Meme - Melissa Chen @MsMelChen: "The meltdown from the British left after Jason Arday is pure derangement. Even American leftists refuse to defend the plagiarist. They learned the hard way to keep their most unhinged woke ideas private after watching them deliver Trump 2.0
The bio of the person who shared it. Honestly thought it was a parody account
"Queer disabled gender-fluid vegan antiwork Marxist ecofeminist (any pronouns)""
"Where is the line Ill: Microfascism and Fascism. The billionaire-funded squadrisimo came for Jason Arday. We didn't do enough to stop it. Now he is dead.
SEAN JOHNSON ANDREWS
I don't know how many of you outside of academia have been following the horrific hounding of the Black British Cambridge Scholar Jason Arday, his resignation from his post at the university, or his tragic death - apparently by suicide - last week. But from"
Axel Folio, PhD, White Tears Distiller 🪁 on X - "Appreciation post for the folks staying on the necks of journalists media outlets, racist scholars & a moronic public that led to the death of Prof Arday. No stopping until his family gets justice. He deserved justice."
Donna-Louise on X - "Anyone else have issue with this post about “staying on the necks” of those who outed the lies of Jason Arday?! Wow. 😮 George Floyd, anyone?"
Donna-Louise on X - "The Rot in the Faculty at Cambridge
A professor whose claims collapsed under scrutiny. A colleague who called Western education a threat. A panel that prioritised ideology. And a leadership that treated questions as the problem. The first four pieces set out the claims, the evidence against them, the resignation, and the immediate defence that followed — the solidarity letter, the Guardian framing, the quiet withdrawal of signatures, and the insistence that scrutiny itself was the problem. This fifth piece is about what the institution that employed him knew, what it did, and what it is only now being forced to examine."
Sander Sassen on X (Translated from Dutch) - "You'd expect a university professor to be able to reason well. Is Tijl De Bie then the exception to the rule? He proclaims that anyone who defends Cofnas but dropped Pettit is the gravedigger of academic freedom. As if an academic who posts on X that it's time "to finish what the Palestinians started on October 7" and that Israel "must be destroyed once and for all" is actually doing the same thing as a researcher who publishes studies on heredity and IQ. Be honest for once, @TijlDeBie . Isn't that just a clumsy attempt to equate a pro-Palestine activist who incited students, contributed to an atmosphere of intimidation and violence on campus, and constantly targeted Israel and the Jews, with the man who dares to name uncomfortable data? That's not remotely comparable. Pettit crossed the boundaries of free speech by cheering on and encouraging violence and terror. Cofnas crossed an entirely different line: that of the woke ideology that reigns on campus. Of course you don't want to see that difference, because then you'd have to critically examine your own moral self-image—or worse, start questioning the woke ideology. One thing, however, is not up for debate, Tijl. You can't use academic freedom as a shield for those who express support for violence and terror. For those who call to "finish what began on October 7": a massacre of Jews. Anyone who does that isn't concerned with academic freedom at all, but with promoting an ideology. And those two things are not compatible. Clear now, Tijl?"
The Jason Arday vigil was everything psychologists warn against - spiked - "We have known for centuries that suicide can be contagious. After Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, reports emerged of young men imitating his suicidal hero. It became known as the Werther effect. The removal of the shame and secrecy that once surrounded suicide was welcome. But it created another problem: how do you talk openly and compassionately about suicide without encouraging contagion? That is why, back in 1989, suicidologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, public-health officials and journalists gathered in the United States to establish recommendations to reduce suicide contagion. Their conclusions were explicit. They warned against glorifying people who died by suicide and against presenting suicide as a means of accomplishing an end. They also cautioned against public eulogies and memorials that might give vulnerable people the impression that society was honouring the suicide, rather than mourning the death. For these reasons, the vigil for Jason Arday in Trafalgar Square last week should never have taken place. Stand Up To Racism organised this vigil in order to remember Arday and, presumably, to highlight the dangers of racism. But in doing so, it risked encouraging copycat suicides. Thousands of people gathered beneath Nelson’s Column for the Arday vigil. There were flowers, speeches and placards reading ‘Rest in Power Professor Jason Arday’. Speakers presented Arday not simply as a man whose death was desperately sad, but as a victim and even a martyr. A villain was identified – Nathan Cofnas, one of the researchers who drew attention to Arday’s plagiarism – and he was booed by the crowd.The irresponsibility of this is almost impossible to overstate. People who are suicidal fantasise about exactly this kind of overblown romanticisation of how they will be mourned, appreciated and valorised after death. They imagine everyone crying their eyes out at their funeral... In 1994, five years after the release of the media guidelines on suicide, Kurt Cobain killed himself. There were enormous fears about what would happen. Cobain was almost the perfect candidate for romanticisation – young, beautiful, troubled, world-famous and an icon of alienated youth. Yet the response was remarkably restrained. Researchers subsequently found that the expected rise in suicides did not occur, although calls to crisis lines increased substantially, especially in Seattle, where he died. It is believed that the unusually responsible media and public-health response may have helped. The response deliberately worked against making his suicide heroic. Twenty years later, when Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014, the media environment had changed. Social media had ridden roughshod over the old