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PaperclipPerfector  29d ago (text post)   23459 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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Wake up babe, Britain has its very own Juicay Smoll-yay

Link for those unfamiliar with the source of the title

UPDATE: Arday has resigned from Cambridge.

My single favourite genre of non-fiction is stories about liars getting exposed as such. It's why I've read Buzz Bissinger's long-form piece "Shattered Glass" (an account of the New Republic writer Stephen Glass, who passed off utterly fictional stories as journalism and ended up disgraced) so many times, and watched its utterly unremarkable and overwritten film adaptation a comparable amount. It's why I've read Dan Davies's Lying for Money three times and have little doubt I'll read it again. It's why I read so many articles about the downfall of Theranos and want to watch the miniseries with the dumb girl from Mean Girls. It's why my idea of a relaxing evening in is watching the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, why I read every instalment in the Observer's multi-part exposé about the couple who wrote The Salt Path. And it's why I followed the Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax so closely at the time it was in the papers. For those unfamiliar with the latter case, the gay black actor Jussie Smollett claimed to have been attacked by two white men wearing MAGA hats, who poured bleach on him and tied a noose around his neck. While many leading Democrats (and, I suspect, at least one poster who posts here) accepted his version of events uncritically, Smollett was ultimately arrested, charged and convicted for filing a false police report.

Now, England has its very own Smollett, and it is a doozy.1

Jason Arday is one of Cambridge University's prize academics. At 41 years of age, he is the youngest black person ever to be made a professor in the university's eight centuries. [This originally read "youngest person"; thanks to @incognitomaorach for pointing out the error.] His relatively photogenic appearance and easy charm have resulted in numerous television appearances and at least one TEDx talk; he has received various honours in recognition of his extensive philanthropic work; and his rags-to-riches story has served as an inspiration to thousands. Simon and Schuster offering him a lucrative deal to turn said story into a memoir (Great and Unfortunate Things) was a no-brainer, and it's due for release next week. Surprisingly for an academic and purported man of letters, the book is being written in collaboration with (read: ghostwritten by) Eve Claxton, who is uncredited on the book's preorder Amazon page and American cover. He's probably the closest thing to a legitimate celebrity the sociological field has produced in decades, and has produced a respectably extensive body of work about the intersections of race, class, disability and neurodiversity (some of which is of the "auto-ethnographic" variety i.e. Arday "interviewed" himself then wrote up what his "subject" thought).

Three years ago, some people (including Arday's colleagues at Cambridge) began raising uncomfortable questions about various factual claims Arday has made about himself, or which have been made about him in promotional materials.2 Jack Grove, a journalist for Times Higher Education, launched an investigation into allegations regarding the quality of Arday's scholarship. Grove's article, however, was never published, as Grove's bosses received a cease-and-desist letter from the law firm Carter-Ruck, threatening them with legal action and directly accusing Grove of targeting Arday for racial reasons. (Grove was also reported to the police, accused of harassing Arday, although the police dropped their investigation after four months.) Two weeks ago, Nathan Cofnas (an academic formerly employed by Cambridge who left the university in a row over his endorsement of human biodiversity, and who now teaches at Ghent) bit the bullet and published a Substack article in which he ran various papers Arday has put his name to (including his PhD thesis) through plagiarism-detection software and found compelling evidence thereof. Cofnas also alleges that Arday's contributions to the papers in which he was one of several listed co-authors were likely minimal, and that his little original scholarship rarely rises above the level of undergraduate mediocrity.

Now, if this was merely a story about plagiarism in academia, I wouldn't be writing a top-level post about it. "Sociologist who writes auto-ethnographic papers doesn't adhere to the most rigorous academic standards" is a quintessential dog-bites-man story, reminiscent of the old observation that, if one was to strip Lance Armstrong of his medals, you'd have to go down about thirty places in the Tour de France to find a cyclist who'd never been implicated for doping. Where it gets interesting hilarious is that, in addition to being a plagiarist, Arday is one of the most compulsive, remorseless fabulists this century has yet given us. Here is a non-exhaustive list of claims he's made about himself, his background and his family:

  • Among his various academic honours, he claims to have received an MA in education studies from Liverpool John Moores University.
  • He claims to have previously played both football and snooker at a professional or semi-professional level.
  • He claims that his mother has five different third-level degrees.
  • He claims to have raised at least £5 million for various charitable causes.
    • Specifically, he claims to have donated his £20,000 advance for a book about neurodiversity, race and class to charity.
  • He claims to have run thirty marathons in thirty-five days, the last nine of which after suffering a hairline fracture in his femur which caused his leg to swell up to twice its normal size.
  • Separately, he claims to have run 600 miles in six days.
  • He claims to have been awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his charity work, which he turned down owing to his critiques of the British Empire.
  • He claims that he was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, didn't learn to feed himself until he was seven, and was unable to speak until he was ten or eleven years old (but overcame this with "four or five hours" of speech therapy, six days a week). When he and his wife appeared on a talk show, she claimed that he was unable even to write his own name until he was sixteen, only for him to correct her that he was really eighteen.
  • He claims that, shortly before finishing his PhD in 2015, he was diagnosed with a life-threatening brain tumour, which he underwent surgery for just three weeks before his PhD viva. The surgery supposedly left him unable to remember all of the material he was supposed to defend, but he successfully completed his viva by summoning all his reserves of mental strength. (In one written account, he later claimed that, after completing the PhD, he was diagnosed with two brain tumours that turned out to be benign. From context, I'm unsure if these tumours are in addition to the one he developed prior to his viva, or instead of.)
  • He claims to have been a participant in the Up documentary series, which interviewed a cohort of children at seven-year intervals (thus the instalments are titled 7 Up, 14 Up and so on) to observe how their lives progressed from childhood to old age. The original documentary series followed a group of children born in 1957: Arday was born in 1985. A second series following a different cohort of children was later released, but all of the children in that cohort were born in 1993.3
  • Now we get into Smoll-yay territory. Arday claims that he and his family have been victims of a torrent of racist abuse ever since he first entered the public eye. In addition to the claims that he's been sent bananas and bullets in the post (neither of which he photographed) and death threats via email, he made two specific, dramatic claims:
    • He claims that a masked man confronted him twice on the Cambridge campus and threatened him with violence unless he resigned. On the second occasion, the man produced a knife. Allegedly, Arday reported the first altercation to Cambridge campus security, to which they dutifully responded by installing a panic alarm and additional CCTV cameras near Arday's office. The intruder was not captured on the CCTV cameras during the second altercation, and no members of the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious on that day. Arday did not report the second altercation to police or campus security on the day, nor made any attempt to warn anyone about a masked man with a knife stalking the campus. Despite having just been threatened with a knife, he attended a PhD candidate's viva less than two hours after the alleged altercation occurred.
    • He claims that someone left a severed pig's head on his parents' front doorstep, which he fortunately managed to intercept and dispose of before either of them discovered it (again failing to take photos thereof), only reporting the incident to the police several months after the fact. Not even the Guardian can disguise their incredulity at this specific howler. "When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said 'that’s the kind of thing we’d remember'. When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were 'categorically' incorrect and no investigation had taken place." When asked about the veracity of the claims he'd made, Arday is directly quoted as saying "To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?"

It need hardly be said that many of these claims would strike a casual observer as unlikely, implausible or outright impossible. For those claims residing within the realm of plausibility (and some of these), hard evidence thereof is sorely lacking. Running 600 miles in six days would put Arday among the most elite endurance runners in the world: no contemporary reports of this astonishing feat can be found. No public evidence has emerged of his having been awarded (or offered) an MBE. His mother has never claimed to hold five academic degrees. No one knows in which hospital he underwent surgery to remove his malignant brain tumour.

Beginning last year, various organisations affiliated with Arday began to quietly retract or hedge some of the more grandiose claims they'd made about him. "600 miles in six days" becomes 600 in twelve, with a rest day every other day. Cambridge stealth-edited Arday's profile on their website to remove his claim to have received an MA in education studies in Liverpool. The text of his forthcoming memoir has been softened and edited in places. Arday himself has belatedly attempted to downplay some of his claims, claiming that the £5 million he'd raised for charity was as part of a syndicate of over a hundred people (none of whom he can legally name, conveniently, owing to non-disclosure agreements).

The Smoll-yay comparisons are particularly apt because, as you may have guessed, Arday is black, and as the evidence of his duplicity mounts, his ethnicity has proven more of a help than a hindrance. Despite stealth-editing his online profile, Cambridge has stood by him and insisted that allegations of plagiarism in his career prior to joining Cambridge are irrelevant to his career in Cambridge. The Good Law Project published an open letter defending Arday and denouncing the "entirely false allegations" against him, which has been signed by, among others, the Green Party leader Zack Polanski, Simon Baron-Cohen and assorted MPs and public officials. (Interestingly, Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, president of Wolfson College at Cambridge, initially signed the letter, before asking for her name to be taken off.) "It is difficult to ignore the question of motivation. When a distinguished Black academic is repeatedly subjected to baseless allegations after being fully exonerated, it signals there is an attempt to undermine Black people who hold positions of influence."

