Merged Arday life and death

[Rolfe]

I had no such oral with a panel of examiners for either of my degrees, and have not heard of anyone else doing it either. Is it a Scottish thing?

No. I was a lecturer at London University for six years and absolutely every student had an oral exam as part of every professional examination for their bachelor degree. Not always with an external examiner though.

I still remember the ceilidh after I got my first degree, dancing with the Dean, and he said "Excellent viva my dear, what happened in the written?" I muttered something about not feeling well. The actualité was that my regular monthly two hours of excruciating menstrual pain had perfectly coincided with the medicine written exam. But what 22-year-old tells an elderly male don that? Maybe he guessed.

I also remember the treadmill of hell that was the "viva week" at the RVC. Everyone had to sit behind a desk (in pairs) and grill students one after another on a conveyor belt. At least they gave us "examiners' lunch" that week. The very definition of TANSTAAFL.

 

[Rolfe]

Are we talking about bachelor's degrees? If so I've never heard any one have an oral examination apart from language students.

It's a massive shock to me to realise this isn't a regular requirement for every degree.

 

[Rolfe]

If it's a massive problem across many universities, then it seems unfair to focus on just one person. That's why I'm only really considering his fabulising about his life story,, which was egregious.

This is true, but I was under the impression that the flakes who got these substandard degrees weren't the people getting lectureships and professorships. Maybe I was naïve.

 

[lionking]

They were for mine at Monash.

Fair enough. I have a son who works at Monash and he got his Masters there by coursework. But we are now probably off topic.

 

[Nessie]

It's a massive shock to me to realise this isn't a regular requirement for every degree.

There was no oral part to my degree award, MA (Hons), ancient Scottish university, social sciences.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm just astonished.

 

[Carrot Flower King]

And another: no viva, Sheffield, Faculty of Pure Science, late '70s.

The only folk I know who have were those for PhDs.

Just as well, as I would have had to defend the worst under-grad dissertation anyone could remember in the Botany department and a couple of very Churchillian "essays" in my finals (make sure your questions are actually worthy of an essay-length answer, mebbe even why I wrote the same essay twice in my Part 1s (don't ask essentially the same question on 2 papers, then).

 

[Puppycow]

This is true, but I was under the impression that the flakes who got these substandard degrees weren't the people getting lectureships and professorships. Maybe I was naïve.

Wow. That doesn't come across as arrogant at all.

 

[Rolfe]

I don't care. I worked like a slave to get my degrees. I was told in confidence, later, that when I applied for the lectureship at London, my academic referee told the appointments committee that my PhD thesis was the best submitted to the university that year. Academic standards are important and their erosion to pander to ambitious lightweights harms everyone in the university.

 

[Rolfe]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2089357106445001124

 

[smartcooky]

Wow. That doesn't come across as arrogant at all.

Some of us consider degrees in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (like history, English, or sociology) to be "soft" degrees because the focus is on subjectivity. You can pretty much make up your own interpretations of the subject, and these days, bluff your way through it by Googling other people's work and opinions. But the sciences, engineering, medicine, veterinary, mathematics and related fields are considered to be "hard" degrees because they focus on fixed, measurable facts. You can't bluff your way to any kind of engineering degree (for example). You have to do the work, you have to understand the principles, and those principles are not subject to your personal interpretations.

I can only tell you about what I know. It takes three to four years of full time study to earn a BEng (Hons) Aeronautical Engineering (it took me over four years because I was in the military so I had other miltary related studies to do at the same time). I had to study and learn basic engineering, metallurgy, applied aerodynamics, thermofluids, aircraft performance, flight envelopes and characteristics, jet engines, rockets, electronics, navigation and flight instruments, fluid dynamics, advanced propulsion systems, structural analysis & flight testing. Its the toughest four+ years learning I ever did, and there are no shortcuts. And in the 1980s, there was no internet - you had text books! These days its probably different in that regard, but as an erstwhile member here has said... "You can Google for information, but you can't Google for understanding"

 

[lionking]

Some of us consider degrees in the humanities, arts, and social sciences (like history, English, or sociology) to be "soft" degrees because the focus is on subjectivity. You can pretty much make up your own interpretations of the subject, and bluff your way through it by Googling other people's work and opinions. But the sciences, engineering, medicine, veterinary, mathematics and related fields are considered to be hard degrees because they focus on fixed, measurable facts. You can't bluff your way to any kind of engineering degree (for example). You have to do the work, you have to understand the principles, and those principles are not subject to your personal interpretations.

I can only tell you about what I know. It takes three years of full time study to earn a BEng Aeronautical (it took me four years because I was in the military so I had other miltary related studies to do at the same time). Basic engineering, metallurgy, design tools, applied aerodynamics, thermofluids, aircraft performance, flight envelopes and characteristics, jet engines, rockets, electronics, navigation, and flight instruments, fluid dynamics, advanced propulsion systems, structural analysis & flight testing. Its the toughest four years learning I ever did, and there are no shortcuts. As an erstwhile member here has said...
"You can Google for information, but you can't Google for understanding"

Pretty poor generalisation. When I went to university Archaeology was under the Arts domain. This was my first degree from Melbourne University, a Bachelor of Arts in Archaeology (I think it has moved to a different area). I also have a Bachelor of Business. The Archaeology degree was far more demanding.

