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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8092 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

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 beyond 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.

UPDATE: Arday has resigned from Cambridge.

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

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.

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?

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

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 intended but I love 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.

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.

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 in the works I'm plagiarizing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, I'll amend.

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