In the news recently has been the story of Jason Arday, a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge who was a liar, plagiarised his PhD thesis at Liverpool, was celebrated as the youngest black professor ever at Cambridge, a position he achieved partly on the strength of his whole biography rather than pure academic merit, had a few television appearances and opinion articles, and was found out by a racist with a specific agenda. Arday has now killed himself.
Arday’s defenders have claimed it is a witch hunt because he was black; his critics say that they are only interested in justice. I heard a defender on Radio 2 exclaim that it’s obviously a witch hunt because academia is one of the most racist professions there is, which struck me as ludicrously blinkered as well as terrible reasoning. Arday’s thesis was undeniably copied extensively from someone else’s work. This was not a quotation that he forgot to credit, or a well-phrased sentence that he borrowed for work that was otherwise his own. Large tracts are identical or only very slightly adjusted.
His academic work seems to have been poor, of no great insight. I am rather biased against the subject: I’m not convinced that decolonisation of education ought to be a subject for professorship, and ‘biases in educational practice’ might be reasonable but somewhat different. But academics have been found who say that it is standard, boilerplate stuff that hasn’t added anything new to the field.
Arday told fantastical stories about his personal life as well. He claimed to have run multiple marathons in consecutive days; to have run 600 miles in 5 days, which he then changed to 10 claiming that includes rest days; he says he was mute until 11, illiterate until 18, is autistic and that he has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for charity, and when challenged that this was with numerous collaborators but that they have all signed NDAs and cannot confirm it. The charity says it doesn’t do what he has claimed he raised the money for. Someone from his school reported that he definitely was not mute. He claimed to have visiting professorships at universities which deny it; he claims publications which were never published; he claimed to have played football for Crystal Palace, which denies it. There are more claims than even these!
None of the claims was impossible, but they do stretch credulity. Running hundreds of miles in consecutive days is an elite activity that only a few runners in the world can manage, and his photos never portray a man with an extreme body type adapted for such activity. Autistic people can be non-speaking long past the toddler ages that most people start to talk, and illiteracy of course occurs, especially in people with extreme special educational needs. But for such a person just a few years later to be an apparently normal, socially well-adjusted person is incredible; a few experts consulted said that it would be unprecedented. Autistic people do mask our autism, but learning to do this takes time and some degree of social awareness that someone so autistic as to be an illiterate mute through most of childhood seems unlikely to have.
I have met such a fabulist before at university, a weird man who delighted in the name Jay Phoenix Singh, who made up silly stories at least some of which I had enough knowledge to know immediately were untrue, and the rest of which invited deep scepticism even without that priming. He too deceived many people who enjoyed the feeling of admiration and desire he cast over them and regarded the rational sceptics as jealous killjoys: conspiracy theorists unable to accept that someone could be more brilliant than us. They didn’t answer our concerns directly but attacked us with social pressure and emotional blackmail.
The same has happened in the media when discussing Jason Arday. ‘Academia is racist’ does not answer findings of plagiarism. He became a figurehead for moral posturing, and an attack on the figurehead an attack on the attitudes people feel he represented, rather than a query of whether he should be a figurehead for anything.
His stories should have triggered scepticism and some attempt to validate his claims. Even sampling his stories and checking a couple would probably have hit a big lie. But no-one who recruited him bothered. Some commentators have claimed that they were biased towards him, desperate to believe the lies because it fitted their worldview and their needs for good PR for a global institution which can no longer simply recruit very bright, studious people but needs superstars.
I have a different take. They might be right, but their theory is unnecessary. The world over, from politics, through business jobs, to academic jobs like this, people let themselves be deceived. The world is full of charisma and lies, and most people trust what they feel without bothering to test for truth, talent or virtue. They believe in confidence, lies and [claimed] experience.
Arday’s ‘manager’, the head of his department, persisted in defending him and saying that he was a brilliant and valuable academic even after evidence of his plagiarism was made public. In this she was doing exactly as Cambridge has done for various other academics that people have dug up who committed misdeeds such as publishing a student’s work in their own name: all have been reprimanded but ultimately continued to work. Cambridge is not exceptional in this regard (and of course is not an exceptional university either: one needs to attend Oxford to find brilliance). People the world over apply the sunk cost fallacy to recruits and acquaintances: once someone is on your side you defend him even when he is shown not to meet whatever criteria you would apply to accepting a stranger.