Cofnas, of course, is rightfully crowing about all of this, quipping "Jason Arday should NOT be fired. He was hired to represent DEI, and he’s doing a great job". In his Substack write-up, he notes that Cambridge hiring Arday was specifically touted as a deliberate step to redress the university's longstanding inequities in faculty composition. The official announcement included the following quote:

Jason Arday is an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education. He will contribute significantly to Cambridge’s research in this area and to addressing the under-representation of people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds: especially those from Black, Asian, and other Minority Ethnic communities.... We are making extensive efforts in this regard—including the expansion of the ‘Get In Cambridge’ programme which provides financial support to address systemic disadvantages and the lack of social and educational capital which often constrains the ability of minority ethnic students to continue with their education. A great deal remains to be done and Jason’s expertise will inform and enhance these ongoing endeavours.

Similarly, "Arday stated that he was coming to Cambridge to 'open doors' to members of underrepresented groups:"

My work focuses primarily on how we can open doors to more people from disadvantaged backgrounds and truly democratise higher education. Hopefully being in a place like Cambridge will provide me with the leverage to lead that agenda nationally and globally.

"In other words, hiring Arday was an overtly political act. Everyone involved—including Arday himself—understood that he was being recruited to promote the ideology of DEI and increase the representation of certain groups."

You can imagine how embarrassing it must be for the university administrators to learn that their poster boy for diversity, equity and inclusion is a fabulist who lied about basically all of his accomplishments (academic and otherwise).4 Reputations other than Arday's own are at stake here.

A common refrain when the Jussie Smollett story (along with assorted other hoax hate crimes) collapsed was that, among white progressives, the demand for racist hate crimes now exceeded the supply, such that they had little choice but to invent them from whole cloth, or at least avoid asking difficult questions about those that had been invented. So too, it seems, in academia: the demand for talented academics from minority ethnic backgrounds (and if they have disabilities too, all the better) exceeds the supply, such that they have no choice but to hire academics who have burnished exaggerated invented their credentials. It seems like an inexorable law of the universe: whenever an institution begins optimising for something other than merit, it's only a matter of time before the liars and cheats begin clawing their way in.

More than anything when I read stories about fabulists like this, I just have an extremely hard time putting myself in their shoes. It's one thing to tell white lies that no one is ever likely to investigate and for which no corroborating evidence would exist even if the claim was true. It's one thing to tell exactly one extremely brazen lie and bank on no one bothering to check it. It's one thing to tell multiple extremely brazen lies, then going to quite extensive lengths to cover your tracks (credit where credit is due: Stephen Glass was a liar, but he put his hours in). But to tell dozens of extremely brazen lies over and over again for decades and make no effort to cover your tracks at all? That's just baffling to me. It genuinely seems never to have occurred to Arday that he would eventually be found out.

1 Much of the following information was taken from Benjamin Ryan's piece in the Washington Free Beacon. I strongly encourage you to read it, and the articles by Nathan Cofnas and Kathleen Stock linked elsewhere, along with this piece by Donna Louise Flowers.

2 There is little doubt Arday was aware of this, and attempted to do some preemptive damage control by rubbishing the forthcoming allegations months in advance. From the Guardian:

When the superstar academic Jason Arday took to the stage at the British Sociological Association’s 75th anniversary conference earlier this year, he delivered a talk called Wanted Dead or Alive: the Playbook.

The youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history told an audience of his peers that the playbook in question had helped bring down some of the biggest names in US academia. Conservative "activists" were trawling through the work of black academics, looking for anything to use against them: inconsistencies, citation errors, passages in their work that were similar to existing papers.

Once an error was identified, rightwing media outlets and conservative politicians joined the pile-on – heaping pressure on universities to cut ties.

Claudine Gay, the first black woman to become president of Harvard, was only in the post for seven months before she was forced out over plagiarism allegations... Some academics have killed themselves after being hounded out of their positions.

The playbook was not restricted to the US, Arday explained. The same tactics were being used to bring down some of the UK’s most high-profile black academics.

“The instruments that are designed to protect academic integrity, designed to protect our wellbeing and our intellectual property, are weaponised,” he told the audience in April.

He called for his peers to defend him. “There isn’t any room to sit there and watch your fellows suffer for no reason. It’s abhorrent, it’s a disgrace and, quite frankly, evil,” he added. “That’s the cancer that we need to eradicate from academia.”

I increasingly feel that "weaponise" is one of many modern words whose use we urgently need to impose a temporary moratorium on.

3 This incident produced my single favourite howler from the entire calamity (emphasis mine):

Last night Professor Arday said that when he talked of 'Seven Up', he didn't mean 'Seven Up' the famous TV series, which followed children at seven-year intervals in the format he described. He says that in fact he was referring to 'a local community and parent-led initiative developed around the Ubuntu principle that "it takes a village to raise a child".

'It was organised by Black women to support Black mothers raising children with complex learning needs.'

He asked that we attribute the quotes to 'a source close to Professor Arday'.

4 Over at Unherd (paywall warning), Kathleen Stock has a rather different interpretation for why Cambridge might stick to their guns on Arday:

I have a possible explanation that is only secondarily connected to skin colour. Namely: at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well.

Lecturers are now routinely expected to make adjustments to their ordinary critical approach as soon as someone has a diagnosis: to ignore spelling mistakes; mentally rearrange sentences without critical comment; try not to mind paragraphs that go on for days, or seem utterly arbitrary in their shape. I speak from experience. As a marker, you are supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within. Most often, this nonsensical strategy is applied at the level of students; but once the principle was conceded, it was only a matter of time before such accommodations were extended to staff too.

... For instance, in correspondence between Harris and Head of the Cambridge Faculty of Education, Dr Hilary Cremin, Cremin said that when she had asked Arday about Harris’s plagiarism allegations, the former had “spoke movingly about his ongoing experiences of direct and indirect racism, and the conditions that he was living in whilst the… article was being prepared”. She also stressed that her faculty remained “immensely proud of Prof Arday’s achievements and scholarship”.

You’d be forgiven for thinking here that Cremin was trying to offer mitigating circumstances for a troubled but promising undergraduate — except that she was talking about someone holding a Professorial Chair. Once a narrative of mental disability is firmly in place, it seems that a presumed experience of racism can just be added to the list, as yet another unfair impediment to intellectual achievement. Minority ethnicity plus disability now equals the suspension of critical judgement.

Review of his memoir is in The Atlantic and everyone has got to read it, it's amazing.

Apparently Professor Arday cracked the secret of never sleeping:

Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style.

So he's commuting to Liverpool from London (five hours round trip), teaching all day, then going back to London to work literally all night, then getting back on the train to Liverpool for the next day. No sleep till Lime Street!

Of course, then he later got the first brain tumour:

As his dissertation deadline approached, Arday started having blurry vision; medical scans revealed a brain tumor. After it was removed, he had a ministroke and lost his short-term memory.

The lies are just incredible. And I mean that as "impossible to believe".

I've been in the area of dealing with kids this level of autism, and you don't start talking, reading, and ending up as a university professor after this:

As a boy, Arday rocked and hummed and banged his head until he bled; he slammed cupboard doors and smeared his feces on the walls. Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize. Still, eventually, he made his way through school.

This is life-long severe problems that maybe stabilise a bit but you're dealing with this forever and it requires a lot of support and intervention.

I know there's a snowball in Hell's chance we'll ever see any original documentation, but his medical records really need to be made available in order to back up the claims of autism, epilepsy, tumours and the rest of it. He's making a ton of claims, and just listing off everything I've read about the various conditions he says he has and things he allegedly did gives me this list not in any chronological order:

  1. Autism (the severe level he claims in the memoir)
  2. Global developmental delay
  3. Dyslexia
  4. Deafness in one ear
  5. Non-verbal until age 11
  6. Unable to read or write until age 18
  7. Beaten up by other kids as a teenager so he developed epilepsy
  8. Struggles with simple maths
  9. Testicular cancer (or was it a ...)
  10. Brain tumour (1) leading to...
  11. Short-term memory loss right before his thesis defence where he forgot everything and had to relearn it all in two weeks
  12. Suicide attempt
  13. Return of brain tumour (2)
  14. Hit by car as a child which left him in a coma
  15. Ran multiple marathons with injured leg (allegedly during the 30 marathons in 35 days he had a seizure, fell, fractured his tibia, and went on running)
  16. Ran 600 miles in 6 days
  17. Played snooker to make money as a teen, played "semi-professionally" for Chelsea F.C. (a claim rubbished amidst much merriment here)
  18. Did charity work in Brazil
  19. Was part of the Seven Up! documentary series
  20. Threatened and assaulted by masked man with knife, had banana(s) and bullets sent to him, death threats, etc.
  21. Intercepted pig's head sent to his parents' house
  22. Raised millions in charitable sponsorships
  23. Was visiting professor at Ohio State University

And I'm sure I've missed a few along the way. The more people dig into his story, the higher the tower of falsehoods gets.

