Are vivas public record?
Jason Arday #3
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I don't think so, but people have said it's weird that no academic has been identified as being part of his, when he named a lot of people he worked with, and no one at the University has admitted to it.
Probably in witness protection
The word masking gets 3 mentions in his book
He says he was deviously masking and also a master of masking in 2 separate mentions in the book
Attachments
I think he's saying more here than he knows. A statement analysis of this would be interesting. It's an embedded confession. [A la the McCanns]
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But people mask all the time, and for different reasons. He is relating it to his apparent autism but narcs mask, Adhders mask, he probably was masking - just not to hide autism.
He has to explain how he appears functional on his speaking tours but apparently needs Sandro to sleep in his room the night before his viva. How he can be the most autistic person ever whilst also functioning as if he doesn’t have autism at all.
I don’t get a vibe that his suicide was about control, I think the scrutiny caused some kind of mental collapse.
I think he genuinely was distraught by the negative press and attention (the book was about to ramp up the public ridicule) people said he’d lost weight. I think his house of cards collapsed and he didn’t know what to do about it. I don’t know that he understood that it was all a house of cards, until it was too late.
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Yes, I think the final straw for Arday was when Cambridge announced it was going to investigate his appointment and his time working there.
The Vice Chancellor issued a statement on 12th August, in which she calls his "case" an aberration - I mean calling it that before they had even started the investigation was the writing on the wall for JA, it was obviously only going to have one conclusion.
She also talks about "anger and anxiety", again a very negative tone.
She announces that Durham and Glasgow have launched their own investigations too (i.e. the jig is up, we're all onto him now).
In the past, Arday could put libel lawyers and the police onto anyone investigating him, and could rely on Cambridge to back him but now Cambridge themselves had turned on him, he really must have felt cornered.
And imagine the humiliation of going from being their poster boy to now being called an aberration?
He also may have been worried about being sued by Cambridge.
I know it's been posted before but it is worth reading the Vice Chancellor's statement again, in the light of what happened:
Statement from the Vice-Chancellor 12 August 2026
Statement from the Vice-Chancellor setting out the University's approach to an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the appointment of Jason Arday.
www.cam.ac.uk
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Don't get me started on the 'masking' thing. I have noticed that a lot of ND ppl attributing their ability to still have a job or cope in social situations to 'masking'. If it is suggested that many ppl struggle with certain social/employment situations, there will be a big discussion about how 'neurotypical' ppl are wildly different to 'neurodivergent' ppl. I always thought that a key symptom of autism was struggling to understand the intentions/thoughts of other ppl? Yet some autists claim an encyclopedic knowledge of how the autistic vs neurotypical mind work. How would they know?
The autistic ppl I know personally, who had speech delay and were dxed as kids, have poor insight into how they are different from others. There is no way they could mask their autism.
Calling his case an abberation also implies that there is no wider DEI agenda, so true or not it's a handy position to take.
Spot on & very much agree with your points - the jig was up.Yes, I think the final straw for Arday was when Cambridge announced it was going to investigate his appointment and his time working there.
The Vice Chancellor issued a statement on 12th August, in which she calls his "case" an aberration - I mean calling it that before they had even started the investigation was the writing on the wall for JA, it was obviously only going to have one conclusion.
She also talks about "anger and anxiety", again a very negative tone.
She announces that Durham and Glasgow have launched their own investigations too (i.e. the jig is up, we're all onto him now).
In the past, Arday could put libel lawyers and the police onto anyone investigating him, and could rely on Cambridge to back him but now Cambridge themselves had turned on him, he really must have felt cornered.
And imagine the humiliation of going from being their poster boy to now being called an aberration?
He also may have been worried about being sued by Cambridge.
I know it's been posted before but it is worth reading the Vice Chancellor's statement again, in the light of what happened:
Statement from the Vice-Chancellor 12 August 2026
Statement from the Vice-Chancellor setting out the University's approach to an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the appointment of Jason Arday.
Another interesting angle that seems to be emerging is Homerton College, the specialist education & teacher training college. Both Lord Woolley (Principal) & Lester Holloway (Head Comms & PR) were involved in Operation Black Vote & Runnymede Trust. Arday had approached OBV 15 years before so presumably knew both?? Did Homerton have any influence over the appointment? It's always a source of resigned frustration to me that groups who complain about establishment cliques often seek to replicate them as soon as they can. Orwell was insightful <understatement>
[For general info - not clipped, but it's available] Lord Simon Woolley, George the Poet, and Professor Jason Arday took part in a public panel discussion called "Black Men on the Couch" in October 2023 to talk about mental health and emotional vulnerability.
