Jason Arday #3

[SunsetSmile]

God loves a trier - is a folk lore expression capturing religous themes of perserverance of will, endurance, or steadfastness in overcoming challenges. Where there may be a heightened sense of persecution, challenges can be internally dismissed as wrongful. The end justifies the means is easier to justify if you convince yourself you are doing something mission worthy.

This story captured my attention due to the obvious mismatch in competence and qualification for a Cambridge Chair. Qualifications in non academic subjects from weak HE institutions did not and should not allow ANYBODY to scramble over others into roles in world leading Unis (Glasgow, Durham & Cambridge).

Arguments are being advanced that he deserved his position (his qualifications other than the MH Birkbeck claim do exist) Spoiler imv they're low quality.

Journo CC is banging on about JA's academic citations. Populism isn't scholarship or high quality. The Irving holaucaust book was cited by nearly every politics student in the 80s. He wasn't an Professor but my point is notoriety.

How long will it be before one of these journalists says the legend will not burn out and reprises Elton John?

 

[TrashleenMoron]

This might be controversial but I don't care about the motives or opinions of the person or people who exposed Arday.

It's a shame that the person who was "targeted" was actually a perfect example of what the alleged racist believed, but Arday shouldn't have been in his position anyway.

 

[Carefree]

He also isn't the first person to question Arday’s qualifications, just the first to say "duck it" and shared it publicly anyway.

Add in the copious amounts of background bull and you've got a story that, as has been proven, will run and run.

 

[nothanksbabes]

This might be controversial but I don't care about the motives or opinions of the person or people who exposed Arday.

It's a shame that the person who was "targeted" was actually a perfect example of what the alleged racist believed, but Arday shouldn't have been in his position anyway.

The idea that you have to be morally pure to talk about things is absurd. Anyone who wants to can read Cofnas's work and speculate on his motives. There are a million and one problems with his hypothesis about genetics, race and intelligence IMO (which I won't go into here). Not one of them changes the facts of Arday's abject unsuitsbility for the position he was given, or the fact he was a liar. People I might not like can ask questions I don't like, and whether I'm persuaded either way depends on the evidence, not whether I think they're a great person.

 

[didisaythatoutloudoops]

This is a brilliant way of putting it, thank you!

What really interests me is education vs street smarts. Like, I'm not well educated (formally, I'm an auto-didact innit? lol) but I can spot a buller 100 yeards off. Hilary Creminlin and all the other Cambridge dons, obviously degrees and IQ scores coming out their pores, yet could not spot an obvious grift despite the evidence in his academic 'work', the fact that students at Roehampton had complained, journalists sniffing around, etc.

Why couldn't they see it? Was it just that typical Progressive racism that assumes Black people are somehow 'other' or 'wild' and therefore must be held to crushingly low academic standards (but then, Thomas Sowell...?). Or did Cambridge KNOW he was full of it but propped him up for political reasons (in which case they have no morals because they're happy to use a mentally ill person as a totem or a puppet)? or is it in fact possible to be highly educated but frighteningly low in street smarts / lived experience so that an obvious liar is not obvious at all to them?

I do often wonder about that third possibility. Because Jack Monroe was beloved by some very so-called intelligent people at one point. And likewise there were at one point highly intelligent people proclaiming that binary sex doesn't exist and that white people are the evillest destructors of all humanity all times and in all places.

Which sometimes makes me wonder if at least some of our cultural, political and academic elites are thick as tit and talking out of their holes. Which is, ya know. Worrying.

I honestly think it's self-preservation. If they call out their workplace(s) as having awarded or hired someone woefully unprepared, producing sub-standard work and insanely out of their depth - they're scared that it will devalue their own work, even if it is entirely honest.

It's the issue my daughter is facing, that I noted before. In short - Russel Group uni, STEM subject masters course. Vast majority of students used AI to patch together a final thesis, could barely string together a sentence in English at graduation. Professors didn't care, her supervisor was misogynistic, missed meetings, didn't read her paper before feedback, and barely understood the topic (despite having a PhD). A formal complaint led to no repercussions for him, but a partial shut-up refund of tuition fees if she didn't pursue it further.

