Jason Arday #2

[Eye_Spy]

It may be that if there were 2 women of colour and they were better candidates…that they weren’t as photogenic and weren’t as interested in pushing themselves forward for thing like tv appearances, Arday was used as a poster boy, and if its true that there were actually other better candidates that were of colour…this makes it even worse as its going beyond the standard thing of just selecting someone on balancing the books on DEI, but also to selecting them based on optics and promotional value.

I think there are more questions to be asked with regards to the money…

he did GCSEs and a BTEC - state funded

he then did:
A Bachelor of Arts
A Master of Arts
A PGSE
A Doctorate

This happened between 2005 and 2015…it’s only the final year of that for which he also state he was employed by the university alongside competing the doctorate. So that’s NINE YEARS at university with either no proper income. So from age 20 to 29…what was he living off, and how much in student loans, government grants, or benefits such as child tax credits did he get due to not working a regular job? Did he pay back his student loans or do they now just get written off?

Bear in mind that in the book extract shown on this thread, he states his wife was pregnant in 2007, so at least one of his two children were born during the time he took 9 years out of being a provider to focus on his education. The obvious thing to factor in is that his wife worked as a ‘teacher’, however assuming they were the same age or near enough (there doesn’t look to be an age gap from their appearance on tv), that would make her 22(ish) when she had the first baby, usually to become a teacher you do a subject degree then a year for teacher training…so she’d have to have been a student herself with very little income, then started a teaching job, almost immediately got pregnant, all while Arday is at uni himself, and she is also in the background having to support him with him still learning to read and write and by his own admission scoring so poorly on that first course that he was close to being thrown off it.

None of this makes sense unless somewhere he was being seriously bankrolled, Maybe he had access to funding that is designed to push for more black people to get places on these courses? Does he actually mention anywhere in the book how all this education, while raising a family, was actually funded?

As for the £200k not necessarily being a huge sum because it’s only giving his family about 2 years of his future salary…I disagree with that! He should never have been earning that kind of money to begin with, so since 2015 the family (if he has actually spent the money on them) have had a larger income than was fairly deserved. All of this extra committees/boards he was on…there would have been payments of some sort and for the tv appearances and public speaking events, he was a grifter, and they were lucky financially while it was working.

There is also the fact that if it’s correct that he split with his wife in 2019, and she’s a qualified teacher…she wouldn’t have been dependent on him anyway or had joint expenses and shouldn’t need any kind of payout from his death. This isn’t a housewife who is suddenly unable to pay the rent and needs emergency funding to give some breathing space prior to getting their finances sorted. One of the children is over 18, so not a financial dependent, and the other could be close to that age, plus if his death means child support payments stop, it could mean tax credit is received instead and the difference may not be that drastic.

I also wonder about the charity money he raised. How do we know it actually reached those charities? Did he name them and state the amounts given to each? Did he have a fundraising page that was directly linked to a charity so it didn’t pass through his own account? Seeing as he can’t settle on an amount and claimed he can’t give details as was part of a syndicate…it makes me suspect a possibility that he pocketed the cash. Anyone can set up a fundraiser and say ‘it’s for charity’, doesn’t mean the money ever gets donated.

Also, his death may have triggered more interest in the book…who is now getting the proceeds? If it’s his children that could be thousands £ for them from that source.

I really detest these types of ‘go fund me’ schemes. The target has been raised simply because the original has been surpassed, but there’s no real explanation of what the money is going to be used for. It’s very possible that people donating are I a worse financial position than his children/family, and just don’t realise it because it’s being sold to them as a sob story that his poor family are now penniless.

 

[SwiftieNewRomantics]

I’m surprised Alastair Campbell has the gall to show his face in public tbh, let alone lecture anyone.

 

[lifeissweet]

It may be that if there were 2 women of colour and they were better candidates…that they weren’t as photogenic and weren’t as interested in pushing themselves forward for thing like tv appearances, Arday was used as a poster boy, and if its true that there were actually other better candidates that were of colour…this makes it even worse as its going beyond the standard thing of just selecting someone on balancing the books on DEI, but also to selecting them based on optics and promotional value.

I think there are more questions to be asked with regards to the money…

he did GCSEs and a BTEC - state funded

he then did:
A Bachelor of Arts
A Master of Arts
A PGSE
A Doctorate

This happened between 2005 and 2015…it’s only the final year of that for which he also state he was employed by the university alongside competing the doctorate. So that’s NINE YEARS at university with either no proper income. So from age 20 to 29…what was he living off, and how much in student loans, government grants, or benefits such as child tax credits did he get due to not working a regular job? Did he pay back his student loans or do they now just get written off?

