Merged Arday life and death

[angrysoba]

I mean, even legally, if Vixen wants to stick to only that definition of fraud, I'll quote the Association Of Certified Fraud Examiners at: https://www.acfe.com/fraud-resources/fraud-101-what-is-fraud

I would argue that it was definitely to the university's detriment, hence criminal. But even without it being criminal, "any activity that relies on deception in order to achieve a gain" amply covers it, since getting straight to being a professor and media darling is a gain.

Sure, but that would have meant the university had no role in it, which they did. Obviously a university would be entitled to fire an academic who committed fraud and brought the university's name into disrepute, but ultimately both Liverpool John Moores and Cambridge did that to themselves.

Nevertheless, it is academic fraud regardless of what they do. Unfortunately, we know that a lot of universities have bad track records acting on fraud.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Sure, but that would have meant the university had no role in it, which they did. Obviously a university would be entitled to fire an academic who committed fraud and brought the university's name into disrepute, but ultimately both Liverpool John Moores and Cambridge did that to themselves.

I will grant that, but then there's also the element of it being detrimental to the students who thought they'd learn from a real professor at a prestigious university and paid 10k pounds a year for the privilege, plus even more than that for food and lodging, and just got to hear a clown spewing vacuous nothingburgers. And now have that stain on their degree for the rest of their lives. Like, can you even imagine having a fresh degree in sociology from Cambridge from 2025, and now everyone thinks "oh, it's from the same university that had that clown as even a professor." I mean, now it can't be any more clear that it's a Mickey Mouse degree, short of getting it at Disney World. You would probably have better luck passing off a degree from a diploma mill in Elbonia as respectable. And you paid for it. I would be pissed off.

The university is an accomplice in that fraud.

 

[theprestige]

Yeah, anyone actually interested in securing the best person for a position should be applauding efforts to increase diversity so that you don't just have white men hiring other white men (or, increasingly, white men and women). This means a massively larger pool of candidates, after all.

If that's what those people want, of course. Fig leaves come to mind for some reason.

Fair enough. If the Arday Affair is any indication, White men and women suck goblin dick at hiring outside their own race.

 

[angrysoba]

I will grant that, but then there's also the element of it being detrimental to the students who thought they'd learn from a real professor at a prestigious university and paid 10k pounds a year for the privilege, plus even more than that for food and lodging, and just got to hear a clown spewing vacuous nothingburgers. And now have that stain on their degree for the rest of their lives. Like, can you even imagine having a fresh degree in sociology from Cambridge from 2025, and now everyone thinks "oh, it's from the same university that had that clown as even a professor." I mean, now it can't be any more clear that it's a Mickey Mouse degree, short of getting it at Disney World. You would probably have better luck passing off a degree from a diploma mill in Elbonia as respectable. And you paid for it. I would be pissed off.

The university is an accomplice in that fraud.

I think the buck stops with Cambridge.

They can be upset with the fraud in their midst, but they hired him and disregarded obviously credible complaints about him. Even some of the people still supporting Arday are saying "They had it in for him for years!" So Cambridge can hardly claim not to have known.

And let's face it. This isn't the first time. People have been drawing attention to William O'Reilly, a Cambridge history professor who plagiarized his undergraduate students' work.

Presumably he was fired, right? Wrong!

Dr William O’Reilly is Associate Professor in Early Modern History at Cambridge University. As reported in the Financial Times and Varsity, Dr O’Reilly included large portions of two essays by one of his undergraduate students in an article published in the Journal of Austrian-American History. The paper ‘Fredrick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, Orientalism, and the Austrian Militärgrenze‘ appeared in 2018 under Dr O’Reilly’s name only. When the student later discovered this in 2021, he contacted Cambridge University. They launched an investigation.

Those familiar with university investigations will not be too surprised at the outcome. Two years later, a tribunal of scholars at Cambridge University decided this was not plagiarism, but the “product of negligent acts“. Nonetheless, the Journal of Austrian-American History did behave honourably. It correctly retracted the article, as the material “was presented without credit“. Dr O’Reilly did not dispute “that uncredited material was included“. His former undergraduate, whose work he stole, did not receive an apology from the University. He said that he was “baffled” at the conclusion. He was not the only one baffled, the verdict was received with widespread incredulity.

