A sad casualty of DEI/Woke at Cambridge University

[TSwizzle]

What is the ideal career, in your view, for a Black man who wants to pursue an education but is prevented from entering the university? What would you have advised him to do with his life?

Do you think that all candidates for university positions should be vetted or just the white ones?

I don't even know what you mean by "vetting". Do you think being hired at Cambridge is like getting hired at the CIA? There is a routine criminal background check for all new faculty, but all new faculty undergo it, there isn't a racial exemption.

Do you think the fraud Arday, having been exposed as an obvious fraud and fantasist should have been left alone to continue his position because he was black?

 

[scombrid]

Sounds like he was hounded because he is black. How that can be blamed on DEI and Woke is a mystery to me.

He was hired because he was black - that's where DEI comes into the picture. He was hounded because he was a fraud.

The actual evidence that he was hired because he was black is......?

They didn't do due dilligence. That's remarkable. I don't think you quite understand the prestige and dignity of Cambridge and the standards they hold.

To my knowledge, no university checks every publication of top candidates for plagiarism.

No fraud by professors has made it through Cambridge's scrutiny before. Since 1209. It would have been revealed over time, if true

And secondly... Cambridge's prestige is on a different level. The damage a fraud would do to their reputation would be incalculable. For Cambridge specifically, this is a catastrophe. It would be stupid of them not to.

And lastly, they now have software that checks automatically. That's how Nathan Cofnas busted Arday. He just used the plagiarism software they routinely use to check the work of students. Almost no effort required.

The whole thing is so very strange

First fraud in over 800 years and it was the black guy. Okeedoakee

 

[Politesse]

What is the ideal career, in your view, for a Black man who wants to pursue an education but is prevented from entering the university? What would you have advised him to do with his life?

Do you think that all candidates for university positions should be vetted or just the white ones?

I don't even know what you mean by "vetting". Do you think being hired at Cambridge is like getting hired at the CIA? There is a routine criminal background check for all new faculty, but all new faculty undergo it, there isn't a racial exemption.

Do you think the fraud Arday, having been exposed as an obvious fraud and fantasist should have been left alone to continue his position because he was black?

If he was "left alone" we wouldn't be having this conversation.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Try to keep in mind that Americans routinely call their lecturers "professor".

Hey, how do you like that? After about four drinks, I turn into a professor.

 

[Derec]

More woke nonsense from the formerly illustrious halls of Cambridge:

Why is Cambridge platforming Islamic creationism?

An academic project hosted by Cambridge University platforms creationism, the belief that the world was created by God in seven days. It promotes an academic paper demanding that schoolchildren be taught to “actively resist” the science of evolution.
At Charles Darwin’s old university, where a college is named after him, Darwin’s discovery is now described by one Cambridge researcher as an example of “potential challenges posed by Eurocentric monoculture.”
[...]
The project which platforms the creationist claims, the Islamic Educator Learning Community (IELC), is led by Cambridge’s assistant research professor of education, Farah Ahmed, a former activist in the since banned terror group Hizb ut-Tahrir. Ahmed’s extraordinary CV, and her long record of grossly bigoted, extremist and separatist views, were revealed by a 2002 pamphlet exposed by The Spectator on Tuesday.
IELC is “hosted by” and “partners with” a university body called the Cambridge Teacher Research Exchange, Camtree. Camtree is a project of Hughes Hall, the Cambridge University college where Ahmed is a governing fellow. Ahmed is also an “affiliate” of Camtree.
[...]
The paper says that “countering colonial hegemony in science education for Muslims” could include “identifying gaps in fossil records to make the case that the evidence of humans descending from apes is inconclusive.”
It says that fitna “boil(S) down to two beliefs being inculcated in students that are problematic from an Islamic standpoint,” namely that “the meaning of existence is socially constructed as an evolutionary response. There is no afterlife or soul; and the universe exists by chance, and runs according to mindless laws of physics…. To counter these hegemonic ideas, it is not enough just to intellectually dispel them. Rather… it is necessary to also instil within students a capacity to actively resist the influence of this monoculture.”

