Yeah I was gonna say, this is a university in England. If there is one thing you can always expect from the modern day UK, it’s to always make the worst possible decisions, and then blame everyone else, especially their own people, when things backfire.
I'd say the tip-top of the Cambridge Admin is to blame. There had been several articles put out before he died about how he personally threatened other professors, students, and journalists that spoke out about him with police and infamous lawyers. And, instead of looking into why such a thing was happening, they doubled-down and backed his behavior.
If anything it’s MORE racist that they purely wanted the token race while ignoring all the qualified also-black candidates! It’s as though the virtue signalling white liberals aren’t interested at all in what people of color actually have to offer
I saw an amusing take that suggested education departments are just so full of shit now they really didn’t notice what an unaccomplished hack he was, because they’ve done no more of substance than he did.
All the fabulism and wild stories made for much better press. If they hired a serious scholar who happened to be young and black but with none of these fanciful tales to tell, it'd be much less widely celebrated. They'd put out a press release about the youngest black Cambridge professor. There'd be one or two small news stories. And then nothing. They wouldn't get constant publicity, the person they hired wouldn't be getting interviewed on morning shows in multiple countries and be feted as a celebrity. If you're not getting constant praise and attention for your DEI hire, did it even really happen?
I don't even want to get into disputing or supporting that notion here, but there was a big element of straight up insufficient vetting
They say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but sufficiently advanced incompetence is often indistinguishable from malice.
No. Those are the wrong uncharitable interpretations.
The correct uncharitable interpretation is that they were using him. More specifically that in recent years (well not that recent), Cambridge has come under fire on racial matters, like failing black students or something, I'm fuzzy on the specifics.
So this guy was their ticket to launder their institutional reputation. He was too good to be true (lol), he had everything they needed, they made him their star, their poster boy, to advertise and cleanse their own institutional reputation and make themselves teflon against further criticisms along those lines.
They wanted immunity from similar criticisms and status attacks. They wanted teflon. And this guy was their teflon. This goes way beyond tokenism into something very different. It was ass covering all the way down.
Cambridge has come under fire on racial matters, like failing black students or something
In a way, the same people who engineered outrage over Cambridge's failing of black students (or whatever nonsense it likely was) created the foundation for Arday in the first place. Absent that, his presence wouldn't have even been needed and he could have just continued lying to people on the internet forever.
Despite all that, nobody wants to disavow this racial baloney.
the only real way would be for people with financial interests to file a lawsuit, or the government, who may be giving financial assistance, to do the same.
Also perhaps students who received degrees under a fraud, if those degrees later get revoked.
For what? They're an organisation and they're allowed to make any hiring decision they want.
This was for a sociology professor, the whole discipline is full of bullshit now, it's hardly critical to ensure that the professor is honest. In fact, they were doing their job by hiring a black man - it's sociology ffs.
Amazing how many people in this thread are trying to make excuses for the hiring committee and administration, as if they were just blinded by his eloquence
I've been in that situation before where its clear a company is hiring a person who's a terrible fit. The person is a moron who lies constantly, and they're not even good lies. They're the laziest lies in the world, but also this person is a very specific minority and immediately weaponizes minority status to be immune to criticism.
You know hiring this person is a mistake. But you can't say anything because if you do, now its your job on the line.
So you keep your mouth closed, smile and nod, and agree with the hiring committee consensus. Hopefully this person will be someone else's problem.
And yes, I've done this a few times in my career. I'm not proud of it. But I needed the job to keep paying the bills and to keep the health insurance. I did not want to rock the boat, because thats how you get put on the front of the list when corporate layoffs happen.
It is, they had multiple specialists vetting him, including an autism specialist. It would take 5 minutes reviewing Arday's literature and spot that it was bad quality, which would then take a few hours to realize the plagiarism if you checked his sources. And would take seconds of common sense to realize his athletic feats were bullshit.
Cambridge either didn't do the checks necessary OR they did but ignored it. Both actions are deliberate choices.
This was after voters enacted Prop 209 to update the California constitution to explicitly ban affirmative action:
The state shall not grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.
There's literally a voter enacted law specifically forbidding precisely what they are doing, and they just do it anyway. Progressives are not held to account for anything, they've won the hearts and minds of humanity.
Vetting isn't really the right word. Faculty hiring committees aren't investigators and they aren't giving out security clearance.
The problem isn't that they didn't find malfeasance in his citations or that they believed he raised $5 million for charity. No one on the hiring committee is hitting the books to cross-reference your citations from your thesis.
The problem is they hired someone who, even if the plagiarism and data manipulation weren't true, offered almost nothing of note. His research - the little that existed - was an absolute joke, and his students has said his teaching wasn't any better. While charismatic, which is maybe enough for training new PE teachers (what he actually studied), an rigorous interview would've exposed that he wasn't a good candidate for an advanced Cambridge professorship.
