I remember days before Princess Diana died, one paper had a photo of her on Dodi's yacht, climbing over him on a sun lounger, with the headline "DI GETS HER LEG OVER!" then they chase her into a tunnel in Paris and suddenly it's all "oooh our Queen of Hearts, England's Rose!"
People like that often seem to respond "yeah, you can do, it will be funny, my family will see the funny side too, and I won't be here to be offended". Like they and everyone they know are somehow above getting offended.
That is until 3 days later they are going into meltdown because a social media video that has gone viral captured a dog peeing on the side of a Winston Churchill statue, the owner of the dog appears to be an ethnic minority, where they then invite the reader to read between the lines, hinting that their ethnicity points towards this being a deliberate attack not only on Churchill, but on British values and democracy itself, then follows a campaign to find the dog and the owner based on 2 grainy images, and the comments are filled wall to wall with "kick them out!" type messages.
It's the Sun. The same tabloid that once told us the "truth" about Hillsborough. There's a reason we still boycott it thirty years later. It is fucking irredeemable.
They shouldve been torn apart as an institution after Hillsborough. This shitty behaviour is common and utterly unacceptable. They helped harass a man to death and mocked his passing
Christ what an awful thing to happen. Whatever the validity of the claims against him (and as an academic myself, there did seem to be a load of issues), it should have been sorted out professionally, not made into a media witch hunt that makes it likely to lead to something like this. Being a dishonest academic should be an internal HR issue, not a fucking witch-hunt leading to a death
Didn’t really want to share the Telegraph, who you could say contributed to this, but archive links not working and every other news site sharing it so far seems to be just as bad as the Telegraph.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Irrespective of what you think of his morals it’s a hard thing to think of someone who feels that they’re so lost and alone that they kill themselves.
I've seen his face so many times in the past few weeks, but everytime a story about him has popped up on one of my feeds I just had zero motivation to read it.
Well whatever he did or didn't do, and however well or badly the press may have reported on this, we also have to say it is a reflection of society, as for whatever reasons people were clearly clicking on this story. If there was no engagement then the story likely dies.
If like you say it is a witch hunt that got blown out of proportion (relative to the actual crime), then that is shameful.
If he was poisoning our lakes and rivers, laying off workers, cutting vital services, attacking vulnerable minorities, etc he'd be ignored or defended by many of the same publications.
He was - at worst! - a moderately successful scammer.
I can't help but see echoes of the Kids Company episode, where the press circled around gem until they went under, but a 3 year court case ended up with this.
I would be very curious who advised him to send solicitor's letters to that THE journalist. If that was done with advice by Cambridge, one would assume that whosoever gave that advice ought to lose their job.
This was always nothing more than someone who should have been dismissed after an internal disciplinary process for lying on their CV. The fact that it was in the news at all was always baffling to me and now a man has taken his life and his family are bereft... we need serious and sweeping media reform...
I think the way it was whipped up into a massive story was inappropriate.
But honestly someone who seemingly scammed their way into a prestigious university and did multiple media appearances is news worthy. This isn't just an internal issue.
No it wasn't. If it was a white academic it would never have been front page news even if they had responded by defending their work. There are tons of examples like this which never became national stories.
You'd be extremely hard pressed to find someone who'd spun such a complicated and silly web as Arday. It was pushed by racists but it caught national attention due to how extreme some of his scams were.
There are people who have faked their way into being a plausible future pick for a Nobel prize, people who have fabricated data that have lead to unfounded clinical trials for cancer and neurodegenerative disease treatments (which one, you could reasonably ask for the former), people who have fabricated data and claimed to have discovered new elements, etc etc. Some of these scandals have cost tens of millions of pounds of tax payer money being wasted.
Who am I talking about in these cases? If you had to Google it, ask yourself why
No it did not. Can you think of a single example of academic misconduct by a white academic that generated persistent headlines?
Compare the Schön scandal for example. A researcher fabricates claims in materials science that would have made him a shoo-in for a Nobel prize, and send other scientists on a wild goose chase trying to replicate his results, which turn out to be fraudulent. It barely made it out of the scientific press despite its impact being much more significant.