But here's the issue. She worked incredibly hard despite almost zero support from the university. She earned her award - the exams, set by external adjudicators, were tough and many did fail. She paid thousands for the degree.

If she called out what I would consider to be a woeful scam - and I think that's the morally right thing to do - it devalues the award itself. With enough traction, it could result in that degree being seen as worthless. Two years of her life and tens of thousands of £s effectively reduced to nothing.

I think that is what is stopping many academics and students from speaking out - it's a very fragile system, propped up by everyone nodding and playing their part and keeping hush about how the sausage is actually made. It's Mutually Assured Destruction if you speak out - because it is nigh-on impossible nowadays to separate those who came by their degree honestly from those who didn't. You either devalue the degree as a whole or you keep quiet.

 

[cokeyoakey]

All I get from this is ‘I want everyone to see how quirky & artsy my notes are, ergo how cool & unconventional I am’

Yes, and illustrates the problems his students had - makes me think of the young woman who said that she'd looked through all her lecture notes and there was nothing she could use for the exam.

 

[cokeyoakey]

This constant mantra of 'will unmeasurable, skill measurable' I really think is the crux of the issue (sorry if it's been touched on before).

If you truly, truly believe in the idea that will is the most important thing you can have, and that skill is inferior and secondary to it, why would you choose to pursue a career entirely based upon the idea of measurable skill? Academia is all about measurable achievement. That's what it runs on. A PhD is perhaps the greatest mark of measurable skill there is; because it's a huge effort that has a tangible award at the end of it. It's not like a craft where you might get better (or even great), because you don't tend to be able to categorically rank or judge a craft, you just get better and can subjectively compare yourself. A PhD is written proof of your skill in a very rare and rather unique way.

Not that a PhD doesn't require great will too, but it is very odd that someone who supposedly was so committed to the idea of will being triumphant would also put such great value on, well, measurable skill. It does make me wonder if this mantra was less about what he genuinely believed in and valued, but more about what he wanted others to value.

After all, if you've achieved your PhD by fraudulent means/plagiarism, you'd have a vested interest in promoting the idea that your will matters so much more. It effectively pushes the idea that the person who wants it most deserves it - and there's no questioning that Arday wanted it, even if he didn't have the skill himself to get there (and therefore plagiarised off others).

It is, for me, the most compelling part of the idea that Arday was very much maliciously utilising any methods available to achieve his goals, rather than having been swept into a kind of delusion by the university validating him constantly.

And in his book, his description didn't seem to be of achieving his PhD by "will" - not if will means putting lots of sustained effort into something over a sustained period. He seemed to use "will" to mean "if you dream it, it will come".

 

[cokeyoakey]

A powerful message indeed.
View attachment 4099352

Time - invaluable commodity
Custodians of this space - which space am I custodian of
Power of observation - the greatest gift of not speaking (or not being able to speak)
Outcomes are the language executives understand
How do we ensure we use technology for good in the world?
Neurodivergent people are on the periphery
This jersey doesn’t belong to you
Seven people pulled this together - and made it look easy
Nothing about us without us
Cambridge is the least remarkable thing about me
The greatest gift you can give someone is agency
London 2012 para olympic games - game changer
Rocky - a million to one to one in a million - I just want to make it to the final bell


I’m intrigued as to what “powerful message” she took from this.
And I know this is a “keynote”, but I think it gives a flavour of what his students were working with.

 

[ChastityDingle]

No wonder the book was such a collection of banal details and clichés is all I can say. An original thinker, he most certainly was not.

 

[SunsetSmile]

Degree inflation is the academic equivalent of the junk bond/sub prime mortgage scandal of 25 years ago.