And then...

Unfortunately, further plagiarism allegations against Dr O’Reilly have now come to light, as reported in Varsity. Three journal articles by O’Reilly published between 2006 and 2016 contain sections of word-for-word overlap with uncredited sources. For example, Dr O’Reilly (2011) article on “Movements of People in the Atlantic World, 1450-1850” (left panel above) contains material lifted almost directly from a 1995 article by Michael Heffernan (right panel). O’Reilly does not cite Heffernan at all. The image comes from Pubpeer, who give more examples.

I doubt, until recently, many people had heard of this case or were particularly exercised by it.

 

[angrysoba]

I think this is a good summary by Daniel Munoz:

I’ve seen some strident defenses of Arday recently that, for whatever reason, misconstrue or omit some important facts.

One widely shared article doesn’t even concede that Arday plagiarized. Another claims that Arday only plagiarized, ignoring the evidence that he published fraudulent interview material—in one case, nearly identical quotes were attributed to women of different races living in different countries; in another instance, Arday attributed as a quote material that closely matched another researcher’s paper.

The most unfortunate omission is the fact that Arday hired elite lawyers to intimidate journalists, even filing a criminal complaint against Jack Grove in 2025. It was this unjust cover-up that allowed “race realist” Nathan Cofnas to be the one who broke the story.

Two other facts. Arday’s department was made aware of the allegations in 2023, just three months after hiring Arday, and two years before Grove’s reporting. And when Arday was hired, the committee asked for just one piece of research from each candidate (by the way, two of the other finalists were black women who were more senior than Arday; I can’t help but wonder if the committee wanted the PR of hiring someone with a splashy story).

This story ended in tragedy, and I agree that there is a moral here about the power of online shaming. But there is no excuse for distorting facts—especially when this case is so clearly going to be a focal point for politics for a good while.

Link

 

[smartcooky]

Ok so when the Anglo-Saxon workmate comes in on Monday and claims they scored six goals for Crystal Palace over the weekend they should be sacked and have their face plastered all over the press? Or does what they do in their spare time have no effect on their ability to perform heart surgery..?

IMNTK

@d4m10n wasn't talking about his hobbies.

However, when your "Anglo-Saxon workmate comes in on Monday and claims they" carried out six open heat surgeries before breakfast, maybe you should be looking closely at their credentials

I see no evidence of any pecuniary gain or criminal intent. Pure hearsay.

Because Professors at prestigious Universities work for free.

 

[Darat]

I think this is a good summary by Daniel Munoz:



Link

"two of the other finalists were black women who were more senior than Arday; I can’t help but wonder if the committee wanted the PR of hiring someone with a splashy story)."

I suspect there will have been another reason why the male Arday was chosen over the other female candidates. Now if only I could think of what that reason could be...

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Yeah, as I had mentioned before, "They excluded even against genuinely competent blacks to rush to have him skip straight to being a DEI poster kid." But I will thank angrysoba for providing a better source than my saying so. Much appreciated.

The whole story is unbelievable, coming from a prestigious university. I mean if it came from some fundie hillbilly camp like Liberty University (no, really, I'm not using it as a slur: they actually have a photo of students holding "Hilbilly 4 Life" signs and the like on the front page) I wouldn't even bat an eye. But for a prestigious university to do that, AND even pass over a couple of other diverse candidates who were better qualified, in favour of a media clown... that's sincerely mind-boggling. It doesn't even have the DEI excuse.

Nor any sanity excuse. It was predictable that his chasing media fame would cause more scrutiny. It should have been bleeding obvious even to a village drunk that they've made a ticking time bomb and they're sitting on it. It's like putting cotton in nitric acid and being surprised it blows up in your face. (Literally how nitrocellulose, aka guncotton, was discovered.) You can excuse it if it's some kid who broke into the chemistry lab, but when several academics get together to do it... WHY? Did they lose some bet?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

I doubt, until recently, many people had heard of this case or were particularly exercised by it.

Well, yes, but those didn't go over the top to draw media attention as a pathological liar. "Some obscure academic plagiarised on his PhD," meh, it dies down very quickly, and might not even make it to national newspapers. It might get a few people harping on it on YT and X, but the average guy on the street ain't gonna give a flip, unless it's part of some bigger story.

