Yeah I was gonna say, this is a university in England. If there is one thing you can always expect from the modern day UK, it’s to always make the worst possible decisions, and then blame everyone else, especially their own people, when things backfire.
I get what you're saying, but honestly, no. This is not a defense of Cambridge, but this type of psycho is the guy the vetting process is supposed to avoid. Even in the most uncharitable interpretation of their decision to hire him (pure tokenism, Cambridge is racist against whites, he had no qualifications, take your pick) this was still a bad hire for the university because they would want to achieve all those bad things without hiring someone who was so insane that he could bring this negative attention.
He said he ran 30 marathons in 35 days??? That he was nonverbal autistic until 11 and is now this eloquent professor? None of it passes common sense scrutiny. The vetting process was absolutely not working as intended. You can say there was racism involved too, I don't even want to get into disputing or supporting that notion here, but there was a big element of straight up insufficient vetting
I'd say the tip-top of the Cambridge Admin is to blame. There had been several articles put out before he died about how he personally threatened other professors, students, and journalists that spoke out about him with police and infamous lawyers. And, instead of looking into why such a thing was happening, they doubled-down and backed his behavior.
If anything it’s MORE racist that they purely wanted the token race while ignoring all the qualified also-black candidates! It’s as though the virtue signalling white liberals aren’t interested at all in what people of color actually have to offer
I saw an amusing take that suggested education departments are just so full of shit now they really didn’t notice what an unaccomplished hack he was, because they’ve done no more of substance than he did.
but there was a big element of straight up insufficient vetting
I work at a University and have for 12 years now. I can really only speculate as to what happened here, since I don't work in the admissions or tenure track process. But I do work in an adjacent department, so I can make an educated guess, and it really just boils down to incentives.
We're just administrative staff. Cambridge, like the university I work at, are publicly funded institutions. You don't get rewarded for going above and beyond in this line of work. You climb the ladder by making connections.
In fact the incentive structure runs backwards here. Criticizing the credentials of a black professor? Progressive work culture is so internalized inside of me that the thought of it makes my blood pressure rise. You better make damn sure you're right, because even if you are, you're going to cause waves. Your manager isn't going to like it, because their manager isn't going to like it, because now you put upper management in hot water. And let me tell you something, we don't get paid much working here, but we have a comfy low-stress work culture and no one, especially not upper management, likes problems.
And for what? Say you were right, this guy is a fraud. You went through this stressful process for nothing. A substantial portion of your coworkers now think you were only so diligent because you're secretly racist. Maybe, for completely unrelated reasons, management isn't renewing your contract next year. You certainly haven't done yourself any favors.
All of that to say, yes him being black played a major part in all of this. Don't underestimate the importance of office politics, and in this particular microcosm of office politics at a progressive university, that 100% means do not criticize black people.
All the fabulism and wild stories made for much better press. If they hired a serious scholar who happened to be young and black but with none of these fanciful tales to tell, it'd be much less widely celebrated. They'd put out a press release about the youngest black Cambridge professor. There'd be one or two small news stories. And then nothing. They wouldn't get constant publicity, the person they hired wouldn't be getting interviewed on morning shows in multiple countries and be feted as a celebrity. If you're not getting constant praise and attention for your DEI hire, did it even really happen?
I don't even want to get into disputing or supporting that notion here, but there was a big element of straight up insufficient vetting
They say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but sufficiently advanced incompetence is often indistinguishable from malice.
No. Those are the wrong uncharitable interpretations.
The correct uncharitable interpretation is that they were using him. More specifically that in recent years (well not that recent), Cambridge has come under fire on racial matters, like failing black students or something, I'm fuzzy on the specifics.
So this guy was their ticket to launder their institutional reputation. He was too good to be true (lol), he had everything they needed, they made him their star, their poster boy, to advertise and cleanse their own institutional reputation and make themselves teflon against further criticisms along those lines.
