u/TossMeOutSomeday

Last week, British public academic Jason Arday seemingly committed suicide after weeks of media scrutiny over academic plagiarism and the many fabricated details of his life story. This included some rather humorous claims, like that he was threatened by a knife-wielding attacker in Cambridge who was invisible to security cameras (and didn't bother telling anyone until weeks later), and that he was nonverbal and illiterate until he was 18, which has been contested by his former classmates.

Since then, several progressive groups have pushed for press regulation, arguing that the media coverage of Arday amounted to a coordinated racist harassment campaign.

Do you think this is justified? Should journalists be expected not to cover newsworthy events if the subject of the coverage doesn't like it?

Edit: I almost forgot, Ibram X Kendi (one of the biggest left-wing influencers of the "woke 1" era) has also referred to the media's treatment of Arday as a "lynching".

I'm mainly interested in this story because it's extremely funny, but also, this guy was considered a serious expert on race and racism, at one point advising the British government, and a whole lot of people in positions of power had to let a whole lot of shit slide for things to get this bad. Basically, my takeaway is that the state of the humanities must be absolutely dismal if you can get away with this kind of thing. And this is bad for the left, because so many of our ideas are legitimized by (or originate in) academia.

The UK academia subreddit has a post on this, addressing how horrid the scholarship is: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAcademiaUK/comments/1v7uy4v/the_jason_arday_plagiarism_case_highlights_a_deep/

For a tl;dr, the highlights of his claims:

• Being an illiterate nonverbal autist who taught himself to read at 18 and finished a PhD at 30

• Raising millions of dollars for charity

• Running 30 marathons in 35 days, then 600 miles in 6 days, which would make him one of the greatest distance runners of all time

• He's been the subject of violent threats, including being accosted by a masked attacker with a knife on the Cambridge campus. He didn't tell any of his colleagues that there was an attacker in the building until weeks later, and the attacker did not appear on security footage.

• He was mailed a pig's head as a threat. A police investigation subsequently failed to find a butcher's shop in the area that had been sold a pig's head.

• The title of his PhD thesis contains a misplaced apostrophe:

  > An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research

  Which starts to make a lot more sense if you consider the possibility that he just Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V'd it from someone else's thesis 10 years earlier

  > An analysis of the concept reflective practice and an investigation into the development of student teachers’ reflective practice within the context of action research

Attacking interracial couples

Chevalier on prison abolition

Both of these positions poll at about the same support level as ISIS, and Chevalier had the support of Zohran Mamdani, who's been a rising star within the left-wing of the party.