Cambridge University has a scary moment of sanity, but then it appears to mercifully pass
For a short while it seemed as though Cambridge was going to investigate how it was that it had hired someone – Jason Arday – who was a serial plagiarist and liar, as well as unqualified academically. But now there appears to be a shift and the emphasis will be on how the university failed to properly support Arday.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, because reporting on the initial process honestly and thoroughly would be too threatening to the entire belief system that has taken over Cambridge and so many other universities in recent years. We could call that belief system anti-meritocracy, pro-DEI, anti-truth, or some combination of all three. The original stated aims of the investigation would threaten the livelihood of too many people connected with the university. Best to focus on the question of why the university wasn’t kinder and more helpful to Arday, who after all is no longer on this earth because he committed suicide after his plagiarism et al was revealed.
The university is now virtue-signaling, its favorite occupation. But perhaps the greater virtue would have been to have systems in place that wouldn’t have exposed Arday to any of this in the first place by hiring him. His hiring was itself a form of virtue-signaling – “look at this nice young black man we hired; aren’t we super?” They used him, among other things, although he also used them. And both used the students, who were shortchanged.
I would guess that students at Cambridge are constantly shortchanged these days. Cambridge is hardly alone in this, either.
From the article:
As reported by A.J. Katz of TheWrap and original findings published by The New York Times, the University of Cambridge has altered the scope of its planned independent inquiry into the appointment of the late Professor Jason Arday, opting not to focus directly on his individual recruitment or academic record. …
As reported by The New York Times, Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice had initially promised a “thorough and transparent” investigation into the recruitment of Professor Arday, who made national headlines in 2022 when appointed to a chair in the sociology of education as Cambridge’s youngest Black professor at the age of 37.
“However, the university has restructured its approach into a two-part review. The first stage, led by former British prosecutor Nazir Afzal, focuses exclusively on the welfare and support provided to Professor Arday while he was subject to public scrutiny. As noted by A.J. Katz of TheWrap, Mr Afzal stated that this phase is “not about the allegations made against Professor Arday or about his academic record,” but is instead centred on ‘his welfare, his care, his well-being’.”
The second phase of the review is set to evaluate broader university policies regarding academic hiring and the handling of research misconduct claims across the wider institution. As reported by The New York Times, the framework for this second phase remains unfinalised, leading critics to argue that specific questions surrounding Professor Arday’s vetting process will remain unresolved.
I suppose it’s possible that the second phase will actually deal with the origins of the problem honestly and thoroughly. However, I doubt it. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if it does.
It seems there are two factions among the Cambridge faculty on this:
A group of Cambridge professors has begun circulating a draft letter expressing concern over the narrowed scope of the review. According to the Times, the draft letter calls for greater institutional accountability and requests an explicit examination into how the university verified and promoted Professor Arday’s qualifications and background during his recruitment.
Conversely, supporters and colleagues have highlighted the severe psychological strain placed on academics facing public allegations, arguing that the university’s primary duty in such circumstances must be to evaluate duty of care and mental health support structures.
The entire thing is sad from start to finish.
The “sociology of education” is a fine indicator of the sad uselessness of so-called “higher education”.
All things considered, if one isn’t bothered too much by Arday’s suicide, this worked out pretty well for the DEI movement.
The suicide is the only thing that retrieved it for DEI, and it still lay a lot of things bare.
How could so many presumably intelligent, educated people think that that guy was not going to be found out? Or were they so secure that they didn’t care. Or did they so badly want a poc to be on their staff that they just lied to themselves? It meant that much to them????
Belated condolences at your loss Neo.
Has it ever been legally/medically confirmed that Arday was indeed a suicide? That is probably the way to bet but it’s not impossible that he had, say, some underlying or unknown heart condition that did him in, possibly exacerbated by stress. Apologies if I missed it.
Can’t let it pass. FOAF: death does not result from stress. Stress is widely invoked but rarely, if ever, is it a death trigger. Lots of us operate under very stressful circumstances, and get right back to it the next day, the day afterwards, etc.
@FOAF: Has it ever been legally/medically confirmed that Arday was indeed a suicide?
Not yet. Though it seems that cause of death sometimes takes a while to come out for celebrities.
However … cui bono? Arday’s suicide has been convenient for Cambridge and DEI.
Woo-oo-oo! 🙂
Just another leftist coverup…
At some point these institutions which continue to fabricate “a reality” will lose all credibility with the general public, right?
