Merged Arday life and death

[theprestige]

Yes equality is the same as saying a billionaire should pay the same tax as a pauper.
Shifting taxation from being income based to expenditure based is moving from equity to equality, Millionaires tend to spend a lower proportion of their income on goods and save and invest a greater proportion than poor people, So whilst taxation may become more equal with the rich man paying less tax but still more than the poorman, it becomes less equitable with the poor man paying a greater proportion of his income than the rich man.

Not everyone thinks equality trumps equity.

Where was the equitable outcome for Jason Arday?

And why is it that in practice, "equity" seems to translate to "ignore the lack of qualifications, promote race"?

 

[Darat]

Where was the equitable outcome for Jason Arday?

And why is it that in practice, "equity" seems to translate to "
ignore the lack of qualifications,promote race"?

His lack of qualifications were not ignored, for his Cambridge job he would not have been one of the candidates if he hadn't had his PhD and the same is true for the other jobs he had.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

@Planigale
Sales tax and the lottery are already a tax on poor people to make up for that.

But we're not talking about taxes anyway. The whole thrust of "equity" is that if you think some ethnic group historically had less chances (generational wealth, past discrimination, yadda yadda) then they should get more employment and education chances, at the expense of the group you think was favoured in those ways.

If you accept that logic as valid, then LITERALLY antisemitism in '30s Germany makes complete sense. They believed that one ethnic group (the Jews) were historically advantaged, and that the other Germans were disadvantaged. (Generational wealth, ethnic discrimination for high paying jobs, yadda yadda.) Then discriminating against the Jews based on that belief starts to make a whole lot of sense.

I mean, I obviously don't subscribe to nazi ideology, but just saying: It's the EXACT same logic. Hence why I don't subscribe to "equity" either.

 

[lionking]

His lack of qualifications were not ignored, for his Cambridge job he would not have been one of the candidates if he hadn't had his PhD and the same is true for the other jobs he had.

Can’t you at least concede that Cambridge lacked due diligence in its recruitment process? I do have a background in executive recruitment. It is (or should be) a long and costly process. The Cambridge selection committee failed.

 

[Darat]

@Planigale
Sales tax and the lottery are already a tax on poor people to make up for that.

But we're not talking about taxes anyway. The whole thrust of "equity" is that if you think some ethnic group historically had less chances (generational wealth, past discrimination, yadda yadda) then they should get more employment and education chances, at the expense of the group you think was favoured in those ways.
...snip....

But that is not what is enshrined in our constitution nor employment or education legislation.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

But that is not what is enshrined in our constitution nor employment or education legislation.

It is indeed not. And thank F for that. But it's an ideology being pushed. Is all I'm saying.

 

[Rolfe]

His lack of qualifications were not ignored, for his Cambridge job he would not have been one of the candidates if he hadn't had his PhD and the same is true for the other jobs he had.

A PhD is like saying "he passed his eleven plus" when you're at the level of appointments to a senior professorial chair. Publication record is crucial, and his was extremely thin.

 

[Darat]

Can’t you at least concede that Cambridge lacked due diligence in its recruitment process? I do have a background in executive recruitment. It is (or should be) a long and costly process. The Cambridge selection committee failed.

At the moment no.

As I said I don't think any company or body would go to the level of re-evaluating someone's PhD thesis, the reason we have these qualifications is in part so we don't have to do such deep dives with every candidate, and LJMU does not have a bad reputation despite it being in Liverpool. I suspect they also took up references and I suspect given the sector that these would have been more than the usual totally unhelpful "Arday worked here between xx and xx" corporate references. So on the due diligence side we don't (yet?) have any evidence that they didn't follow SOP for employing someone.

We obviously don't know what lies he did tell them, and I do assume he did tell lies during the selection process, he seems to be someone who couldn't help but lie, but if he managed to keep them toned down they might have passed unremarked. I would like to see the documentation of his selection process, there will be a record of what questions he was asked and so on.

I think one area that Cambridge did totally screw-up was in-job evaluation and handling the complaints against him, it is inexcusable that it got to the level of requiring national press focus for them to do anything in regards to complaints and the like.

 

[Darat]

A PhD is like saying "he passed his eleven plus" when you're at the level of appointments to a senior professorial chair. Publication record is crucial, and his was extremely thin.

