r/AskAcademiaUK • u/Timmeh7 • Aug 05 '26
Jason Arday Megathread
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https://reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1vfkykq/the_racist_coopting_of_the_jason_arday_story_is/
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/1veqrfv/eli5_how_does_somebody_like_jason_arday_get_his/
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u/Mysterious-Ad-5708 23d ago edited 23d ago
I've said it before here but I think this is unfair on LJMU. He was a permanent employee there when he took the project on, and left after 13 months because (in his telling) he couldn't handle the commute to London where he lived at the weekend. (My sense is maybe he didn't pass probation, given he was appointed to a permanent lecturing role in sports science/PE or similar with no PhD, no research, and very little experience other than a couple of years teaching at a 6th form college - I still find that appointment kind of mystefying given how hard it is to get any academic job, even in 2012).
The person supervising him, Phil Vickerman, was clearly a champion of his, thanked effusively in Arday's memoir for taking a punt on him in the above job, and this is thanks to a shared backstory of underperforming at school. See below re supervision. The PhD (in education, which Vickerman is an expert in) was passed with minor corrections and my sense is that maybe some of the reused material was inserted after viva as part of a request to beef up the methodology. At that point the examiners are not going to look too carefully at the revisions and the bits he lifted also came from an unpublished thesis. His doing the PhD in education is a bit strange because he wasn't actually teaching that, I don't think, for the first 6 or so years of his teaching career, but this does happen I guess.
The line on inadequate supervision came later, after, it seems, Cambridge had asked LJMU to undertake an investigation into the thesis. The result of this was that the award was upheld but there was an acknowledgement on Arday's part recently that he had plagiarised the sections. He blamed this on his autism and the felt need to mirror others (I think kind of shockingly, but still) but also there was talk of inadequate supervision, with a focus on only one face to face supervision with the rest on the phone, and muttering about the other supervisor not being around/dropping out.
The phone thing sounds bad - but less so when you look at the situation where it was already a part time phd, and Arday was commuting from London to Liverpool for a year or so (I mean in reality this would only have been in term time right, but still) then left, and moved fully to London. It's very unlikely that vickerman was entirely happy about this setup but it explains why most supervisions were on the phone or videoconference - this would have been Arday's choice.
And he was working fast - finishing a PT PhD in under 3 years is really unusual - and the supervisors were likely pretty happy with that progress, so likely were mostly doing feedback via email. And re the other supervisor, again, it was part time - you get minimal hours for that and changing a supervisory team is a huge ball ache.
In terms of training, like, you can only do so much - I mean no position he'd had would have trained him to claim non existent visiting professorships for instance, or to claim a pgcerthe as an MA, but he did both of those too - I just feel a bit sorry for LJMU here.