If you like someone, that counts for a lot. And in the world of friendship, that’s right and proper. A real friendship is not something you cast aside; it endures for life, even if you spend time apart. You can and should support your friends through their weaknesses and failures as well as enjoying the good times.
But work, academia and politics should not be run as friendships. Liking someone at interview is what recruiters emphasise to candidates: ‘they want to ensure you’re a good fit’. It’s how the whole world seems to judge other people. And this story is exactly what happens as a result. Boris Johnson, Brexit, Farage, a poorer country are the result. Fantasists, liars and immoral, charismatic chancers go the furthest.
Cambridge might now be investigating how it came to recruit Arday; Glasgow, where he was previously employed, seems to be doing likewise. They will find specific failures, but this is a global cultural problem. Arday should have been discovered when he submitted his thesis to Liverpool John Moore’s university. His fanciful person stories should have been debunked when he first told them. He passed through five universities (teaching PE at two of them, presumably related to his marathon running and footballing lies), each of which should have found him out.
Each place in the chain trusted his lies, and the imprimatur of the previous employers. This is exactly how employers everywhere behave. No-one wants to do the hard work of assessing ability. It’s easier to find someone who seems to have done roughly what you’re looking for and trust that the previous employer judged it well.
This is the most important moral of the Jason Arday story: friendships, charisma and motivated reasoning feel good but will cost an employer in the end.
On the subject of his death, I did see someone publicly ask the question “Are all his detractors happy now?” I, for one, am happy with my behaviour. A liar and fraudster deserves to be found out and leave his job, in this case through resignation but being fired and paying compensation to Cambridge would have been fine too. Is it right that other misbehaving academics have kept their jobs? No. They should be fired too. It’s true that the media attention, and the initial investigations into him, were motivated by racism. But they found something true: if it seems unfair that he is the only one to have been ‘forced’ to resign, people are welcome to campaign against all the other wrongdoers too.
We should not judge whether an action was right by someone else’s (apparent) emotional response. If someone becomes absolutely incensed on reading this, for example, it does not change the truth of the words. That Arday was so distraught that he killed himself does not mean that he should have been permitted to keep his job, or to have his previous public appearances go unchallenged. He had been publicly celebrated as demonstrating how even the most disadvantaged can drag themselves up, as an example of brilliance, and this was a lie. His previous media appearances help to justify the public interest in his defenestration.
This is another oddity in how people often judge outcomes. If someone gets emotional about something, the default conclusion seems to be that that something was wrong: that we should avoid triggering those emotions. But it is very common for people to be unbalanced and have inappropriate responses to reason or truth. It is tragic that Arday killed himself. There is a life after disgrace: even the worst people can reform and rebuild a life. But the disgrace was thoroughly deserved. Any decent person who had exaggerated, or told a lie that got out of hand, would retract it, or perhaps retreat, never repeat it and hope it would be forgotten. Arday told many, repeated lies, lies that got him jobs and adulation. He was a disgraceful human being, and this is true even if in person he was warm, friendly and easy to get along with. His charm has no bearing on his talent or virtue.
Charisma, emotional ‘judgement’ (an oxymoronic phrase), lies, confidence and wrongdoing: yet again we find these things in confluence. ‘The emotions must be right’ feel all the easily-manipulated people. Emotions are how you are manipulated by the deceitful, not a trustworthy source of truth. When other people are finding themselves quickly at ease, comfortable and trusting, my senses are screaming ‘smarm alert’. Others should join me in this.
When will people realise that us slow plodders who do things properly, prickly and pedantic, are not the despicable human beings we seem to be judged to be, worthy only of the leftover jobs? Every time someone likeable gets a cushy job it’s not one isolated instance that makes those people happy at no cost to anyone else: it’s a whole society in which the socially awkward, morally determined people (and these two things go together) find that nothing is cushy, there are no easy rides and everyone else seems to coast along easily. It’s yet another reward for style over substance and it adds up to change the world.