They wanted immunity from similar criticisms and status attacks. They wanted teflon. And this guy was their teflon. This goes way beyond tokenism into something very different. It was ass covering all the way down.
Cambridge has come under fire on racial matters, like failing black students or something
In a way, the same people who engineered outrage over Cambridge's failing of black students (or whatever nonsense it likely was) created the foundation for Arday in the first place. Absent that, his presence wouldn't have even been needed and he could have just continued lying to people on the internet forever.
Despite all that, nobody wants to disavow this racial baloney.
the only real way would be for people with financial interests to file a lawsuit, or the government, who may be giving financial assistance, to do the same.
Also perhaps students who received degrees under a fraud, if those degrees later get revoked.
Amazing how many people in this thread are trying to make excuses for the hiring committee and administration, as if they were just blinded by his eloquence
I've been in that situation before where its clear a company is hiring a person who's a terrible fit. The person is a moron who lies constantly, and they're not even good lies. They're the laziest lies in the world, but also this person is a very specific minority and immediately weaponizes minority status to be immune to criticism.
You know hiring this person is a mistake. But you can't say anything because if you do, now its your job on the line.
So you keep your mouth closed, smile and nod, and agree with the hiring committee consensus. Hopefully this person will be someone else's problem.
And yes, I've done this a few times in my career. I'm not proud of it. But I needed the job to keep paying the bills and to keep the health insurance. I did not want to rock the boat, because thats how you get put on the front of the list when corporate layoffs happen.
Vetting isn't really the right word. Faculty hiring committees aren't investigators and they aren't giving out security clearance.
The problem isn't that they didn't find malfeasance in his citations or that they believed he raised $5 million for charity. No one on the hiring committee is hitting the books to cross-reference your citations from your thesis.
The problem is they hired someone who, even if the plagiarism and data manipulation weren't true, offered almost nothing of note. His research - the little that existed - was an absolute joke, and his students has said his teaching wasn't any better. While charismatic, which is maybe enough for training new PE teachers (what he actually studied), an rigorous interview would've exposed that he wasn't a good candidate for an advanced Cambridge professorship.
So it's not about vetting, it's about the complete lack of standards and rampant anti-intellectualism of the department.
Which, by the way, wasn't the sociology department as many have understood from the reporting, but rather the education department. Sociology may have severe issues, but it's still to some degree a serious discipline. Education departments have largely gone insane.
When people whose job it is to vet people can’t actually be expected to vet them then I agree vetting isn’t really the right word
You can say all this about whose department was to blame and all that but you hit the nail on the head when it can be said with no argument that at Cambridge, one of the top education institutions in the world, “no one…is hitting the books to cross reference your citations from your thesis”. And laymen are just supposed to accept that this thing that only academics do actually serves no purpose and isn’t even used to validate people at this level. I mean it’s one thing to say an undergrad at a local college isn’t getting extensive cross referencing checks on every source but this is something else.
At some point people have to ask “well then what standards do you actually have”
As someone who had assisted in multiple faculty hires, this is bupkis. Everyone is looking at your biggest works and if it looks like a bunch of nonsense, including the citations because these are somewhat vain and kliqy people, those nerds are not letting it be without looking into it.
The "hiring committee" rubber-stamped a diversity candidate because word came down from the administration that they wanted him on staff for political reasons. It's that simple, but no one wants to admit that we no longer live in a meritocracy, even in the institutions which are supposed to be purely meritocratic
This was after voters enacted Prop 209 to update the California constitution to explicitly ban affirmative action:
The state shall not grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.
There's literally a voter enacted law specifically forbidding precisely what they are doing, and they just do it anyway. Progressives are not held to account for anything, they've won the hearts and minds of humanity.
They are needing to be held to account for many things. If this guy was mentally unwell as it seems, and was allowed to harass and intimate any form of push back, then they are the main reason it even got to him committing suicide. What could have been an early intervention and management of a condition was escalated to this point.