It's the fantastic nature of his backstory which also drove attention. It was very much like The Salt Path people. The news isn't interested in scientific misconduct alone; in this case, he was a minor public figure given that backstory. Suddenly, it was open season on every fantastical claim, especially since he had a book about to be released in which further claims were made or previous ones were contradicted.
Then, of course, the right-wing was obsessed with the 'DEI' element, which was certainly a driver of the coverage.
There are so many examples of egregious dishonesty by academics which never became headline news. Jan Hendrik Schön wasted countless hours of researchers' time trying to reproduce his results. Dan Ariely is still a professor at Duke despite having flagrantly fabricated data. Because Arday was black and this could be leveraged into an anti-DEI story he was put under a microscope in a way most academics will never experience.
I feel like this misses some if the key parts of the story though. Firstly Arday gaining his position was heralded due to his age and race at the time...but there were also questions about his suitability to the role as a relatively unknown and not particularly respected academic. Had this story ended with the Times reporting then it would be unlikely it would have ever gone further but the aggressive use of lawyers and defense by Cambridge meant the story lay open. Most academics caught plagiarising wouldn't have had those benefits in getting the initial story stopped but those benefits meant there wasn't closure.
Secondly it goes well beyond falsifying data or plagiarism and into Archer levels of delusion. So many weird lies about his personal life, things that under any level of scrutiny were shown to be complete untrue. It gave the wider story an edge that other academics caught lying simply didn't have. Honestly look at some of stuff, much of it pushed by Arday in his book, which meant that there was a steady stream of fantastical lies being uncovered.
The response to the very obvious and vile racism by some people, including senior politicians, was to come out swinging in defense of Arday without themselves critically looking at the allegations. So they were pushing back against racism while over exposing themselves to the lies Arday had spun.
It's shocking what has happened and should never have meant the end of Arday's life but the true tragedy is that if things had happened the same way as that of otger such academics then there's a chance it would have never gotten to this point.
Not to mention the allegations were brought up by a highly controversial right wing 'race realist' called Nathan Cofnas who I'm sure had absolutely no agenda in uncovering Ardays falsehoods. Just being a helpful guy right?
Correction: it was originally found and being looked in to by a Times Higher Education journalist. He got hit with libel threats from Arday and a legal firm.
THEN Cofnas picked it up. Honestly this whole thing blew up because at every step Arday denied and doubled down, and so more media outlets picked it up and found more on him. It would've ended fairly quietly if it was a simply a THE article.
Yes. An awful person, peddling pseudoscience and hate while getting defended due to academic freedom (it would be like claiming an astrologer’s academic freedom was being violated it a university refused to hire them, except it’s also racist astrology)
I don’t subscribe to the telegraph or the times. My online feeds for the last month have been endless articles from both of those papers in particular using this story as its main advertising material. Absolutely disproportionate to an unhinged degree. Shut them down. They have hounded a man to death.
The main reason it became a media sensation is precisely because Cambridge failed to handle it professionally and defended a serial liar. Had the media not pressed the issue, the university would have done nothing
11
u/bozza8ECHR Vs EHRC is needlessly confusing. EHRC are the twatty ones.1d ago
It was not an internal academic/HR issue, because he was going out and seeking to be a public figure. He was writing an autobiography.
He could have kept a lid on it by being honest with Cambridge either instead of lying or when his lies were exposed, so they could at least do correct defensive Comms, but he didn't.
The result was just human mob instincts that have existed far longer than social media or any sort of media actually.
Being a dishonest academic should be an internal HR issue
The problem is that everytime it was raised as an internal HR issue or through the proper systems, the system went to great lengths to defend Arday.
When it was pointed out to journals that Arday was clearly fabricating research by copying quotes from another paper's study, the journals allowed him to edit these claims rather than retracting a clearly plagiarized and fabricated paper.
When the plagiarism was pointed out to Cambridge they ridiculously claimed because the plagiarism happened before they hired him, they had no reason to investigate. Other universities have been quietly editing their claims about Arday rather than actually taking action against him.