[Lord Woolley's expressions during Arday's comments were amusing]
The job spec for the Cambridge Professor position refers to the sucessful appointee then having the option to apply to be a fellow of a College. It seemed a separate process to being appointed a Professor. I don't understand how this process of becoming a fellow as a sucessful new appointee works - is it a rubber stamp or more interviews?
If your background was education why would you not choose to be a fellow of Homerton rather than Jesus?
I think he did personally, one he put a lot of effort into creating. The masking he was talking about referred to narc masking, ie, lying and fraud, not to his supposed autism.
Also it's 2026, is autism supposed to be a curse that you have to mask nowadays? The Aspergers person I know was 20 years older than JA and had a harder childhood because of it, only getting diagnosed as an adult but by then he had already learned coping strategies so it wasn't so hard to deal with. He also acknowledges certain advantages of having it, which JA never does but then I don't think he had it.
But there are different levels of autism and it’s not just autistic people who mask. Although you describe an autistic person who masked.
I don’t think the whataboutery of “I knew an autistic person and they wouldn’t have been able to mask” helps, it ignores the large amount of people who do have to mask and “go through the motions” of small talk, or try not to stim in front of workmates.
I worked with someone who spent two decades secretly taking work home at night and weekends because they were dyslexic, they’d been able to “mask” as someone who didn’t have any issues with reading and writing.
No different to a traveller lady who used to shop in my local supermarket, she’d always say “oh silly me, come out without my glasses, can you tell me which one of these is…”
it’s particularly relevant to women and girls. They have been excluded from diagnosis precisely because they understand societal pressures and norms so they (at great personal cost) “act normal”
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Because Homerton doesn't have anything like the cachet of the other Cambridge colleges. It only became a full college by Royal Charter in 2010, before that although it was affiliated it was still a bit like Oxford Brookes to the Oxford colleges.
Not to diminish the very real struggles that autistic people face, but don’t we all mask to some extent? You could call it imposter syndrome or perhaps trying hard to fit in, but essentially it’s the face we put on designed to cover up what we perceive as character flaws or deficiencies. Or in this case to hide untruths?
Yes, it's the effort and extent that make the difference. Some people have to try hard to mask their autistic mannerisms so they can work, and the effort of that causes exhaustion and they can't do anything but work and sleep. I don't think this is true of JA. But we need to remember that autistic people do have debilitating struggles with this, and to say "We all do" is to misunderstand the difference.
Hence my preface to that part of my comment. My daughter is autistic so I am familiar with the struggle.
Did JA present similarly to my highly intelligent yet neurodiverse child? Not in any of the interviews I’ve watched. I’ve concluded he was either, to add to all his other talents, amazing at masking, or perhaps less neurodivergent than his memoir would have us believe.
i think we end to stop thinking that neurodivergent is a euphemism for autistic.
Lots comes under neurodivergence, not only autism.
He’s dyslexic so he is neurodivergent. I have my doubts about the claimed autism but I wouldn’t be surprised if thee are other issues an
s well as a personality disorder.
Lots comes under neurodivergence, not only autism.
He’s dyslexic so he is neurodivergent. I have my doubts about the claimed autism but I wouldn’t be surprised if thee are other issues an
s well as a personality disorder.
It would be useful to have uniquely-named subtypes of masking - it's becoming a very wide umbrella term for things which have a very different mechanism/motivation behind them.
The timeline of what Arday says here is interesting (and beyond self-serving). September 2025. Nobody but Arday/Cambridge knew at this point that Jack Grove had contacted Arday directly three times in July-September/the two months leading up to this, because THE had pulled together evidence of his widespread plagiarism and invented back story.
By this point, Carter Ruck had already been instructed and had written to THE, and Arday had reported Jack Grove to the police. He’s not talking about his crappy coauthored autoethnography book here, even tho he’s pretending to. (This is still on YouTube)
By this point, Carter Ruck had already been instructed and had written to THE, and Arday had reported Jack Grove to the police. He’s not talking about his crappy coauthored autoethnography book here, even tho he’s pretending to. (This is still on YouTube)
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