media guidelines. Researchers subsequently found 1,841 more suicides in the United States between August and December 2014 than their statistical model predicted, an increase of almost 10 per cent... Arday’s treatment was not unique. Others have come through similar public maulings. James Frey endured an onslaught after parts of his supposedly autobiographical A Million Little Pieces were exposed as invented. Rachel Dolezal and Belle Gibson became international objects of ridicule when their fabrications came to light. More recently, The Salt Path controversy had many of us glued to our screens as another inspirational life story was ripped apart... The response to Arday’s death was depressingly predictable. The academics went to war against the journalists. The journalists retaliated and turned on academia. The right blamed DEI while the left blamed the right... people choose suicide for a whole raft of reasons – typically, many different issues have converged. It is therefore not only dangerous but also inaccurate to reduce his death to a simple morality tale in which journalists criticised him and he died as a consequence... we should never turn his suicide into his apotheosis. We should never give suicidal people reason to believe that death is the moment when the world will finally love them."
Jason Arday and the Merciless Lie - "Arday laid claim to athletic as well as intellectual greatness, including the clearly ludicrous alleged feat of running six hundred miles in six days. Yet he wasn’t without athletic ability. Schoolmates remember him as a talented football goalkeeper. Before setting his sights on higher education, he worked as a PE teacher. What might his future have been, had he been content with the little life he was given? What fulfillment might he have found, had he believed that even our modest talents bear a divine stamp, and that we can offer them up to the Creator who delights over us as we are, not as we imagine ourselves in our daydreams?"
What Ghent University Just Taught Every Academic Whistleblower - "Ghent is instead suspending Cofnas because his expressed public views are misaligned with the university’s values and therefore “creates a reputational risk”. This is not how academic freedom should work. At this point, the timeline of events over the past month is clear... The statement by Ghent on their suspension of Cofnas is bizarre for anyone who cares about academic freedom. It’s framed as a statement on the university’s values rather than anything specific to Cofnas’ writings or any alleged misconduct that would warrant a disciplinary investigation. The statement then goes on to specify that Ghent University’s view of academic freedom is predicated on specific values... It is true that academic freedom is not unlimited. Yet, it should alarm every academic who holds any potentially contentious view on any subject that a university such as Ghent is openly declaring that academic freedom is only protected insofar as one’s publicly expressed values are aligned with the university’s. Ghent is suspending Cofnas because they don’t like his views. In a leaked letter that appeared online the day after the public statement, university officials detail the reasons for his suspension by citing (among many disputable things) “offenses committed in private life” that argue his views on race and intelligence “may be interpreted” as racism, which is against the university’s values. This is despite Cofnas being hired in the spring with years of published writing on group differences in intelligence. His hiring at Ghent this past spring drew a petition with more than 2,000 signatures within weeks (with a new petition now appearing for him to be dismissed, along with a counter letter to keep him). Ghent defended the hire anyway, with Ghent rector Petra De Sutter (now ironically) stating at the time that “Dissenting opinions are allowed to exist and debate must take place at a university. It is primarily up to experts and fellow researchers to test ideas, criticise them and, where necessary, contradict them.” The only thing that has changed since March is that Cofnas’s views are now too big a liability to the university’s reputation for them to defend, and therefore now he must go. Now with Ghent’s decision to suspend Cofnas, academia should be alert to the precedent such an event leaves for scholars who criticize the work of other scholars. First, if you express views that are unpopular, could cause “tension,” or “may be interpreted” in any type of way, keep your mouth shut. Second, such unpopular views are subject to the heckler’s veto via public pressure campaigns, so again, keep your mouth shut. The suspension of Cofnas only serves to entrench academic self-censorship and erodes trust in the academy’s ability to reform itself. If academics cannot trust that alleging academic misconduct about another scholar won’t cost them their job, then who is going to risk sticking their neck out to criticize scholarship when warranted? Criticism of scholarship comes with the job, and in today’s environment, that is certainly going to play out online, especially when the scholar being criticised is a publicly lauded academic at a nation’s top university. To academics who think public criticism of a lauded scholar at a prestigious university is too harsh, consider how this situation could have played out differently. Had the original Times Higher Education story run, backed by an even more extensive dossier of alleged plagiarism, the scandal would likely have broken anyway, just under a different byline. Outlets like Retraction Watch exist specifically to call out academic misconduct — as they should. Scholars, no matter their background, personal characteristics, or public standing, are subject to scholarly standards and peer criticism. That is what happened here: at root, this is a case of one scholar exposing another’s misconduct. Academics need to police our own scholarship and take the lead on intentional reform to build back public trust in scholarship. And if we don’t, we’re handing the reins over to legislators and politicians eager to regulate campuses themselves. For the scholarly record and the institutions that safeguard it to be trustworthy, they must be seen as places that uphold scholarly standards to generate knowledge that can be trusted."