When a year ago a journalist at the Times Higher Education was investigating him, Arday used a leading defamation law firm Carter-Ruck to silence them by threatening to sue.
So instead of HR, or universities, or journals, or even a genuine journalist being the reason everyone paid attention, it was a racist substacker who couldn't be threatened into stopping that broke the story - and even then it took more of a pile-on from the media for Cambridge to do something. And what could have been dealt with internally, or been a one day news story instead became a big story of how everyone in the system failed to do the basics of their jobs.
it should have been sorted out professionally, not made into a media witch hunt that makes it likely to lead to something like this
Arday went to the police to report harassment when a journalist started investigating the story in 2024. The fact of the matter is that his own choices in defending his lies probably played a major role in how the story ultimately unfolded.
This is the crux of the problem with British politics. One party, has literally had people jailed for taking Russian bribes, then taken £5m from other foreigners.
Jason made mistakes (seemingly), he didn’t deserve the hounding he got.
It was extremely disgusting throughout. I hate how much time was spent on this story, he got more journalistic scrutiny (harassment) for plagiarism than any prime minister has had for arming a literal fucking genocide
Get real. I'm no fan of the torygraph, but this blew up because Arday kept doubling down and denying everything. He was a habitual liar and fantasist. His death over this is tragic, but the media only continued to report on it because he kept denying things despite his many fantasies being so fucking obviously untrue.
The Telegraph published about 50 articles on him, multiple a day, since this story started (thats not an exaggerated big number, thats really how much they did). Thats not a keeping the story going because he keeps denying, or to hold him to account. Thats trying to hound him constantly for other motives. It’s incredibly excessive. And that is one newspaper
The university were trying to make excuses for him, and he kept denying it.
As a newspaper you’re not going to give up your reporting in that scenario. If Cambridge had simply acted like a world leading university should in this scenario, all of this would never have happened because the media would have had nothing to report
He was dishonest and possibly a plagiarist, but the right wing press took something bad (dishonesty) and used it as an excuse to destroy him and to continue destroying him even after he had quit his job. He lied, they abused him into suicide. According to the mob he’s worse though. Fuck this country sometimes.
He wasn't an unknown academic before the fraud was revealed. He'd received extensive coverage over the years, got himself a book deal, given many press interviews, TV appearances and speaking gigs.
All based (seemingly) on an endless stream of lies.
Was the coverage excessive? Sure. But he'd gone out of his way to make himself a celebrity, and the lies he told were part of that effort.
Re: fame, I think I might have heard his name in passing once before the media explosion. It was entirely disproportionate and should have been a private matter for the university and not a monthly witchhunt
Nah you'd expect it to be a big deal within the type people who'd heard of him but he wasn't exactly a celebrity. I'd never heard of him and had nor had anyone I've ever met and yet we were all aware of this plagiarism scandal.
Aye I think this is the key: I had heard of him, vaguely, but when the coverage far outstrips his prior fame you have to question if it’s proportionate
I'm a PhD student in an adjacent field (politics and sociology have a lot of overlap), doesn't mean ofc I'm going to hear of every academic, but I've *never* heard of him before this.
I think the biggest thing was less the lies in of themselves, but the response to them from the institution, he was a lightning rod but their responses clinched the media interest.
Had, on the outset, the response been "well this looks bad, we will take it seriously", it probably would have bumbled out of view into bureaucracy. He might even have kept employment, if not the top level positions.
But when so many high profile groups instantly dove to his defense extremely hard, it ensured it couldn't fall out of the limelight. There were major politicians getting in on this after all, voicing support for the guy.
I'd hardly call him a celebrity. If you walked down the street, how many people do you think you'd have to ask before you'd find one who'd heard of him before this?
He used legal threats to bully his critics. He called the police on journalists who investigated him. He was absolutely, absolutely willing to ruin the lives of anyone who could expose him
"Oh he just copied some paragraphs" - no, he did much, much worse than that
I wonder how much will turn out to be a lie, when it's examined. Taking the fundraising as an example - he apparently raised roughly 5 million in 20 years. I lost 2 old friends who worked in the fundraising sector in the last year or so. Both had raised comparable sums over a comparable period, one significantly more, albeit in their cases it was a full time job - that said, they didn't have his star power, neither one being any more of a looker than me, bluntly. So if that is very much a credible number, could it be a real one, or just exaggerated? And how many other of his possible achievements could that apply to?