Which, as I was saying, is why I don't understand what were they even thinking when picking that guy instead of, say, one of those two black women, even if they wanted to go DEI virtue signalling. It was so blatant that it's going to go badly.

But yes, in any case, I will definitely agree that academic fraud or even publishing nonsense is becoming a bigger and bigger problem in the last couple of decades.

 

[Darat]

...snip...

But yes, in any case, I will definitely agree that academic fraud or even publishing nonsense is becoming a bigger and bigger problem in the last couple of decades.

Or is it that we can better detect plagiarism and so on these days?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Or is it that we can better detect plagiarism and so on these days?

THAT can also be the case.

But honestly, I don't remember before having such nonsense published and taught as, say, that Cat Pause professor of "fat studies." As in not the chemical study of fats, but in why it's healthy to be morbidly obese. (Which she promptly proved by dying at the venerable old age of... 42.) And giving lectures about how the obese are discriminated and victimised by doctors and the academia. (I mean, what did the academia do to her? Put her office upstairs?) And when finally pressured to publish SOMETHING if she's a professor, she and a couple of other berks published an autoethnographic "study" (autoethnographic=the only sample is oneself) about how she feels oppressed by being pressured to publish something, i.e., to do her job.

I might be remembering through rose tinted glasses... come to think, actually I am. I already mentioned that appalling anthropology college manual I had while taking a year in that. And then there was the philosophy course. Oh dear. I'm not against philosophy per se, but that one particular course was just an exercise in talking gobbledygook.

So ok, fair enough, I disproved my own point

 

[Vixen]

Are you trying to demonstrate your claim that “The public do not get to determine guilt.” by pretending to completely misunderstand what academic fraud is?

Let's get this into perspective. Arday's thesis was 401 pages long. Albert Einstein's was just 21-pages. In the 'literature overview' section, Arday quoted another thesis failing to ascribe the source, of which 12 are a repetition of the same, so Cofnas' claimed '180' includes these various repetitions. John Moores Liverpool University INVESTIGATED this thoroughly and concluded whilst Arday erred in this, it did not amount to intent to plagiarise or deceive. Remember, Arday was a relative rookie to academia, only starting to study aged 18. When I did a course at Birkbeck London Uni, I was not initially aware of the set rules of presenting work (literature, style of book titles, etc.) until I was firmly put right. Okay it is possible Arday sneakily decided to pass of her work as his but in the context of where the error occurred (discussing other's work) and it representing just 5% of the entire thing and NOT being in the main body where Arday's own ideas were presented indicates to me that it was entirely fair and proper to allow him the benefit of a doubt.

 

[Vixen]

I will grant that, but then there's also the element of it being detrimental to the students who thought they'd learn from a real professor at a prestigious university and paid 10k pounds a year for the privilege, plus even more than that for food and lodging, and just got to hear a clown spewing vacuous nothingburgers. And now have that stain on their degree for the rest of their lives. Like, can you even imagine having a fresh degree in sociology from Cambridge from 2025, and now everyone thinks "oh, it's from the same university that had that clown as even a professor." I mean, now it can't be any more clear that it's a Mickey Mouse degree, short of getting it at Disney World. You would probably have better luck passing off a degree from a diploma mill in Elbonia as respectable. And you paid for it. I would be pissed off.

The university is an accomplice in that fraud.

Arday was a 'real professor'. Sociology is not a 'Mickey Mouse degree'. It's actually hard and demanding.

You are thinking of things like 'media studies' and stuff like that.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

Arday was a 'real professor'. Sociology is not a 'Mickey Mouse degree'. It's actually hard and demanding.

My point is: a lot will think it IS a Mickey Mouse degree if you got it from Cambridge, after this debacle.

 

[Vixen]

Fair enough. If the Arday Affair is any indication, White men and women suck goblin dick at hiring outside their own race.

Race is not a thing in the UK unlike America. The defining barriers to entry in the UK is class. Lots of upper class twits get into Oxbridge after years of extremely intensive and expensive schooling from age 8, all geared towards passing the entrance exams, which - I don't know if it is still the case - often required things like classics and latin, which the average working class or even middle class Brit did not study until secondary level.