The Simon and Schuster page contains a "Raves and Reviews" section for all the blurbs it's got (pre-sale). Best of all is:

‘Jason Arday is a remarkable and brilliant man’

– James O’Brien, Sunday Times bestselling author of How To Be Right

(Emphasis mine.)

Um.

I'd like to see the full review because blurb writers do cherry-pick and alter sentences. It might well be that James O'Brien said "Jason Arday is a remarkable and brilliant man - if you believe his self-report, but if you do believe it, here's a bridge I'd like to sell you" 🤣

Probably it was just "got sent a review copy, never heard of the guy, skimmed through it, wrote a few lines of praise and sent that back".

I looked up the author and book, and here's a corker of a Guardian review from seven years ago. Apparently Mr. O'Brien is a sucker for "them conservatives is all bigots" so the Arday story would have been catnip to him: son of immigrants bravely overcoming adversity and racism all the way to the top!

Here’s a question. How often have you come away from listening to a radio phone-in feeling educationally enriched or intellectually stimulated? Here’s another: did you notice how loaded that question was?

The loaded question is the preferred mode of expression of the radio talk show. It’s a variation on the prosecutorial “When did you stop beating your wife?” of legal legend. And James O’Brien, the LBC presenter, is something of a master of the form. He’s forever asking questions aimed at uncovering a caller’s underlying prejudice, the better to put them right.

Because that’s what O’Brien does. He puts callers right. Or, as LBC likes to put it, he “schools” people, which is not quite the same thing as educational enrichment or intellectual stimulation. Talk radio isn’t a medium best suited for either. But books are, and O’Brien has written a book called How to be Right... In a World Gone Wrong.

This book comes with a pained-looking O’Brien on the cover, with headphones and mic, presumably listening to another foaming caller, above a quote from the New Statesman declaring O’Brien “the conscience of liberal Britain”. It seems designed to suggest that O’Brien is a principled figure fighting a tireless battle against a tide of misinformed opinion.

Is O’Brien right? Well, I imagine I share at least 80% of his self-avowed liberal beliefs, but I’m not sure that he’s the person I’d trust to make the case for them. His speciality is putting members of the public on the spot for their ill-thought-out views.

Is funny that in an alternate universe where Cofnas hadn't taken the shot there's probably a reasonable chance this biography would be a BBC TV Movie within a decade

Jason Arday hearing or reading about someone else's personal tragedy.

Already being discussed in the Friday Fun Thread

Whoops, that's on me for not reading all the threads! Thanks for the correction.

The entire story is so ridiculous that I want (for once) some proper investigative reporting to do an entire exposé on this (though I suppose this is why Arday sicced the cops onto that journalist about harassment, in order to prevent it coming out).

So he was diagnosed with autism? Okay, provide the medical records. Didn't speak until he was eleven? Couldn't read and write until he was eighteen (and yet somehow was attending second-level education and doing a course?) Okay, get the records from the social workers, special education units, and schools he attended to corroborate this.

The lies ballooned to such levels (running marathons with a fractured leg?) that the only possible reason nobody queried him is that he was indeed a pure DEI hire and nobody expected him to actually be able to do anything. That makes the likes of Simon Baron-Cohen stepping up to defend him even worse.

Now he's resigned, which is probably "jump before you're pushed" and an attempt by the university to reduce the egg on face quotient as much as possible. And of course he'll still go round telling everyone it was racism that pushed him out, not him being a liar and a fraud.

The lies ballooned to such levels (running marathons with a fractured leg?) that the only possible reason nobody queried him is that he was indeed a pure DEI hire and nobody expected him to actually be able to do anything.

I speculate what happened was that, before becoming somewhat famous, he told Alice a relatively mild version of one lie ("I had a cancer scare a few weeks before my PhD viva, it was pretty stressful"), a mild version of a different lie to Bob ("I injured myself running a marathon"), a mild version of yet another lie to Carol ("I was actually non-verbal for the first few years of primary school") and so on. Each of these lies sounds plausible enough in isolation, although Alice, Bob or Carol would probably raise an eyebrow if they were aware of all of the lies. Having gotten away with it (successfully curried sympathy), he tells an embellished version of each lie to Dave, Ewan and Frederick, none of whom are aware of any of the lies told to the others. On and on it goes, Arday upping the ante each time, until eventually the lies have become so heavily embroidered that telling someone just one of them causes people to raise an eyebrow, at which point they start comparing notes and realising how preposterous the whole edifice is.

He's also obviously someone not bright enough to realise that being a Baron von Munchausen is no longer compatible with being a public figure. If he'd lived a couple of hundred years ago when there were no TV cameras and most people were illiterate, he could have happily told his tall tales as long as he pleased. If the listener noticed discrepancies or inconsistencies with earlier tales, they would probably have just shrugged them off or assumed that they (the listener) were remembering the details of the earlier tale wrong. But nowadays, any tall tale told via the Internet is there forever, as is any told verbally during a television appearance. Under these circumstances, being honest is the only viable option: you will eventually be caught in a lie and face the consequences. (Unless you're Donald Trump.)

Weirdly, a comprehensive wikipedia page probably would have been the worst possible thing for his career.

Well, second-worst, given what just happened.

Here's a (somewhat sad) description of his actual teaching style from one of his former students. Predictably it involved very little actual teaching and lots of talking about racism (both in the abstract sense and with direct accusations).

He gave me 70% on my essay, with no feedback, which sounds good except that my average score for the year was 75% and this was my lowest mark of the term and actually dragged my average down. I asked for a meeting with him to ask him to explain why he had given me the mark and provide feedback. At Roehampton marking is blind so he didn't know whose essay it was when he marked it but in the meeting he implied that I was racist and that the only reason I wasn’t happy with 70% was due to my white privilege.

That is appalling. He should have been sacked on the spot.

At Roehampton marking is blind so he didn't know whose essay it was

Getting feedback on essays and implementing improvements was largely the point when I went to school. They weren't blindly graded tests.

A common refrain when the Jussie Smollett story (along with assorted other hoax hate crimes) collapsed was that, among white progressives, the demand for racist hate crimes now exceeded the supply, such that they had little choice but to invent them from whole cloth, or at least avoid asking difficult questions about those that had been invented. So too, it seems, in academia: the demand for talented academics from minority ethnic backgrounds (and if they have disabilities too, all the better) exceeds the supply, such that they have no choice but to hire academics who have burnished exaggerated invented their credentials. It seems like an inexorable law of the universe: whenever an institution begins optimizing for something other than merit, it's only a matter of time before the liars and cheats begin clawing their way in.

Anecdotally, genuinely talented minorities tend to be the people most opposed to DEI policies as they see DEI as an effort to undercut their status and accomplishments. They also tend to have more lucrative opportunities available to them than anything academia can offer them.

I think it depends on degree.

If you're a 180 IQ Minority Supergenius you're probably going to be against DEI since it might besmirch your accomplishments. If you're a 120 IQ you're probably benefiting from DEI to a degree turning your career from good to great, but you're also likely going to look down on somebody who's blatantly incompetent but also only allowed in through the door due to DEI. Without getting into the amount of people in the middle categories who develop a complex about being a 180 IQ Supergenius due to how successful they are when they've actually had a substantial thumb on the scale in their favor.

Again this is purely anecdotal but in my experience nobody doubts "the Supergenius", and as such they don't care. It's more often the guys (and gals) who could have plausibly made the cut on pure merit but then get dismissed as "diversity hires", because it's not immediately obvious that they are not, who seem to develop chips on their shoulders.

Anecdotally, genuinely talented minorities tend to be the people most opposed to DEI policies as they see DEI as an effort to undercut their status and accomplishments. They also tend to have more lucrative opportunities available to them than anything academia can offer them.

I've never spoken to any racial/ethnic minorities about it, but I did go to university with a female engineer who was furious when the institution introduced a female quota for the cohort after us.

Hard to say how much was her angry at the unfairness of less talented female undergrads being let in below the threshhold that she had to meet, vs regular intrasexual competition, although knowing her I'm inclined to be generous.

Another possibility slightly different than "regular intrasexual competition" is she chose the program she did because she wanted to get away from other women due to cultural differences and is worried attempts to bring in more women will import that culture she wanted to escape. That was the primary motivation for a number of my female colleagues.