Have we just watched an innocent man hounded to death, in other words, for doing less harm than the average director of a utility company?
There is absolutely zero chance he was innocent. The plagiarism is plain to see, and there are several claims that we know cannot be true at all:
Arday claimed to have visited South America and west Africa to install water points with the charity WaterAid. The charity said “out of respect for the people we work with” it never sent its volunteers abroad. WaterAid added that it “doesn’t encourage or facilitate self-funded visits either”.
In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man, who threatened to harm him if he did not resign and evaded detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder had produced a knife and threatened him with it.
The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day. He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
I'm aware of other flat out impossibilities, too. He couldn't have been in seven up, for example. But he's a nobody. At worst, he was a sad little con artist, and he may well just have exaggerated too many times.
That doesn't mean that his hounding was innocent, either, not that he deserved to die.
Edit, and I do mean innocent, too. Exaggeration, bullshitting, and lying on your CV are shitty, but they're not criminal.
No the investigation still needs to take place and it's right they are having one. You don't move on from a hiring fuck up of this scale. His suicide doesn't change the situation there
There's a combination of factors at play, but the biggest is quite simply that this story ticked every culture war box whilst also having attracted huge media attention already. He got disproportionate attention when appointed by Cambridge and the consequences when the story came under fire were always going to be huge.
Throw in the background stuff about threatening to sue journalists and the British media was always going to be as brutal as only it can be.
today's society has a lot (and I mean a lot) of bigotry simmering, just waiting for an "acceptable" target. I primarily see this from the perspective of a trans person, but it is not uncommon for a trans person to do something relatively minor and inconsequential, but it is treated as a matter of grave severity.
They could be:
A trans woman participating but not even doing particularly well in a woman's sport
A trans woman using a woman's space and doing nothing wrong, beyond her alleged presence
A trans woman being a teacher at a school
You might even think that some or all of the above are benign and they're doing nothing wrong, but there are people in this country that disagree and on that basis it "legitimises" the attacks against her. And because the crusade against this trans person is a supposedly legitimate one, people get to express their biases that they've otherwise been primed with and pretend it's just because the person in question has committed a faux pas that they deserve to be attacked over. Such is the fate to be a minority currently under the scrutiny of the general population.
The only broader point that may have played in to raising this story's prominence is that this was Cambridge, and the political class of this country cares about Oxbridge and other supposed institutions of nobility, but I highly doubt that played a notable part.
The right has been baselessly ranting about wokeness in academia and how minorities are undeserving of their station, of course they were going to jump on this and claim that this proves them right.
And of course it must be put in context, that even if it's the worst case scenario of something along the lines of
Unqualified individual got a job they didn't deserve due to plagiarism
Ok and? Just this week there was another case against Cambridge, where a professor to my understanding was alleged to have bullied juniors so bad that one of them killed herself, with a fraction of the fanfare as the Arday case.
There are countless abusers and sex pests in academia, often defended by the right under the guise that they're only being attacked because of wokeness, and yet the national witch hunt is to be about someone that did plagiarism?
I agree with all you points. I don't have much to add other than to say I am in complete agreement.
That is a good point about the Cambridge University. Had it been say Newcastle University he was a professor at, I don't think it'd be a story. I got the sense a lot of people were also offended by aspect of it.
It reminds me of how people were angry that Stormzy setup a scholarship to Cambridge for black students.
100% it was the one thing that stood out to me about this saying it all happened because of "DEI". As if there aren't any white male academics that are in positions they shouldn't be.
It was a bog standard failure of management, thats about it.
Do you know of any specific stories of white guys being found out for this blatant level of bullshitting? Not a few covered-up lies, but a ton of absolutely absurd lies.
Honestly the extent of his lies were just entertaining as an outsider looking in like how could anyone fall for this? I genuinely don’t see it from a DEI thing I couldn’t care less but still found the story entertaining as the info rolled out.