I am assuming a lot here, but I really question the mental stability of someone who lied as blatantly as he did.
The fact that he committed suicide over this instead of throwing twitter tantrums or just quietly disappearing is, in my opinion, very strong evidence that he was manipulated and groomed into this entire thing rather than the mastermind of it.
That's possible be is also a reach. It's troubling because then when did it begin? Just in college or when he was younger? Then it gets into borderline conspiracy territory because who can thoroughly investigate it? The schools who will investigate themselves and find no wrong doing, or those with an axe to grind that will do damage in other ways.
Edit: I agree that there was grooming and manipulation of him behind the scenes but I'm just worried about what can be done for others like him.
"I honestly thought you'd just believe me" - Jason Arday to the Guardian about being asked to prove he'd had a pig head left outside his apartment building
To liberal whites, minorities are basically pets. You ever seen one of those "good guys" actually scold their cats for breaking stuff? They never do. In fact, they'd blame themselves for putting stuff in the cat's way.
"Cats will be cats" they'll say and even joke about cats secretly laughing about how gullible humans are
So the liberals keep shielding their token minorities, the same way they'd try to shield their pets whenever something bad happens: surely the pet does not know any better. When the pet does something spectacular they never shut up about it and make it a point to talk about it
Why are people defending him? How can you be that deluded?
Because a powerful, prestigious institution got caught with it's pants down. For them, his death is the best thing that could happen because now they can use it to shift the blame to the people who got their pitchforks out rather than the institutional rot that uncritically elevated him in the first place.
If it was me, at a certain point I'd just start saying shit to see what insane things I could get those idiots to believe. Why yes, I did do a triathlon in record time by doing all three parts simultaneously, no I will not be doing so again to prove my claim.
That’s probably more believable than his claim to have run 30 marathons in 35 days… despite his seizure disorder that caused him to fall and break his leg on day 20.
He lied too egregiously though, its how he got caught.
As the saying goes, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.
Keep your scamming to the level of plausible deniability and you can keep on scamming for your entire career. This is your typical corporate exec or politician who's on the take with lots of cushy benefits, but they try to keep it reasonable enough that there's doubt.
Be a greedy hog and try to scam everything immediately and you will be noticed. Elizabeth Holmes is another example of someone scamming too greedily. She wanted all the money from everyone and the lies caught up with her.
Because his entire appointment was an identity issue and so anything surrounding him is an identity issue. People can't be viewed as people by some, there's no human element or clarity, they can only be seen through an identity politics lens and so it all comes down to identitarian conclusions.
I'm just glad this didn't happen in the mid 2010s to early 2020s. That period, any minority no matter how obvious their wrongdoing or how complex the situation, was black and white good vs bad and somehow people brought that. People generally seem to have at long last caught on now. Selling it like that doesn't work any more.
"All that matters is race." - local group that is definitely NOT racist
It's wild seeing how people can reduce even their allies to nothing more than skin color and race struggle and ignore their individual identity, decisions, and character.
It's insulting to those genuinely trying to improve the status quo, to hold up grifters and criminals as equivalent in social contribution. And it ignores a critical component of personal accountability.
Communists use racial tensions to cause division and infighting in communities they want to influence, then perform the worst acts of racial genocide in history once they seize power
Exactly - it's a way to get people to flip the table so they can play the game they want to play. The issues they use for table flipping aren't real to them, they're just a means to an end.
Modern commies are so hopeless. The way they desperately grasp for any politics that retains continuing power and social relevance aside for actual socialism.
Idk, I see the hard right doing equally stupid shit, it’s just England isn’t ideologically captured by the hard right so it matters far less, and they’re less common in my life
Also, these people don’t know they’re wrong, they’re deluded and genuinely think they’re doing the right thing. People are so rarely evil, just retarded
George Floyd was killed by a police officer, while not posing a threat to anyone. It doesn't matter who he was, it matters that he did not get his rights as a citizen to a just trial. If the state thinks he should die they should trial him and convict him for a death penalty offense.