Another article about Farah Ahmed:
Meet Farah Ahmed, Jason Arday’s colleague

We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.
Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’.
These statements are part of her long record of bigoted, extremist and separatist views on education. In a Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet, ‘Education and Identity’, originally written in 2002, republished in 2017, and obtained by The Spectator, Ahmed writes that ‘the Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognise that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values.’
She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’
[...]
he attacks British schools for teaching that ‘polygamy or marriage under the age of 16’ is ‘archaic and discriminatory to women’, and for telling children that ‘democracy… is the only way that laws should be created.’ Democracy, she says, is a ‘corrupt tradition’, where if ‘decision makers decide to make bombing Iraq or homosexuality legal, as they currently have, there is nothing anyone can do about it’.
Worst of all, ‘religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education’, meaning that ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.’
Nor does academic study escape Ahmed’s censure. English, she writes, ‘is one of the most damaging subjects’ a school can teach. Fairy tales ‘reflect secular and immoral beliefs, which contradict the viewpoint of Islam.’ Romeo and Juliet ‘advocates disobeying parents and pre-marital relations.’
Science is a problem too, because in the ‘teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’. And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together. ‘As Muslim parents we try to protect our children from the rubbish that western society encourages’, but interaction with non-Muslim children in the playground, which is ‘full of the competitiveness and individualism that western culture encourages… moulds their personalities away from Islam.’ As she puts it: ‘western culture is playground culture.’

What the fuck is Cambridge even doing any more?

 

[Derec]

Arday was harassed because he was black.

No he wasn't. He was scrutinized because of plagiarism and because he made up large parts of his autobiography.

In order to establish that he was hired because he was black

That was established in the article southernhybrid posted. He was hired despite not having qualifications normally required for the position because Cambridge was under pressure to "diversify" its faculty. I guess having an Islamist woman who thinks western education and science is from Sheitan is not enough "diversity".

but not harassed because he was black, you’d need to demonstrate that other academics at Cambridge who are white males and who are discovered to have plagiarized work or inflated their credentials are similarly harassed by their colleagues.

Burden of proof should be on those who claim that he was "harassed because he was black". First you'd have to show that the was harassed in the first place. Then you'd have to show that it was because of his skin color and not because of the Munchhausenesque levels of lying he was involved in. For example by showing white professors engaged in similar levels of fraud who were treated differently.

The correct course of action is not to be so vile that you drive another human being to suicide.

Was he "driven" to suicide or did he maybe despair at the fact that the edifice of lies he built over the years collapsed like a house of cards it was?

 

[ZiprHead]

He was hired despite not having qualifications normally required for the position because Cambridge was under pressure to "diversify" its faculty.

Do you have any proof of this?

 

[Derec]

Do you have any proof of this?

SoHy posted the article way back in post #50.

When Cambridge University interviewed Jason Arday for one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world, he was an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards.

Cambridge’s requirements, reviewed by The New York Times, called for “an outstanding research record of international stature” and a “proven successful track record” supervising Ph.D. students. Dr. Arday had a modest publication record and had bounced from one university to the next — not staying long enough to oversee a full three-year-or-more doctorate.

Cambridge hired him anyway in 2023, making him, at 37, the university’s youngest Black professor at a time when the school was under pressure to diversify. In doing so, Cambridge thrust him into the international limelight, giving him a platform at one of the world’s elite universities to champion academic diversity and making him a target for critics.

Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring

 

[Toni]

Arday was harassed because he was black.

No he wasn't. He was scrutinized because of plagiarism and because he made up large parts of his autobiography.

In order to establish that he was hired because he was black

That was established in the article southernhybrid posted. He was hired despite not having qualifications normally required for the position because Cambridge was under pressure to "diversify" its faculty. I guess having an Islamist woman who thinks western education and science is from Sheitan is not enough "diversity".

but not harassed because he was black, you’d need to demonstrate that other academics at Cambridge who are white males and who are discovered to have plagiarized work or inflated their credentials are similarly harassed by their colleagues.

Burden of proof should be on those who claim that he was "harassed because he was black". First you'd have to show that the was harassed in the first place. Then you'd have to show that it was because of his skin color and not because of the Munchhausenesque levels of lying he was involved in. For example by showing white professors engaged in similar levels of fraud who were treated differently.

The correct course of action is not to be so vile that you drive another human being to suicide.

Was he "driven" to suicide or did he maybe despair at the fact that the edifice of lies he built over the years collapsed like a house of cards it was?

Harassed was the word frequently used used to describe how ‘colleagues’ treated him. In a different situation, I’ve see. ‘scrutiny’ turned into harassment. It was very ugly. And I’ve known about ‘scrutiny’ being used as a weapon against rivals in academia. I’ve seen situations when people who were struggling with mental health issues instead being more and more isolated and more ‘scrutinized’ until they suicided.

 

[Derec]

But that’s one person’s anecdote ftom 50 years ago.
Surely things have changed since then. Right, Steve? That’s what most present day white racists contend, IME.

Surely you are not accusing people who acknowledge that things have changed over the last 50 years of being "racist"? That would be out there even for you.

But yes, things have changed a lot. For med schools specifically (and your anecdote was from medical school) the standards for white and Asian prospective med students are far more stringent than standards for black, Hispanic and American Indian students. That is easy to see from MCAT and GPA data broken down by race. But I guess you are a "racist" if you don't think things are exactly the same as they were 50 years ago.