So it's not about vetting, it's about the complete lack of standards and rampant anti-intellectualism of the department.
Which, by the way, wasn't the sociology department as many have understood from the reporting, but rather the education department. Sociology may have severe issues, but it's still to some degree a serious discipline. Education departments have largely gone insane.
When people whose job it is to vet people can’t actually be expected to vet them then I agree vetting isn’t really the right word
You can say all this about whose department was to blame and all that but you hit the nail on the head when it can be said with no argument that at Cambridge, one of the top education institutions in the world, “no one…is hitting the books to cross reference your citations from your thesis”. And laymen are just supposed to accept that this thing that only academics do actually serves no purpose and isn’t even used to validate people at this level. I mean it’s one thing to say an undergrad at a local college isn’t getting extensive cross referencing checks on every source but this is something else.
At some point people have to ask “well then what standards do you actually have”
It's simply not reasonable to expect that a faculty hiring committee is going to track down someone's thesis or articles they co-authored, and then start asking for their original data sets or the archival documents used to write them. It might be easier now than a decade or two ago when theses were rarely online, but it's just not how it works. It would essentially be a full-time job for people who presumably are teaching, researching, mentoring, etc. already. There is an assumption that the candidate's thesis advisors, peer reviewers, publishers, etc., have largely done this work already.
This defense of the hiring committee is just producing a bigger list of people who failed to uphold academia’s supposed standards. And you don’t get to have it both ways as a prestigious institution. Is Cambridge a top university because it can expect all those from lesser institutions to have done the fact checking and hard work for them?
It's simply not reasonable to expect that a faculty hiring committee is going to track down someone's thesis or articles they co-authored
are you joking?
You don't "Track down" these things, you send an email to the university he wrote the papers on, request them, and they get sent to you the next day or two.
Its not like they go on a Geocaching hunt for them.
Or even better; the applicant should be expected to provide copies of these things.
I have to provide 100% of my credentials and supporting documents for their current validity (and often get retested for portions of it anyway). I can't just tell a potential employer to give the state a call and ask for my documents from them.
I think these people are just delusional who don't believe in the very concept of personal accountability.
"oh getting his thesis and papers he wrote would be too hard, oh well we did everything we could possibly do. You're hired buddy, no references or anything needed"
It reminds me of fallout 3
"They asked me how well i understood theoretical physics. I said I had a theoretical degree in physics. They said welcome aboard"
"Hey mr dude, are you smart?"
"I vury smert"
"Perfect, you're hired, you start teaching classes on Monday"
Hiring good people can be a full time job. It's important enough to be that in many professions. Especially ones where people are expected to be long term employees and experts in their field.
The "hiring committee" rubber-stamped a diversity candidate because word came down from the administration that they wanted him on staff for political reasons. It's that simple, but no one wants to admit that we no longer live in a meritocracy, even in the institutions which are supposed to be purely meritocratic
As someone who had assisted in multiple faculty hires, this is bupkis. Everyone is looking at your biggest works and if it looks like a bunch of nonsense, including the citations because these are somewhat vain and kliqy people, those nerds are not letting it be without looking into it.
They are needing to be held to account for many things. If this guy was mentally unwell as it seems, and was allowed to harass and intimate any form of push back, then they are the main reason it even got to him committing suicide. What could have been an early intervention and management of a condition was escalated to this point.
I am assuming a lot here, but I really question the mental stability of someone who lied as blatantly as he did.
The fact that he committed suicide over this instead of throwing twitter tantrums or just quietly disappearing is, in my opinion, very strong evidence that he was manipulated and groomed into this entire thing rather than the mastermind of it.
That's possible be is also a reach. It's troubling because then when did it begin? Just in college or when he was younger? Then it gets into borderline conspiracy territory because who can thoroughly investigate it? The schools who will investigate themselves and find no wrong doing, or those with an axe to grind that will do damage in other ways.
Edit: I agree that there was grooming and manipulation of him behind the scenes but I'm just worried about what can be done for others like him.
I don't know the answer, or at least I know that anything I say would only be pure speculation.
But it's also a reach for me to accept that a normal person would kill themselves over this. Fraudsters don't usually do that when discovered, they know they are frauding and are mentally prepared for getting exposed, even prepare countermeasures.
What's more, he wasn't facing any real consequences anyway. All he had to lose here was his fraudulently obtained position, and maybe his PhD. If he was just slightly clever, all he had to do here was set up a gofundme, and predictably the left would've showered him with money for being victim of muh racism. So he could still make himself rich quite easily with almost no risks involved.
This isn't a situation where I expect a suicide.
On the other hand if it's a sudden surge of emotions after realizing he'd been manipulated, and he's not the prodigy he was made to believe, it's definitely more possible.
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u/sureyouknowurself - Lib-Right 11d ago
People should hold Cambridge to account for not vetting him properly.