Chris Selley: The DEI meltdown at a British university shows why we need more skepticism

Cartoon stink clouds continue to amass over the august University of Cambridge, after a high-profile professor was credibly alleged to have plagiarized significant parts of his 2015 PhD thesis. The reaction can best be described as an unholy mess.

Jason Arday, a professor of the sociology of education, became known as a rising star in academia in the early 2020s, when he became the youngest-ever or youngest-ever Black professor at various universities in sequence. His story was compelling: born with autism to Ghanaian parents, he says he was non-verbal until 11 years old, yet achieved a doctorate by 30, all while battling brain cancer. He has claimed accomplishing magnificent running feats for charity.

Alas, the Telegraph reports, Arday’s thesis at Liverpool John Moores University contained “dozens of passages… that were taken nearly verbatim from the 2009 dissertation of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a reader (i.e., associate professor) at Brunel University of London.” The passages are very damning indeed, though more so (for now, anyway) in terms of how obvious they are than necessarily how serious.

You can’t just copy great swaths of text from someone else and plunk them down in your paper without at least putting quotation marks around them. That’s true even if you cite the author in question many times in the same work, which Arday did. But so long as you have cited the source of the material, “sloppiness, not malice,” is often a viable defence in the court of academia.

But that’s not where Arday’s supporters went, mostly. They went straight to the imputed motives of those pointing out the problems: accusing them of being racially motivated, far-right, “vile” (as Cambridge itself put it). Arday is a “working class Black man,” a petition from the Good Law Project notes, in a typically British class-war flourish. The petition calls the allegations against Arday “groundless. That doesn’t quite explain why he reportedly sicced a defamation lawyer on Times Higher Education magazine, which was getting ready to publish a story, Retraction Watch reports.

Clinical psychologist Simon Baron Cohen, a professor at Trinity College Cambridge, went further: he played both the autism and suicide-risk cards. “(Arday) continues to be systematically discredited over every detail of his life, daily,” he wrote, while conceding “we should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards.” (So where exactly does that leave us?)

“This is relentless bullying of a vulnerable autistic man and raises safe-guarding issues.”

Well, if Arday is dangerously out of his depth, someone had to first throw him in the pool.

Academia was more than happy to have him as the poster boy for diversity, inclusion, minority achievement, all that good stuff. But there was no shortage of red flags suggesting he might be rather less than he seemed.

The largest and reddest perhaps were the athletic feats: In November 2012, Scottish tennis star Andy Murray reported drawing inspiration from Arday’s fundraising marathon runs. And why not? Such runs they were! Thirty of them in 35 days, Arday claimed, which would reportedly be in the neighbourhood of a world record. Not a world record for young academic sociologists with a running hobby; a world record for human beings.

“(Arday) told me on the 20th day he fell — he had a fit, a seizure — and he got a hairline fracture in his leg and continued to do it,” Murray enthused. “That was pretty cool speaking to someone like that.”

“Experts” are now being quoted to the effect that this seems quite unlikely.

It’s all reminiscent of the “pretendian” fiasco Canada has been going through in recent years — in the arts, in academia, in the senior civil service. One of the most remarkable things about several of the frauds who falsely claimed Indigenous backgrounds is that they were hiding nearly in plain sight. Buffy Sainte Marie’s birth certificate was out there waiting to be unearthed: born Beverley Jean Santamaria, to electrician Albert Santamaria and housewife Winifred Irene Santamaria (née Kenrick). It was official records that in large part brought down Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the supposedly Indigenous scholar and advocate, in 2022.

No one wants a society in which everyone claiming any identity at all — or none — is subject to forensic investigation of their past. “Take this DNA swab! Next, the polygraph!” God knows, fraud and hucksterism transcend race, gender, class and all other divisions. But perhaps there’s at least an implicit message here that we value identity over aptitude at least a wee bit too much. Naturally there are plenty of white male frauds, don’t get me wrong. And that only underscores the central takeaway here, which is that embracing healthy, polite, but unapologetic skepticism is the only appropriate way to go through life.

National Post cselley@postmedia.com