Crémieux on X - "Woke never ended. The New England Journal of Medicine just published an insane thinkpiece that starts with a neurotic hallucination and then alleges Jason Arday did no wrong and that he was killed. It's no surprise people don't trust our institutions anymore."
Ruettiger on X - "NEJM platformed a systemically privileged academic who states: "They are trying to kill us... This is how it feels to know there are systemic pressures working against your success." She seems healthy! How encouraging to see elite academia search for its next Arday."
Colin Wright on X - "A new opinion piece in the "Voices" section of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine states "They are trying to kill us." She further claims that there are "systemic pressures working against" the "success" and "well-being" of black academics, and parrots the vacuous talking point that Jason Arday's PhD advisor and university "cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations," despite the shocking extent of his verbatim copy-and-pasting of large blocks of text from other authors without attribution. She then says that even if he was guilty of extreme plagiarism, he should have kept his academic job: "None of them were worth his career." She believes "Black academics" are "held to a different standard," by which she means a higher one, even though Arday was given a professorship at Cambridge and hailed as a prodigy despite his abysmal qualifications and laughable quality of scholarship. She claims that former Harvard president Claudine Gay, who was also found to have plagiarized a significant amount of her work, was "ousted" because people "simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution." She says that academia is rife with the "ever-present winds of white supremacy and anti-Blackness.""
Jeffrey Flier on X - "The editorial standards of the @NEJM must be questioned for deciding to publish this article as it is presented below. Such terrible judgement. Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia | NEJM Voices"
Thread by @BrandonWarmke on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "“I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true.” Academic institutions are not just incapable of self-reform, they’re going to invite you to a front row seat as they light themselves on fire.
It’s good for people to be this honest though. It’s pretty obvious many don’t care about the standards or the facts of the matter and it’s refreshing when they admit it so openly. More should do so! An admission that all you care about is progressive politics and racial grievance and pay lip service to standards only when you think you can use them to further the cause would be a welcome addition to the discourse"
tomwoot on X - There will be no reforming of academia. Instead, they will fly the plane right into the side of the mountain. The entire time they will exclaim that they are our betters."
Since it's no longer 2016, left wingers no longer need to pretend that they care about Truth
Steven Pinker on X - "I try to convince haters of universities that, particularly in science and professional departments, we are not woke ideologues with contempt for truth, evidence, and common sense. But many of these professors and institutions don't make it easy. Jeff Flier (Co-President of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, and former Dean of Harvard Med School) calls out a bizarre defense of the university-enabled con artist Arday in the formerly respected NEJM."
Jonathan Kay on X - "This is insane. It’s a kind of time warp back to mid 2020 and 2021, when publications went all in on this gothic “they’re trying to kill us” melodrama. The prospect of turning Arday into a martyr seems to have reawakened the dormant social-panic spore left over from that period"
Dr. Insensitive Jerk on X - "The Face of the Wokeness that Corrupted our Medical Journals. And you won't believe her qualifications.
Debra Malina, PhD, is leaving her job as the Perspectives editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, a once-premier medical journal that went full retard. The entire NEJM is now woke, but its "Perspectives" (I.e., editorials) section is wokest. My long-time followers have seen me post numerous examples, including one I linked below. This week, the NEJM announced Dr. Malina's retirement, accompanied by only two other Perspectives articles. (One advocated for more research spending on medical marijuana, while the other advocated more spending for research on transgender hormones.) Debra Malina did not merely edit the NEJM Perspectives articles; she selected them. Yet she does not have an MD, so you might wonder, what was her expertise?
"She earned a PhD in English, taught a variety of literature courses, and published a book on postmodern fiction and narrative theory."
The New England Journal of Medicine handed its editorial section over to an expert on narrative theory and postmodern fiction. I wonder who will replace her? Sadly, Professor Jason Arday is no longer available, and Dr. Anthony Fauci is busy not getting lynched. Perhaps Dr. Jill Biden would like the job."
Meme - David Decosimo @DavidDecosimo: ""Nowhere does the charge of 'whistleblowing' appear" Do these folks actually think that when an institution retaliates against a whistleblower they charge the person with 'whistleblowing'?!? Do they not know that inventing some pretext is *exactly* what retaliation involves?"
Red Maria @dolphinmaria: "Steven Pinker has hallucinated that Ghent University suspended Cofnsas for exposing academic misconduct. It did not such thing. Read the letter De Sutter sent Cofnas yourselves. Nowhere does the charge of whistleblowing or anything approaching it appear."
