Meme - Basil the Great @BasilTheGreat: "Spare me the faux outrage. If Jason Arday had been an anti-immigration right wing activist who said the trans cult was a lie Owen would have hounded him online personally and not lost a wink of sleep over his health. You're one of the biggest c*nts on the internet Jones"
Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno: "Jason Arday has been found dead. The obsessive media focus on this one man - as if it was one of the biggest scandals in history - was disproportionate beyond belief. Push notifications, top headlines, constant investigations. And now he is dead."
The Truths That Failed Jason Arday - The Atlantic - "Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir... What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person... like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him. Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”... I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles... It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further.
Copes include Cofnas is lying, Cofnas is responsible (apparently he forced Arday to plagiarise; also this ignores how Martyn Hammersley and David Harris found the same thing), he was cleared of plagiarism multiple times (if "experts" say the sky is green, it is), plagiarism is not worthy of execution (we should ask Arday why he executed himself, then), he already got cleared of plagiarism (weird how Cambridge said it was taking another look), that you haven't seen his PhD thesis so you can't comment (it's available online though), that he had selective mutism so he wasn't lying (Arday claimed he was totally mute though), that others plagiarised too and nothing happened to them so this is proof of racism (even pretending they all plagiarised as much and they all had as much academic merit as him, this ignores his other lies including university affiliations), everyone lies so his lies don't matter (apparently everyone lies as much as him) and that the media scrutiny was disproportionate (without the media scrutiny the establishment would've covered it up as they tried to for so long).
The author tries to impugn critics by accusing them of racism, then claims Arday didn't get a second chance (when he had many). He also doesn't mention Arday sending the police and lawyers after critics, and making false formal complaints of racism (as per the NYT)
Daniel Friedman on X - "Arday could not admit to being a plagiarist and a fabulist because he had taken a $1.4 million advance from Simon & Schuster to write a memoir of his true story. If he admitted it was all lies, he’d have to give the money back. The week he killed himself, it was discovered that numerous anecdotes in the memoir were lifted from the TV show “Spartacus: Blood and Sand.”"
Bo 🏴 🇬🇧 🇵🇱 on X - "Absolutely mercenary decision to release the book once Arday had been exposed. I note that the family's statement (still repeating the misinformation and relentless scrutiny lines) was issued via Simon and Schuster. His children may benefit from the profits but this traps them in their father's lies too. (Of course there are also the much broader issues about Cambridge and the cult of DEI)."
Richard Hanania on X - "We've seen grifters in academia before. But Arday was on another level. Some did bad research, others plagerized or lied about their lives. He dominated in every category. He's the Wayne Gretzky of academic conmen. May he be an inspiration for reform."
Sadly, his suicide just means the establishment will be able to make reform even less likely
Jason Arday and the Scourge of Professional Minority Academics - "Beware always of false dichotomies. Arday was both “a culture war pawn” (and quite a willing one) and a “fucking human being.” In fact there are a lot of fucking human beings around, billions of them, so it’s hard to know how that changes anything. Suicides are solely responsible for their own deaths and do not become special put-upon victims the moment they take their own lives. That is an important line to hold, and not only because some of what follows will be critical of Arday: Nobody should be constructing suicide as a means of farming sympathy or of striking back at one’s critics, because suicide in most cases is a profoundly anti-social and destructive answer to one’s problems. Particularly for a father of two children, as Arday was, killing oneself represents a seriously selfish and narcissistic act. I was a professor for many years in the United States, and I’ve had abundant experience with diversity hires and their enablers... I doubt that very many people will be surprised to discover that (predominantly white) antiracist academics and (predominantly white) antiracist administrators feel compelled to fill their institutions with strange effete diversity tokens who tell lies about themselves that are microcosms of the bigger lies they collaborate to tell about Western society and culture."
University of Cambridge whistleblower who reported alleged bullying wins employment tribunal - "A University of Cambridge whistleblower who alleged bullying of female staff inside the university’s Institute of Astronomy has won a tribunal against his employer... After the tribunal in Bury St Edmunds, Employment Judge Graham found serious failures in the university’s handling of complaints by Evans, with 11 of 14 alleged detriments upheld against the university or individual respondents including the vice-chancellor. The investigation into Evans was found to be “contrary to natural justice”. The tribunal ruled it was “baseless (as nothing had been provided to support it) and it had been filed in retaliation … and was therefore likely malicious and vexatious”. “By contrast, a number of the claimant’s detailed concerns or complaints were dismissed out of hand without a proper process,” it said. The tribunal also concluded that senior figures at Cambridge relied on correspondence and processes prepared for them by HR or administrators. The vice-chancellor attended the tribunal in person in June and claimed that she had drafted a response to Evans “with the assistance of” the then university registrary, Emma Rampton. The tribunal rejected Prof Deborah Prentice’s evidence. “We find that it was written solely by Ms Rampton and then presented to the vice-chancellor as a fait accompli. Professor Prentice had very little to do with it, save for putting her name to it.” “Ghostwriting was a consistent and a concerning theme throughout this matter,” the tribunal concluded. “In one example the person being complained about drafted the response to the claimant rejecting his complaints against them.” Evans, who last year stood to be the University of Cambridge’s chancellor on an anti-bullying manifesto, has said the tribunal judgment raised questions about the vice-chancellor’s fitness for office. “Never rains but it pours for Cambridge,” he said. “Cambridge University has lost the whistleblowing tribunal, with vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice among the respondents found to have retaliated against a whistleblower. That comes on top of serious concerns about her leadership during the Jason Arday crisis. Taken together, these events raise a fundamental question: is Deborah Prentice actually in control of the university she is supposed to lead?”"