I have to admit I do have to try and stop my own biases with it being as far as I am concerned a fluffy-role, was his publication record thin for that type of role, I sincerely have no idea?

 

[steenkh]

The whole thrust of "equity" is that if you think some ethnic group historically had less chances (generational wealth, past discrimination, yadda yadda) then they should get more employment and education chances, at the expense of the group you think was favoured in those ways.

In the form that I have seen it presented, the policy of favouring women, blacks, handicapped, etc is not done primarily to help the individual, but to gradually remove the bias that the majority has against the group, by accustoming majority people to see these minorities in such positions.

Of course, it is counterproductive for this purpose, if these employees are unsuited for their job, which is what I see as the main problem with Cambridge's employment of Arday.

 

[Darat]

In the form that I have seen it presented, the policy of favouring women, blacks, handicapped, etc is not done primarily to help the individual, but to gradually remove the bias that the majority has against the group, by accustoming majority people to see these minorities in such positions.

Of course, it is counterproductive for this purpose, if these employees are unsuited for their job, which is what I see as the main problem with Cambridge's employment of Arday.

In UK employment it is viewed more along the lines of being aware of the biases that have reduced "diversity" in employment, it's not even just in terms of minorities, it can be in terms of women and men being considered for roles or in terms of the "old schoolboy" network and so on.

 

[lionking]

At the moment no.

As I said I don't think any company or body would go to the level of re-evaluating someone's PhD thesis, the reason we have these qualifications is in part so we don't have to do such deep dives with every candidate

Well this is pretty naive of you.

One of my daughters is an executive in one of Australia’s biggest companies and her remit includes recruitment. She has told me that people lie all the time about qualifications. Her company uses AI to dive deeply into claims of qualifications, including plagiarism for senior jobs. It takes little time and doesn’t cost a lot.

 

[Darat]

Well this is pretty naive of you.

One of my daughters is an executive in one of Australia’s biggest companies and her remit includes recruitment. She has told me that people lie all the time about qualifications. Her company uses AI to dive deeply into claims of qualifications, including plagiarism for senior jobs. It takes little time and doesn’t cost a lot.

He didn't lie about having a PhD.

 

[lionking]

He didn't lie about having a PhD.

So? He cheated to get it. Grounds for non-selection.

 

[Rolfe]

He didn't lie about having a PhD.

Her company uses AI to dive deeply into claims of qualifications, including plagiarism for senior jobs. It takes little time and doesn’t cost a lot.

They didn't enquire into the quality.

 

[Rolfe]

I have to admit I do have to try and stop my own biases with it being as far as I am concerned a fluffy-role, was his publication record thin for that type of role, I sincerely have no idea?

Multiple people in that field have come forward to say that they realised at the time that his publication record was pathetic for a job of that nature. They didn't say anything at the time of course, for fear of accusations of racism.

A strong publication record, both as regards numbers and depth, is the main thing an appointments committee will look at. That and the ability to attract research funding, and having headed up major research projects. (Teaching ability is a fair way down the list, at least as regards undergraduates. They will be expected to have supervised many PhD students through to graduation though. Arday hadn't done a single one.)

I remember when one of my PhD supervisors was promoted to Senior Lecturer. I had by then realised that he was a bit of an intellectual lightweight, and was being carried along by being able to talk a good line, and by the efforts of his numerous PhD students whose work he assimilated. He got them to write papers, which was good for their CVs of course and their academic development, but then he got his name on all the papers. Heard in the tea-room later, "Well have you seen his publications list? It ran to five pages. All they did was count the papers and give the job to the guy with the largest number." He wasn't useless, but I relied more on my other supervisor, he just wasn't a heavyweight. He left for another job where they saw through him and he was sacked. I later went up to his former boss at a BVA meeting and said, I just want to shake the hand of the man who sacked David Snow!

For a senior professorial chair, particularly when considering an unusually young candidate, the appointments committee should be taking a very deep dive into his work I would also expect some informal conversations with people the candidate had not named as referees but had worked alongside or under him.