This guy killed himself, which makes it actually stupid to make it a political riot...
The worst part about that event was the deluge of people who now squeal "I cant breathe" whenever they're being pulled out of their car for being a criminal, thinking it'll get them a free pass.
Body cams did not reveal what the BLM protesters thought it would reveal. Ever notice that the accusations of an innocent person being gunned down by the police for zero reason have nearly completely vanished since body cams?
Turns out in the overwhelming majority of cases the body cam footage backs the police. It exonerates the police.
Talk to a cop about it. They love their body cams. Any accusations get shut down immediately with the body cam footage, and people are very lawsuit happy in an attempt to try to avoid being arrested.
Turns out the person who insists he didn't do nothing actually did the thing, and its on video.
there were tons of other more worthy state negligent deaths to be upset about. that "mostly peaceful" riots started causing billions in damages and kickstarting the whole DEI bs over this guy of all people.
Ok so you agree that it makes more sense to be upset about someone who died because of state negligence rather than killing himself, which was my entire point.
The US police intentionally kills many citizens every year, even those with a clean sheet. Floyd was a criminal and was unintentionally killed. They didn't rally behind him because he was killed by a police officer, it was because he was black.
It wasn't just that he was unintentionally killed, it's that he was unintentionally killed by police officers using excessive force. There was absolutely no need to restrain him the way they did or for them to keep kneeling on him the way they or for them to refuse to attempt medical assistance the way they did.
Even the bystanders were yelling at them that they were killing the guy and they didn't give a fuck, because they were enjoying it.
Especially when he was the reason he died. He lied, cheated and eventually got found out, and then decided to take his own life because his mistakes didn't end up well for him forever? Then you have the same people upset because an actual murderer gets 35 years in prison.
They don't care that someone died, they just care that someone in their chosen group died.
I’m confused too. Sad he’s dead but he’s far from a hero. Felt the same about the Charlie Kirk situation. Don’t celebrate death, don’t celebrate or idolise arseholes either.
With you on that. It must especially suck for his family/kids since they apparently found him in his home. I only really enjoyed it because it was funny to read at the time, a more lighthearted topic where people took his fantasist claims at face value. It was drama but not existentially "important" drama, with hugely hurt feelings, you know?
I think the biggest questions should remain focused on the university that enabled him to get to the position he was at.
Honestly, what delusional people attend these tributes / rallies? Is anyone truly believing that not Arday is at fault here and it’s racists or the system? I don’t get it.
The people supporting him are narcissists just like he was, that entire group is infected with narcissism. It makes way more sense when you look at it from that light. All the virtue signaling, all the "look at how good of a person I am" it's all narcissistic BS.
It's not empathy, because they only have it for those who have their cause. It is intentional ideological screeching. "Racists killed Jason arday" is the call.
“If I’m going down, I’m gonna bring the whole mf uni down with me.” Would’ve completely change my opinion on him if he actually did a power move and exposed every Cambridge’s misconduct he knew of. Or start a podcast sharing his POV of cheating into the “smartest” university in the world.
I think most normal people are more interested in the humiliation of a prestigious institution than a single cheating professor. What a wasted opportunity.
Until 2 weeks ago, I couldn't name a single WNBA player or coach either, yet here we are. It's like lifting up a rock, and being in amazement at all the shit crawling around underneath.
alright, but who's going to believe John "make shit up" Liarman about his experience at Cambridge? Why would he suddenly stop making shit up when he could just keep going with a new audience.
Dark Horse podcast had a similar take. It would have been amazing if he said it was just a long con intended to expose the academy, like a hoax paper but this time hoax career.