Clearly, Prentice should've done more to protect Arday and her announcement of an independent review into his hiring is credible
Jason Arday scandal turns spotlight on publishers - "Sources inside the publishing industry said that they were not surprised publishers were going ahead with the memoir even while claims Arday has made about his life are being questioned. “There is so much that’s taken on trust when you write a memoir,” said Catherine Taylor, whose 2023 memoir about her childhood, The Stirrings, won the TLS Ackerley prize for autobiography. “Nothing that I put there about my own personal experience was ever fact-checked.” The only time a publisher will query a memoir, according to Taylor, is when material may be libellous or inflammatory. If a book doesn’t raise any red flags to a lawyer, she said, then no investigation will be done. A literary scout, speaking anonymously to protect professional relationships, agreed that the publishers didn’t “particularly care whether the details of the memoir are true or not as long as the margins of it are good and it’s a conversation piece”... Roger Kreuz, an academic who researches plagiarism, said accusations like those made against Arday are a lot more common in academia than many realise. “It’s almost never publicised because nobody benefits from having it publicised,” he said. What has changed is that accusations of plagiarism are now becoming a “political weapon”, he said, citing the resignation of Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, in 2024. Plagiarism is the “mortal sin” of academia, he said. “Maybe you’re an unfaithful spouse. Maybe you kick your dog. People can overlook those things, but when it comes to plagiarism, that’s the one line you can’t cross,” he said. One senior book editor who spoke on the condition of anonymity suspected that publishers overlooked due diligence on Arday’s memoir because he was a “star”. “He’s a Black professor at Cambridge. He’s gorgeous-looking. He’s young. It’s the full package,” they said. Publishing lists are so “pale and stale” that the editor suspected “everyone just went, oh brilliant, this solves the problem because we don’t have enough Black authors.” The publishing industry, they said, was unwilling to invest in the structural issues that led to this lack of diversity, but just hoped for “these miracle people to come along… He’s a PR dream. Well, he was.”"
With Gay and Arday, if the institutions had not tried to cover up the plagiarism, the consequences wouldn't have been so severe. As is often the case, it's not the lie that gets you, but the coverup.
This also suggests that when academia proclaims that plagiarism is a mortal sin, they don't really believe what they say
Jason Arday claimed he was paid ‘1.4 million’ by publisher for memoir - "Arday said Simon & Schuster had offered 1.4m for the book in a “pre-empt”, a type of deal in which a publisher is so keen on a book they put in a high offer to take it off the table before it can go to auction. Arday did not specify whether the 1.4m figure was in pound sterling or US dollars. Simon & Schuster did not respond to a request to comment on the sum. While it is a high figure, publishing sources said it would be plausible if Simon & Schuster US and UK teamed up to buy the book and sought worldwide rights – meaning they could sell the book into other regions as well as the UK and US. After the deal was signed, it was rumoured to be a seven-figure sum. One senior publisher said it was an utterly mad number, but that “madness sometimes happens”, so it was conceivable. They said a book such as Arday’s would normally be expected to sell about 5,000 copies, so with £2 of royalty per copy, that equates to an advance of £10,000, not 1.4 million dollars or pounds... Pulling the book at this point would be a “pretty massive decision”, one publisher said, if only for logistical reasons: Simon & Schuster has “probably printed the book already, probably paid the author, and may have started shipping the book all over the world”, so “actively withdrawing the book now is both extremely difficult and quite expensive”. In a statement before Arday’s resignation, Simon & Schuster said: “We have worked closely with Professor Jason Arday on Great and Unfortunate Things since acquiring it and can speak to the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication. “Great and Unfortunate Things is Arday’s memoir of overcoming remarkable challenges and responding to adversity with resilience. It is told through his own recollections and those of the people closest to him.” Arday “worked closely with his co-writer, as well as our editorial and legal teams, to carefully research, write and corroborate the narrative”, they added. The book is co-written by Eve Claxton. In comments reported by the Bookseller in April, Kris Doyle, the nonfiction publisher at Simon & Schuster UK, said: “I can promise you’ve never read a story like this – even the viral news headlines don’t do it justice.”... When asked to share information about the book’s fact-checking process, Simon & Schuster said: “We do not comment on our editorial processes.” In the acknowledgements section of the book, Arday credits Iman M’Fah-Traoré with checking the book. The publisher did not respond when asked whether it had contracted Traoré rather than Arday hiring her independently... The problem facing Simon & Schuster has echoes of that faced by Penguin following the infamous Salt Path scandal, where Raynor and Moth Winn were accused of fabricating large chunks of their story... Signing a contract for a memoir, writers promise that they have the “right to tell the story and that it’s true”, one British publisher said. Any publishing house was “relying on that warranty”."