 

[malbui]

My MSc and PhD were in computing and that field has the advantage of being binary on many levels. It works or it doesn’t. My PhD thesis was very tightly argued and although I don’t claim it was anything special it had the merits of being very clear: here’s my hypothesis, here is my code, here are the data, here are the results, here is my conclusion. Easy to reproduce and pull apart and no amount of sociological waffling could get around that central golden thread.

 

[Rolfe]

My first degree is in veterinary medicine. I have a second bachelor's degree in pure biochemistry, and a PhD in the biochemistry of exercise in the horse. (If you want to know why you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink, I'm your girl.) Later I was admitted as a Fellow of the Institute of Biology.

I have always been somewhat interested in literary and musical criticism, and more recently it has occurred to me that it would have been an absolute walk in the park to get equivalent qualifications and standing in English literature or even musicology (although my performance capabilities were never good enough to get me into a degree in music). But one of the nice things about a career in science is that one can be an amateur musician as a hobby. Not so easy to do it the other way round.

But back to Arday. A narcissistic fabulist who calls the cops on people asking polite questions and then engages the infamous law firm Carter Ruck to frighten off criticism is not a gentle soul who needs to be protected from the cruel world. He's someone who needed to be told, firmly and as often as possible, that making up wildly implausible tales about ones achievements is not a viable way to get through life. Unfortunately it would seem that nobody did him this service.

 

[Nessie]

...

But back to Arday. A narcissistic fabulist who calls the cops on people asking polite questions and then engages the infamous law firm Carter Ruck to frighten off criticism is not a gentle soul who needs to be protected from the cruel world. He's someone who needed to be told, firmly and as often as possible, that making up wildly implausible tales about ones achievements is not a viable way to get through life. Unfortunately it would seem that nobody did him this service.

The police have a power of arrest and can compel people to sit through an interview. But, they cannot make them answer their questions. Journalists have no power of arrest, no power to compel people to sit through an interview and people do not need to answer their questions. A journalist should give someone they are writing an article about the right to reply, which would give them cause to contact that person.

If someone does not want to speak to the press at all, they have a right to be left alone. Each newsgroup, under press standards, is allowed to make one approach for an interview or comment. Nowadays, that is pretty much unenforceable, due to the sheer number of news sources.

People absolutely have the right to report press harassment to the police or use lawyers to stop it. Once it became knowledge that Ardey had gone to the police and had engaged a lawyer, the media should have respected his right to not answer their questions and not face the harassment of a constant barrage of requests.

How gentle a soul he was, I don't know. There is evidence he was a fantasist and liar, but there is also the evidence of a police officer being concerned about his mental wellbeing and subsequent suicide.

We take it as read that we have the right to silence when being investigated by the police and now, it should be made clearer to everyone, especially the press, that we have the right to silence when being investigated by them.

 

[Rolfe]

Oh, what nonsense. The details of these incidents are public and they're nothing like what you seem to imagine. These were his responses to normal, polite, non-harassing approaches well before the recent storm blew up. He told a retired academic who sent him a single polite respectful email never to contact him again or he'd report him for harassment. When the man sent a second short email in reply, he did just that. He pulled the race card every time anyone questioned him.

He engaged the notorious pit-bull law firm Carter Ruck to get the Times Higher Education Supplement to pull a fully-sourced and properly researched article about him.

You think a policeman was really concerned about his mental health, rather than just repeating Arday's complaint?

 

[angrysoba]

I guess some people delight in other people's misfortune.

For me, I certainly didn’t delight in his misfortune, and was shocked to hear he (probably) killed himself.

But I did find some of his claims amusing in their absurdity, and I don't mind admitting that I laughed about some of those at the time, and much less so now.

For example,...

He claimed to have run 100 miles a day for six days.

Do you know how much that is? That is four marathons a day! A good marathon time for someone of his age would be about three and a half to four hours, and that’s running fresh and pushing your limits. So he did FOUR of those in a row, totaling 14 to 16 hours, washed, ate and then slept for maybe 7 or 8 hours. woke up and did it all again, repeat five times. Even David Goggins or Courtney Dewalter would have found that a challenge and that’s what they do for a living!

Ironically the 30 marathons in 35 days would be more plausible, especially if he had done it Eddie Izzard style and walked a lot of the marathons. That way he could have done them in eight hours each. That’s doable. But then he mentions a twist, that he got a hairline fracture and his leg doubled in size for a huge chunk of those marathons. Oh my god! Needs to be seen to be believed.

