A 21st Century Fable
I have a sig at the bottom of my personal emails, and it includes a quote from Mark Steyn. Steyn is a Canadian author and commentator (I guess that’s the word) whose acid-dipped pen and highly sensitive bullshit detector I have always admired. I think he has not been well in recent years, so his visibility has dropped, but the quote of his at the bottom of my email is this:
‘Our leadership class’s real accomplishment is resume padding.’
I think that is very accurate, and it seems this is my week to write about such resume padding among the lanyard class. The adjacent post about the Globby Mail’s article on homelessness is basically pointing out that GM’s so-called Medical Reporter is deeply unqualified to write about much of anything, despite the letters after her name and the list of awards on her webpage.
Well, here comes an instance of resume padding that puts that one to shame. If I had not been an academic myself in the years after 2012, I would find it hard to believe.
Some years ago, but not many, Cambridge University in the UK hired a shooting star of a young professor. His name is Jason Arday, and Cambridge appointed him to a position as a Professor of Sociology of Education.
Now, had I been on the hiring committee (fat chance) I might have pointed out that the two academic disciplines that stand just behind all the ‘xxx Studies’ disciplines in terms of academic worthlessness are sociology and education. So, why bother to fill this position at all?
Which is why I would never end up on that hiring committee.
Cambridge hired him into that position nevertheless, and the academic world was agog at his achievements, academic and otherwise. Here’s a partial list, much of which I credit Nellie Bowles of TFP for putting together:
- He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university.
- He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity.
(The charity now says it never sends volunteers abroad).
- He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days, and that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg.
(I believe that. Millions wouldn’t, but I do.)
- Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University.
(All three institutions deny that Jason held these positions.)
Btw, here is a picture of the wunderkind:
Great dreadlocks, eh?
All of this would have, I suspect, stayed under a very large rug at Cambridge U, except that some other academics took a look at some of Arday’s actual research, and said the dreaded word: plagiarism.
Or, perhaps worse. Here’s a quote from an X post on some of Arday’s published work from a U of T (yep, Toronto) prof:
I don’t want to pile on to the Cambridge situation, but media coverage saying “plagiarism” are really missing the boat. There is pretty obvious fraud – literally claiming he did interviews that couldn’t have happened and so on – in like every paper of his that I looked at.
Sounds kinda bad, eh?
This whole thing is sufficiently indicative of the madness of 21st century universities that it has crept into some of the mainstream media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic. I will, I hope, note some aspects of it you may not have read about elsewhere.
Predictably, once the various forms of lying and fraud perpetrated by Arday had begun to surface, a set of ideologically devoted but ignorant folks rose to defend him, and – no one can be surprised – to accuse Arday’s accusers of racism.
I found an instance of this online, in a publication known as The Good Law Project, which put online an article titled ‘Stand in solidarity with Jason Arday’
A meter off to the right of the article title says: 17,203 have signed. Let’s get to 25,000
Make of this what you will, but under that meter one finds this:
Gloria signed 2 minutes ago
Liar signed 9 minutes ago
Karen signed 9 minutes ago
Eye signed 17 minutes ago
Um….. Liar? And Eye?
There is a photo of young Arday that starts the article off (he does look quite young) and under it this statement:
“Jason is the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history. Rightwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of plagiarism. We can’t let them. Stand up to their hate and division by adding your name.”
I dunno, it seems to me it is other academics who are accusing him of plagiarism, and the ‘rightwing newspapers’ are reporting it. Those newspapers include the NYT, by the way. Here is a quote from one recent story in the NYT about this:
Ahead of its publication, reports from other academics, independent journalists and a number of British news outlets have cast doubt on both Arday’s scholarship and biographical assertions, including his claim to have once run 30 marathons in 35 days while raising as much as 5.5 million British pounds for charity and that he was visited twice at his office by a masked intruder, once while wielding a knife.
Arday has said previously that mistakes in his early work were the result of his autism and inadequate supervision from professors, and that the current accusations of plagiarism are part of a racist smear campaign.