Looks like Simon & Schuster doesn't mind having its reputation destroyed too
Weird how racism is definitely not a factor behind people questioning the Salth Path authors
Jason Arday's Fairy Tale Is Over - The Atlantic (aka "Icarus in the Faculty Lounge") - "Great and Unfortunate Things, which Arday co-wrote with Eve Claxton, is still scheduled to come out next week from Simon & Schuster. The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent. But the book is also, in a way, very honest and quite telling: It provides a vivid portrait of a man who was always manifestly ill-equipped for academia yet found a way to reach its upper levels. This is not someone else’s cruel assessment of Arday’s tragic and improbable career. It’s his own... Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.)... As one might expect, his thesis defense did not go smoothly. One examiner was suspicious of his work: “I am struggling to see that there is any original contribution here,” she said, according to the book"... Is that really true? I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. Even asking that question places me on the wrong side of Arday’s moral ledger. Again and again, the book acknowledges his “impossible” success, yet his indignation at anyone who ever doubted him remains a running theme throughout the book. These are Arday’s villains—the Ivan Dragos and the Clubber Langs of academia, who dared to wonder whether his work was really so original, or questioned whether he did it on his own. He swallowed his “feelings of offense,” he says in reference to one lecturer who insisted on drilling him about subject material in person, “but I have never forgotten them.” When you succeed against pretty much insurmountable odds,” Arday writes in the book, “it weirdly makes people question your credibility.” Is it weird? I don’t think it’s weird. When you keep succeeding against insurmountable odds, the facts of your surmounting will be bound to get a second look. Arday’s record of public statements includes plenty that would seem to be exaggerated, if not completely false... the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir. Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome. “As I will describe to readers in the book,” Arday wrote in the proposal, “these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.” The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.”... Then there is the prophecy—the revelation Arday was given in Brazil, that he would suffer greatly and also do great things. According to the proposal, this occurred in 2005, not 2006, and the message came not from a local aid worker in her 30s but from “an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures.” (Later in the proposal, he calls this person a “shaman woman.”)... By his own account, Arday rose to fame as a scholar and a writer despite staggering limitations; he became an academic who can read only a single page of academic text an hour and cannot comprehend what is happening at work 90 percent of the time... There’s a moment near the end of Great and Unfortunate Things when Arday’s confidence begins to waver. He’s filling out his application for the professorship at Cambridge, and just then, as he draws to the brink of destiny, doubts begin to fill his mind. “What if I have completely overestimated my capabilities?” he writes. “What if my story ends up being a cautionary tale like Icarus about flying too close to the sun?” What if."
If what Arday said at one point contradicts what he said at another point, clearly the media is racist and evil for pointing out the inconsistency. But some left wingers will still claim there's no proof he lied
Prof Ian Pace on X - "Some people have said that everything to do with Arday was just about plagiarism allegations. But that is to remove from the equation a highly publicised memoir released this month. How could it not be legitimate for media to scrutinise the biographical claims in this?"