Jennifer Thetford-Kay on X - "White academics have been ousted for plagiarism and academic misconduct.
Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne (white) resigned in 2023 over research data manipulation.
Gregory J. Vincent resigned as president of Hobart and William Smith Colleges after plagiarism allegations in his dissertation.
Robert Caslen stepped down from the University of South Carolina presidency after admitting to unattributed material in a speech.
These are not isolated; proven cases of fabrication or serious plagiarism routinely end careers regardless of the individual’s race.
Gender-critical academics have also faced severe professional consequences for stating the biological fact that sex is binary and immutable.
Kathleen Stock was hounded out of her professorship at the University of Sussex after a sustained campaign of intimidation.
Jo Phoenix (Criminology, Open University): Faced a sustained campaign including an open letter signed by 368 colleagues
Rosa Freedman (Law, University of Reading): Endured death threats, urine poured on her office door, campus stalking, anti-Semitic abuse, and repeated calls for her dismissal.
Alice Sullivan (Sociology, UCL): Experienced cancelled events, disrupted talks (including protesters scaling walls and shouting at a Bristol event), and professional targeting. She has documented widespread barriers in her government-commissioned reviews and is pursuing legal action over free-speech failures at Bristol.
Michele Moore: Faced roughly a decade of harassment across multiple institutions for gender-critical research, including work highlighting issues at the Tavistock. She was effectively abandoned by London South Bank University and relegated to a kitchen annexe as an office.
Selina Todd (Modern History, University of Oxford): No-platformed from events (including an Oxford International Women’s Festival talk) and faced protests against her lectures for her gender-critical positions.
Laura Favaro (Sociology, City, University of London): Her research interviewing female academics about bullying over gender views led to complaints, suspension of her project, loss of data access, ostracism, and the end of her employment. She is pursuing an employment tribunal claim for discrimination and harassment.
Almut Gadow (Law, Open University): Dismissed after criticising the embedding of gender-identity theory in the law curriculum; she has brought an employment tribunal claim alleging harassment, discrimination, and unfair dismissal.
Others include Heather Brunskell-Evans (King’s College London), Michael Biggs (Oxford), James Caspian (whose detransition research was blocked at Bath Spa), and Shereen Benjamin (Edinburgh)... who have been investigated, ostracised, or forced into diminished roles simply for defending material reality on sex.
Arday’s case was not ordinary plagiarism.
Multiple independent analyses documented extensive unattributed copying in his PhD thesis and papers. Institutions he claimed as visiting professor or degree-granting bodies (including Ohio State, Glasgow, and Birkbeck) stated they had no record of those roles or qualifications. Large parts of the public biography he promoted; non-verbal until 11, illiterate until 18, extraordinary multi-day ultrarunning feats raising millions, were contradicted by available evidence and school contemporaries. He held positions of real influence: Cambridge professorship, NHS Race and Health Observatory Academic Reference Group, ITV Cultural Advisory Council, trustee roles, and input into education curriculum work. Public scrutiny of someone advising on NHS policy, broadcasting, and education reform is not “hounding”; it is basic accountability when the underlying credentials and claims collapse under examination.
The intensity followed the scale of the discrepancies and the institutional prominence, not skin colour. Pretending otherwise requires ignoring the documented pattern of cases involving white academics and the specific, multi-layered evidence in this one."
Left wingers keep claiming that white people who plagiarise aren't scrutinised, so the scrutiny on Arday is racist (and maybe ableist). Even if you ignore his other lies, there're so many examples of white academics punished for much less
Chad Felix Greene on X - "The Arday myth is that an accomplished young black man was unfairly scrutinized because white supremacists did not believe and/or could not tolerate the idea of a successful black academic and they hounded him until they found anything they could use against him, resorting to lies. He made a few mistakes anyone could make, but because he was black, they were disproportionately escalated. He had to fight just to get into the room and when he was smarter, better and morally superior to his white peers, they turned on him and destroyed his life and reputation. The racist media saw an opportunity to take down an example of black accomplishment and so they aggressively fabricated a controversy until the man saw no other option but to end his own life. All black academics have faced this same treatment in their own careers. This is a morality tale crafted to validate a specific leftwing/race-identity fantasy that justifies racial prioritization and preferences in academia. White supremacist academia won't allow black scholars to achieve and when one is so extraordinary they cannot be ignored, will do everything in their power to make them an example. This is the framework they have built the Arday story on and they will not accept/allow any other version."