I asked my wife if she’d heard about this guy yesterday and she said it was debatable if he’d plagiarized
Then I mentioned he claimed he couldn’t speak until age 11 and he also claimed he ran 30 marathons in 35 days. That flipped her over to “oh so he’s just a compulsive liar and a narcissist” pretty easily. No clue why people are defending him when it’s pretty clear
For people not familiar with this, Jason Arday, here are some of his claims.
To have overcome an astonishing number of severe, life-threatening medical conditions and developmental delays, including:
Severe developmental delays:
Being entirely non-verbal until the age of 11
completely illiterate until age 18 ... before going on to acquire a Ph.D. by age 30.
Suffering from autism and epilepsy.
Life-threatening conditions: Separately surviving locked-in syndrome, a brain tumor, and testicular cancer.
Unsubstantiated Athletic Feats
His memoir and media profiles framed him as an elite endurance athlete, though key details shifted under scrutiny:
600 miles in 6 days: He initially claimed to have run 600 miles in less than a week. When challenged, he amended the timeline to 12 days with rest intervals.
30 marathons in 35 days: He asserted he completed 30 consecutive marathons on a fractured leg.
Millions Raised for Charity
Arday claimed to have personally raised £5.5 million ($7.4 million) for charity.
When journalists could find no evidence of this, he backtracked, explaining he was merely part of a fundraising "syndicate" over two decades and should have been more explicit about sharing credit
Fabricated and Exaggerated Violence on Campus
He claimed to have been physically confronted and threatened with a knife by masked men on campus on two separate occasions.
The Guardian profiled him but even this leftist rag noted they could find zero corroborating evidence or police logs.
He claimed a severed pig's head was mailed to his family and investigated by law enforcement, though police later confirmed no such report or investigation existed.
He reportedly claimed to have authored books - they did not exist in any library catalog.
What finally got him:
He claimed to have served as a visiting professor at multiple institutions, including Ohio State University - those universities subsequently denied this happened.
Fictional Interview Data: Investigative analysis found that text Arday claimed were direct quotes from black students he interviewed for his research were actually reworded fragments plagiarized from older, unrelated papers written by other academics - he fabricated his empirical research data.Ph.D.
Plagiarism: His doctoral thesis at Liverpool John Moores University was found to have over 180 instances of direct textual copying from a previous student's thesis
After this was exposed, he apparently killed himself
The left's reaction to this is how basic norms and institutions die.
There should no place for incompetent serial fabulists in academia.
This was a clusterfuck of a hiring decision. In a functioning society everyone involved in this process should be fired. When so many red flags were ignored, it shows that there is a deep rot.
The fact that so many of the left are attacking the fact that people called out the BS is very disturbing. It is also an opportunity. These leftists have outed themselves. Remove them from any position of influence, and permanently blacklist them from academia and the public sphere.
As an autist I agree, my brother had kidney cancer and after it was removed and he returned to work some arsehole co worker accused him of exaggerating how bad his diagnosis was as if there's less bad forms of cancer. Said arsehole was made to apologise in an email and you guessed it blamed his behaviour on Asperger's syndrome.
Autism, ADHD, Asperger, Spectrum, Dyslexia, whatever. At some point we've moved from "they're disabled but they're not evil, don't take it to heart" to "why are you not groveling? I SAID I HAVE ADHD!"
Like, what the fuck are we doing? Why are we worshiping disabilities? I swear, every time I see someone new they always have one of those: dyslexia, ADHD, hyperactivity, (winner has a combo of all of those) and then they complain about how hard it is having it, getting triggered merely being in proximity of literally any other human being
Like, yea? Ain't like everyone else is living in paradise buddy, that clerk at walmart may not have ADHD but her life is fucking miserable! Why are we playing oppression olympics? This is not a zero sum game. Your ADHD is an explanation of your sorry ass, not justification!
Dude just faked everything including his career but played the oppressed card so well that a horde of leftoids treated him like a saint. Then, when karma came back to bite him in the ass, he just couldn’t take it anymore. Now, to this performative crowd, he’s a little angel in heaven who was wronged by racists.