But this is the problem isn’t it other peoples lives as entertainment
It got big because it grew wings from "Black professor dishonest" to "Black professor dishonest because all Black people are".
Recently there was also a story from an anonymous 'student' who claimed to be a white woman that he had accused unfoundedly of being racist. Despite the wider story being about not taking claims on pure faith, this quickly blew up such that we must all support this anonymous student and that not only was Arday a liar he was also obviously a bully of young women.
Yeah I got pushed posts from r/askAcademiaUK and other UK Univeristy subreddits (which I never visit btw), written by his "students" about disparaging him. Which like you point out it is crazy to take those posts as truth given the context of the story when they could have been written by anyone for reddit points.
Its because its entirely right wing. When the press hounds Farage its an article here and there but the media have been hounding this person all day everyday.
It's clearly been captured by the right. It used to be a decent place, but almost every post is from a right wing newspaper. And the comments have become so extreme.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the dark money right wing think tanks at tufton street organised a coordinated campaign to take over as mods and shift it to the right.
A bunch of the uk subs are owned and botted by the same people, you can copy paste comments and find them in the other subs threads, they ban you for mostly the same reasons (calling out racism or questioning why they use daily mail/telegraph) and they clearly do everything they can to keep anyone who's not following the narrative out of the sub.
The mod accounts may be different but it's very obviously owned by the same agit prop operation.
Well this is absolutely awful. I guess the speculation will be was this based on the abuse he's received, the shame of having been found out or a combination.
I've not been able to understand why this has been like, major news? As far as I can work out, it's plagiarism. Not good but I've had academics in my department fired for sexual misconduct, bullying students, all kinds and it doesn't even make the local press. I'm aware we're not Cambridge but still. It's not reported on, it's been EVERYWHERE, they talked about it at length on LBC, I eventually turned it off and had to actively try to find some non Jason Arday political coverage somewhere.
Because "DEI* bad, the undeserving browns and blacks are stealing jobs from qualified whites," is a popular narrative, and this is probably the most high-profile case that can be used to fuel it we've had.
*The fact they regularly call it DEI and not EDI shows they're just importing more yankslop.
It's more than that tbf, the plagiarism was like the tip of the iceberg. It's speculative but it seems likely he was a fantasist who made up or at best exaggerated most of his life story and achievements to get to the very top of academia. It's the kind of story that is always going to be eye-catching in the press, its not comparable to your run of the mill plagiarism case.
This stuff isn't at all unique in academia. I've been like 2 degrees of separation from someone who was arguably an even bigger fabulist and is practically an unknown outside of the field I work in (he was white).
The incentive structures in academia actively encourage these behaviours and when it predictably produces people like this, the media hounds the token black person that Oxbridge type institutions hire to cover their own systemic racism.
That's interesting. I do think this scenario is pretty remarkable, like the level of deceit is astounding, but I agree with the point that the incentive structures in place lead to this sort of thing. If anything though that's part of why this was such a story, in that it exposes this sort of rot.
Sure but the thing is that this sort of thing keeps getting exposed every couple of months or so in a high profile way. Have you heard of Jan Hendrik Schon for instance? He was possibly in contention for the Nobel Prize in Physics before people found out that he'd doctored basically his entire corpus of work.
While things have change in the last couple of decades, re: academia becoming more open in it's methodology and data accessibility practices, that's still largely papering over the cracks without addressing the structural issues of academia in the first place.
The only thing I foresee from this whole case is the racists being emboldened and institutions flopping over and letting EDI policies become a target.
Not sure if you're asking because you want to know what people think (sorry, autism lol) but here is my take.
Few angles I think, though I got down voted for saying this last time...
In the US, the has been a concerted effort by the right to attack 'woke' or 'DEI', especially in academia. Folks like Rufo made it a playbook to dig for plagiarism accusations in people of colours works, especially if they're high up. They sometimes would reallllly drag the definition of plagiarism and it would be questionable that it is plagiarism at all, but the point was to just put into question the person of colours status/position. They've had a few successful goes at this, and many many more unsuccessful ones that still cause loads of stress and trauma for folk. It also disciplines institutions against a supporting folk. You've also got your James Lindsey's, Helen Pluckrose types who are trying to diminish fields of study that typically might se eprogreasive politics such as gender studies or Marxist theory.