Since engineering is concerned I doubt there was that much intrasexual competition involved even after a female quota was enforced. I’m guessing what made her furious is her likely and also correct assumption that the normalization of female quotas results in the public perception that the average newly hired female engineer is more likely than not to be an underperforming DEI hire.

I’m guessing what made her furious is her likely and also correct assumption that the normalization of female quotas results in the public perception that the average newly hired female engineer is more likely than not to be an underperforming DEI hire.

Again this is purely anecdotal, but I have spoken to multiple black lawyers and female engineers, who after a few drinks will go on a tear about how DEI stands for "Didn't Earn It" and about how in their ideal world the supporters of such policies would be "first against wall". This experience is what prompted my original reply.

Is this true? Obama would seem to be the leading brand. And he definitely played the DEI game.

The counter force to DEI tarnishes my accomplishments is tribal loyalty feels like a human personality trait.

More than a few big donations to HBC despite probably having intelligence to realize HBC were essentially dead as institutions posts affirmative action.

“ Robert F. Smith has given over $134 million to HBCUs, famously paying off Morehouse College's entire 2019 graduating class debt and launching the Student Freedom Initiative to support STEM students at dozens of HBCUs.”. - pulling from google AI summary.

Is this true? Obama would seem to be the leading brand. And he definitely played the DEI game.

Regarding Obama, I have had an old Chicago Lawyer tell me something to the effect that "It's a good thing the man pivoted to politics because he couldn't write a brief to save his life". Beyond that see my reply to @Botond173 above.

Is this true? Obama would seem to be the leading brand. And he definitely played the DEI game.

It's certainly not universal or consistent, but there are examples. Clarence Thomas has described affirmative action as a "badge of inferiority" and wrote a concurrence in Students for Fair Admissions (2023) against it. There are at least a few Hispanic writers that have criticized the practice (Richard Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory is, I think, the one I read in school). Kemi Badenoch is also on the record against it, if you want a non-American example.

'as an effort to' or 'a consequence of'?

I've definitely known some people who felt they had to overcome the diversity hire stigma, but can't say I've met anyone who felt DEI was developed to undercut them.

Well, if you're the kind of talented person who would naturally thrive in a legitimate meritocracy, any policy designed to make it easier for untalented people to thrive must intuitively feel like an effort to undercut your own status, even if it isn't presented like that.

original scholarship rarely rises beyond the level of undergraduate mediocrity

Worse than that, it was just meaningless babble. I saw some samples of his writing and it was awful.

"Dismantling Power and Privilege through Reflexivity: Negotiating Normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric Curriculum and Racial Micro- aggressions within the Academy," Whiteness and Education (2018)

In Arday's own words from the Abstract:

This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling [sic] 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 [sic]. The narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in racism unfolds [sic] within in [sic] the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness. (p. 141)

Slightly worse than the usual CRT/"Whiteness" fare.

I saw on Twitter that Pangram judged his resignation letter as AI-generated. Can't verify the actual screenshot or that Pangram is credible, but it certainly would be expected of him. This adds a couple more culture war wrinkles, including differences in attitude towards using AI to generate letters, especially ones that are purportedly have deep personal meaning and expression, and the credibility of AI-detection. I've been skeptical of Pangram, though basically everyone who's casually tested it seems to speak to its competence, so I could believe there's something there. An AI certainly would be better at seeing signs in patterns of words and phrases used in a way beyond any human like me, after all.

I would be glad if it’s normalized that AI-generating a public statement reflects badly on the “speaker”. Unfortunately I predict we’ll be seeing it more from many of today’s “leaders”, who previously used ghostwriters.

Yeah, that's straight up not happening for the same reason that ghostwriting is so common these days, and honestly, who can blame world leaders? Their time is already very constrained and so high value that it's the correct play on the margins to get the wording of their speeches provided to them by a third party, whether that be AI or a ghostwriter.

AI just means that the rest of us can now do what the rich and powerful were already doing.

As an aside – this whole affair started with an accusation of plagiarism. Does passing off AI-generated text as your own writing also qualify?

Plagiarism, as I understand it, means taking a piece of text (or music, art etc.) that somebody else created and attempting to pass it off as your own original work. What if the "somebody else" is a computer? Is that still plagiarism?

Does passing off AI-generated text as your own writing also qualify?

Don't think so. As long as none of it is wrong, the formatting is fine, and it contributes to the literature, then it would probably be fine. Not like there is a way to prove it is AI-generated in that case anyway.

I think AI would be regarded as a tool here. Like, you don't have to cite your calculator when solving equations either.

You also don't generally cite, say, a speechwriter or press release writer as "these words were written by Bob, and are not my own, though I stand by them."

If the journal explicitly states no AI writing, I think it counts as something bad, because AI writing causes issues even when it’s not noticeable (such as model collapse). It’s not like a calculator because there’s not one correct way to phrase something.

That's fair, but also an issue specific to certain journals. I don't think there are any general recommendations surrounding AI assisted writing in academia, as long as the data you give the model isn't sensitive.

The issue is mostly with bachelor and master's students not learning anything when they AI generate answers for their assignments and reports.

Agreed if the journal doesn't say.

My general opinion on AI-assisted works is: OK, as long as the authors don't hide or lie about it, and the target doesn't explicitly disallow it.

When it's essentially a form letter I think the onus is different. It's not like his resignation is intended as original research

Oh I know, I don't care about the resignation letter specifically. But I am curious about the general case. There have been quite a number of literary competitions embroiled in scandals recently when it turns out the winning entries were AI-generated. Ought that to be considered plagiarism?

In a competition it is certainly a form of cheating, since you are not displaying your own skills. However, you are also not taking credit for someone else's work. Like riding an electric bicycle in Tour de France. You are technically the one crossing the finish line, but you did not do what the competition is supposed to be about.

In academic writing, the goal is to contribute to the literature while adhering to academic standards. Since there is not actually another person behind the text, I don't think it would be plagiarism in that case. Publishing the results of your research faster due to AI is not something I believe would be punished.

Using ChatGPT sounds very on-brand for Arday, and there was a quote in the Daily Mail article that certainly gave me a whiff of it.

I've never used Pangram, but Freddie deBoer recently got into a back-and-forth with the founder in which he argued that it's extremely easy to produce false positives and mutually contradictory results. His argument seemed convincing enough to me that I'd take any Pangram result with a pinch of salt.

or that Pangram is credible

Pangram seems pretty good. It has a low false-positive rate in general, and its primary weakness is on very short passages, both because there's not much to analyze and because it breaks it into (IIRC) 300 word pieces and performs worse when it's partially empty.

You could, of course, tell ChatGPT to keep rewriting its message until it didn't get flagged. It's not immune to adversarial false-negatives. That's an entirely different failure than innocent human-written text getting mistakenly flagged.

I wouldn't convict anyone based on Pangram (or even fire/expel them), but I'd rate it better than the average bit of hearsay.

I'd agree with all of this, but the one thing that you omitted that raises my hackles with Pangram is that (at least in all the screenshots I've seen) they output a point estimate rather than a range. You've got a test that inherently is going to have at least a few false positives and a false negatives (they claim 1-in-10k, and report third-party tests that suggest around 1-in-40 false negatives and N-was-too-low-to-find-one false positives), but you can't give us a 95% CI instead of just the mode (mean would never hit 100%) of your estimate, to make it easier for us to be wary when we input a hard-to-classify passage? That does not signal respect for avoiding error.

My single favourite genre of non-fiction is stories about liars getting exposed as such.

I enjoy the genre too, and my favourite remains the unravelling of the UVA frat rape hoax.

If that was the tragedy, this one is the farce. And a farce worthy of Feydeau himself. The Arday case is absolutely hilarious. Among people who understand Cambridge, it doesn't even hurt my degree because I can raise my eyebrows and say "Lol SPS" with a knowing expression. [For those not familiar, SPS (Social and Political Sciences), now called HSPS (Human, Social and Political Sciences), was the main social science degree at Cambridge, and had a reputation as the least academically rigorous undergraduate degree the University offered.]

I couldn't believe my eyes when I learned that Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who wrote "A Rape on Campus", was in the same journalism class as one Stephen Glass.

What the hell was that professor teaching?

And the first person to call out the story as implausible (Richard Bradley, who would be picked up by Steve Sailer) was Glass' editor at George. Part of the hilarity of the scandal was the sudden widespread mutual knowledge that essentially every big name in the media read Steve Sailer and the need to prevent it becoming common knowledge.

and had a reputation as the least academically rigorous undergraduate degree the University offered

Hey, Land Economy exists, though out of shame they've now changed the name to "Environment, Law, and Economics"...