By all accounts, in addition to his PhD being plagiarised "quotes" linked together by meaningless waffle, his publications were few in number and lightweight, some merely detailing a handful of conversations he'd had with people, or even with a friend. These also showed both external and internal plagiarism, copying from various other sources and then repeating the same material from paper to paper. If you listen to David Harris's video, this was what he first noticed. He was writing a book about the subject, and when it was nearly completed someone drew his attention to the existence of Jason Arday, whom he had literally never heard of. He felt this was a serious omission, and started to skim-read Arday's papers to get a handle on his research. Reading them one after another like that he spotted the same quotes being attributed to different subjects in different papers, and other anomalies and inconsistencies.

If David Harris could do it, the appointments committee could do it.

 

[malbui]

I left academia after a bit of post-doc and I honestly don't think anybody outside academia has looked at my PhD thesis in any detail since it was published. It's available online on my university's website and I get the occasional notification of a citation in a research paper or thesis, but it's pretty heavy going for the non-specialist and I genuinely doubt that your typical HR department would be able to do more with it than confirm that it was properly awarded by a reputable public university in Switzerland. I mean, years afterwards, I glance at the odd chapter and think that younger me must have been seriously clever because there's some subtle argument in places.

 

[malbui]

Multiple people in that field have come forward to say that they realised at the time that his publication record was pathetic for a job of that nature. They didn't say anything at the time of course, for fear of accusations of racism.

A strong publication record, both as regards numbers and depth, is the main thing an appointments committee will look at. That and the ability to attract research funding, and having headed up major research projects. (Teaching ability is a fair way down the list, at least as regards undergraduates. They will be expected to have supervised many PhD students through to graduation though. Arday hadn't done a single one.)

I remember when one of my PhD supervisors was promoted to Senior Lecturer. I had by then realised that he was a bit of an intellectual lightweight, and was being carried along by being able to talk a good line, and by the efforts of his numerous PhD students whose work he assimilated. He got them to write papers, which was good for their CVs of course and their academic development, but then he got his name on all the papers. Heard in the tea-room later, "Well have you seen his publications list? It ran to five pages. All they did was count the papers and give the job to the guy with the largest number." He wasn't useless, but I relied more on my other supervisor, he just wasn't a heavyweight. He left for another job where they saw through him and he was sacked. I later went up to his former boss at a BVA meeting and said, I just want to shake the hand of the man who sacked David Snow!

As a bit of a tangent, my PhD supervisor was brilliant but not always in contact with reality, but she did have an excellent eye for a PhD student and got her name on lots of decent publications as a result. When I was leaving the university I had a coffee with the Dean and he remarked that it had been noticed how her publications in English had seen a major upswing in quality during my time in the department .

 

[theprestige]

His lack of qualifications were not ignored, for his Cambridge job he would not have been one of the candidates if he hadn't had his PhD and the same is true for the other jobs he had.

A Doctor of Philosophy should be a master of the current state of the art, and actively engaged in advancing the state of the art with new research and new findings.

Merely having a Ph.D is prologue to that. The professorship given to Arday was touted as one of the most important and prestigious positions at Cambridge. He very much did get it without qualifications.

Much has been made of the falsehoods he produced. Much has been said, both implicitly and explicitly, about how it's racist to talk about his shortcomings as an academic.

Nothing at all has been said about the groundbreaking work he did in the field of the sociology of education. Nobody has come to his defense with evidence that, regardless of how spurious his doctorate, his subsequent research in the field lays those concerns to rest. Because there's nothing there.

The fact that Cambridge had nothing to go on besides his PhD should have been their sign to take a closer look at the PhD itself. Not only because they had nothing else to look at, but also to answer the obvious question of how did this guy get a doctorate, if he's not bothering to research and publish.

 

[Rolfe]

I left academia after a bit of post-doc and I honestly don't think anybody outside academia has looked at my PhD thesis in any detail since it was published. It's available online on my university's website and I get the occasional notification of a citation in a research paper or thesis, but it's pretty heavy going for the non-specialist and I genuinely doubt that your typical HR department would be able to do more with it than confirm that it was properly awarded by a reputable public university in Switzerland. I mean, years afterwards, I glance at the odd chapter and think that younger me must have been seriously clever because there's some subtle argument in places.

It's not the HR department who should be doing that, it's the academics on the appointment committee.