The Jason Arday Plagiarism Case

[Bunmi fatoye-matory]

Jason Arday: Fabulism versus Irresponsibility

By Ato Quayson - Professor at Stanford University

Let me start by making a full disclosure: I am a Ghanaian who gained a PhD from the University of Cambridge and also taught for a decade on the English Faculty there before moving to North America.

There are many aspects of the Jason Arday story that I find deeply unsettling.

1. It is quite clear to me that Arday is a highly inventive fabulist. But whatever backstory to his life he has shared, whether it is running 600 miles in 6 days (revised to 12), not reading until being able to speak until he was 11 and to read until he was 18 and yet gaining a PhD by the age of 30, and running 30 marathons in 35 days, all share a common theme. Basically, it is that despite the incredible disadvantages he has faced all his life he is capable of unimaginable superhuman feats of grit and endurance. This theme has been central to his self-presentation from the start.

2. It is also clear that he was badly served by his mentors in all the institutions he has studied or worked at. Liverpool John Moores University is perhaps most culpable for not providing him with the proper guidance and supervision to help exorcise the plagiarist tendencies he exhibited in his dissertation and elsewhere. This should have been picked up early so that he could be set straight. Of course, some students are simply not subject to good advice, and this may have been the case with him. But if so, then he should not have been allowed to graduate with a PhD from the institution.

3. I wish this problem were only one for Liverpool John Moores, but unfortunately it is quite common. A comparable case is that of the disgraced Chris Spence, who was Director of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) from 2009-2013, when he admitted to having plagiarized several passages in a op-ed piece he co-wrote for the Toronto Star. The TDSB is the fourth largest school district in North America and carries substantial stray over educational policy in the Canadian province. It turns out that several passages of Spence’s 1996 PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Toronto had also been plagiarized. Clearly, something was seriously wrong with the system that granted him the doctorate. But in 2017, the university investigated the allegations and found him guilty of serious academic misconduct. They rescinded the degree. I suspect this laxness regarding the application of rigorous academic standards by mentors and supervisors is particularly common for students who happen to be black. The idea is that since they have made it so far through various woes and tribulations, that they should not be impeded by the standards applied to others. This is of course a complete insult and disservice to the many hardworking black students who have labored through our best educational institutions.

4. One wonders why the Cambridge University search process was not able to pick up the flaws in Arday’s profile. Clearly, they were enamored of the fairly tales Arday shared with them. So, there are serious questions to be answered regarding Cambridge’s usually reliable procedure for appointing people to professorships. But in this case it may come down not to failures of the search committee itself, but to weaknesses in the search process at Cambridge more broadly. At Stanford, where I am currently based, appointment to the position of Professor requires among other things the soliciting by the relevant department of at least 9 external referee letters for inclusion in the candidate’s dossier. Sometimes the number of letters tendered in support of a candidate can rise to 15. The effect of this large number is that it is unlikely any problems with a candidate’s career will not be picked up by one or more of the referees. And once it is picked up and reflected in a referee letter, the relevant department is obliged to make a careful response to the allegations and include these in the dossier for onward transmission to the Dean’s Appointments and Promotions Committee. And presenting chairs are seriously questions about all aspects of the dossiers being submitted before a vote is taken on the suitability of the candidate. This is after the same process has already been had at the department level. Many searches have failed on the grounds of unsatisfactory responses to negative assessments from referees, sometimes seemingly minor but for Stanford’s university hiring system the sign of patterns suggestive of potential problems lurking for the future. It is good that after originally supporting him, Cambridge finally launched a thorough investigation of the accusations against Arday and that Arday himself decided to resign rather than face the ignominy of full exposure.

5. As for Arday’s own repeated defence of being the subject of racial hounding because of his academic achievements, I hope no serious person buys that ridiculous tripe. Accusations of plagiarism are a very serious matter among scholars and should not be taken lightly for any reason. And it is a serious insult to hardworking ethnic minorities and persons with disability to feel that they are being submitted to lower standards because of their neurodiversity or race. While Arday’s own case might be put down to sloppiness, given the extent of allegations he should also take full personal responsibility for not discovering and applying the rigorous scholarly standards required of both his discipline of educational sociology and of academia in general.

6. There are many lessons to be drawn from this sorry saga, not the least of which should be that the mentorship of rising scholars and academics is a very serious matter and should be undertaken by both individuals and university systems with all seriousness and diligence.