Star Academic at Cambridge Can’t Back Up His Own Stories

His name is Jason Arday and he’s a bit of a rock star because he’s the youngest black academic ever at Cambridge University. Beyond that, he’s led an extraordinary life which is going to be chronicled in a forthcoming autobiography. Among other things, he claims he was illiterate until he was 18 and then overcame the odds to earn his Ph.D. by age 30. He also claims to be an elite runner who has raised millions for charity.

But lately the accuracy of some of this work and his stories about a racist backlash against him are being questioned. Last week, David wrote about the claims of plagiarism which were circulating around Arday. He has been officially cleared by Cambridge and the school in Liverpool where he earned his Ph.D. Arday doesn’t exactly deny the plagiarism so much as blame any faults in his work on the universities in question to give him proper oversight.

Part of Arday’s defence against a complaint of plagiarism at Liverpool John Moores University was to point to alleged racism, saying that a misconduct panel should consider the political context of a “war on critical race theory”. 

The university set up the panel, which cleared Arday, after complaints were received last year. Arday’s work contained passages that were identical or highly similar to the work of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a ­Brunel University student, published six years earlier. The statistical chances of Arday using the same words have since been calculated as one in 100 billion.

Although Arday did not dispute the allegations of plagiarism, he defended himself by saying he had received inadequate supervision and support, especially given his autism and “complex learning disabilities”…

The panel concluded in March that the citation issues were a result of “honest and reasonable error” and also detailed that the text overlap with Zwozdiak-Myers was “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time”. 

So is Arday cleared of the allegations? According to the two schools, he has been. But there’s some question about whether their reviews were entirely honest. Recently, an unnamed professor ran Arday’s Ph.D. thesis through a plagiarism checker used by many universities. The author notes that Turnitin, which compares work to a large database of previously published academic work, isn’t perfect. It has a habit of giving false positives in some cases. Nevertheless, Arday’s thesis doesn’t appear to be one of those.

Turnitin isn’t perfect. It doesn’t catch everything. It can think it has caught plagiarism when it hasn’t: sometimes it mistakes common or idiomatic phrases for plagiarism; it always thinks there is plagiarism even if a source’s words have been put in quotation marks with a correct citation. It also always thinks there is a lot of plagiarism in bibliographic materials simply where two essays legitimately cite the same source in the same way. As academics, we tend not to use Turnitin as a final judge, but more as a diagnostic tool. It allows for a quick scan of work to see if there is anything fishy, and then we can follow up by hand, checking the text against sources ourselves.

There are some interesting results here. Alongside the plagiarism from Zwozdiak-Myers, which has been reported in the press, there is substantial plagiarism from a range of other sources including a PhD thesis by Christina P. Ligadu at the University of Wollongong. There is also a lot of plagiarism from sources by academics in the field, and in particular Arday seems to have borrowed liberally from various handbooks (for non-academics, a handbook is a publication where various thinkers in a field contribute definitive articles on a set topic.)…

The large blocks of verbatim copying we see in Arday’s thesis are not normal. Nobody in academia would consider this normal, despite the conclusion of Cambridge and Liverpool John Moore’s that this is not academic misconduct. I am posting this because I think it is helpful for people to be able to see clearly why lots of academics are freaked out by the denial of issues here. A Turnitin report that looks like this rings every single alarm bell for people used to looking at them. Arday has argued that “if anyone’s academic work had been subjected to as much scrutiny it would show similar errors.” This is simply untrue. The report linked below is genuinely unusual.

You can download the full report at the link above if you’re so inclined. And the Times of London mentioned other questions about his research.

Other quotes from his research participants appear to have been repeated across multiple papers, seemingly attributed to different people.

The Times also found inconsistencies in how he described his participants. In one paper, participant no 11 is variously described as a black female academic, an Asian female professional services worker and a mixed-heritage female academic.

Such inconsistencies appear at least 25 times across three papers.

Independent experts said on Friday that failings uncovered by The Times warranted further investigation.

Part of the problem for Arday is that his truthfulness is also being questioned on the basis of other claims he’s made outside of his academic work. Saturday, the Guardian posted a story on these outside issues.

He has claimed in media interviews to have raised £5m for charities over a 20-year period (sometimes this figure has risen to £5.5m). He has done this, he says, by running 30 marathons in 35 days – a feat he has spoken about in media interviews and in his book. He also claimed at public events to have run 600 miles in six days.

As his critics online have pointed out, £5m raised for charity would be a staggering amount for someone who is not already famous. In 2012, Arday said he hoped to raise £250,000 by the time he was 50.

When asked if the £5m figure was accurate, Arday clarified to the Guardian that the money was raised with the help of “many fundraising collectives over a two-decade period”. When asked to identify other people who took part in these efforts, Arday said he had signed NDAs preventing him from disclosing that information.

Has anyone ever heard of someone being asked to sign an NDA for a charity fundraising event? I mean, maybe it has happened before but it sounds pretty unusual, especially if the person in question isn’t well known. He’s also claimed to be the victim of a racist backlash but some of those claims seem dubious as well. For instance, Arday specifically claimed a man twice confronted him on campus by a masked man who demanded he resign. The second time, the man pulled out a knife. However…

The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.

He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.

In another incident, Arday claimed a pig’s head was sent to his parents’ home. He claimed he intercepted the package and threw it away but only mentioned it to police months later. Then he claimed police had investigated and identified the source, a local butcher shop in south London.

In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.

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…

Arday took no photographs of the bullet, the banana, the corrosive substance or the pig’s head. The only other people who saw any of the items were close family members, who told the Guardian Arday had shown them the bullet and the “poison”. Arday could produce no messages from the time in which he discussed any of the items with friends, family, colleagues or the police.

So, either the local butcher and Scotland Yard are part of the conspiracy against him or Arday is lying about the pig head.

Arday’s response to all of this has been to accuse his critics of racism and claim there is a playbook used by conservatives to discredit black academics and to demand that people rally to his defense to eradicate this “cancer” from academia. It’s effective rhetoric but it doesn’t resolve the issues with many of his fantastic stories.

His stories just don’t seem very credible, but I guess Cambridge doesn’t want to lose face by backing down at this point. So everyone is instead sticking with the claim that he’s the victim of a racist conspiracy. 

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