Merged Arday life and death

[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.

I checked the university web site for my thesis and the poor neglected thing is showing three citations!

Biochemical and physiological aspects of endurance exercise in the horse - Enlighten Theses

I see a few downloads showing every month, but maybe this is university administrators tidying things up.

It's odd to see what they now list for "colleges/schools". When I actually did the work it was Departments of Clinical Biochemistry and Pharmacology, University of Glasgow Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. I don't even recognise what's given now!

 

[Darat]

And yet, people who were privy to the appointment said that it looked as if the committee were just going through the motions, having already decided to appoint Arday. I wonder how they came to that position.

I'm not imagining any informal conversations would be on the record. The point is, informal. You test the water and listen to a variety of opinions on the candidate from people who have no idea why you might be interested, and you form a view. That's it. This guy was a chancer, and there were people who knew it. On the other hand there's more than a slight suspicion that people in the establishment he was leaving might have been very disinclined to say anything that might obstruct the departure process.

But that really does open yourself to potential legal difficulties - for example what happens if someone mentions to a candidate that "oh I was having a chat about you yesterday with X" but that's not mentioned to the candidate during the selection period, it's much too easy to come a cropper. Really can't recommend it to anyone.

 

[malbui]

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

I agree. I was thinking of the non-academic world.

 

[Rolfe]

But that really does open yourself to potential legal difficulties - for example what happens if someone mentions to a candidate that "oh I was having a chat about you yesterday with X" but that's not mentioned to the candidate during the selection period, it's much too easy to come a cropper. Really can't recommend it to anyone.

This is not the business world.

 

[Darat]

Good question. My guess is that they started to call it an AI detector when no student who would otherwise have plagiarized had any reason to do it any more. All such students would simply feed their essay questions into an AI and have it churn out the answer.

...snip....

Somewhere between Feb 2023 and August 2023 - just had a quick look on the wayback machine.

 

[Darat]

This is not the business world.

The same laws apply.

 

[Rolfe]

I'm inclined to say "so what?" again.

 

[Darat]

I'm inclined to say "so what?" again.

Again - you open yourself and your organisation to potential legal action.

 

[Rolfe]

You live in cloud-cuckoo land.

 

[theprestige]

The closest I've seen anyone here get to that accusation is 'do people care this much when anyone else is caught out in bad academic behaviour, whose qualifications don't hold up etc'

I did say explicitly and implicitly.

But it seems you missed Safe-Keeper's contribution, where he said this concern about qualifications is nothing more than a fig leaf for white supremacy.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

I checked the university web site for my thesis and the poor neglected thing is showing three citations!

Biochemical and physiological aspects of endurance exercise in the horse - Enlighten Theses

Horses are notoriously illiterate.

It varies. Google Scholar is showing 456 citations for mine, but less than 10 for each of the three I supervised.

 

[Rolfe]

If you want to know why you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink, I'm your girl. (After the thesis was completed I happened across a one-sentence suggestion in a chapter in a book that what I spent three years painstakingly investigating and proving might be what was going on. No I didn't plagiarise it! Apart from that sentence I never came across anything in all the equine biochemistry/physiology of exercise literature that even hinted at it.)

 

[Darat]

You live in cloud-cuckoo land.

I live in the land in which actions have consequences.

 

[Vixen]

I think some people still miss the part of DEI that some of us have a problem with. It's the E. It doesn't stand for Equality, but Equity, aka bending over backwards to give some supposedly disadvantaged group extra opportunities and resources, at the expense of the group who is supposedly already having an advantage. Here's an image from a PRO-equity site illustrating the fundamental difference between Equality and Equity.
View media item 8788
The whole POINT is to take the tall guys' boxes and give them to the short guys.

Incidentally it's also basically discrimination by the back door. It's essentially the same logic applied in the 30's in Germany: in their case, the supposedly over-privileged group were the Jews.

EDI stands for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion.

 

[theprestige]

EDI stands for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion.

Which is somehow conceptually distinct from Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, according to you.

 

[smartcooky]

EDI stands for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion.

That might be technically or historically correct, but if you had bothered to venture beyond the first Google result before posting, you might have found out this is changing.

Equity v. Equality: Why are universities updating their definitions of EDI? - Committee For Academic Freedom

We explore how new definitions of EDI spark a debate on equity vs equality in higher education, and what this means for academic fairness, access, and priorities.

afcomm.org.uk

 

[theprestige]

Equity is and always will be a terrible metric.

Poverty correlates with poor education, which corellates with poor career options.

 

[Darat]

That might be technically or historically correct, but if you had bothered to venture beyond the first Google result before posting, you might have found out this is changing.

Equity v. Equality: Why are universities updating their definitions of EDI? - Committee For Academic Freedom

We explore how new definitions of EDI spark a debate on equity vs equality in higher education, and what this means for academic fairness, access, and priorities.

afcomm.org.uk

Pity they couldn't have got Anna Loutfi's view on this, would have made interesting reading.

 

[Rolfe]

Sights are beginning to be turned on Hilary Cremin.

Revenge of the Blob: good teachers are under siege

Jolyon Maugham has a point. There is a need for an inquiry in the aftermath of Jason Arday’s tragic death. But, not for the first time, the Good Law Project director has identified the wrong target. It’s not the press that needs to be investigated and held to account. If newspapers and...

spectator.com

(Reader View works.)

 

[Safe-Keeper]

And "IQ deniers", "heritability deniers", "sex difference deniers". None of these seem to be high on the leftist political agenda. The poster who added this text to the image must have really been wrangling his or her brain to come up with something for the left side.

When whataboutisms and both sides-isms is all you have...