And was sufficiently rigorous that the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors recognised it as a valid pre-professional degree. Which isn't much given that some Anglia degrees had the same status, but is more than SPS. And HSPS is worse than SPS because adding social anthropology to the mix somehow manages to dumb down the average even further.

There were real economists and lawprofs involved in teaching Land Economy. SPS was taught by sociologists. 'Nuff said.

In my day, English was considered the easiest Tripos. Land Economy and SPS were seen as the Triposes with the dumbest students (apart from Education, which back in the day wasn't a real Cambridge Tripos just as Homerton wasn't a real Cambridge College. The latter has very much changed, though apparently not the former given where Arday teaches).

I did have the sense that Land Economy's bad reputation was more founded on the sort of people who chose it (the stereotype said directionless and dull scions of the landed gentry, whose parents perhaps figured they would have to make some high-level decisions about the use of their inherited land holdings one day) rather than the substance and rigour of what was being taught.

Kind of like "HOD" (Human Organizational Development) at Vanderbilt, I suppose.

UPDATE: Arday has resigned from Cambridge.

Pity. I was hoping they'd promote him to dean.

There are no deans in Cambridge. In a flipped version of the American system (where departments have Chairs and faculties have Deans), Cambridge departments have a Head of Department whereas faculties have a Chairman of the Faculty Board.

Well, there are, but iirc they are the people (associated with each housecollege) you get sent to for a stern talking-to (or more) if you engaged in mischief such as copypasting your supervision work or pennying Stephen Hawking (PBUH), not part of the research hierarchy.

Admitted. I meant that there is no University office of dean analogous to the American one, but the Colleges do indeed have deans.

There are no deans in Cambridge.

In Mr Arday's case, is that relevant?

First dean of Cambridge would surely fit right in with his illustrious list of other accomplishments. Perhaps he could be the first king of the USA if Trump doesn't get there first.

first king of the USA

Margaret Thatcher or bust, I'm afraid.

I was hoping that, and also that he'd then become the stodgy nemesis of a fraternity of plucky misfits until they ultimately earn his grudging admiration, ideally somehow involving a big concert in front of the whole student body. Alas, life is rarely so kind.

PCU is an underrated masterpiece of both satire and prophecy

Definitely gonna give that a watch. Love the genre.

It was originally a satire/reductio-ad-absurdum of Clinton-era culture war nonsense, but then fell victim to Muggeridge's Law during the Obama era. Still a fun movie though, if you really are a fan of the genre (as I am) I recommend it. The funny thing about men is that when you're nice to them they bring you things

fell victim to Muggeridge's Law during the Obama era

If anything you undersold this. I ultimately liked the movie but it was jarring how on the nose it was, and contemplating how this used to be obvious satire when now it's, if anything, so much worse than portrayed left me unamused and depressed. (I was also, in retrospect, coming down with a nasty flu and am still fighting it a couple days later).

Still it definitely has its moments and belongs in the set of 'movies like that worth watching'. Ended appropriately. Also I have a soft spot for some of the minor actors. Always nice to see early Matt Ross, who made my favorite movie, Captain Fantastic.

legitimate celebrity the sociological field has produced in decades, and has produced a respectably extensive body of work about the intersections of race, class, disability and neurodiversity

(My emphasis.) Come on, at I am perhaps in the ~80% percentile of being leftness on the motte and even I am biting my tongue really hard right now.

Having read the rest of it, I have a few more comments.

First, how sure are we that he is actually black, given that he lied about everything else?

Secondly, it is kinda ableist of you not to overlook his pathological lying. From where I stand, it seems like Cambridge wanted a neurodivergent, minority scholar, and they likely got someone who fit the bill on two of three counts.

Sure, the pathological and implausible lying might not be characteristic of being autistic, but the autists are not the only neurodivergents. If he thinks he can lie about the stuff which he did, that places him rather squarely (as far as one can tell these things without a formal diagnosis, (or even with one)) in dark triad territory. Pointing out that he is lying is no different than pointing out that a guy in a wheelchair can not walk!

Thirdly, if I were to brazenly lie about everything to score points with the wokes, I would obviously claim to have one of the rare genetic disorders which makes me intersex. As someone presenting as male, claiming to be an XX male should work well enough, though that guy might have preferred to invent his own combination of genetic conditions (45,X with SRY might be on the same level of plausibility as his other exploits) which result in him passing as a male. Just appearing as a cishet guy is not even trying.

Fourthly, I am grateful that my own discipline (physics) is generally not on the forefront of that level of academic fraud. Sure, we have plenty of shoddy research (and the rare outright fraud), but at the end of the day we are at least not the obvious path towards earning tenure. Presumably, the physics professors at Cambridge are physicists first and on the spectrum second, not the other way round.

Lastly, I do not see any reason why one should let the people involved live this down for the rest of their academic life. "Oh, you have tenure at Cambridge. So how many miles can you run within six days, personally?" should be the kind of question any of their professors should expect for the next decade. Anyone who actively signed the open letter should find it necessary to credibly distance themselves from that before anyone ever takes their opinion serious ever again. Putting your reputation on the line is meaningless if it remains intact if you vouched for a fraud.

First, how sure are we that he is actually black, given that he lied about everything else?

Freddie deBoer refers to this phenomenon (white people passing themselves off as non-white to advance their careers) as Dolezalism, and calls it an entirely expected byproduct of the incentive structures in academia, activist NGOs and so on. (When someone pointed out how his argument applied to – uhh, another thing that people can pass themselves off as, he closed the comments on the article. Never change, Freddie.)

He cited many examples of Dolezals, and the thing I found fascinating was that all of them were women. (And by "women" I mean "female people".) I have literally never heard of a white male academic attempting to pass himself off as black, Hispanic or similar. I vaguely recall Johnny Depp claiming to have partial Native American ancestry, and there's a Wikipedia page called "Indigenous identity fraud in Canada and the United States" in which male examples outnumber female. But a white man passing himself off as black is unheard of, to the best of my knowledge.

But yeah – if this was a story about Jacinta Arday being accused of plagiarism, I'm sure Cofnas would be going full forensic accounting, purloining her bank statements in an effort to determine if she'd purchased a tanning bed or had been to Istanbul to undergo a Brazilian butt lift.

(When someone pointed out how his argument applied to – uhh, another thing that people can pass themselves off as, he closed the comments on the article. Never change, Freddie.)

There is speculation that he is inconsistent on the trans question because of one particularly openly trans (and influential?) relative of his.

I've heard this several times before. His sister also has a Substack and she once posted an utterly sophomoric article about how gender-affirming care is safe and effective, and she'd know because her own son daughter child has been subjected to it. Upon reading said article, an awful lot clicked into place.

What about Shaun King? does he qualify?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaun_King

Oh damn, I forgot all about him. You don't hear so much about him ever since BLM fell off.

I have literally never heard of a white male academic attempting to pass himself off as black, Hispanic or similar.

Mindy Kaling's brother is apparently one such? Though he wasn't an academic. I do wonder if there are some cases which we haven't yet heard of, the thing is that if you are going to pretend to be black or Hispanic, if you have some heritage there it's a lot easier. It may be that there is less of an advantage for a male academic to add on minority identity than for a female academic (I think Elizabeth Warren still holds the record there for "most advantage derived from a family story of possible indigenous ancestry").

I think it might also have been more common in previous centuries; in the 19th to mid 20th century, hiding any (say) Italian or Hispanic ancestry and presenting as completely 'white' in the racial context of the time would have benefited male academics more than claiming minority status or heritage. Take the Healy family, a mix of Irish and African-American, where the sons staunchly denied and hid their slave ancestry while becoming prominent in American Catholicism, amongst other fields. If you look at the photographs with the Wikipedia articles, they passed as wholly white. The irony today would be that they would have great difficulty claiming their black heritage because they are so passing.

Mindy Kaling's brother is apparently one such?

He may have faked being black, but he certainly wasn't a white male.

True and the whole Kamala Harris thing where Afroindians or other similar borderline groups will try to wildly fluctuate the dial for maximal advantage seems pretty common.

Bruce Pascoe is an Australian male who has claimed indigenous heritage and has received pushback from both far left and right wing sources on it. Partly since his indigenous research is controversial to both sides for threading the needle somewhat in claiming Aboriginal cultures were more advanced than given credit for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Pascoe

First, how sure are we that he is actually black, given that he lied about everything else?

His physiology is unambiguously black in the published photos.

you must admit that a discovery that his true skill was makeup and wigs would only improve the farce.

Your final paragraph is dead on. I like how the Henry Nowak murder made "don't think you have, mate" the default way to mock and belittle anything a British police officer says. So too should it be here.

From where I stand, it seems like Cambridge wanted a neurodivergent, minority scholar, and they likely got someone who fit the bill on two of three counts.