‘Frankly, He Has Been Killed’: Angry Scholars From UK’s Top Academics’ Union Blame Jason Arday’s Death on Racist Mob, as ‘Race Realist’ Who Ignited the Firestorm Is Suspended - "As anger grows among the left over the apparent suicide last week of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, an influential band of activists within Great Britain’s largest academics’ union is moving to fuel that raw sentiment into action. These academics—from the University and College Union—want to shield other black academics from scrutiny from what they view as a racist, right-wing conspiracy... the UCU Solidarity Movement, an activist caucus within the academics’ union, held a virtual organizing meeting... the angry scholars repeatedly denounced the attacks on Arday as the product of a racist, right-wing mob seeking to drive blacks out of the academy. The meeting’s organizer, Sean Wallis, a principal research fellow in English at University College London, or UCL, suggested time was of the essence. He already knew, he said, of one black British academic facing scrutiny for alleged plagiarism. The central purposes of the meeting were to draft a public statement on the Arday tragedy and develop a toolkit to help the union respond if black academics are targeted with attacks on their credibility. Wallis further proposed a UCU hotline for members "who have been threatened."... "I think there is a campaign going on" against black academics in Britain. He said there is a conspiracy to "target black colleagues because politically that is what they want to do. They want to hound out our black brothers and sisters." He further said, "I am convinced that’s already happening"—in Britain—"because I’ve seen it with my own eyes." "Jason is not the only person who is being targeted right now," Wallis said, claiming that a purported Substacker had put an unnamed academic’s thesis through plagiarism-detection software. This, Wallis said, evidently "found some overlap with some other PhD’s, which had been written a few years previously."... attendees appeared primed to regard scrutiny of black academics as illegitimate almost by default. Wallis said the group challenges racism "even when it’s disguised as concern for standards."... Eva Hartmann, a university associate professor in Cambridge’s education department, where Arday served until resigning August 5, smiled and gave a thumbs up in response... Lyes Kahouadji, a chemical engineering researcher at Imperial College London, who is non-white and whom Wallis appointed to chair the meeting, later replied to Wallis that "it’s really important what you mentioned about textual overlap and plagiarism." Kahouadji insisted that plagiarism is "completely different, and academics are supposed to come forward and say, ‘No, this is not plagiarism.’" Regarding Arday, he continued: "It’s really a shame that people who are supposed to protect from this plagiarism fantasy didn’t speak up." All of the academic institutions where Wallis, Kahouadji, and Hartmann work, as well as Liverpool John Moores University, from which Arday received his Ph.D., clearly and explicitly define plagiarism as including the lifting of text without clear attribution... Arday himself did not dispute that he had lifted text, blaming his autism, but attributed the plagiarism accusations to a cynical racist plot against black academics... the meeting’s attendees appeared to overlook the fact that Arday has more recently been credibly accused of plagiarism and academic fraud involving multiple academic papers—written at multiple institutions—in addition to his thesis... [it is] alleged he stole another academic’s research and fabricated data... extra-academic issues were never mentioned at the UCU meeting. Jeffrey Vernon, a principal teaching fellow in postgraduate medicine at Imperial College, was an outlier in his skepticism of Liverpool John Moores’s findings. He wrote in the meeting’s chat that it was "clear" that the university "did not supervise him properly." He said, "They were anxious to find ‘no problem’ and move on." No one responded to this counterpoint... "The agenda of far-right ideologues who attacked Jason Arday while openly boasting that their goal is to create a ‘meritocracy’ in Higher Education by chasing Black scholars out of academia should be confronted, challenged and exposed, instead it was amplified by the right wing and liberal press." The academic-activists’ statement also points to the "common struggle against institutional racism and management failure in Cambridge and beyond." It commits the group to defending "colleagues and students from racist harassment and victimization and building an anti-racist movement on our campuses and in the streets." Vernon was also among a minority who noted that not all media coverage was so deserving of fierce condemnation. Pointing to Retraction Watch, which was one of the first to publish an article on Jason Arday after Cofnas last month, Vernon wrote in the chat, "I don’t think that can be called right wing, non-academic, or unscientific." He continued, "I don’t want us to go overboard on the ‘right wing racist’ argument." At least one of the meeting’s attendees envisioned a counteroffensive against James Orr, who is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge and the head of policy for Reform UK. Orr has been accused of racism, including for expressing negative attitudes toward Palestinians. Talat Ahmed, a senior lecturer