Merged Arday life and death

[theprestige]

I’m a computer programmer. I constantly copy other people’s writing/code but the ideas or problems addressed are mine.
Similar ideas have been expressed in music where certain chord sequences reoccur but the time is new.

Thanks, but I'm unable to relate these other two scenarios to the matter of plagiarism in academic works.

 

[Rolfe]

Computer code and music are not academic publications written in language.

 

[dirtywick]

Constantly in awe at how often self-identified skeptics mistake personal attacks for decisive arguments.

i don’t think you’re being honest if you’re saying it ended up on your radar because you’re really concerned with the hiring practices of cambridge. a woke guy did something bad and that’s why it’s international news and i don’t feel like i have to humor anyone pretending it’s really important. taking that as a personal attack is just more bad faith on top of it.

 

[Ziggurat]

i don’t think you’re being honest if you’re saying it ended up on your radar because you’re really concerned with the hiring practices of cambridge. a woke guy did something bad and that’s why it’s international news and i don’t feel like i have to humor anyone pretending it’s really important.

You don't think the deterioration of standards at a globally premier university matters?

I beg to differ.

 

[theprestige]

I see we've moved from phase one, "DEI isn't problematic" to phase two, "DEI problems aren't a big deal". Can't wait to see phase three, "DEI problems are a feature, not a bug!"

 

[dirtywick]

You don't think the deterioration of standards at a globally premier university matters?

I beg to differ.

i don't think they matter to you, if it wasn't a wokester in a social sciences program you wouldn't give a ◊◊◊◊. it's culture war bull crap

 

[Shepherd]

How was it blackmail? Do you know what that word even means? Given your hangup about the definition of fraud (you were wrong about that, BTW), it's rather ironic that you get blackmail completely wrong.

As for harassment, did he ever contact Arday? I didn't hear that he did. My understanding is that he just exposed Arday's plagiarism. And it seems to me that if academia wants to make it a fireable offense to expose academic misbehavior, they're basically destroying the self-policing mechanism that society has been assuming that academia operates under. That's suicidal in the long run.

Fyi, Cofnas claims he sent Arday a couple of e-mails before he published his article but that he didn't get a response.

At 24:09 in this interview on youtube, there is the following exchange:

Montz: "Has he have you communicated with him directly ever?"
Cofnas: "Well, I of course before I published the article, I contacted him twice at two different e-mail addresses and said I have this evidence and let me know if I've misunderstood it and if you have an have a comment, but he didn't reply to me."

"Jason Arday: The Most Extreme Academic Plagiarism Case in Modern History | Nathan Cofnas"

 

[d4m10n]

i don’t think you’re being honest if you’re saying it ended up on your radar…

Can you please explain why it should matter how it got on our radar? You don't have to explain why we should care about academic standards at the world's foremost research universities, consider that part as read.

 

[Ziggurat]

Fyi, Cofnas claims he sent Arday a couple of e-mails before he published his article but that he didn't get a response.

At 24:09 in this interview on youtube, there is the following exchange:

Montz: "Has he have you communicated with him directly ever?"
Cofnas: "Well, I of course before I published the article, I contacted him twice at two different e-mail addresses and said I have this evidence and let me know if I've misunderstood it and if you have an have a comment, but he didn't reply to me."

If that's true, that's absolutely not blackmail, because there's no demand being made. It sounds like basic decency: give the accused a chance to respond before you make your accusations public, in case you're wrong. Given that this fits the pattern we've seen with journalists, I'm inclined to believe it unless evidence to the contrary surfaces.

 

[Shepherd]

That's my take, also.

 

[JayUtah]

It sounds like basic decency: give the accused a chance to respond before you make your accusations public, in case you're wrong.

It goes beyond courtesy; it's basic due diligence. It lays the foundation of a historically effective defense against accusations of defamation. It's pretty much the opposite of blackmail. Of course U.K. defamation law is notoriously more stringent than U.S. law. But under U.S. law if you made reasonable efforts to contact the subject of your reporting with the express intent of verifying correctness and soliciting comment, but the subject does not respond, it becomes much harder for the subject to sue later for defamation.

 

[Safe-Keeper]

i don’t think you’re being honest if you’re saying it ended up on your radar because you’re really concerned with the hiring practices of cambridge. a woke guy did something bad and that’s why it’s international news and i don’t feel like i have to humor anyone pretending it’s really important. taking that as a personal attack is just more bad faith on top of it.