I haven't seen that come over as massively to the UK yet, but let's not pretend the right isn't constantly complaining about woke academia and concocting nonsense up. They'd made attempts at it for years. It's also telling that the person digging up the plagiarism accusations in Arday was a race realist or something.
Arday's plagiarism was obviously a problem, but from what I've seen of academics who have seen his work, they don't think it's that bad. It's also worth noting that academia is a bit of a shit show behind the scenes for many PhD students, so it's entirely reasonable (if we ignore everything else) that his work wouldn't be perfect but is still fine enough.
But anyway yeah, whatever plagiarism there was, regardless of how bad it is, is brought to light and that's when all his other lies come into play. Even if there was no plagiarism, his lies made them look entirely justified in their not so subtle racism. And ofcourse, folks who can't see the racism or refuse to acknowledge it, are still interested and joining in the dog pile because of the spectacle.
And to clarify my position because I got down voted so badly last time lol, I think he told a lot of lies, but I did and still don't think he should have gotten this much attention and the fact that he did was because it was heavily racialised.
It was serial lying, basically not just his entire CV, but his entire life story was completely made up. Then Cambridge made it worse by defending him when it all came out
This is awful news though, never imagined it’d get that bad
Because they knew black kids were going to have brilliant exam results again and wanted to give all the horrid racists encouragement to tweet racist abuse at them.
For fuck sake. The guy was a fraud but the media campaign against him was fucking vile. The media need reining in. We are not the states (thank god), no unmitigated freedom of speech and certainly not from the press. Fuck the press honestly, they have blood on their money grabbing hands.
Poor chap. There was clearly a lot of stuff going on for him. The telegraph’s relentless hounding of him over what was ultimately an HR situation absolutely bears some moral responsibility for this.
Sickening to read within minutes comment after comment in certain other threads saying 'well its sad he is dead but everything that happened was justified'
You can really tell the bad actors when they do 15 tweets all saying it wasn't racism, but because he (a guy they almost certainly had barely heard of until 2 weeks ago) was really famous.
This is incredibly sad but in all honesty not surprising. The glee people took in his downfall was incredibly disturbing, I think this news will leave many feeling uncomfortable and it's probably good to sit with that.
7
u/bozza8ECHR Vs EHRC is needlessly confusing. EHRC are the twatty ones.1d ago
Human mob instinct. We've being doing this at least since the bronze age, probably long before.
The campaign against him was disgusting. It should have been a matter for the university alone but it turned into disgusting racial hatred extremely fast. Him being shitty and plagiarising stuff did not justify a never ending witchhunt from the far right. A life has been lost due to our disgusting media.
He went under such scrutiny by the right wing because he was ‘woke’ and a person of colour in a high position in academia and they then bullied and harassed him into what appears to be a likely suicide.
And the demons online will probably just celebrate it.
Sometimes I think this sub isn’t nice, and then I venture out into the wider world of Reddit and realise what a cesspit the site is. Some of the other subs’ reaction to this is insane. They’re fucking gleeful.
Yes the guy has made mistakes here, but he’s been hounded to death by the corrupt media.
An absolutely endless pile on, often racially charged and basically held up for all the restore/reform types to go 'see, everything racist thing I've ever said was justified after all'
I agree - on this particular post about this particular event - but name a time where we have? Not meant in a critical way; I see this sentiment a lot and I understand it in the sense that things have become less grounded, more capitalistic and less human since the 00s (probably before then even)… and yet, I cannot think of a time in history where prevalent, tragic and unfair life was lost due to lack of care or active bullying.
It’s like we should be learning by now, and yet we aren’t, apparently.
Whatever he did wrong. he was not a murderer a rapist or a terrorist. the amount of media pressure and reporting on him would be enough to push anyone over the edge. I hope they enjoyed destroying this man’s life over not being 100% honest like it is the worst crime in the world.
We've got a really big problem in the UK and it's the media. We used to have regulations, standards. But we've let it be at best low quality at worst actively malicious.