Excellently turned phrase.

Fourthly, I am grateful that my own discipline (physics) is generally not on the forefront of that level of academic fraud. Sure, we have plenty of shoddy research (and the rare outright fraud), but at the end of the day we are at least not the obvious path towards earning tenure. Presumably, the physics professors at Cambridge are physicists first and on the spectrum second, not the other way round.

Have you tried publishing a paper about how physics makes you feel? Auto-ethno-physics?

First, how sure are we that he is actually black, given that he lied about everything else?

I looked at the first picture when I googled his name. Given how thoroughly he covered up his (currently known) lies, I believe that he is black.

My single favourite genre of non-fiction is stories about liars getting exposed as such.

You might enjoy Good on Paper if you haven't seen it already.

I do remember encountering serial liars in my life. It usually only takes a few months of exposure for everyone to realize whats going on. That doesn't mean they get punished for their lies, usually its just social ostracization. But institutions are terrible at catching and exposing them. The liars excel at interview format, and there is no limit to what they will put on their resume. That gets them in the door at institutions, especially ones where the interviewer/acceptor isn't really responsible for how the person is after they get in.

I'm pretty sure the claims you've collected here are only the tip of the ice berg. Serial liars tend to lie about everything. Its a game to them, and they do it constantly. Being around them too long creates this weird cognitive effect where you start feeling unmoored from reality. They'll lie to your face about events that you were at, and sometimes even things you did. I remember being angry originally, but then I switched to going along with it and egging her on. We made it a game to get her to tell the biggest lies to us and would laugh about her behind her back. She might have caught on to what we were doing eventually because she started avoiding us. We probably should have stuck with angry, because she was on a full ride scholarship to the college, and I don't ever remember her losing that scholarship.

Grove was also reported to the police, accused of harassing Arday, although the police dropped their investigation after four months

Everytime I feel like I can't get shocked at how the British police behave anymore and then something new comes up.

How does one waste four months of investigation on this? And why is no one terrified that the cops are now involved in a plagiarism scandal? How does it even occur to this guy to call the cops on this issue and be right to do so?

How does one waste four months of investigation on this?

Walter Mitty: Cops, Cops, Freddie Starr ate my hamster!

PC Plod (to Freddie Starr): Hello, hello, hello. Did you eat the hamster, Freddie?

Freddie Starr: No

PC Plod (to Walter Mitty): We spoke to Freddie Starr and he denies eating the hamster.

Walter Mitty: He did too!

PC Plod: Can you help point us towards any evidence?

Walter Mitty: No. But if you let Freddie Starr eat my hamster and get away with it I'll call you Xist.

PC Plod: Okay. We will try to investigate this and see what happens.

PC Plod fills out an "Opening of Investigation" form. Given the 300 other forms he had to fill out this week, he doesn't have time to investigate anything

Four months later

Sergeant Simple: The Inspector is going to be checking our paperwork soon. What did you find in the Mitty/Starr investigation?

PC Plod: I didn't even find the hamster.

Sergeant Simple: Then close the investigation with no crime.

PC Plod fills out a "Closure of Investigation - No Crime" form.

How does it even occur to this guy to call the cops on this issue and be right to do so?

Because he's based his career on racism and learning all about the ways to weaponise such accusations, and the UK police have been pushed to investigate such accusations under current law.

It's an over-correction, if you like; if, as with the Rotherham rape gangs where the assumption in part was "well yeah these are lower-class white trash girls, you can't take their accusations seriously", attitudes about allegations of racial discrimination and harassment were "nothing happening here, probably all lies and fake accusations", then the over-correction was "take all claims seriously and investigate them (even if you think they're nonsense)".

Also could be a criminal offense under the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act. Arday rings the police and claims the journalist is harassing him by trying to persuade his place of employment that he's a liar and a fraud, is making fake claims about Arday, etc. and conveniently leaves out that the guy is a journalist investigating plagiarism charges. Police don't get to decide "okay this is a nothing burger", they have to at least do a basic investigation. That it took four months indicates to me that the cops weren't straining at the leash to prosecute this wicked monster attacking a poor innocent black guy, but rather had better things to do and just left it in a file on someone's desk:

Wikipedia link:

Harassment also occurs when, on the grounds of race, disability, sex, sexual orientation, belief or religion, an employer - or their agent such as another employee or a manager - engages in unwanted conduct which has the purpose or effect of violating an individual's dignity or creating an interrogating, degrading, hostile offensive or humiliating environment for the employee in question. This is wide spectrum, and covers all types of harassment.

Such actions can be:

Physical conduct;
Verbal conduct; and
Non-verbal conduct.

and

This Act was primarily created to provide protection against stalkers, but it has been used in other ways.

Under this Act, it is now an offence for a person to pursue a course of action which amounts to harassment of another individual, and that they know or ought to know amounts to harassment. Under this act the definition of harassment is behaviour which causes alarm or distress. This Act provides for a jail sentence of up to six months or a fine. There are also a variety of civil remedies that can be used including awarding of damages, and restraining orders backed by the power of arrest.

The introduction of this legislation considers 'emotional harm generally,' which was considered a 'radical change to the law.'

How does one waste four months of investigation on this? And why is no one terrified that the cops are now involved in a plagiarism scandal? How does it even occur to this guy to call the cops on this issue and be right to do so?

If I was police investigator, I would do my best to investigate this for at least couple of months covering my bases. We are talking about prominent minority scholar who feels threatened by a racist. This reeks of huge problems where Guardian and the like will pour through results of investigation to find even hint of investigators showing their racial bias not investigating it properly.

How does one waste four months of investigation on this?

I'm not familiar with how law enforcement works here. Does "four months of investigation" imply more than "this was theoretically on someone's desk for four months before officially closing the case, but actual time may or may not have been spent on it"?

That's possible but even that is, imo, unjustifiable.

What if someone did do a pro forma search, just to say they did it, and found something icky on his social media? Would they still do nothing?

And why couldn't they just tell him there was nothing to be done?

In their begrudging defense, at least they didn't arrest Grove. Can't fathom why it took them four months to determine no law had been broken though.

My guess is that it just takes a while for the paperwork to clear. The length of time an investigation is "open" might be pretty unrelated to how much manpower is actually put into it.

That is an optimistic assessment, and might even be true. I think it would be good to verify, because I've seen a lot of previous examples of unconscionable behavior on the part of Britain's law-enforcement establishment.

Sure, but law enforcement is a lot of paperwork and this is unlikely to be a high priority case(entirely possible that this went to the bottom of the pile because there's no pending trial, for example).

Your unrelenting use of “Smoll-yay,” left me laughing throughout. Whenever I read stories like this, it triggers in my mind famous historical aphorisms like “Most people are far too preoccupied with themselves to be malicious. - Nietzsche; and think just how unequivocally wrong he was. Or Napoleon, “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” Totally. Wrong.

The entire Dave Chappelle routine linked in the header is hilarious, but the punchline will have you doubled over laughing.

Haha, thanks for this, "Juicy Smoll-yay". I am dying here :D

I remember that one. I don’t think you originally intended me reading your post in the way I did. I kept reading it the way 4chan pranked call in shows, reading out multi-page essays only to break out into the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme at the very end, confusing the host and wondering if they’ve been trolled the whole time.

Bahaha, not at all what I intended but I loved those "do you have Battletoads?" memes.

I always thought of it as "Juicy Sommelier", with the implied layer of one who has gotten high on his own supply.

Can't wait for the next headline about how Ukrainian President Zhuéłzñeūesc̣qkyieayï has gone to visit the President of Türquïyẏyè (Japan still just Japan).

Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, my dad mentioned the capital of Kiev, then stopped and corrected himself: "sorry, I should have said Kyiv."

This was a conversation we were having in his kitchen. There was no one outside of the family in attendance. I don't know who he was doing this performative virtue signalling for. Very embarrassing for a man of his advancing years.

What I find really funny is that, right before the war, I was in Ukraine, and I said "Kiev" - my guide's face darkened, he took me around the back of an armoured van, and he explained "I know this is what you say in the west, you should not say that here, it's sensitive, might cause trouble. You say Kyiv" and coached me on how to pronounce it like a Ukrainian until I got it right. But it's nothing at all like how westerners now pronounce "Keev", it's more like "Kyuff". I know that you should never expect libs to understand any of the cultures they valorize, but this drives the absurdity home to me every time it comes up.

I don't find that especially odd or embarrassing. If he wanted to change to using "Kyiv" in public for any reason (fitting in, supporting Ukraine, virtue signaling, etc) the way to do that is just to build a habit of calling the city Kyiv instead of Kiev, which includes in private conversations in the kitchen.