Also, conflating the hiring of a token minority person (apparently without even bothering to properly vet them) and DEI practices is incredibly dishonest (as I'm sure they know). One is an empty PR gesture, the other is an effort to actually increase diversity in workplaces and in positions of power. But when's the usual suspects cared about what words mean .

eta to elaborate

 

[angrysoba]

An article by another academic about how Arday’s work actually had an apparently high impact factor which he says would have influenced his appointment more than dubious claims of posts.
He further suggests that the plagiarism may have been more apparent than real - ie of words rather than ideas. Via Carole Cadwalladr

It sure looks like Jason Arday was horrifically wronged (based on citation data)

The media’s profound ignorance of academia is a problem

jasonstanleyantifascist.substack.com

Jason Stanley is wrong.

Retraction Watch has an article about how the problems go much deeper than simply copying words without attribution which is plagiarism nonetheless and which I do not accept from my own students who are undergraduates and writing in a second language.

In this article he is also accused of using quotes from other papers obtained by other scholars and passing them off as if he had obtained the responses. That is straight-up fraud. In addition, he appears to have done it without having obtained the ethical approval from his institution. That’s pretty serious.

Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Jason Arday In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thes…

retractionwatch.com

But the Social Sciences correction notice glossed over the most significant post-publication changes Arday actually made to the text. He removed claims that he analyzed the transcripts from interview subjects with “an iterative coding scheme using NVivo qualitative data analysis software” and had a second researcher “independently read the scripts” and code the data to “enhance the validity of emerging themes and claims.” Instead, he said, he recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim and identified salient themes through “review and reflection.”

In addition, Arday changed or removed quotes that had previously been attributed to his interview transcripts. Out of 31 quotes in the original manuscript, he trimmed or reworded 12 of them, and cut 6 of them entirely. Some of the original quotes appear to have been patched together from subjects in Memon’s BMJ Open paper.

 

[Vixen]

Jason Stanley is wrong.

Retraction Watch has an article about how the problems go much deeper than simply copying words without attribution which is plagiarism nonetheless and which I do not accept from my own students who are undergraduates and writing in a second language.

In this article he is also accused of using quotes from other papers obtained by other scholars and passing them off as if he had obtained the responses. That is straight-up fraud. In addition, he appears to have done it without having obtained the ethical approval from his institution. That’s pretty serious.

Exclusive: News outlet killed story on plagiarism allegations after Cambridge prof hired law firm

Jason Arday In September 2025, Times Higher Education had a bombshell story in the works: A star sociology professor at the University of Cambridge had allegedly plagiarized parts of his Ph.D. thes…

retractionwatch.com

An accusation is not a verdict, no matter how many times you do your accusing.

 

[dirtywick]

Can you please explain why it should matter how it got on our radar? You don't have to explain why we should care about academic standards at the world's foremost research universities, consider that part as read.

because it's the reason why the article you provided that darat asked about what it has to do with liberals. if it wasn't culture war bullcrap, there'd be no conservatives vs liberals angle to this thing and it would just be a guy that lied on a resume and he never would have gotten all those interviews and he'd have been fired and you wouldn't know anything about it.

you can't both fight the culture wars and be above it at the same time

 

[d4m10n]

it's the reason why the article you provided that darat asked about what it has to do with liberals.

That article was from a publication called Persuasion, which bills itself as "The magazine and community dedicated to defending liberal values and democracy wherever they are threatened." That is why articles from that publication try to pitch themselves in terms of liberal values, rather than some sort of "conservatives vs liberals angle" in the story itself. If anything, I'd say it was more of a progressives vs. liberals framing.

 

[d4m10n]

you can't both fight the culture wars and be above it at the same time

Sign me up to fight for whichever side says it's not okay to plagiarize the living ◊◊◊◊ out of your thesis.

 

[dirtywick]

That article was from a publication called Persuasion, which bills itself as "The magazine and community dedicated to defending liberal values and democracy wherever they are threatened." That is why articles from that publication try to pitch themselves in terms of liberal values, rather than some sort of "conservatives vs liberals angle" in the story itself. If anything, I'd say it was more of a progressives vs. liberals framing.

where the progressives are the ones saying that plagiarism is bad and the liberals aren't? my take was it's more of a don't start defending stupid ◊◊◊◊ and make bad arguments because you don't want to admit this feeds into the conservatives stance on dei

 

[angrysoba]

An accusation is not a verdict, no matter how many times you do your accusing.

Irrelevant!

I was responding to the claim that plagiarism accusations were restricted to words and not ideas. The charge is that he also stole interview responses. That is passing off other people’s fieldwork as his own. He apparently also claimed to have initially transcribed his interviews and run an Nvivo analysis on them, then removed the claim later. Very dodgy! In addition, there is no evidence of putting his work to an ethics board, which his institution apparently demanded. Very naughty!

 

[d4m10n]

my take was it's more of a don't start defending stupid ◊◊◊◊ and make bad arguments because you don't want to admit this feeds into the conservatives stance on dei

Good take.