Note that the department that Arday was in is "Education", which is in any case far more squishy and less rigorous field than medicine, or for that matter hard sciences and engineering.

 

[Derec]

I don’t know much about how things work in other countries but I will say that fewer US students are continuing to graduate school and graduate students receive much less financial support compared with previous generations.

Depending on the field, that may be good or bad. It should not be viewed as "one size fits all". In some fields there is limited utility of postgraduate degrees except for teaching in that field, and that has a limited demand. So why train a lot of English Lit PhDs who will never work in that field?

States have cut back on the portion of the expense of public universities they are willing to cover, meaning that tuition paid by students is much higher than it was for the boomer generation. Abd since younger generations are smaller in number and steadily increasing, there is a much smaller pool of students from which to draw.

The inadequate state support for state universities is a problem, as are tuitions increasing much faster than general rate of inflation. True.

This is all kinds of wrong. Ultimately it will mean that fewer US students earn advanced degrees, and that even fewer will pursue careers in academia. Meaning that increasingly, university coursework will be taught by international faculty.

As I said, you don't need that many PhDs just to perpetuate a workforce of college professors in that field, especially when the student population is not increasing. I am more concerned about fields where advanced degrees are used for things other than just teaching. E.g. Trump administration limiting student loans for medical students. That will make it harder for those without rich parents to go through medical school.

Which, sadly, I fear will result in greater erosion of public funding and higher education and education in general.

I think fields with low level of rigor and high level of ideology are the chief reason of the erosion of public trust in higher education. A lot of stuff that comes out of the modern university is unvarnished nonsense. The hiring of a fantasist like Arday fits this, as does a professor like Farah Ahmed who is pushing hostility toward western education and science because they are unislamic.

Harassed was the word frequently used used to describe how ‘colleagues’ treated him.

But we cannot accept Arday's description of anything, given how much he lied.

I’ve seen situations when people who were struggling with mental health issues instead being more and more isolated and more ‘scrutinized’ until they suicided.

British media are notorious in being relentless when they latch onto something. That probably contributed to him taking his life. But it all started with his penchant for lying about himself. It is sad that he killed himself, but him being pushed to resign form Cambridge was not wrong. It was necessary.

 

[Derec]

Abso-fucking-lutely. Ask any Black, Asian, Mexican, or Native student whether they feel they were treated differently in grade school on account of their race.

Even if many feel that way does not necessarily mean that they are actually "treated differently ... on account of their race". Those are two very different things and should not be conflated.

 

[laughing dog]

Do you have any proof of this?

SoHy posted the article way back in post #50.

When Cambridge University interviewed Jason Arday for one of the most prestigious sociology positions in the world, he was an early career scholar and underqualified, by the school’s own standards.

Cambridge’s requirements, reviewed by The New York Times, called for “an outstanding research record of international stature” and a “proven successful track record” supervising Ph.D. students. Dr. Arday had a modest publication record and had bounced from one university to the next — not staying long enough to oversee a full three-year-or-more doctorate.

Cambridge hired him anyway in 2023, making him, at 37, the university’s youngest Black professor at a time when the school was under pressure to diversify. In doing so, Cambridge thrust him into the international limelight, giving him a platform at one of the world’s elite universities to champion academic diversity and making him a target for critics.

Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring

We don't know any of the details, but I am skeptical of journalist's opinions on the quality of anyone's publication record. Moreover, I know from experience that it is not uncommon for an university to overlook/ignore a stated requirement when hiring someone.

 

[Toni]

I don’t know much about how things work in other countries but I will say that fewer US students are continuing to graduate school and graduate students receive much less financial support compared with previous generations.

Depending on the field, that may be good or bad. It should not be viewed as "one size fits all". In some fields there is limited utility of postgraduate degrees except for teaching in that field, and that has a limited demand. So why train a lot of English Lit PhDs who will never work in that field?

States have cut back on the portion of the expense of public universities they are willing to cover, meaning that tuition paid by students is much higher than it was for the boomer generation. Abd since younger generations are smaller in number and steadily increasing, there is a much smaller pool of students from which to draw.

The inadequate state support for state universities is a problem, as are tuitions increasing much faster than general rate of inflation. True.

This is all kinds of wrong. Ultimately it will mean that fewer US students earn advanced degrees, and that even fewer will pursue careers in academia. Meaning that increasingly, university coursework will be taught by international faculty.

As I said, you don't need that many PhDs just to perpetuate a workforce of college professors in that field, especially when the student population is not increasing. I am more concerned about fields where advanced degrees are used for things other than just teaching. E.g. Trump administration limiting student loans for medical students. That will make it harder for those without rich parents to go through medical school.

Which, sadly, I fear will result in greater erosion of public funding and higher education and education in general.