The US has a significant issue with educational debt default. By increasing HE participation & charging £9.8k fees the UK is facing a similar position. Historic beliefs of a graduate earning premium should be more critically appraised. Even before the seismic changes from AI it was delusional to believe that poor quality degrees would deliver high graduate salaries. There are 1st class graduates doing food delivery jobs & not just as holiday work!

Sure, student spending benefits certain local economies NOW but this is generated through debt & borrowing. This debt might seem irrelevant (investment innit) as the borrowing is individual however a generalised default will become a public finance problem. Even those who can service the debt face a brake on their future spending and investment opportunities.

There is an opportunity cost to applying that financial resource to HE which might deliver more benefit if deployed elsewhere.

 

[nothanksbabes]

View attachment 4099683

Time - invaluable commodity
Custodians of this space - which space am I custodian of
Power of observation - the greatest gift of not speaking (or not being able to speak)
Outcomes are the language executives understand
How do we ensure we use technology for good in the world?
Neurodivergent people are on the periphery
This jersey doesn’t belong to you
Seven people pulled this together - and made it look easy
Nothing about us without us
Cambridge is the least remarkable thing about me
The greatest gift you can give someone is agency
London 2012 para olympic games - game changer
Rocky - a million to one to one in a million - I just want to make it to the final bell


I’m intrigued as to what “powerful message” she took from this.
And I know this is a “keynote”, but I think it gives a flavour of what his students were working with.

When I was a student 20 years ago there was a lot of talk about the dumbing down of standards in education and "Mickey Mouse degrees" and with the benefit of hindsight you begin to understand that was a valid concern.

These notes are utterly bleeping asinine. The best thing I can say about him is that he had nice handwriting. Which for someone who wouldn't write until adulthood is remarkable.

 

[MavisBeacon]

When I was a student 20 years ago there was a lot of talk about the dumbing down of standards in education and "Mickey Mouse degrees" and with the benefit of hindsight you begin to understand that was a valid concern.

These notes are utterly bleeping asinine. The best thing I can say about him is that he had nice handwriting. Which for someone who wouldn't write until adulthood is remarkable.

Those are notes made by someone who sat through one of his lectures, not Arday himself

 

[Harlot O'Scara]

Which sometimes makes me wonder if at least some of our cultural, political and academic elites are thick as tit and talking out of their holes. Which is, ya know. Worrying.

I mean, this has been demonstrably true for quite some time.

Beyond being thick and talking out of their holes, many of them are also utterly self-interested and actively malicious.

 

[SunsetSmile]

Putting the trite into detritus.

Woeful keynote.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

He also isn't the first person to question Arday’s qualifications, just the first to say "duck it" and shared it publicly anyway.

Add in the copious amounts of background bull and you've got a story that, as has been proven, will run and run.

And the only reason he could do that is because he’s an American based in Belgium so U.K. libel and non crime hate incident legislation don’t apply. I’m 100% certain that Arday will have contacted both the police and his law firm when Cofney published evidence of his plagiarism.

 

[emmer_moans]

I mean, this has been demonstrably true for quite some time.

Beyond being thick and talking out of their holes, many of them are also utterly self-interested and actively malicious.

The problem is, I think, is that the people who are more naturally likely to put themselves forward and do the networking needed in order to advance, are often narcissists or control freaks or power hungry egotists, because they are driven to hack away until they get what they want. And while they do it, genuine hearted and intelligent people who want to make good changes and good decisions get silenced, trodden on, and are more likely to concede defeat rather than become an egotist.

Also good hearted leaders are more likely to give up on their dreams of progression in order to look after people they care about , whether that's family or local community, etc. They are also unlikely to shout the loudest to get heard. People like Arday get where they want because they know how to spin and play and they don't care about who they trample on to get there (in Arday's case he was happy to undersupport his students ).

 

[moldwarp]

I honestly think it's self-preservation. If they call out their workplace(s) as having awarded or hired someone woefully unprepared, producing sub-standard work and insanely out of their depth - they're scared that it will devalue their own work, even if it is entirely honest.

