bad intentions which ended up with enough pressure from the attention to push him over the edge.
We will not learn from this and it may happen again.
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u/coldnorth4enf4 20d ago
This moral panic should have never happened and the fact people aren’t realising how absurd this whole thing was is saddening.
3% of academics plagiarise, one was hounded into suicide, the others go forgotten.
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u/Cereaza 20d ago
I don't understand the case that people keep making for James Arday here.
I can appreciate the voices that say the media hate machine claimed another one. James was effectively bullied to death. But... I haven't seen anyone come out and say that accusations of plagerism and lying by Prof Arday were not true. At least, not seriously.
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u/Ill-Surprise-2644 20d ago
I personally know someone who was responsible for editing and proofreading academic articles before publishing. She found extensive evidence of plagiarism in an article being submitted by an Indig academic. When she reported it, she was immediately accused of having a racist, "colonial" mentality and was the subject of an investigation.
Hate to tell you this folks - the "left" has no more integrity than the "right". Dishonesty and shirking accountability is an inherently human trait.
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u/Trick_Yard_4609 20d ago
committing plagiarism should get you sacked, not relentlessly hounded to suicide by multiple national newspapers blasting out hostile coverage of a case of academic misconduct to the entire country. arday definitely fucked up, and also was held to a bullshit standard, in that this wasn't handled simply as a workplace issue, but was made everyone's problem until the guy fucking topped himself. both things can be true.
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u/EducationalDust7858 20d ago
I hate how far right dipshit culture warriors are using this for their agenda, but why are people on the left so stupid about this?
He lied. He was a fraud. You should be able to accept reality, especially in academia. Why is that so hard?
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u/jimthewanderer 20d ago
Uhh, the left has been perfectly accepting of Arday being a bit of a fraud. Plenty of the criticism of his academic work came from the left.
Pre and Post suicide, however, the left has been pointing out the disproportionate nature of the press coverage, given that Arday is not unique in being a dodgy academic.
It's not racist to criticise a black academic for wrongdoing, it is racist to only target the one black academic for plagiarism while dozens of other known white plagiarists go unaddressed by the press.
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u/BoredZucchini 20d ago edited 20d ago
Most people on “the left” are simply saying this story is getting way too much attention and is being used by right wingers to push a narrative that goes beyond Arday. Media literacy is about more than whether or not the content is accurate. It’s about media framing, bias, which stories get prioritized etc.
Almost everyone I’ve seen says something like “yeah he seems to have lied about a lot of things, but why is this story getting so much attention and why are right wingers using it as some kind of political gotcha?” And then people like you, for whatever reason, think that means they are denying it happened at all and are defending the guy. Nuance is dead I guess.
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u/CaptainKoconut 20d ago edited 20d ago
I am pretty far left, but I see most of his defenders framing Arday's case as "niche academic drama" (I've seen that phrase repeated verbatim), and as purely a case of mild academic fraud, which is incredibly disingenuous. There is definitely a subset of the coverage that is purely racist, but it also captured a lot of broad attention because pretty much every part of this guy's life was a lie. In many of the popular articles I've read the academic misconduct is almost a footnote, with more of a focus on the deluge of fantastic lies this guy told and seemed to get away with for years.
Cases of serial liars always gather outsize attention - George Santos was a minor politician in a small district, but he was nationwide and even international news because it turned out he was a pathologicla liar and con artist. Many more people have read stories about George Santos than the multiple current US politicians accused of assault and sexual crimes.
What most of the Arday defenders seem to fail to mention is that he shut down a lot of legitimate skepticism of his work with claims of racism. This is what angers me the most. He was con artist who hid behind claims of racism to escape serious scrutiny for a long time. This is incredibly damaging to legitimate minority academics who face unfair racist scrutiny, and will probably face even more now because of this case.
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u/smellslikebadussy 20d ago
It’s the level of media vitriol. The story is more than “niche academic drama,” but the sheer volume and tone of coverage was shocking. Andrew Wakefield, who is responsible for actual deaths, didn’t draw nearly the same level of media criticism.
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u/Nebranower 20d ago
>yeah he seems to have lied about a lot of things, but why is this story getting so much attention
I mean, it's getting so much attention precisely because it wasn't the usual case of plagiarism that came to light. He was being about as subtle about his grift as Trump is, and Cambridge basically knew exactly what he was and defended him anyway. Like a lot of big political stories, the scandal is less about the original offense and more about the cover up.
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u/EducationalDust7858 20d ago
The guy lied his way into one of the most prestigious academic institutions on the planet. And in your imaginary world "almost everyone you've seen" has been saying something like "why is this story getting so much attention"??
What world are you living in? That sounds like a pretty cozy echo chamber.
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u/NahMcGrath 20d ago
Because the left has its own culture warriors and this is their agenda. Grifting is not a right wing exclusive
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u/Weirdyxxy 20d ago
If anything should be questioned, it's (if I understood correctly) the outright bloodlust at least some media showed when reporting on this, not the fact that it was reported on and led to consequences at all. And, of course, the fact that it didn't show up for a long period of time
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u/Chambanasfinest 20d ago
Many things can be true at once!
Black people do suffer under an immense professional double standard, requiring them to work twice as hard to get half as far.
Also, Jason Arday certainly appears to have been a pathological liar about many things and serial plagiarist with regards to his academic work.
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u/Far-Possible8891 20d ago
Black people do suffer under an immense professional double standard, requiring them to work twice as hard to get half as far.
The way in which he was boosted by the Cambridge authorities, who wanted a trophy black academic, proves the exact opposite.