It's rather silly to change the English name to Kyiv considering our pronunciation sounds considerably closer to the Russian pronunciation for Киев but that's neither here nor there. But unless you are a diehard about still calling it Lvov or Lemberg I don't see what's so bad about consistently using Ukrainian transliterations for cities in Ukraine, no one really uses the spelling Kharkov or Uzhgorod either.

I remember chicken kievs being mass-renamed chicken kyivs, too.

Following the time-honored tradition of Freedom Fries and Liberty Cabbage.

And, oddly, french toast.

What, really? What was it previously called?

German toast, mainly. Only that didn't sound so great during the first world war.

So after 9/11 when they wanted to call it 'freedom toast' it was extra-deliciously ironic.

Don't forget Liberty measles!

It’s a guilt thing. By not using the ‘correct’ non-Russian name he was letting down the Ukrainian war effort. Men of a certain age feel really strongly about this.

Men of a certain age and specifically-low testosterone levels. Beards, beer, bacon, fedoras?

If you haven't already, I think you will really enjoy reading this article: https://newrightpoast.substack.com/p/the-four-commandments-of-reddit

In concurrence with @Terracotta below, I can't feel anything other than second-hand embarrassment for this article. The author spends, per Firefox's reader mode estimate, "33-42 minutes" whining. All these things apparently just happened to him and his tribe out of nowhere. It does not even occur to him to ask the question where exactly his people went wrong, if they could have done anything different then or now, or to consider that they might have any sort of agency at all.

On that matter, chances are high that his bewildered grandma was in the class of people who were calling another sitting president as "Obongo" in their FB posts (but calling the current one "Fuckface von Clownstick" is where moral degradation truly has gone too far?). I'm yet to see an instance of that tango being danced by a single dancer.

Yeah, read it when it came out (but thanks). Wordier than it needs to be but I think it nails several points that aren't typically discussed anywhere else.

The sad irony: 99%+ chance the author of that article looks exactly like one of the men pictured, only wearing a cringe button-down instead of a cringe slogan tee. Whatever the opposite of Reddit might be, it's certainly not posting novella-length denunciations of soyboys on a Substack with the word Poast in the title.

That grandma whose conservatism he so reveres is twice the man he is, and I bet he never visits her, either.

IIRC Dudley New-Right does actually have children, which puts him head and shoulders above most of the people he's mocking in this post. But I take your point.

This may be a hot take here, but I’d much prefer the mainstream becoming 2010s era Reddit (and old Something Awful) than what has happened, Reddit becoming “mainstream”.

They may have been ugly and cringe, but they were fun and libertarian. Mainstream would benefit from more of that. Now Reddit is ugly, cringe, prudish and miserable.

No, well-dressed men in their seventies who remember the Cold War and feel strongly about the necessity of Standing Up To Russia.

I remember a video of someone heckling Kamala Harris about Gaza, but he used the authentic Arabic pronunciation so I had no idea what he was saying.

I read it more in the vein of a deliberate mocking tone than an inability to pronounce it; laughing as if he had both his hands up making quotation marks; saying “this ‘Smoll-yay’ retard…” I think it’s embarrassing and annoying when I see normal English speakers try and give foreign import phrases in their original accents. Just speak it like a regular American.

So too, it seems, in academia: the demand for talented academics from minority ethnic backgrounds (and if they have disabilities too, all the better) exceeds the supply...

Maybe, but if you look at Arday's scholarship, it's shockingly bad. Some of that, the schools took a blind eye toward -- anti-plagiarism is a more a tool to say they've protected themselves, rather than a real best-case effort -- but a lot of it's just vacuous. Ignoring for now the question of whether academia should be aiming higher, there's no small number of African-American people who can write a bad five-paragraph essay. I doubt the UK is fresh out. And they could get an unchallengable mental health diagnosis, too.

Which makes for a fun question. What's the selection effect, and at what rung does it first apply?

I wonder too tbh.

Stories like this intrigue me me because I truly ask myself if I should have traded my education as a mediocre programmer to be a really bad academic. Apparently there are no checks.

I'm a bad writer, but I like to think I would at least avoid carrying over typos from the works I'm plagiarizing.

But, being immigrant-brained, I thought I had to study programming so my children could study philosophy.

Apparently there are no checks.

There are checks, but it's about playing social games.

That would be an effective filter for me then. I just don't have the level of anxiety tolerance people like Arday and Hilaria Baldwin seem to have, let alone Arday's (good enough) social awareness of how to flatter white people.

Maybe for the best, I hear it's addictive

An aunt of mine is essentially the only conservative academic at her small midwestern college. (Her erudition would rightly place her at a national college on talent alone, but, alas, she is a conservative; her academic husband failed even worse.) Among her many, many horror stories of how far academia has fallen, I remember the one where a colleague applying for tenure faked having cancer in order to boost her prospects. My aunt, when she suspected that the diagnosis was fake, realized that nobody would believe her. Faking a cancer diagnosis is so unbelievably deranged. Fake chemotherapy; fake shaving your head. It's so crazy that it is substantially more likely that the conservative must be lying. If she tried to convince her colleagues of the truth, they would assume that she was the crazy one.

My aunt's solution was to quietly make every one of her liberal academic friends think it was their idea first. She would, publicly, express nothing but the deepest sympathy for [Bridget]'s diagnosis. My aunt might make a remark in private like, "It's so unfortunate that Bridget's chemotherapy conflicts with her hearing again." And eventually, virtually every other academic on the tenure board came to my aunt and had a conversation like this: "Betsy, I know it sounds impossible, it's so unlikely, but, I've been thinking, have you noticed, Bridget, her diagnosis, is it possible she's exaggerating?" And my aunt would reply: "No, that had not ever occurred to me!"

Anyways, fabulists and serial liars are not new in the human experience so it's not even all that specific to Academia or the UK or leftwing circles. Academia especially is supposed to be a rarefied gentlemen's club where the select few who make it are granted a lot of deference. It will probably always be vulnerable to fabulists.

I will say, though, that I think leftwing and liberal attitudes about sex and race have created very fertile grounds for being preyed upon by fabulists.

Incredible story. Out of curiosity, what made your aunt suspect she was malingering?

IIRC, this woman was already a serial fabulist who my aunt had caught before in other lies. It didn’t take much for the scales to drop when my aunt realized that the diagnosis was a little too convenient.

I will say, though, that I think leftwing and liberal attitudes about sex and race have created very fertile grounds for being preyed upon by fabulists.

Yes. The problem isn't liars, liars will always exist. With healthy scepticism and verification procedures, you can mitigate the damage they do. The problem is that when your culture considers questioning certain claims anathema, you're systemically unable to deal with liars who exploit this.

My aunt might make a remark in private like, "It's so unfortunate that Bridget's chemotherapy conflicts with her hearing again."

I don't get it. Are you saying that she got people to recognize the lie by just... restating it verbatim? If she could do that, why wouldn't they already disbelieve it when they heard it the first time, rather than when it came from her?

As Sir Humphrey once said, "It is necessary to get completely behind a man if you wish to stab him in the back". The point is that people will resist the open implication, especially if it comes with apparent malice, but if you keep the relevant data points in front of their face long enough they will come to the conclusion you want themselves.

I both love and hate how eternally relevant "Yes Minister" is.

This is aged old tactics of fake sympathy where you blur the difference between jab and reality, maintaining plausible deniability. It can be something like "I'd never buy Toyota Camry given how it breaks down every other week leaving John stranded and missing work". You just plant this idea in people's mind making it acceptable to talk about at least in this indirect manner.

This is my proposal for fixing flopping in sports. Believe them, but take it to the extreme. "No, you're hurt. We couldn't possibly allow you to play again until you've been fully cleared by our medical team and given a week's mandatory rest. You fell down pretty hard, we should probably run the concussion protocol just to be safe. Your wellbeing is more important than some silly game."

They already use something like this for some soccer competitions, where a player who claims to have an injury that requires the play to be stopped, has to leave the field and get checked out. The referee can informally punish the player as well, by delaying the permission to re-enter the field.

Malicious compliance, in other words.

If she challenged the lie, they would have doubled down. When she repeated the lies, credulously, they thought a lot more critically about them.

Translation: She was low-status/suspect enough that when she said something they ran it through a filter which would otherwise have not been engaged. Also, to be clear, she was leveraging this intentionally and clever for it.

That's the smartest idea I've heard all week.

Idk about you put I pay within an epsilon of zero attention during faculty meetings, whereas I pay a larger nonzero amount of attention while having coffee with a friend.

Anyways, fabulists and serial liars are not new in the human experience so it's not even all that specific to Academia or the UK or leftwing circles. Academia especially is supposed to be a rarefied gentlemen's club where the select few who make it are granted a lot of deference. It will probably always be vulnerable to fabulists.

One would assume that a small club where social status accrues to very few members would have a strong set of gatekeepers, which is the only way that leeway is sustainable.