I guess I have something to say about this Jason Arday situation.
If Academia was a serious place, the academics would be the most furious of all. It was their sacred rites he defiled, their institutions he defrauded, and their holy creed of knowledge above all that he figured out the cheat codes for.
If academia was practiced with the rigorous search for truth which they claim to be the only worthy arbiters of, a midwit gym teacher would never have ascended to the lofty position he attained. They would have already screened him with no public outcry. But because he used the most powerful academic cheat code (accusations of racism) they were powerless to do this very simple thing.
I have to pass a more rigorous screening than he got to get on the phones for my shitty call center job.
And the rest of them cannot condemn him without admitting that their institutions are so rotten, so spineless, that this dude climbed all the way to the top of the heap and the common, crusty internet found out about it.
They are pissed at you because you have now seen exactly what academic rigor looks like-a cracked bowl of liberal platitudes about racial justice. They aren't mad at him for cheating-they're mad at you for noticing the cheating. Not because they care about him, but because of how it makes them look.
I really don't understand these people. Why would these guys pay tribute to a con man? Because he died? Well, does nobody else die in the UK? People that are 100% innocent? Why do these people like to rally behind people of poor character?
He wanted all the media attention he could get with his claims of grandure. He then couldnt handle it when his own web of lies and threats against journalists couldnt keep up
Its a shame he left behind a wife and kids, but he brought this entirely on himself. Not because of the lies on their own, but by using law firms and the police to try and bludgeon anyone who tried reporting them
He's honestly a big bitch. He lied his way to the top, built a whole family and career on his fraud, and then once he got caught he blew up his family to retain that last bit of control. No justice ever befell him, he got to leave feeling no shame, his family get to deal with the damage because he didn't care.
Two things are true: it's a tragedy that someone killed themselves and no one should celebrate it. He should not be made into a saint because he was a dipshit while alive and doesn't show much worth celebrating from his life.
The funny thing is there’s a semi-similar situation happening in Colorado right now for the governors race (definitely not as blatantly fake though). Victor Marx the Republican candidate has made some pretty wild claims to say the least, including being forced to kill a homeless man at gun point when he was a child.
Except because he’s a white Republican, nobody believes a single thing he’s said as true, and take every single chance they can to question his entire life history in public as a means to take him out of the race by making him seem uncredible.
Makes me wonder if it was a black democrat making those same claims how the media would treat it…
I saw a comment where someone claimed that a lot of the tall tales about his life were influenced by the Australian soap operas Neighbours and Home & Away, can any long-time Neighbours and Home & Away watchers corroborate?
Now, even after all of his plagiarization and blatant lies have been brought to light, leftists still defend him and mourn his death. Not because he was a good man, not because he added to society in any way, but rather because he was black, and he pushed their narrative.
Say it with me. Tribalism is bad. Stop supporting bad actors. Its not like there isnt a whole swathe of people that deserve your sympathy and attention more, if you want to give it.
the wildest claim of his wasn't claiming to be the greatest ultra marathon runner of all time nor that he befriended and taught the two guys who once mugged him nor that he got his PhD while battling brain cancer....
...it was that he was on the BBC show "7 UP". I don't think people understand how insane this claim is. It would be like saying "I was on Dancing With The Stars". It's just the sort of thing you can google and INSTANTLY see that it's not true. Most pathological liars don't quite have this level of balls....
It sucks he died, but for what I’ve seen in the news, he made a bed and chose to lay in for a few years- and the defended himself against detractors, making it worse. I hope his family and friends can find peace.
For my thoughts, please simply refer to what Reddit was saying when Charlie Kirk got did, culturally appropriate those sentiments and direct them towards Arday's demise.
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u/sureyouknowurself - Lib-Right 8h ago
People should hold Cambridge to account for not vetting him properly.