Conrad on X - If this was the medical profession I would take the issue of fabricating data and committing research fraud as in the Andrew Wakefield case seriously. This is sociology of education which, while important, is not life or death stuff. Which is why I find this whole furore baffling"
Sarah Ditum on X - Great, we've reached the bedrock of "this happened but I don't care". This is a heinous attitude and wholly anti-scholarship. What you're saying is that even if Arday's work was good, it would be worthless. That is not a defense of him, or academia."
Of course, all these racists would be foaming if a white man did even 1% of what Arday did. Naturally, he among others is still pretending there's no proof he was guilty of plagiarism
Meme - Chris Howell @ChrisHowellFCA: "Not a word about the extraordinary damage that has been done to the reputation of the University by promoting a fraud purely because they were so excited by his demographic and invented back story. I think the whole institution is lost."
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE: "News for alumni. Dear Chris, Before moving to this month's news for alumni, I wanted to add a note about the tragic news of the death of Jason Arday. This is a time of profound sadness, and our thoughts and deepest condolences are with Jason's family and loved ones, who have lost a father, partner, brother, uncle and son. Many of our alumni have been in touch wishing to share their condolences, too. It is also a difficult time for many within our community, and increased support is being provided for both staff and students. Helping everyone through this period of grief and reflection is a priority for the Vice-Chancellor and University leadership. Yours,"
Gethin Chamberlain on X - "Informative month for those outwith the world of publishing and academia: plagiarism is fine, memoirs don’t have to be true and academic papers can be gibberish. Publisher Alexandra Pringle on the Jason Arday book: "A memoir is a work of literature that is verging on fiction.""
The Salt Path was literally a memoir, yet the author got a lot of heat for making it up. Presumably she was a victim of racism.
Thread by @colinfreeman99 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Alexandra Pringle, ex ed-in-chief Bloombury publishing, drawing a distinction between memoir and autobiography while discussing Jason Arday book on BBC R4. Says that while an autobiography is supposed to be strictly factual, a memoir is not. "A memoir is a work of literature that is verging on fiction and you can't necessarily expect it to be a factual day-by-day or yearly account of somebody's life." Not sure that the average reader knew that. I certainly didn't. Have written two memoirs myself, don’t remember any agent/publisher telling me it could verge on fiction…"
Does it matter that Jason Arday’s memoir is made up? | The Spectator - "“I think questions of truth and accuracy in memoir are very, very blurred because they are subjective accounts of a bit of someone’s life,” she told listeners. “A memoir is not an autobiography, and it’s important to make the distinction between the two. If you’re thinking of, for example, John Major or Mrs Thatcher’s autobiography you would expect that to be absolutely true. But a memoir is a work of literature which is verging on fiction, and you cannot necessarily expect a memoir to be a factual day-by-day or year-by-year account of someone’s life.”... The primary distinction between memoir and autobiography seems to me one of scope, not factuality. If you pick up an autobiography, you expect to read the story of someone’s whole life. A memoir will be the account of a slice, or a few slices, from a life; or the author’s perspective on a slice of someone else’s life. You can write lots of volumes of memoir, but unless you’re Barry Humphries or a soccer player it’s usually considered seemly to limit yourself to one autobiography. (Confusingly, though, when someone talks about writing “my memoirs” that usually simply indicates an autobiography that nobody sane is going to want to read.) It is true, as Alexandra says, that memoir is usually a more literary form. A formal, which is to say a literary, decision has been made as to what to put in and what to keep out. There’s selection in autobiography too – lives are long and we can’t be Tristam-Shandying our way in prose through every moment on earth – but the reader expects something that will cover the ground from childhood to spitting distance of publication date... the reader doesn’t sweat the small stuff in a memoir. That’s part of the implicit contract. But, equally, the reader of Alan Bennett would be entitled to be annoyed if he discovered that this dinner with Mike Palin and Maggie Smith never took place; or that Bennett had never had cancer of any sort. Gesturing at the impossibility of ever perfectly knowing the truth is not the same thing as proving there’s no such thing. Some things – marathons run, wars fought, life-threatening illnesses suffered, books published, children born and marriages contracted – are verifiable features of the historical record. If you buy a book billing itself as either a memoir or an autobiography, you expect those features to be reliable. Both memoir and autobiography, however imperfectly they’re defined, have in common that they sit in the nonfiction section of the bookshop. Vulgar as