Someone pointed out that when a memoir is coming out, the publishing house contacts the press to drum up publicity and the press will write about it. Of course, since the journalists refused to take his lies at face value, they are racist and guilty of harassment and lynching
The most unfortunate thing - "By Jason Arday’s own account, he experienced a lot of bad luck in his life... Unpicking the truth, or otherwise, of these claims has become a national sport over the last four weeks. Arday’s biggest piece of bad luck, though, is unquestionable. It was a gigantic misfortune for the questions about his life and career to come to prominence in the summer, when parliament is closed and the news agenda is a vacuum... Arday was a perfect silly season story. It was — and I am sorry to say this now that Arday is dead, but it is true — very funny. There was a childish brazenness to his exaggerations and inventions... If he had been less amusing, he’d have attracted less attention. But it was also (another misfortune) a serious story. It fell plum into the narrative of DEI-run-amok: Arday was significantly underqualified for his job at Cambridge, which was thrilled to have appointed the youngest black professor in its history. The story also raised questions more broadly about academic standards in the humanities, regarding both Arday’s education (Liverpool John Moores, which awarded his doctorate, confirmed that he had received just one in-person supervision while writing his PhD, which was later found to have substantial signs of plagiarism) and the education he provided to his own students. There was the issue of police overreach. When Jack Grove of the Times Higher Education Supplement submitted a routine journalistic query to Arday, Arday reported him to the police — and the police pursued the journalist, pressuring him to abandon the story. There was legal chill. Arday retained the specialist defamation firm Carter Ruck and threatened reporters with the possibility of libel action. And yes, there was racism: Cofnas is a “race realist” who considers black people intellectually inferior. But it would not have fallen to Cofnas to break the story of a “DEI cover-up” if there hadn’t been a cover-up. Arday’s self-mythologising was not harmless. He hurt the academics whose work he plagiarised. He hurt the discipline he belonged to. He hurt the early career lecturers who were competing with him for jobs, but couldn’t match his fantastical legend. He hurt the families of non-verbal children who believed the story of his unprecedented late acquisition of language, and either blamed themselves for lacking the patience and love of Arday’s mother, or blamed their children for their failure to blossom. (For whatever reason, that’s the part that made me angriest.) Arday’s fall did receive a vast amount of coverage, and some of that was racially inflected. In a different month, there would have been less of it. But I’m not sure I can say the coverage was overall disproportionate. The Salt Path scandal, for example, was very extensively reported, and that does not have nearly the same serious implications as the Arday story (medical misrepresentation and general non-fiction ethics aside). Should I, for example, have not reviewed his book? Should I have silenced my doubts about his medical history? I would have been failing to do the basics of my job in either case. Academic plagiarists don’t usually make headlines, but Arday was not any old academic. He was a star, who had done the media rounds on his appointment to Cambridge. He was publishing a high-profile memoir with celebrity blurbs: Kathy Burke called it “a remarkable book by a unique and extraordinary man”. He had chosen the spotlight. Genuine entertainment, genuine importance, genuine public interest: put those things together, and in the absence of anything else to capture popular attention, a story is likely to run and run. Until, on Friday, Arday apparently killed himself. The obvious party to blame, for some, is journalism. The writer Matt Haig published an Instagram post calling on Andy Burnham to change the law so journalists would face “consequences” for “the reckless damaging of people’s mental health via the media”. (Incidentally, I once wrote a critical piece about Haig which he flagged up to his followers, who then subjected me to one of the more vicious and unpleasant pile-ons I have been through. But I suspect my mental health isn’t the kind that counts here.) Press regulation advocates have used it to renew calls for Leveson 2, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Arday had already used the law to suppress journalism. Authoritarianism is in the air. Being at the centre of a media storm is isolating and horrible. Arday had lost his job, lost his credibility, and even those he might have banked on as supporters were abandoning him: The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch wrote a column that was probably more brutal than anything from The Telegraph or The Spectator, which accused Arday of gulling his defenders and exploiting his autism as a cover for his actions. Ostracism is deeply destructive. I don’t think that Arday’s life was beyond redemption (if the Winns could survive The Salt Path, he could survive this), but I can understand why he might have believed it was. There are other things that can be hard for a human to bear. Losing face, for example. In 1969, the sailor Donald Crowhurst disappeared during a round-the-world race. He had been woefully underprepared for the challenge, but desperate to succeed: he had pinned both his family’s finances and his own reputation on completion... It was suicidal in the first place for Crowhurst to enter the race (after his disappearance, entry criteria were tightened to exclude overambitious amateurs like him). But what killed him, in the end, was his own psychological inability to turn around and acknowledge his errors. Suicide is a complex and terrible kind of violence. The most palatable way to interpret it is as a rational reaction to a suffering so great, only oblivion can end it. But the act of suicide affects everyone the suicidal person is connected to: Arday’s decision to kill himself has inflicted unimaginable pain on his family, and especially his children. Suicide can be an act of revenge (“They’ll be sorry…”). It can be an act of control: think of criminals who kill themselves rather than face the judgement of the courts. It is also rarely a simple response to an obvious trigger. While I take seriously what Louis Appleby says about how the strain of being the world’s main character will have affected Arday, I’d also point out that the majority of the coverage was about the institutional issues rather than Arday personally.
Chris Rose on X - "Jason Arday was on a six figure salary. He was in the top 0.08% of taxpaying earners in the UK. Why can’t his family pay out of Jason's estate? If you want to know how easily people fell for his lies, just look at the people donating to this grift.
Jason Arday also received a seven figure advance for his book. The family can easily afford a funeral."
Claire Lehmann on X - "The press interest in Arday can be explained by the fact that ~40% of British journalists went to Oxbridge. It's an elite protecting its own status. If Cambridge can no longer tell the difference between fraud & excellence then the status of an entire elite class is in question."