It’s like someone saying:
“my aunt has three buttocks…”
“Wow! That’s weird and something I have never heard of but I suppose it is possi…”
“And she was born on Neptune!”

The obvious nonsense undermines any other claims that you might give the benefit of the doubt to.

And sadly one of the most pernicious is the one that you, Vixen, used to promote Woody Brown and your claims that he did too get a masters at Yale and write a bestseller with a letterboard, interpreted by his screenwriter mother, while not looking at it and watching Thomas the Tank Engine.

We can now be extremely skeptical of Arday’s claims about his non-verbal youth given that so much of the rest of his life story was obviously made up.

That said, it is a sad story. Regardless of how much he made stuff up, and tried to use the police and lawyers to prevent his lies being exposed, the incessant hounding was over the top. The problem is that anyone involved in a pile-on presumably feels that their part of the pile-on is justified and only others are going too far.

 

[Nessie]

Oh, what nonsense. The details of these incidents are public and they're nothing like what you seem to imagine. These were his responses to normal, polite, non-harassing approaches well before the recent storm blew up. He told a retired academic who sent him a single polite respectful email never to contact him again or he'd report him for harassment. When the man sent a second short email in reply, he did just that. He pulled the race card every time anyone questioned him.

He engaged the notorious pit-bull law firm Carter Ruck to get the Times Higher Education Supplement to pull a fully-sourced and properly researched article about him.

You think a policeman was really concerned about his mental health, rather than just repeating Arday's complaint?

The right to silence is not nonsense. The right to ask people to stop communicating with you and then complaining when they ignore you, is not nonsense. Ardey was being contacted by people left right and centre, so one anecdotal example does not cover what was happening in reality. He had clearly had enough and he was well within his rights to use a lawyer to send out a legal version of eff off everyone.

Considering how often the police now get called to mental health episodes, I would not be surprised to find that cop was genuinely concerned and he saw someone who he recognised as having a genuine wellbeing issue.

 

[Rolfe]

When I first heard about his suicide I was absolutely shocked. But then when I thought again about what he had done, my sympathy began to be tempered with reality.

This was a 41 year old married man, with a family, who had worked his way up to an extremely senior academic position, with a commensurately high salary. He didn't fit the "vulnerable young man" profile being put about posthumously, any more than his clinical presentation fits the diagnoses of either autism or Asperger's. He was happy to have a very high public profile while he was being praised and platformed and adulatory articles were being written. He accepted multiple honorary degrees and awards. But the minute anyone approached him with any academic criticism his reaction was to call the police and engage a notorious firm of reputation-protecting legal sharks.

His entire life story appears to be his own invention, and this wasn't just the telling of tall tales, as that article about the 30 marathons demonstrates. He staged a finish then fed the paper with a pack of lies to induce them to print his story. What did he really do in the month leading up to that stage-managed finish? We don't know, but there is no evidence to back up his claims. (It is indeed possible to walk a marathon distance every day for a month, and he was only 25 at the time and a gym teacher, so maybe, but where are even the photos?)

Some of what he says seems to have had a kernel of truth to it, which he then embroidered out of all recognition. He did raise a few thousand pounds for charity - but then inflated it to £5.5 million. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the claims are in that category - something not especially out of the ordinary being inflated into an enormous achievement.

He was living in his own fantasy world, and when forced to face reality he couldn't cope. Worse, his book full of fantastical claims was about to come out and that was going to be dissected for evidence which was in all probability not there. But also, I'm afraid, I think there may have been an element of "you'll all be sorry when I'm dead" about this. What better way to deflect criticism, silence the critics with their awkward questions, and turn public sympathy back on, but to become a suicide victim.

Well, that seems to have worked.

I don't buy this "pile-on" thing. It's not at all uncommon for people in the public eye to be the subject of multiple press stories. He was happy enough when the press reports about him were fawning and adulatory. Are we really saying the Times shouldn't run an article about a current event of public interest because the Guardian and the Telegraph have run stories?

The fundamental sin was elevating someone who was so fragile and whose CV was quite obviously a tissue of lies into such a senior position where sooner or later he was going to be subjected to scrutiny. He and his two GCSEs and his waffly content-free PhD should have been allowed to be a gym teacher with an admirable hobby of fundraising for charity. And he'd still be alive.

 

[Rolfe]

The right to silence is not nonsense. The right to ask people to stop communicating with you and then complaining when they ignore you, is not nonsense. Ardey was being contacted by people left right and centre, so one anecdotal example does not cover what was happening in reality. He had clearly had enough and he was well within his rights to use a lawyer to send out a legal version of eff off everyone.

Considering how often the police now get called to mental health episodes, I would not be surprised to find that cop was genuinely concerned and he saw someone who he recognised as having a genuine wellbeing issue.

The incidents described happened some time before the current storm blew up. He was fighting to prevent the storm blowing up, because he knew his entire persona was built of fabrications.

https://twitter.com/x/status/2089662185458802918