it may sound to us snooty literary types with our eyes on Higher Truths, the idea that this stuff actually happened is their main selling point to readers and therefore driver of profits for publishers. As I pointed out when I wrote about The Salt Path, a bestselling memoir that turned out to contain a number of confabulations, there’s a reason publishers are more interested in badly written celebrity memoirs than in badly written celebrity novels. I added that it was “telling that one of the most notorious frauds in the genre, James Frey, tried and failed to sell his A Million Little Pieces as a novel before hitting the jackpot by packaging it as a memoir.” The problem with Arday’s book, whether you call it a memoir or an autobiography, is that a great deal of what he says in it about those verifiable features of the historical record seems to have been codswallop... A fastidious editor could and should be on the lookout for internal inconsistencies or obvious howlers. They might be hoped to apply a bit of a smell test to some stories (as Simon & Schuster plainly and to their shame failed to do in the case of Arday) – and a legal read for libel is standard practice. But they’re not in the business of digging up old medical records, comparing timelines, investigating charity filings or tracking down former schoolmates for interview – which was the sort of investigative work that put the lie to Arday’s fabrications. Responsibility for the accuracy of an autobiography, just like any other nonfiction book, rests finally with the author. Whether Simon & Schuster should be plowing ahead with publication as if nothing has happened, that said, is a matter for another day. "
Prof Ian Pace on X - "‘Imagine if this standard were applied, say, to one of Frank Dikotter’s books about Mao’s China: would his publisher be expected to send teams of researchers to replicate Dikotter’s decades of work in the archives before they were able to put his findings into print? Nobody sensible would suggest so.’ Well, Dikötter’s books are provided with the full scholarly apparatus of footnotes, references, at least some of which are checkable. This is a different category from Arday’s memoir."
Diego A. Ballestero on X - "This puppet is a coward.
Reporter: “You called Prof. Arday ‘mentally disabled’
He: He called himself cognitively impaired
So you called a Black professor "mentally disabled" — and your defense is that he said it first?"
Justin Tosi on X - "The current rules appear to be: (1) People with socially approved politics are free to plagiarize and fabricate data with impunity. (2) People with socially disapproved politics can neither quote (Cofnas cannot repeat Harvard's own argument) nor paraphrase (as in the clip)."
Edward Dutton on X - "Jason Wilson of The Guardian has gone through the academics who've signed the pro-Cofnas petition and is preparing hit pieces on them. If you're one them, attack the anti-Reason journalist personally as part of your reply. He will be too cowardly to quote you, but must quote you, so will likely not run the piece."
Jonathan Keeperman on X - "Jason Wilson is the Antifa/Bellingcat hatchet man who wrote my dox article and doxxed several other anons as well. These are coordinated networks that use the imprimatur of the Guardian to provide cover for their political activism. This is all part of an effort to deny free speech to people on the right through the the threat of financial and professional pain--especially for non-tenured academics who have no recourse against this kind of harrasment campaign. @UnderSecPD Perhaps something for you to look at."
Zack Polanski on X - "Someone has died after a relentless press campaign. The very least the public is entitled to is an investigation into the press’ role in these events and an independent body to review complaints against the press in the future."
Jesse Singal on X - "They won't let this go and it's absolutely disgraceful. Keep in mind what these people would do if they had full power to punish the media."
Emil Kirkegaard on X - "I've had 100s of hostile articles in world media about me the last decade because of my research. Can I also cry victim and demand a media inquiry? What about Charles Murray? We're talking several decades of hostile articles, lies and harassment, leading to actual assault."
Samantha Asumadu on X - ""Jason told me and others that articles written by Black people had hurt him most" — @LesterJHolloway in @TheVoiceNews"
Francis Harris on X - "Cambridge University executive calling for revenge against journalists reporting on Arday. These people are not only crackers, they’re / X
Professor Alice Sullivan on X - "This attack on the press, which says that 'some of our community have blood on their hands' singles out a piece written by a black Guardian journalist. The author, Lester Holloway, is head of Communications and Public Relations at Homerton College Cambridge. This is not mentioned in the piece which states that he writes 'in a personal capacity' https://homerton.cam.ac.uk/people/lester- holloway Homerton College has a close institutional relationship with the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, which employed Jason Arday. Arday's death was a tragedy. This response looks like a call for vengeance rather than reflection. It is genuinely astonishing to see this from someone employed in a senior professional services role."