Some amount of Ariely-style shenanigans are to be expected but these lies would be stopped at the door by a twelve year old.

At my job, we had a former co-worker (fired before this incident came to light) steal several expensive electronic devices that deprived us of the ability to do our job, only to gloat about it by text to another co-worker, sending an image of his face holding all the equipment in front of him. The image then got shared around the department and to our manager who texted him to bring the devices. Later he got a text saying he committed suicide. Probably thinking that’d be enough to shoe us away or something; but we kept pressing the matter. Then the following day he came out of the grave, and dropped off all the items in our department and turned around and left.

All of this had to be documented and ended up getting forwarded to the corporate attorney who undoubtedly is in the process of ruining this guy’s life.

enough to shoe us away or something

"shoo" is the correct term

::gets into the usage-Nazi-mobile and drives away::

Lmfao.

And after this post too. There’s two people writing every Motte comment. The human and the autocorrect. I blame the latter for that one. I surely know the difference.

You're not the first!

I sometimes fantasize about an ongoing usage post every week here to get everyone's grammar and such better. I did this on reddit for a week though and BOY WERE THEY MAD

If there's one website that might be welcoming of such a post, it's this one.

... if there's one website where said post may turn hotter than the culture war, it's also this one.

Have been waiting for the thread on Arday.

Honestly whilst he's clearly an insane fantabulist who got used to not receiving pushback on fanciful claims, I can kind of sympathize with why there hasn't been pushback from inside the academy on him from his peers or people who weren't directly involved in the decision to hire him. Trying to call him out on his insanity is 98% going to result in you getting a 'Racism' tag on your proverbial permanent record in Academia, and unless you are actually in direct competition with him for a specific job (and you'd probably need to be a level 15 Diversity Hire to even be his 'competition') it's hard to see the upside to your career for exposing yourself massively to censure and a PR battle you will most likely lose. Cofnas can swing on him since he's already outside the academy, but I'd be shocked if there weren't people reflexively eyerolling at his claims who knew it was not worth the potential massive career downsides to swing at him.

Simon Baron Cohen's tweet in support of him essentially arguing that he shouldn't be targeted due to Autistic Suicide Risk was particularly disappointing, though. But a Black Academic who can also play the disability card is essentially a Grand Wizard of 2026 communications. There is no strategy you can take against this manifestation. Complete sideline but another fascinating Twitter drama of the week in the form of a UK wheelchair-bound disability influencer in a video that needs to be seen to be believed, which has led into a plethora of spinoff dramas in which people are unearthing her rich social media presence as a Gymnast and Hiker despite requiring a wheelchair. A certain chunk of society has realized that claims of disability/anxiety give them an instant win button against all forms of mild lifestyle agitation.

A certain chunk of society has realized that claims of disability/anxiety give them an instant win button against all forms of mild lifestyle agitation.

Back in the day you had to descend from someone rich enough to be able to support a totally useless daughter prone to fainting spells or whatever the mental illness of the day was.

You may not like it, but this is what successful democratization looks like.

True though in the days of yore I'd be more willing to extend the branch of 'poor constitution' to somebody considering the relative lack of medical care, abundance of childhood diseases and prevalence of random untimely death.

I've heard rumours that "going to the shore/countryside for one's health" actually made a lot of sense given that the building materials/paint resulted in a decent amount of low-level toxins in the air.

Complete sideline but another fascinating Twitter drama of the week in the form of a UK wheelchair-bound disability influencer in a video that needs to be seen to be believed

Based on "I had a bit of energy on this day" I guessed that it would be one of those I-dont-feel-like-getting-out-of-bed illnesses that mostly women get, like post-lyme or fibromyalgia, and I was right, although the one she has in particular (FNSD) I did not know. Although she usually just calls it "chronic illness" for some reason. Reference video.

I mean, I guess Munchausen Syndrome is a chronic illness.

What's been so interesting to me here is the way it's being minimized by many on the left.

NYT:

Martyn Hammersley, an emeritus professor of educational and social research at the Open University in Britain and an expert on research methodology, contacted Cambridge in 2023 with questions about what he said was significant plagiarism in some of Arday's work. In an interview with The Times last week, he lamented that the political and racially charged debate has overshadowed important questions about academic rigor.

"We now have a public scandal in which right and left confront another, so that there is not much space for sensible discussion of the issues," he said.

Cofnas, I think correctly, translates this as "We now have a situation where the right is demonstrably 100% correct and the left is 100% wrong, so really there's no way to have a sensible discussion." (via twitter)

The particularly interesting bits to me are,

  1. The stranglehold of the left on political discourse seems to be slipping. It seems more and more common lately that issues which the left would like to sweep under the rug instead get enough mainstream exposure that they can't actually do so. Sure, there's tons of comments like Hammersley's which fall back on their feminine strategy of rolling their eyes at how uncouth the right is being by continuing to hammer on topics which the left would much rather see treated as not important actually and impolite to talk about, but that doesn't seem to be working any more. I think this is nearly 100% downstream of Elon purchasing twitter, and I'm increasingly horrified by a hypothetical counterfactual world where he didn't.
  2. I didn't think I had much respect left to lose for the academy, but from what I can tell Arday would have continued to get away with this indefinitely no matter how egregious and flamboyant his fraud. I don't know that, of course, but to the degree that it's true I'm surprised to feel something dying inside of me where I thought nothing still lived.

I think this is nearly 100% downstream of Elon purchasing twitter, and I'm increasingly horrified by a hypothetical counterfactual world where he didn't.

There's a huge lesson here that the right may never learn, because they got lucky with Elon. The thing is you cannot have your strategy revolve around getting lucky with a billionaire. You need to build institutions that will accomplish what you want.

In the right's defense, they were learning this before Elon bought Twitter, and they have made progress on that front.

"We now have a situation where the right is demonstrably 100% correct and the left is 100% wrong, so really there's no way to have a sensible discussion."

I call these anti-scissor statements.

A very good explainer for the "Republicans pounce" phenomenon.

A bunch of the early tweet replies were literally 'This looks like a potential issue, but I cannot support it since Cofnas is a bad person' from Academics of decent standing. The whole thing's quite flagrantly embarrassing as an Emperor's New Clothes situation for Academia.

I can also try to put myself in the shoes of a peer of Arday's who was skeptical of him, and I get why nobody inside the tent wanted to go for him. Massive risk of getting tagged with the racism/ableism brushes, none of Arday's science actually means anything so it's not like he's really setting back any field and all of his direct competitors for jobs would also need a long list of diversity dotpoints and 'senior white Cambridge Professor casts doubts on superstar Youngest Black Professor in Cambridge history' is not a headline that anybody's career would benefit from, even if they won the war.

I can also try to put myself in the shoes of a peer of Arday's who was skeptical of him, and I get why nobody inside the tent wanted to go for him. Massive risk of getting tagged with the racism/ableism brushes, none of Arday's science actually means anything so it's not like he's really setting back any field and all of his direct competitors for jobs would also need a long list of diversity dotpoints and 'senior white Cambridge Professor casts doubts on superstar Youngest Black Professor in Cambridge history' is not a headline that anybody's career would benefit from, even if they won the war.

There's a famous tweet that was made like 10 years ago that comes up every now and then, which seems appropriate for this. I don't have the tweet, but the text was something like:

William Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? William Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman.

Black woman invented the telescope is the version of the tweet I believe gets the most push but there's lots of variants.

https://x.com/i/status/1352218757880557570

an open letter [...] the letter [...] it

You'd think these phrases would be grammatically correct, but one mildly interesting bit of this story that your summary underemphasized is that technically they're not; "the letter" here doesn't describe a singular thing but rather a plural. The Good Law Project made a couple stealth edits to "the" letter after publishing and getting hundreds of online signatures with the first version of it. "Both conducted thorough investigations and found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing." (already with 600+ signatures in that archive snapshot) became "Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing.", and then in addition to removing Professor Uchegbu's name entirely from the principal signatories they've deleted Lord Simon Wooley's affiliation with Cambridge for some reason, despite leaving it for three other Cambridge names there.

Good post, I'll write a substantial comment shortly but a minor nitpick first: Arday was the youngest ever black professor at Cambridge (presumably not of a particularly long list). I'm not sure who the youngest overall/white professor was, but Newton was 26 when he was appointed Lucasian professor, a full decade younger than Arday.

Surely the sheer age of Cambridge has to figure into it since the first Professorship was rewarded in 1502 and the standards for professorship, research and general societal attitudes towards 'rich family blasts 500,000 groats into making their 4th son professor of Theology at age 8' have all shifted a lot in that period.

Sure, sub 40 is definitely impressive. Same age as Hawking when he won his professorship, just not the youngest!

Thanks, I'll amend.

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