As I was preparing to go to my bed the night before last, there was a news flash which indicated the probable suicide of Jason Arday, the youngest ever black Cambridge professor who resigned last week amidst numerous accusations of plagiarism of his PhD thesis. Certainly, there has been a massive culture war surrounding this man with detractors and supporters lining up on both sides. To the claims of plagiarism, the reply is that some ‘errors’ may have been made but Jason Arday had been the subject of a vicious and sustained campaign to underline his credibility. To throw some light on this, I located and then ran off the 22 pages of his Wikipedia entry. I think the fairest judgement on this academic is that he was subjected to bouts of fantasy and most of the claims of his CV were never fully checked out. He claimed to have a form of autism which meant that he did not speak until the age of 11 and could not read or write until the age of 18 (the fact that he acquired some GCEs ‘O’-levels whilst being unable to read or write is one of the many unexplained facts in his biography). Some of his claims were to the effect that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, raised millions of money for charity, was a visiting professor at several universities and suffered severe memory loss following the removal of a benign brain tumour just before his viva voce examination for the PhD. As my first degree was in sociology and I acquired my own PhD at the age of 52, I have followed the Arday case with some interest and have concluded that apart from the man himself, a terrible light has been thrown on several parts of the academic community. For a start, what kind of supervision was offered at Liverpool John Moores University when the title of the PhD contained a greengrocer’s apostrophe (elementary spelling error) and did the first and second supervisors do their job (or even read the thesis)? I also wondered whether it was routine to submit the electronic version of a PhD to a plagiarism detector such as ‘Turnitin’ as is the case nowadays with Birmingham University. To this we might add the role of the examiner(s) of the PhD itself and whether they had performed the necessary rigorous examination and to this we might add the role of several universities which offered employment to Arday. One of his claims was that he fulfilled his role at Glasgow university by flying back and forth to Glasgow each day by plane as he was domiciled in London. Then we come to Cambridge University itself and rather than exulting in the appointment in the youngest black professor, did the appointments process ever check up on any of the claims made in the application or perform elementary checks upon their veracity? As the post was in the sociology of education, I wondered from whence Arday had acquired his knowledge of sociology to which the response was that he had read up on it in private study times in the evening. In short, there is no doubt that Arday’s life and career has been weaponised by both political left and right but I think that as a detached observer and evaluating all of the available published evidence, it is fair to conclude that chunks of the PhD were plagiarised and this academic had led the life of a ‘chancer’ whose claims had never been subject to claims of verification as they should have been. One letter to ‘The Guardian’ written anonymously claimed that academic dishonesty was not uncommon and did occur in ‘white’ candidates but without arousing any of the scrutiny that occurred in the Arday case. In conclusion, I feel that my own rigorously examined PhD might now be regarded with some suspicion with some on the political right who are claiming that the whole of higher education has been gripped in a ‘woke'( i.e. exceptionally liberal) culture in which academic standards have slipped over the years.
I had a quiet morning at home, having ensured that I got down to collect my Saturday edition of the newspaper in plenty of time as I know from bitter experience that the Saturday editions end to sell out quickly. I had been intrigued by the Arday story detailed above and so I returned to the Wikipedia article mentioned above and found that at the click of a button I could read the whole of the Arday thesis for myself and attempt to reach some conclusions. What I read astonished me as for his primary field research Arday had contacted 43 students by email of whom some 24 replied. Many did not reach the criteria that had been specified for the research so the whole thesis was based upon extensive workshops and interviews with – four students! This was surrounded by a lot of academic verbiage but I was astonished that a sample size of four was not ridiculed by internal and external examiners alike. Probably one of the most succinct comment on the whole affair that I read and which echoes my own feeling was ‘It is fair to say that some of those taking him down are driven by a form of sneery, reactionary racism, but ultimately he sounds like total fantasist who has brought this upon himself. The worst part is this may damage the perception and opportunities of the 000s of bright young people from disadvantaged backgrounds going into academia.’ Turning to more mundane matters, it is a relief that the temperature is slowly drifting downwards. Last night when I was in the park before starting my evening walk I was initially alarmed by a loud, squawking alarm on my iPhone but to turned out to be our national government giving a warning to most of the population to be especially vigilant about the prospect of external fires. Some on the political right have criticised this as an over-reaction but as someone who lives 10 miles away from Stourbridge where 19 houses were burnt to the ground, a further 18 were damaged and this could have happened almost anywhere in the Midlands or the South East then I believe it to be completely justified. Looking ahead to what I might view on TV during the coming week, I was delighted to find that a viewing is to be transmitted of ‘Brassed Off’. I spent a frustrating half an hour trying to locate a version of this on YouTube but only got trailers for it, a few clips or the whole thing in Latvian! When I have been in a charity shop, I have quickly perused the shelves to see if I could obtain a DVD of it (and I am sure I had one of my own at one time) but I shall look forward to Monday evening with a great deal of anticipation.