in South Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, said if she were a student at Cambridge, she would want "a mass student insurgent campaign to get rid of that racist fucker from my institution." Decrying those who endorse race science in particular, Wallis compared them to climate denialists and said of scholarship that validates such a theory: "Academic freedom is not the freedom to publish garbage." The meeting’s attendees also argued that Arday was egregiously held to a higher standard because of his race. Megan Povey, a professor of food physics at the University of Leeds, said that, by comparison, "you see these white academics getting away with murder, literally." Povey, who is transgender, further drew a parallel to the darkening climate surrounding trans issues in Britain. "You know the right is going for trans because it’s a wedge issue," Povey said. "They’re trying to pull back gains that have been made over the years by Black Lives Matter and so on." Petra De Sutter, the Ghent rector who, according to Cofnas, suspended him, is also transgender. De Sutter was also found to have drafted an inaugural address with the aid of generative AI, which inserted multiple "hallucinated" quotes, the Brussels Times reported in January. In the speech, De Sutter had warned to "not blindly trust" AI. The activist-academic group was especially angry at journalists. Hartmann called for academia to assert its authority and preempt reporters’ efforts to use their own "crude text comparison" to examine plagiarism accusations (as Cofnas and multiple news outlets did with Arday’s texts). Wallis noted that one member "rightly said" in the chat that journalists themselves plagiarize. "They all do," Wallis said emphatically. "They all—yes!" Kahouadji replied. Sardonically quoting reporters, Wallis said, "It’s kind of like, ‘How dare you do plagiarism? That’s our thing!’" The Free Beacon could find no examples of accusations, credible or otherwise, of plagiarism levied against any of 34 identified journalists who covered the story in Britain."
Why Are Academics Falsely Claiming Plagiarism Can’t Be the ‘Mere Overlap Of Sentences’ In the Wake of Jason Arday’s Death? - "When I was in the 7th grade in 1991, my terrific social studies teacher, Mr. Corkran, taught us what plagiarism was and why it was to be avoided at all costs. And importantly, he taught us strategies—which I still use today—for how to avoid even inadvertently plagiarizing, such as taking notes from another text only in paraphrase. That way you don’t later forget that what you jotted down was someone else’s verbatim text. I wish everybody had had Mr. Corkran as a teacher. It would’ve saved, perhaps, left-wing pundit Ross Barkan from getting fired from New York magazine after they found 67 columns of his had citation problems, and also from having Penguin announce this week, per the Washington Post, it was shelving his upcoming book about his longtime friend Zohran Mamdani. When Mr. Barkan was first found out in the spring, he tried to make out like it didn’t matter if he had clearly lifted verbatim passages from another writer absent quotation marks around the text, so long, he said, as he cited them explicitly or hyperlinked to them. Mr. Corkran would tell him that is not a loophole in the plagiarism rules! The Jason Arday affair is much more complicated and ethically fraught, given, in part, that I find it hard to believe any of the sweeping overlap in the text between his work and other scholars’ papers was ever inadvertent—Liverpool John Moores University’s baffling decision to clear him of plagiarism charges on his 2015 PhD thesis notwithstanding... it seems that multiple academics in good standing have missed the message that plagiarism, by definition, can include, absent the stealing of ideas, the mere lifting of someone else’s words if that verbatim text is not put within quotation marks. Take Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto... You know who disagrees with Dr. Stanley? His employer, the University of Toronto. The university defines plagiarism in its Code of Behavior for Academic Matters like this... I obtained a video recording of a fraught and impassioned planning meeting, held Tuesday, of the UCU Solidarity Movement—an activist collective of the University and College Union, the largest higher-education union in Britain—in which two professors claimed a similarly narrow definition of plagiarism that excluded the mere overlap of text. And yet none of the other dozens of academics on this Zoom meeting objected to this narrow definition. Instead, one Cambridge professor seemed delighted that they were at least moving the plagiarism conversation away from textual overlap and recentering it on the stealing of ideas. (Dr. Arday stood credibly accused of stealing both the words and the research of other academics, mind you, per a devastating investigation by The Times. No one in the meeting specifically acknowledged that his accused offenses were this broad in scale.)... Sean Wallis, who organized the meeting, is a principal research fellow in the University College London’s English department, the UCL branch secretary of the UCU, and sits on the union’s national executive committee. So he is no slouch. The most astonishing single thing Dr. Wallis said about plagiarism during Tuesday’s planning meeting was: “Plagiarism is not using the same phrase that somebody else has used in a previous article.”"