 

[Elaedith]

Let's get this into perspective. Arday's thesis was 401 pages long. Albert Einstein's was just 21-pages. In the 'literature overview' section, Arday quoted another thesis failing to ascribe the source, of which 12 were are a repetition of the same, so Cofnas' claimed '180' includes these various repetitions. John Moores Liverpool Universitu I
NVESTIGATED this thoroughly

Clearly they didn't. Nor did they detect it when the thesis was examined, or earlier, as they should have - then none of this would have happened.

and concluded whilst Arday erred in this, it did not amount to intent to plagiarise or deceive.

Unintentional plagiarism is still plagiarism. If the material was properly attributed, it could be questionable whether the thesis represented a significant original contribution to knowledge. That would be very embarrassing to the university that awarded the degree, especially when the former student already has an academic post.

Remember, Arday was a relative rookie to academia, only starting to study aged 18. When I did a course at Birkbeck London Uni, I was not initially aware of the set rules of presenting work (literature, style of book titles, etc.) until I was firmly put right. Okay it is possible Arday sneakily decided to pass of her work as his but in the context of where the error occurred (discussing other's work) and it representing just 5% of the entire thing and NOT being in the main body where Arday's own ideas were presented indicates to me that it was entirely fair and proper to allow him the benefit of a doubt.

The plagiarism was throughout the text, including the discussion and interpretation sections.

 

[Vixen]

@d4m10n wasn't talking about his hobbies.

However, when your "Anglo-Saxon workmate comes in on Monday and claims they" carried out six open heat surgeries before breakfast, maybe you should be looking closely at their credentials


Because Professors at prestigious Universities work for free.

For goodness sake, Arday's specialised interest was Physical Education. He came from an impoverished part of London, of Ghanaian heritage and only became academically interested at age 18. He DID do enormous amounts of running and lots of running for charity. He WAS an amateur footballer who DID play in a recognised league. So the claims are he exaggerated his mileage. Who knows whether that was just rounding up to the nearest hundred, an intent to impress or a deliberate intent to deceive. I very much doubt it was the latter as he didn't pocket any financial proceeds, unlike Captain Tom's daughter and her husband, and all they got was a rap on the knuckles by the Charity Commission and a ban.

 

[angrysoba]

Let's get this into perspective. Arday's thesis was 401 pages long. Albert Einstein's was just 21-pages. In the 'literature overview' section, Arday quoted another thesis failing to ascribe the source, of which 12 were are a repetition of the same, so Cofnas' claimed '180' includes these various repetitions. John Moores Liverpool Universitu INVESTIGATED this thoroughly and concluded whilst Arday erred in this, it did not amount to intent to plagiarise or deceive. Remember, Arday was a relative rookie to academia, only starting to study aged 18. When I did a course at Birkbeck London Uni, I was not initially aware of the set rules of presenting work (literature, style of book titles, etc.) until I was firmly put right. Okay it is possible Arday sneakily decided to pass of her work as his but in the context of where the error occurred (discussing other's work) and it representing just 5% of the entire thing and NOT being in the main body where Arday's own ideas were presented indicates to me that it was entirely fair and proper to allow him the benefit of a doubt.

You're pretty much making the point as well as anyone that he shouldn't have been a professor at Cambridge.

Your excuses for him was maybe he didn't do it deliberately, maybe he just didn't know what he was doing at all.

But again, you also say you are not competent to judge this, and I can only agree with you there.

 

[Vixen]

You're pretty much making the point as well as anyone that he shouldn't have been a professor at Cambridge.

Your excuses for him was maybe he didn't do it deliberately, maybe he just didn't know what he was doing at all.

But again, you also say you are not competent to judge this, and I can only agree with you there.

There is nothing inherently special about Cambridge other than it is traditionally ranked top or near top in research rankings. Anyone can get in with the right UCAS grades and/or entry requirements. The university was impressed by Arday's knowledge of how to facilitate social inclusion and mentoring amongst ordinary working class people and that he was articulate and could connect with people. Once you have your foot in the door at entry level it doesn't matter where you come from or whether you only got two GCSE's.

 

[Ziggurat]

Race is not a thing in the UK unlike America.

Arday's entire career was premised on the idea that race very much is a thing in the UK. Was he wrong?