Bear in mind that in the book extract shown on this thread, he states his wife was pregnant in 2007, so at least one of his two children were born during the time he took 9 years out of being a provider to focus on his education. The obvious thing to factor in is that his wife worked as a ‘teacher’, however assuming they were the same age or near enough (there doesn’t look to be an age gap from their appearance on tv), that would make her 22(ish) when she had the first baby, usually to become a teacher you do a subject degree then a year for teacher training…so she’d have to have been a student herself with very little income, then started a teaching job, almost immediately got pregnant, all while Arday is at uni himself, and she is also in the background having to support him with him still learning to read and write and by his own admission scoring so poorly on that first course that he was close to being thrown off it.

None of this makes sense unless somewhere he was being seriously bankrolled, Maybe he had access to funding that is designed to push for more black people to get places on these courses? Does he actually mention anywhere in the book how all this education, while raising a family, was actually funded?

As for the £200k not necessarily being a huge sum because it’s only giving his family about 2 years of his future salary…I disagree with that! He should never have been earning that kind of money to begin with, so since 2015 the family (if he has actually spent the money on them) have had a larger income than was fairly deserved. All of this extra committees/boards he was on…there would have been payments of some sort and for the tv appearances and public speaking events, he was a grifter, and they were lucky financially while it was working.

There is also the fact that if it’s correct that he split with his wife in 2019, and she’s a qualified teacher…she wouldn’t have been dependent on him anyway or had joint expenses and shouldn’t need any kind of payout from his death. This isn’t a housewife who is suddenly unable to pay the rent and needs emergency funding to give some breathing space prior to getting their finances sorted. One of the children is over 18, so not a financial dependent, and the other could be close to that age, plus if his death means child support payments stop, it could mean tax credit is received instead and the difference may not be that drastic.

I also wonder about the charity money he raised. How do we know it actually reached those charities? Did he name them and state the amounts given to each? Did he have a fundraising page that was directly linked to a charity so it didn’t pass through his own account? Seeing as he can’t settle on an amount and claimed he can’t give details as was part of a syndicate…it makes me suspect a possibility that he pocketed the cash. Anyone can set up a fundraiser and say ‘it’s for charity’, doesn’t mean the money ever gets donated.

Also, his death may have triggered more interest in the book…who is now getting the proceeds? If it’s his children that could be thousands £ for them from that source.

I really detest these types of ‘go fund me’ schemes. The target has been raised simply because the original has been surpassed, but there’s no real explanation of what the money is going to be used for. It’s very possible that people donating are I a worse financial position than his children/family, and just don’t realise it because it’s being sold to them as a sob story that his poor family are now penniless.

Stephen Hawking did the same thing - he had 2 children while he studied and his wife had to raise the kids, look after him and work from home to make ends meet.

 

[Carefree]

Interesting article from the Atlantic here - https://archive.ph/b8QaG

What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.

Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”

 

[Rayne]

It does seem high, but his wife and children have now lost out on the support from his (significant) earnings, so they may well struggle without that.
ETA: 200K would be about 2 years of his approximate current salary

Oh well they will have to learn to budget like the rest of us

 

[nothanksbabes]

Stephen Hawking did the same thing - he had 2 children while he studied and his wife had to raise the kids, look after him and work from home to make ends meet.

Then binned her for his nurse!

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

Just on the intolerable level of media coverage - if you do a google search on Jason Arday from 2010 until June 2026, there are 20 pages of hits. All saying what a remarkable man he is. He loved and courted the media when it was telling the world what an extraordinary human being he was.

There's one on that last page that shouldn't be there (download hub which is talking about his death even thought it's dated 22/8/23) but every other article/citation is dated correctly.

 

[ChastityDingle]

Just on the intolerable level of media coverage - if you do a google search on Jason Arday from 2010 until June 2026, there are 20 pages of hits. All saying what a remarkable man he is. He loved and courted the media when it was telling the world what an extraordinary human being he was.

View attachment 4092172
View attachment 4092174
There's one on that last page that shouldn't be there (download hub which is talking about his death even thought it's dated 22/8/23) but every other article/citation is dated correctly.

Exactly. He courted the attention when it suited him. It's a terrible tragedy that he took this way out, of course. But there are narratives now being rewritten at a speed that would make anyone's head spin.