The publication referred to in the first paragraph is a memoir Arday wrote, about to be released by Simon and Schuster.
The ‘masked intruder’ bit is new to me, he appears to have said that after the storm about his research really broke. The use of the racism card is predictable, sadly. The NYT story includes a link to a story in Times Higher Education (yet another right-wing outlet) in which reporter Jack Grove reports that he sent emails to Arday querying him about the plagiarism accusations, after which Groves was visited by a police constable who told him to leave Arday alone. Can’t make shit like that up. You can read Groves’ THE story here. Also, the folks at Retraction Watch, who publicize cases of academic fraud, published a story about all this early on, which you can read here. They did no investigation of their own, but they do assert that Arday hired a high-profile law firm to write THE a letter, at which point THE spiked their initial story about Arday.
You can also go here to read what those brave supporters of Arday at The Good Law Project write about all this, if you wish.
By the way, on the day I posted this article, the NYT ran yet another column chastising Cambridge and academia in general for the way they tend to handle cases of malfeasance by faculty. Damn those right-wing newspapers.
Appendix
I was dismissive at the start of this article about the value of any academic work done by anyone who claims to be a professor of sociology or education or the sociology of education. In my view, those fields are wastelands in which nothing resembling research (i.e., attempts to understand how the universe and the humans in it work) is ever done.
I went and found some of Arday’s academic papers online, and I present below a handful of direct quotes from them, and say – ‘I rest my case’.
Quote one:
This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula and conceptualising the racial mirco-aggression. The narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in racism unfolds within in the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness.
That quote is from the Abstract of Dismantling power and privilege through reflexivity: negotiating normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric curriculum and racial micro-aggressions within the Academy, published by Arday in 2018 in the journal Whiteness and Education. The bad writing is entirely from the original article, it was not inserted by this white guy.
Another quote:
Recognising the impact of precarious employment on various societal institutions, this article attempts to explore the impact of the ‘gig economy’ in higher education, with a particular focus on the impact upon staff of colour with the Academy. The study draws on critical race theory (CRT) and a thematic analysis methodological approach to illuminate the experiences of staff of colour encountering precarious employment. Importantly, the article will argue that systemic racism plays an integral part in existing cultures of dehumanisation and exploitation within the Academy.
Just after this he writes:
The study emanates from the marginalised voices of 18 Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic members of staff on precarious contracts within the higher education sector, across the Russell Group and post-92 institutions.
Those quotes are from ‘‘More to prove and more to lose’: race, racism and precarious employment in higher education’ published in The British Journal of Sociology of Education in 2022.
A small comment on that one. His data consists of conversations with 18 subjects, all of them from ‘oppressed’ groups. If he really wanted to learn something about their experiences, would it not have been sensible and wise to also interview, say, 18 workers from the oppressor groups? You know, some white folks. Would not differences in their stories – assuming such differences were found – be instructive about the very topic he claims to be interested in? I suppose doing so would implicitly acknowledge that those damned oppressors end up in precarious employment also.
Ok, Ok, if you insist, just one more quote from Arday’s oeuvre –
In this one he actually cites numbers, rare for a 21st century sociologist:
The percentage of HE [Higher Education] staff that are Black, Asian and minority ethnic has doubled from 8.6% to 15.4% over the last decade and a half. Importantly, despite this steady rise, Black HE staff remain statistically underrepresented in comparison to the UK Black population, with only 2.8% of staff identifying as Black compared to 3.3% of the general UK population (UCU, 2021).
OMG. A half of one percentage point difference between the percentage of Blacks in the UK population and the percentage among HE staff?!! Appalling!! No wonder Arday writes so much and so convincingly about systemic racism. What else could cause such a disparity?
That last one is from ‘the black professoriate: assessing the landscape within British higher education’, published in on_education: Journal for Education and Debate [the capitalizations or lack therof are not mine but the journal’s]. That one came out in 2022.
I don’t expect Mr. Arday or any of his supporters at The Good Law Project will waste any time thinking about what all this might mean for the hiring of black and minority candidates into HE in the future.