Lester Holloway on X - "The state of this. A white academic who hounded Professor Jason Arday, lecturing a Black journalist (me) who happens to be a longstanding (and grieving) friend of Jason’s, about what I can and cannot write to a Black audience in a Black newspaper about other Black journalists!"
Helen Pluckrose on X - "Journalist astounded and appalled that members of the public are allowed to read his writing & be strongly critical of its advocacy of 'heads must role' for journalists reporting on the Arday affair despite having a different skin colour to both said journalist & his subject."
Apparently black people are supposed to cover up for other black people's crimes and lies and if they don't, they are race traitors
Thread by @jessesingal on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "The avowed antiracists defending Jason Arday (a con artist) are now weeks into a campaign against a black reporter at the Guardian who published one of the most important articles exposing him. The origin of that article was Arday reaching out to the journalist to lie to him. At a certain point a tiny bit of self-awareness has to kick in. To be clear, I'd think what they are doing to the Guardian reporter is hideous regardless of his race, but the people doing it are hardcore identitarians who highlight race whenever they can! This is really bad.
Arday: Hey, want to cover the pig's head they sent me?
Guardian reporter [after investigating]: There was no pig's head. Lots of other stuff doesn't check out. This guy appears to be a fabulist
Arday defenders: I CAN'T BELIEVE THE GUARDIAN LYNCHED HIM
seriously gtfo idiots"
Nels Abbey on X - "When Billie Holiday sang of "strange fruit hanging from the poplar tree", she could never have guessed that Britain would create 'Strange Fruit Juice' nearly 100 yrs later. Jason Arday is dead. Yet some British writers are still squeezing him for every drop of juice, every click, every penny of profit, possible."
Thread by @HPluckrose on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Do you think this might stop if other people stopped trying to 'airbrush the late fabulist's life' in the service of an identitarian political ideology and censorship of the press? Jason Arday is dead, yes. Questions of institutional complicity in his death remain. It cannot be that those who believe racist media scrutiny was to blame are the only people now allowed to talk about him while those who think ideological capture in universities bears some responsibility must shut up."
Prof Ian Pace on X - "The response to my FOI request to find out who appointed Jason Arday as Professor at Glasgow University. I don’t believe a word of it - there is always a paper trail for such things. @thetimes @timeshighered @jgro_the"
Kevin Yam 任建峰 on X - "Lets assume for a moment that the University of Glasgow really did not keep records from a 2021 professorial appointment (Arday or otherwise). If that’s the case, the university’s document retention practices should have its in-house General Counsel losing sleep at night over it. This is because the limitation of actions period for for standard contract/delict claims in Scotland is 5 years. Not keeping documents for at least that long (or, more typically, at least for another year or two after that) leaves the university vulnerable if it ever needs to defend itself in litigation. Yes, I know there was once a school of thought that the less you keep, the less opponents can dig up to use against you. But that thinking never recovered from certain 1990s/2000s document destruction controversies surrounding corporate scandal and product liability litigation. The prevailing thinking to this day is that the risk of keeping something that “hurts” you is more often than not outweighed by the risk of not having sufficient (or any) records with which to defend yourself. As such, if University of Glasgow was telling the truth on this, then its legal team should institute a review of the university’s document retention policy as a matter of urgency."
Chipo Dendere on X - "Jason’s abilities weren’t limited. He did a lot more than the average person including the person tweeting this. How was he limited? Who is the rightful judge of this?"
nigel biggar on X - "Jason Arday’s intellectual and academic abilities fell far below what the award of a PhD and a professorial appointment at Cambridge should have required @drDendere. That was exposed, not just by the right-wing press, but also by the Guardian, the Times Higher Education, and the New York Times."
Diego A. Ballestero on X - "3K signatories and climbing. Sign and share the letter. Let's bury the Cofnas network in names. Solidarity is our weapon, when we move together, their eugenics empire crumbles. The only answer to racist networks is collective power"
Emil Kirkegaard on X - "The eugenics empire. If there was all that money and power in such a network, I would think the people involved would be rich and powerful. Instead, here we are watching a hetz against a lone postdoc. One of the only openly hereditarian academics on the planet, the others having been fired/forced out already (Winegard, Pesta, Anomaly, Carl, Woodley, ...)."
