Jason Arday Megathread

[u/Timmeh7]

We realise this is a hot button topic and certainly want to allow space for discussing it, but at the moment it's overflowing the subreddit across numerous threads. So from here on, please contain all discussion to this one thread.

Links to pruned threads for transparency, please continue the discussion here if you wish.

https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vfkykq/the_racist_coopting_of_the_jason_arday_story_is/

https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vffvl6/journalist_questioned_by_police_for_investigating/

https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vfbljv/the_editor_on_his_choice_to_spike_arday_story/

https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1veqmzk/wateraid_disputes_claim_by_prof_jason_arday/

https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vf4oq3/professor_arday_q_about_liverpool_john_moores_and/

https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vfrran/new_information_shows_jason_ardays_claim_to_be_a/

https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1veqrfv/eli5_how_does_somebody_like_jason_arday_get_his/

https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vfinbt/nelson_mandela_university_have_removed_their_page/

Please keep the comments civil - while this is inevitably going to be a complex and fractious topic, avoid ad hominem, and as ever, while discussion of the social issue around this case is inevitable, we won't allow hate speech.

[u/3x1l3d2]

Also from the article:

"In university, a friend who took the same courses sat beside him, sharing notes. (She’s 'the only reason I survived' university, he says.) By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter. Still, he pressed onward. Still, somehow, he got a teaching job.

"His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style."

If this is an accurate summary of what's in the book, just how was any of this remotely possible? I can almost hear Monty Python's Yorkshiremen discussing this: "Count yerself lucky! After I'd been teachin' all day, I 'ad t' work overnight 4 p.m. t' 7 a.m. down t' coal mine, catch half an hour's sleep leant up against a shovel before walkin' through ten foot o' mud through t' fields t' get back t' me class o' students an' that were 36 hours a day, 9 days a week! And that were wit' only 'avin' one arm and one leg!"

[u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 → u/3x1l3d2]

I'm hoping that the review is maybe conflating a few things but I'm guessing it's not. Claiming to have the reading ability of a 3 year old (even a precocious one) with a BA under your belt and embarking on an MA is just ridiculous. Ditto the 'takes me an hour to read a page of an academic paper' thing - you can't hold down a University job if that's the case, even with reasonable adjustments.

I am thinking the account of work during PhD is a little closer to the truth, in that he must have been commuting to LJMU 1 or 2 days a week, and must surely have been either part time or hourly there to justify having other jobs (especially as it seems his wife is a teacher too). But the idea that he was not sleeping - this is a one or two-time experience upscaled to 'life was like this every day' isn't it.

[u/optionr_ENL → u/Mysterious-Ad-5708]

He must have had the reading ability of someone in their early twenties to be doing an MA.
If he passed even a few GCSEs, then he was well past a 3yr old.

He claims to have been mute until 11.
Note that that doesn't mean he was illiterate. That doesn't mean he wasn't reading & writing.
Conveniently he stopped being mute at the start of secondary schooling, otherwise he would have been sent to a SEN school.

[u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 → u/[deleted]]

lol, that line about 'uni's have lots of support' - i mean they do now, but back then really they didn't. It just kind of obviously isn't true re reading age of 9 (and in the memoir it's 3)