That's a fair take. As Upton Sinclair said, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Would I have put my principles above paying the mortgage? Probably not, tbh, because my children were young and I needed to keep a roof over their and my heads.

I do think there's something else though which is that it's really hard for an ideologue to let go of their ideology. So if the Arday appointment WAS an ideological appointment (and I accept this take is still just possibly debatable) i.e. an ideology of anti-racism, CRT, DEI, identitarianism which states that the colour of your skin is more important than any other factor including skillset, then questioning his qualifications would also mean possibly questioning that ideology. And if one's entire belief system and worldview is built on that ideology then you're gonna do anything you can to prop it up. I can understand that. Where it falls down is that using a mentally ill person as the keystone to prop up your ideological wall, is really asking that mentally ill person to bear a weight he cannot and should never have been asked to bear.

I think this also relates to what @TrashleenMoron was saying, in that it kind of had to be someone like Nathan Cofnas who broke the story, because he had little to lose. A mainstream journo, mainstream academics and Arday's students had all tried and been warned off / intimidated. Cofnas had already been disgraced by Cambridge and was already an outsider / renegade by virtue of his research areas. So he was already a villain, may as well push the Fuckit Button and become more of a villain.

In an odd reverse way, JK Rowling played a similar role in exposing the trans cult. Many, many women had tried to speak out against it, but they were fired / sued / intimidated, or they simply had little social capital, little platform and couldn't make themselves heard. Or they kept quiet because they had a mortgage to pay. JKR kind of had a Fuckit Button in inverse proportion to Nathan Cofnas - her huge wealth and elite status made her kind of similarly immune in the opposite direction. So she was able to say it (and thank GOD she did).

it sometimes takes an outsider to expose a grift is what I'm saying. Like in the old story, it's deliberate that it's a CHILD that points out that the emperor is naked. The town notables, the burghers, the nobility - they had a higher social platform than the child, and therefore more to lose, so they kept their mouth shut and pretended the emperor had clothes on.

 

[PaddyDomino]

The problem is, I think, is that the people who are more naturally likely to put themselves forward and do the networking needed in order to advance, are often narcissists or control freaks or power hungry egotists, because they are driven to hack away until they get what they want. And while they do it, genuine hearted and intelligent people who want to make good changes and good decisions get silenced, trodden on, and are more likely to concede defeat rather than become an egotist.

Also good hearted leaders are more likely to give up on their dreams of progression in order to look after people they care about , whether that's family or local community, etc. They are also unlikely to shout the loudest to get heard. People like Arday get where they want because they know how to spin and play and they don't care about who they trample on to get there (in Arday's case he was happy to undersupport his students ).

Yes, and not only undersupport the students but accuse them of white privilege if they complained, according to the Roehampton student who has written about her experience of having Arday as her lecturer.
Not to mention setting Carter Ruck and the police onto the professor and the journalist who had queried him before Cofnas.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

View attachment 4099683I’m intrigued as to what “powerful message” she took from this.
And I know this is a “keynote”, but I think it gives a flavour of what his students were working with.

I tried looking for that particular keynote and didn’t find it, but as he just regurgitated the same trite adolescent nonsense and fabulist tales over and over, this recording of a pre-keynote interview from October 2024 came up, which also contains all of the above, but a different title; “You can’t start a fire without a spark”- to funeral directors. #classy.

Aside from all the bull fantasist lies, he is just…staggeringly unintelligible. He just talks utter, utter illegible nonsense and fantasist crap from start to finish (with a ridiculous level of confidence in all his imbecilic pronouncements and hot takes, I’ll give him that).

Spoiler: Link, mither, and sample extracts

How that ghostwriter managed to pull together even that complete pap of a book if this is what she was working with, how his students got anything useful from him ever, and, if this late 2024 interview is anything to go by, how the duck he’d already successfully interviewed for those Assistant Professor/Professor/Chair jobs at Durham/Glasgow/Cambridge is just staggering.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever a world-class academic scholar, or even someone who can string together intelligible, let alone meaningful sentences for a low-stakes 20 minutes.

