Yesterday I wrote about Jason Arday, the Cambridge academic who has been under fire recently for a bunch of different issues, starting with plagiarism. As I pointed out yesterday, Arday has been formally cleared by Cambridge and by the Liverpool college that granted him his Ph.D. So, officially, he's not a plagiarist. And yet, if you look at the comparison between his work and several other people's he clearly seems to have borrowed a bunch of material without giving proper attribution. From the outside, it really looks like the universities are just circling the wagons.
Because this is all happening in England it's mostly being covered by newspapers on the other side of the Atlantic. But yesterday the NY Times published a story which basically summarized what is happening. While the story does cover most of the territory, all of the really damaging findings about Arday are left out. That seems odd, especially after Arday canceled an interview with the Times to answer their questions.
Arday has also told the press that his academic successes brought darker attention, including the delivery of a severed pig’s head to his parents’ home and repeated visits to his office by a masked intruder, once while wielding a knife...
Arday canceled a planned video interview with The New York Times on Monday. But in a statement emailed to The Times by Simon & Schuster, Arday stated that a “detailed investigation” of his doctoral dissertation had “cleared me, acknowledging honest and reasonable errors that did not amount to plagiarism.”
As for his personal life, he said he “had no reason to lie or fabricate,” and reiterated that he was the victim of “a wider campaign, motivated by racism, to discredit me in every single way possible.”...
...over the weekend, British news outlets, including some that previously ran admiring coverage of Arday, raised fresh questions about possible anomalies in his published work and unsupported elements of his personal story, including his claims about the pig’s head and the masked intruder.
So the pig's head story gets mentioned twice in the story and once more in the subheading. But what you see above is it. The Times says there are "possible anomalies" with this story but then stops and doesn't offer any details. The story has been updated today but there's still no mention of what happened with the pig's head. They do offer a link if you want to look it up yourself, but why not follow this story to the end? Here's what the Guardian reported Saturday about the pig's head story.
In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place...
Arday could produce no messages from the time in which he discussed any of the items with friends, family, colleagues or the police.
As I said yesterday, there only seem to be two possible explanations here. Either the police and the local butcher are out to get Arday or he's lying. The much more likely possibility is the second one. So, getting back to the NY Times, why would they raise this issue in an article and then fail to mention that the police and the butcher said his claims were absolutely false? Why wouldn't they mention that Arday has zero evidence (no texts or pictures) to back up his crazy claim?
I'll tell you bluntly why I think the NY Times left it out. This is essentially a he said, they said story. The fundamental question behind all of this is whether Arday's stories can be trusted or whether he's just a fabulist. What any sensible reader is looking for in a story like this one is proof one way or the other.
Does Arday have proof that a pig's head was sent to his family's house? Do the police have proof that he lied about an investigation of those claims? And in this case it's pretty clear that Arday was lying. And once it's clear he was lying about one thing, you're a lot more likely to be skeptical about his other claims as well.
For instance, he claims a masked man twice came on campus and told him to quit his job. The second time, the man pulled a knife on him (he claimed). And yet, Arday has nothing to back this up. No photos, no surveillance video showing the man and no evidence he told anyone there was a masked man with a knife running around campus immediately after it happened.
Or consider his claims that he raised £5.5 million for charity, including by running 30 marathons in 35 days. When asked to back up his claims about the fundraising he admitted that it wasn't him it was more of a group effort involving 100 people. Asked to back up that claim, he said he'd signed an NDA and couldn't talk about it. Is that remotely plausible?
He also claimed to have run 600 miles in 6 days, making him one of the world's leading endurance athletes. When challenged he admitted he'd taken a day off in between each run, making it 600 miles in 12 days. That still makes him an elite athlete, assuming it's true. But the fact that, once again, he was caught in a lie, really hurts his credibility.
So that's why I think the NY Times hasn't mentioned any of this in their story. They want to present a controversy but they'd rather not give readers the impression Arday is a definitely a liar because they'd like him to be the hero of this story and they'd prefer it if the conservatives questioning him are the villains (as always).
There's another story about Arday in the UK press today. This is from the Telegraph:
Jack Grove, a reporter for Times Higher Education (THE), was accused of harassment after he emailed a series of questions to Prof Jason Arday about his academic record. Mr Grove said officers told him to stop contacting the professor because his “mental health” had been affected by the questions.
Prof Arday also hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, which suggested in a letter to THE that its “apparent attack” on him “may be... racially motivated”.
The Metropolitan Police spent four months looking into the claim of harassment before deciding in February to close the case.
Grove, the reporter, hadn't known about the investigation while it was happening. He only found out when the police contacted him to say they weren't pursuing the case any further. Despite dropping it, they asked him not to contact professor Arday again for the sake of the professor's mental health.
“I was told a complaint had been made against me and investigated, but the force was not taking it forward. The officer told me that I shouldn’t contact Professor Arday again because his mental health had been affected by my actions.
“I asked him what I had done, and he said there had been online posts about Professor Arday. I said I’d never posted anything about him and asked him if he realised he was speaking to a journalist who was investigating a story. He didn’t really respond but repeated his request for me not to contact Professor Arday again, citing his mental health."
Cambridge denied having made the complaint to the police, which only seems to leave Arday himself. When asked about it, Arday didn't respond. Also today, Arday was caught in another blatant lie.
It also emerged on Tuesday that Prof Arday falsely claimed to have been a visiting professor at Ohio State University.
On the Cambridge Faculty of Education page, he claims to be a visiting professor at the US university in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
However, a university spokesman said they had “no record of an employee by that name” and that “visiting professors appear in our employment records”.
This is now two universities who have clarified that, despite his claims, Arday does not work for them.
On the Cambridge Faculty of Education page he claims to be a visiting professor in Glasgow’s School of Education. However, this has been denied by a university spokesman, who said: “I can confirm that Professor Arday isn’t a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow.”
When asked if he had ever held that position, the spokesman told The Herald that Arday “was never a visiting professor here”
Llke the pig-head story, there doesn't seem to be any wiggle room here. Arday is a person who routinely and publicly exaggerates his own record. Maybe readers at the NY Times will find out about all of that eventually but not from today's story.
Update: I missed this story. This is wild.
...footage of a talk Prof Arday gave in October 2022 has re-emerged, revealing his claim that he appeared as a child on Seven Up.
He told the University of Bath’s Race Equality Taskforce: “I was part of a programme, actually, which – it doesn’t really exist any more – but it was called Seven Up at the time.
“And Seven Up is basically when they follow you over the duration of your life, so they follow you at [ages] 7, 14, 21. I was pulled out of the project when I was 14.”
Just one problem with this claim.
The inaugural episode was broadcast in 1964. He was not born until 1985.
This story was published by the Telegraph two days ago so the NY Times definitely could have seen it and mentioned it in their story published today. But of course they left it out.
Correction: I somehow wrote Arday's first name as James. It's Jason Arday. Sorry for the error.
Editor's Note: Do you enjoy HotAir's conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member