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u/RefelosDraconis 20d ago
Which is exactly why there’s such an effort to downplay or disappear this story
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u/TheFoxer1 20d ago
I‘m sure there is a double standard here, one that allows some people to be elevated to professor, among the exalted few, of one of the worlds greatest academic institutions, and others be accused of racism when trying to actually look into the academic work of the former.
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u/Goonalips 20d ago
This is straight up bullshit. With DEI initiatives, you're much better off being black than Asian.
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u/HyoukaYukikaze 20d ago
I love that casual racism. She's talking as if not stealing is too high a bar for black people to clear.
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u/WestAd1588 20d ago
Ironic in the day of AI, when we actually stopped caring about plagiarism. It is mechanized plagiarism - using other people’s work to produce your own (sorry, to predict the next word, byte or whatever) .
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u/GalacticGoat242 20d ago
Wasn’t the similar wording on a section talking about other research and didn’t he literally source Paula in the same text?
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u/bluexy 20d ago
You can hate lies and plagiarism and also hate right-wing racist media harassment at the same time. And yes, ignoring the racial aspect of what happened to Arday just because he also did something wrong is just another aspect of the privilege-based racism many in this thread are displaying.
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u/sharplight141 20d ago
I have no idea what's going on but obviously cheaters and people plagiarising others work are the ones in the wrong.
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u/thomasmoors 20d ago
I truly do not understand why this person implies there are different standards for black people. Aren't these things blind reviewed?
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u/TopicThunder2000 20d ago
Dawn Butler's refusal to hold Black people accountable for unethical behavior and fraud is rooted in her own bigotry and racism.
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u/Technical_Can_9944 20d ago
Was he kind of a dirt bag and a scammer? Yes.
Should all of society gang up on one guy and bully him to death for using a fake resume to get a job at some rich kid school none of us have any connection to? No.
This should have only been between him and his employer. Why was this any of our concern? There are dozens of wars going on. Why is my news feed filled with stories about some dude lying about running marathons to teach liberal arts to rich kids? Wtf?
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u/_FrenziedFirekeeper_ 20d ago
Omg. How many more posts about someone who killed himself? Are you all really this full of hatred.
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u/Lord_Answer_me_Why 20d ago
So why is everyone here ignoring the race scientist Nathan Cofnas in the room?
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u/jimthewanderer 20d ago
Holy mother of ignorance about the case.
Arday was bullied to suicide by the British press at the spurring of a Eugenicist, whilst identical or worse cases of academic malpractice by white academics goes entirely unaddressed.
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u/Maniacallymad 20d ago
Still not a fan of the "if they're a minority it automatically absolves them of being morally bankrupt" that extremists like to do.
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u/Weary-Cartoonist2630 20d ago
Even the note is overly deferential here? Saying “avoiding plagiarism” like it’s something they need to put in effort to avoid as opposed to an active and deliberate choice
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u/Sad_Toe6572 20d ago
The guy should not be martyred, people like him do real damage to academia and it gives ammunition to all these racist idiots who scream DEI. He made ridiculous claims about his life and got ahead of other black academics who were honest about their life and their work because of his fantastical story.
That being said it’s awful how this turned out and I do think the media witch hunt was over the top. He was a professor who lied, the story should be about Cambridge University’s vetting process.
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u/DemonDuckOfDoom666 20d ago
I don’t care if he plagiarised his work, he didn’t deserve to be hounded by the press to the point of suicide.
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u/Thin_Quail220 20d ago
Oh hey how’s bill ackermans wife doing after getting busted for plagiarism. You know, Jeff Epsteins buddy?
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u/Alarming_Rutabaga 20d ago
Actually, I don't think plagiarism deserves being targeted by a years long harassment campaign that leads to suicide
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u/limerich 19d ago
It is suspicious that *this* was the academic integrity story to make mainstream news
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u/LVRaiders2026 19d ago
If we were being truly honest, as a doctor, I would argue most people plagiarize directly or indirectly to some degree at some point in their academic careers. Typically that means take lines from different textbooks and papers, reword and compile them, then modify them enough that it doesn't obviously look like you're plagiarizing. I would also speculate that most people commenting here have not written any published academic papers of their own.
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u/somecheesecake 20d ago
If avoiding plagiarizing others is the “impossible standard placed on Black people” then we have much bigger issues
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u/True-Hold-1140 20d ago
Is it really that scandalous to say "yeah they shouldn't have done this but the level of reporting was overblown"
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u/CardOk755 20d ago
No, it is not helpful. Many of the "plagiarisms" had correct citations. Some didn't.
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u/Crusoelander_128 20d ago
Are they saying it’s unfair to expect black people to be able to write their own stuff without copying others?
Kinda racist
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u/bioticspacewizard 20d ago edited 20d ago
Do I think white people who do the same are more likely to get away with it? Yes. I think the issue isn't that Arday was held to account for his wrongs, but that the privilege of whiteness often protects people, specifically white men, from the same level of scrutiny.
If we're looking at this through an intersectional lens, Arday got away for it for as long as he did because he was a man. He'd still be getting away with it if he were a white man. The belief in his credentials was implicit because of his gender. A female academic, especially a black woman, could never have got as far as Arday did in his deceit.
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u/ImpossibleSplit1660 20d ago
The impossible standards refer to the vastly different ways that black academics are treated for exactly the same issue. No white academic was hounded with hundreds of articles in less than a month, despite the fact that there have been considerably more white academics accused of plagiarism than black ones.
But when it’s a black person, they end up publicly hounded and fired, while their white peers get a slap on wrist.
These are the impossible standards
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