He starts at 25 mins in

International Convention and Expo Preview 3 - Keynote Speakers | National Funeral Director's Association

The International Convention and Expo is taking place in New Orleans October 20th to the 23rd. To get ready for the event we have 3 convention preview episodes for you to check out. In this final episode before convention, host, Gabe Schauf, is joined by the 2024 International Convention and...

www.nfda.org

Sample (all within the first few minutes!) on being asked about being unable to speak, read, or write:

“in some respects, in more respects, in many respects it was beautiful…to observe life without (sic) the absence of words…you’re forced to have to…listen…and in some ways, the power of speech can conflict (sic) that…and in some respects it provided dexterity (?) to me which meant when I was able to learn to speak… really aided through (sic) my amazing mother Gifty…”

“…there are a lot of things that you are limited to, or that become limited, if you’re not literate…”

“…complex learning difficulties, or autism, for etcetera (sic).”


*And stay tuned for (or skip to if you can’t bear it, though suffering through the whole pile of self-aggrandizing vacuous nonsense is pretty illuminating, especially given that this was late 2024) the 44th of 46ish minutes where in talking about his coming keynote, he uses a truly staggering (analogy-I think it’s meant to be?! something, anyway) about them embalming bodies and “this mortal coil” in response to “what attendees will learn about, or expect to hear about” in his presentation to his audience of funeral directors (which will evidently be all about himself, and himself only).

 

[GabbyJ]

I tried looking for that particular keynote and didn’t find it, but as he just regurgitated the same trite adolescent nonsense and fabulist tales over and over, this recording of a pre-keynote interview from October 2024 came up, which also contains all of the above, but a different title; “You can’t start a fire without a spark”- to funeral directors. #classy.

Aside from all the bull fantasist lies, he is just…staggeringly unintelligible. He just talks utter, utter illegible nonsense and fantasist crap from start to finish (with a ridiculous level of confidence in all his imbecilic pronouncements and hot takes, I’ll give him that).

Spoiler: Link, mither, and sample extracts

How that ghostwriter managed to pull together even that complete pap of a book if this is what she was working with, how his students got anything useful from him ever, and, if this late 2024 interview is anything to go by, how the duck he’d already successfully interviewed for those Assistant Professor/Professor/Chair jobs at Durham/Glasgow/Cambridge is just staggering.

This is not by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever a world-class academic scholar, or even someone who can string together intelligible, let alone meaningful sentences for a low-stakes 20 minutes.

He starts at 25 mins in

International Convention and Expo Preview 3 - Keynote Speakers | National Funeral Director's Association

The International Convention and Expo is taking place in New Orleans October 20th to the 23rd. To get ready for the event we have 3 convention preview episodes for you to check out. In this final episode before convention, host, Gabe Schauf, is joined by the 2024 International Convention and...

www.nfda.org

Sample (all within the first few minutes!) on being asked about being unable to speak, read, or write:

“in some respects, in more respects, in many respects it was beautiful…to observe life without (sic) the absence of words…you’re forced to have to…listen…and in some ways, the power of speech can conflict (sic) that…and in some respects it provided dexterity (?) to me which meant when I was able to learn to speak… really aided through (sic) my amazing mother Gifty…”

“…there are a lot of things that you are limited to, or that become limited, if you’re not literate…”

“…complex learning difficulties, or autism, for etcetera (sic).”


*And stay tuned for (or skip to if you can’t bear it, though suffering through the whole pile of self-aggrandizing vacuous nonsense is pretty illuminating, especially given that this was late 2024) the 44th of 46ish minutes where in talking about his coming keynote, he uses a truly staggering (analogy-I think it’s meant to be?! something, anyway) about them embalming bodies and “this mortal coil” in response to “what attendees will learn about, or expect to hear about” in his presentation to his audience of funeral directors (which will evidently be all about himself, and himself only).

I just can’t take him seriously. Why does he always reference Rocky?