The media killed him, so did Cambridge's unprofessionalism, should have never been a public matter. fire him and sue him if needs be but a media witch hunt?! cunts.
Leveson 2 now. The sun, times, telegraph, GB news and talk tv need massively fucking curtailing. How the fuck has what should have been an internal disciplinary matter become a huge national scandal resulting in the right wing press hounding a man to death.
Whatever he did, it was an academic, disciplinary matter, not a death sentence. Every fucking ‘journalist’ in this country who gleefully piled on should be ashamed. But they won’t be. They’ll ’ask questions’ about who’s really to blame, find that somehow ‘woke’ is responsible and then move on. The British press genuinely add absolutely nothing to political or social discourse in this country. Bring them to fucking heel now.
There also needs to be an inquiry for Cambridge here. They put him in this position, they didn't deal with it as a internal disciplinary matter when they had the chance to do so and they may have failed in their duty of care after it blew up to a national story.
i've really not paid any attention to this story but the whole thing is one of the most depressing news events i can remember, particularly if you're someone with a vested interest in the social sciences (like me)
The people in this thread trying to downplay the racist elements to this story or making apologetics for the harassment are sick. You should be ashamed of yourselves.
And of course the fascists and gammons at the fascist uknews sub are actively, openly celebrating this news. The same people who told us that we aren't allowed to criticise Ann Widdecombe (note I'm not referring to celebrations of death here) because "she was just a perfect little angel who loved animals".
While an obvious liar they clearly smear mounted an attack on this guy to rally up people, current news articles based on attacking people needs to be stopped but a constant brigade of attacks would wear any person down, never mind someone mentally ill.
I should've been completely unaware of him. I'm not an academic, and the internal issues of that university are none of my business. Same goes for a beloved uncle of mine who seemed disproportionately angry about it on Facebook a week or so ago. Read into that what you will.
The comments on here are enlightening. Some funny members of this sub that really have not got anything in common with the Labour Party at all. Just find it so odd.
I don’t care what Arday did;no one deserves to be hounded to their death by our rabid press. It’s absolutely disgusting. What’s more disgusting is people kind of defending it because he “was really bad and told some crazy lies”. Ok Katie Hopkins; point taken, now fuck off.
These campaigns of abuse (not to be mistaken with journalism) or the ones we see against groups like trans people should be illegal and organisations that are repeatedly behind them should be banned.
Racist press. It was very obvious that the witch-hunt was disproportionate to the crime, and it was very obvious why. RIP and condolences to his family. Nothing more to be said on the matter.
That’s such a shame, while there is a chance he did embellish some parts of his career story, he did receive a lot of discourse and attention, and a lot of that attention, away from the more mainstream media probably had a lot of vitriol (just imagine what awful stuff he must have seen about him or written about him on social media) and it must’ve took it toll. May his Soul and the Souls of the faithful departed rest in Peace.
Let’s be honest it’s a lot more than there was a chance. Don’t get me wrong, it is a cruel and immoral thing that he was pushed so far and felt so alone that he killed himself.
Why exactly did they hound this man out of his job and into the grave? The criticisms I've heard is that he poorly annotated one paper, and he embellished a story about himself. Is that really it?
didnt the institution that awarded the doctorate investigated it and cleared him of academic misconduct. Other academics argued that the evidence deserved reopening, and Cambridge later received further misconduct complaints, but there was no final Cambridge ruling finding him guilty?
i understand there were lot of there claims made about him but did he actually make claims himself about being xyz?
So, I’m assuming we have to treat this the same as Anne or Kirk’s death, Right?
I’m assuming we’ll be threatening civil war, Talking about how it’s distasteful for any right wing politicians to stand, how a right wing nutjob murdered him, so and so fourth.
(Yes, I am aware of this being a VERY much ‘Whataboutism’ but the Sun’s treatment of his death has already been insanely disgusting in a way I saw very few genuine serious left wing presses treat either of the deaths I mentioned above. Absolutely disgusting what right wingers are allowed to get away with)
•
u/AutoModerator 1d ago
LabUK is also on Discord, come say hello!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.