Academic Activists Said The Telegraph and The Times Led a ‘Lynch Mob’ Against Jason Arday—Papers They Said They Don’t Read - "The central thrust of the meeting was that these academics, who were predominantly white, but who also included a substantial cohort of South Asians, was that there was a racist right-wing conspiracy to hound black academics out of their jobs in the United Kingdom. This notion was short on specifics. The only person they clearly identified as behind this conspiracy was Nathan Cofnas... Sean Wallis, a principal research fellow in English at University College London, said at the meeting that the goal in this conspiracy was to make cynical and bad-faith use plagiarism-detection software. He said that “it’s leveraging existing algorithmic tools, and of course you could do it in a targeted way. You target black colleagues because politically that is what they want to do. They want to hound out our black brothers and sisters, and I think we have to recognize the nature of what’s going on right now.” Led by Wallis, who is a major UCU organizer (and who, on Oct. 7, 2023, retweeted an approving post about the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023), the group sought to lay the groundwork for an action plan that could leap to the defense of any black academics who were targeted in Britain with accusations of academic misconduct... Lyes Kahouadji, a chemical engineering researcher at Imperial College London, was among those at the meeting who falsely asserted that Arday had been cleared of all accusations of plagiarism. Liverpool John Moores University did investigate Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis and, despite substantial textual overlap between the thesis and the work of another scholar, they cleared him of the charges in March. However, an Aug. 5 investigation in The Times found considerable evidence that Arday had committed plagiarism and data theft in multiple papers he published while at multiple other universities. The members of the UCU meeting seemed overwhelmingly unaware of this. Eva Hartmann, a university associate professor in Cambridge’s education department, where Arday held his prestigious professorship, was especially eager to hear Wallis shift the focus of the definition plagiarism away from textual overlap and toward the stealing of ideas (as if this would exonerate Arday, who was accused of that too). She gave Wallis an enthusiastic thumbs up when he did that... Wallis was especially keen to lambast right-leaning Telegraph and the more centrist Times as culpable of targeting Arday with harassing coverage. But he admitted that he did not read either publication. This could perhaps explain why he and others in the meeting seemed unaware of the accusations against Arday that were more serious than mere textual overlap. Wallis wondered aloud why in the world the British press even considered Arday a news story. It was one only because they said so, he said."
Wesley Yang on X - "Some media organs (NYT and Atlantic) are fitfully trying to extricate themselves from the morass of extreme wokeness, while some of the dominant peer-reviewed scientific publications of the Western world have no capacity to self-correct. A civilizational danger that nothing is contesting."
BH on X - "Arday wasn't a physician, his fabrications and plagiarism had nothing to do with the medical system or medicine, so what is NEJM even doing?"
Genetics Realist on X - "This is the gender-medicine pattern with different stationery. York/Cass reviewed 50 puberty-blocker studies and found one high-quality paper. No reliable conclusion on dysphoria, mental health, or cognition. Bone and height risks were the clearer signal. Meanwhile the Endocrine Society and WPATH guidelines cited each other and treated dissent as harm. That is not peer review. It is a closed loop. A journal that will print “I don’t care whether the allegations were true” has already left the scientific method. Cass is what self-correction looks like. Those specialty societies are what capture looks like."
Trust the "Science" that doesn't care what is true or not