Cicero, do you exclude the possibility there may have been another cause of his death? Haven’t young people sometimes died suddenly for the reason I stated, ie underlying heart defect that may have gone undetected? Obviously not common but not unknown. I would have thought by now there would be an official determination of Arday’s cause of death.
huxley: “cui bono” Exactly, that is why I wonder.
Pehaps if they do go find out what they did wrong they might find other skeletons in their closets.
I doubt DIE only hired 1 fake professor
No sanity from California…as Goofy Governor Newsom appears to have pretty much decided that state suicide is really cool!
(Maybe, like Canada’s Carney, Newsom can try to obtain EU “association” status for his state/toy…)
“Is California Running A Shadow Welfare System For Illegal Immigrants”—
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/california-running-shadow-welfare-system-illegal-immigrants
IMO, sociology is not inherently an unserious discipline and schooling is not an invalid research subject. As far as I can see, there was a seminal issue in who was attracted to and retained in academic sociology and each generation of sociology faculty has had a higher ratio of narrative pushers to actual scholars.
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The Arday case is instructive in that it indicates that at the apex and center of academic life in the English-speaking world, basic competence is dispensable if it interferes with whatever projects emerge from faculty politics and the institution itself lacks the integrity to conduct an inquiry even when egregious misfeasance has already been exposed. (See Nathan Cofnas’ evaluation of his published work. Posing ‘academic journals’ were accepting for publication junk projects that a serious professor would not have accepted from an undergraduate). We’re not talking about a rank-and-file aspirant given mulligans allowing him to land a position at Penn or Princeton when he’d ordinarily be interviewed by one of New Jersey’s common-and-garden state colleges. We’re talking about someone who should not have been admitted to a post-baccalaureate program, much less received a signed dissertation from one. That he was a yarn-puller of astonishing insouciance is the maraschino on top.
I doubt DIE only hired 1 fake professor
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Hiring him was an assertion of impunity, confirmed by the institutional response. Calling him a ‘DEI professor’ suggests he was employed by a tier 1 institution when he should have been employed by a tier 3 institution. He should not have been employed anywhere in higher education outside of staff positions where his authentic skills might have been employed. A full audit of his life and career – which would have to devote itself to locating any kernels of truth among the biographical confabulations he was offering – has not been done and may never be. There’s been some suggestion that he has sufficient background to function as an athletic coach in some venue.
NB also the commentary by the editor of Nature. Another assertion of impunity. We’re not dealing with people who have an actual conscience.
BTW, it was not the responsibility of Cambridge, Ghent, or Nathan Cofnas to see to Mr. Arday’s ‘care and well-being’. It was Dr. Cofnas’ responsibility to tell the truth as best he understood it. It was Ghent’s responsibility to go on about its business and not foster anything nefarious. Cambridge’s responsibility was to see to it that his fringes were in order and he received his salary in a timely fashion, to see to it that he was not in the course of his employment exposed to radiation, toxic chemicals, and injurious particulate matter; to see to it that he was not expected to put in hours wildly in excess of what is ordinary for salaried employees, and to see to it that he got a fair and impartial hearing in performance reviews and in re allegations of misconduct. Your employer is not a nurse; your employer is not your wife. We’re he a competent professor, other faculty members of good will may have acted as his mentor. No guarantees of that in any workplace, however.
At some point these institutions which continue to fabricate “a reality” will lose all credibility with the general public, right?
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If any repairs can be undertaken, politicians will have to get off their duffs and do it. Their interest in so doing in the occidental world approaches zero.
Nathan Cofnas may have done valuable work in publicizing Arday’s incompetence but he’s not my cup of tea. His first Substack essay (that I can find) claimed that conservatives are measurably stupider than liberals. As support for this idea, he says that if conservatives were smart, they would have a world class conservative university. This seems wildly simplistic to me.
More interestingly, he claims that wokeism is more logically coherent than conservatism: wokeists believe that everyone starts from a baseline of equal intellectual capacity (conservatives don’t dispute this idea, he says) so the only possible explanation for unequal outcomes is racism. Hmmm.
“everyone starts from a baseline of equal intellectual capacity”
Oh, my goodness. I thought blacks averaged a score of 85 on IQ tests. That must mean school stupidifies them.
Mr. Cofnas preferred notion is that a political movement should be motivated by and propagating his hereditarian theses. Mr. Sailer waggishly refers to libertarianism as ‘applied autism’. Guess where else you find that?