 

[SunsetSmile]

@Eye_Spy you raise some interesting points.

As you say from 2005 to 2015 he was studying. He may have received DSA given his need for assistance with proof reading.

There are references to jobs he was doing - ie the *humbling* Sainsbury's job. It seems a stretch that earnings from these roles would have covered the fees for undergrad, masters & a self (?) funded PhD and rent on a place with his wife & baby. The wife qualified as a teacher so presumably has been pursuing her own career in education alongside being a parent. One child is a young adult but the second was born at the end of his PhD. Happy to be corrected if I wrong.

In the Carter Ruck letter it referred to his being the breadwinner for the last 20 years. Such a claim surprised me as it seemed more likely the wife was the breadwinner whilst he studied. He always refers to Giff's Clapham house as his home and he returned there after the relationship with his wife ended.

There is a lot of smoke and mirrors and after the martyrdom transparency may be very uncomfortable.

The GFM claimed money was for funeral expenses. Fundraising laws mean that GFMs should accurately show what money is for.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

I think I read somewhere that there were 4 shortlisted for his professorship; the other 3 were all more senior academics with proven track records, and two of them were women of colour. Is this accurate? If so, that really makes my blood boil, and those two women have a legitimate axe to grind and story to tell.

It’s in the NY Times article.

 

[FrumpyCat]

Unless a former candidate comes out to confirm it, I don't know think we will ever know if other candidates were female, or BAME, and it could just be speculation to make JA's appointment looks worse.

What I can see is that Diane Reay, who held/holds a broadly similar post in the same department from 2005 and also had a working class background and, in some respects, a similar career path and research areas, seems to have outshone JA in every aspect. PI on multiple grants, better citation record, more respected co-authors etc.

Also doesn't seem to have sought personal glory.

 

[FrumpyCat]

I’m surprised Alastair Campbell has the gall to show his face in public tbh, let alone lecture anyone.

Although I do like the podcast he does with Rory Stewart, even if I don't always agree with it.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

I wonder if this clip was before or after his mentor took him to the karaoke bar?

 

[FrumpyCat]

@Eye_Spy I think JA self-funded his PhD while working. Probably not the multiple jobs at Sainsbury's and cleaning offices, but working at a university.

 

[VielleFemme]

This lecturer in journalism is not only seemingly entirely ignorant of the guidelines around reporting suicide, but also very happy to openly state that whistleblowing students are 'culpable' for Arday's death.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

This lecturer in journalism is not only seemingly entirely ignorant of the guidelines around reporting suicide, but also very happy to openly state that whistleblowing students are 'culpable' for Arday's death.
View attachment 4092206

Assault? How dare students who are leaving uni with £60k’s worth of debt expect their teaching staff to be competent. Vile man

 

[ButtonDownTheHutches]

This lecturer in journalism is not only seemingly entirely ignorant of the guidelines around reporting suicide, but also very happy to openly state that whistleblowing students are 'culpable' for Arday's death.
View attachment 4092206

Really? So students rack up £50k of debt to get a degree, but they mustn’t complain about sub-par teaching in case they find themselves ‘culpable’ for the suicide of a fabulist with a series of question marks around their credentials?

 

[Harlot O'Scara]

This lecturer in journalism is not only seemingly entirely ignorant of the guidelines around reporting suicide, but also very happy to openly state that whistleblowing students are 'culpable' for Arday's death.
View attachment 4092206

Blaming the media at large is debatable, blaming anonymous students who were given poor quality teaching is disgraceful.

And "assault"? Do words mean nothing at all now?

 

[Tabitha D]

I wonder if this clip was before or after his mentor took him to the karaoke bar?

I know this chap has been scrambling around to try and prove some of Arday’s tall stories, but he’s really not come up with anything. For example, a press article about the “marathons” (which is just Arday’s account, nothing is backed up) - and this thing about the football, it’s not Crystal Palace is it (which is one of his claims). I think his stories probably had a kernel of truth, but this tends to be the case with serial fantasists.
Also, Arday himself would have been the person to back his accounts up, and he didn’t even attempt to do this.

 

[Rayne]

This lecturer in journalism is not only seemingly entirely ignorant of the guidelines around reporting suicide, but also very happy to openly state that whistleblowing students are 'culpable' for Arday's death.
View attachment 4092206

People like this are only offended because something similar has likely happened to him