I think fields with low level of rigor and high level of ideology are the chief reason of the erosion of public trust in higher education. A lot of stuff that comes out of the modern university is unvarnished nonsense. The hiring of a fantasist like Arday fits this, as does a professor like Farah Ahmed who is pushing hostility toward western education and science because they are unislamic.

Harassed was the word frequently used used to describe how ‘colleagues’ treated him.

But we cannot accept Arday's description of anything, given how much he lied.

I’ve seen situations when people who were struggling with mental health issues instead being more and more isolated and more ‘scrutinized’ until they suicided.

British media are notorious in being relentless when they latch onto something. That probably contributed to him taking his life. But it all started with his penchant for lying about himself. It is sad that he killed himself, but him being pushed to resign form Cambridge was not wrong. It was necessary.

I don’t see education, particularly graduate school, as job training. I see education as being both means and end. I believe that education makes us better people—not as in better than anyone wise but better than we were before.

I do not think k that educational support should be just for fields that ‘experts’ or really, legislators and their donors believe will e remunerative. Certainly we’ve seen new areas of employment t emerge where we had never previously imagined such opportunity.

Teaching is not the only thing or, depending on the field and place of employment, the main thing that Ph.D’s ‘do’ with their graduate degrees. Research is essential trial, including in humanities and social sciences. Just a casual read of say, Facebook or these furs should tell us that there is a great deal that the general population does not understand about ( in the US) US or world history, sociology, civics, economics and economic policy and generally speaking: any science. You may look down on literature but that’s a mistake: literature allows us to understand ourselves and others better and to help process change, culture, understand ourselves place and roles in the world, etc.

The real purpose of education us to teach is to think. Deeply and also broadly. We should be encouraging everyone to gain a better understanding of themselves and the world, not pre-limiting them by deciding what is ‘worthy’ of being funded and what is not.

 

[Politesse]

Abso-fucking-lutely. Ask any Black, Asian, Mexican, or Native student whether they feel they were treated differently in grade school on account of their race.

Even if many feel that way does not necessarily mean that they are actually "treated differently ... on account of their race". Those are two very different things and should not be conflated.

Then we will ignore your "feeling" that hiring discrimination against whites happens. Nice and neat!

 

[ZiprHead]

Abso-fucking-lutely. Ask any Black, Asian, Mexican, or Native student whether they feel they were treated differently in grade school on account of their race.

Even if many feel that way does not necessarily mean that they are actually "treated differently ... on account of their race". Those are two very different things and should not be conflated.

Then we will ignore your "feeling" that hiring discrimination against whites happens. Nice and neat!

It's amazing the people that have never had any experience there feel they are experts at Cambridge's hiring practices

 

[DrZoidberg]

I corrected my text. Bilbys link is irrelevant

You correction is hand waved wishful thinking.

ok, then. Back it up with anything of substance. Bilby couldn't. Maybe you can?

Unlike you, bilby provided a link.

The article is paywalled.

According to google Arday's case is unique. Me and Bilby have access to the same Intrrnet. You too.

Yes, there are examples of professors making the mistakes.

But there are no other examples of Cambridge professors comitting systematic fraud.

Those doing doctoral thesis and students is a different level. But the standards are the same. Zero tolerance for fraud. And rare.

I don't see the point trying to pretend this is nornal, as if lessening Arday's culpability. You're not doing Arday, Cambridge, blacks, autists or any other minority any favours.

Yours and Bilby's accusations are very serious. Not to be overly dramatic, but faith in the honesty of our universities is the foundation of the modern world... pray even civilisation itself.

I made no accusation. I asked for evidence that universities check for plagiarism in the publications for top candidates. From my 40+ years in university academia, I never saw nor heard of such checking.

What I said waa that it easy to do. Cofnas said he busted him by using standard university software.

Its remarkable they didn't run it on Arday, I think.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I corrected my text. Bilbys link is irrelevant

You correction is hand waved wishful thinking.

The narrative of this story is that an intelligent man conned his way into Cambridge University. The claim that universities check for plagiarized publications among top candidates remains unsupported.

Let's think about the logistics of this. If universities actually did routine plagiarism checks on top candidates, the process would have to be automated. Manually cross-referencing a candidate's entire body of work against every other book and paper in existence is impracticable.

So, presuming they use a standard software tool to scan submissions, this DEI conspiracy theory requires us to believe one of two nonsensical things. Either the hiring staff said, "Hey waitaminnut, this guy is Black—let's bypass all our standard scans," OR the hiring staff ran the scans, looked at the plagiarized results, and actively conspired to say, "Hey waitaminnut, this guy is Black—let's bury this report and pretend it never happened." It's really quite absurd.

Makes you wonder—do these same conspiracy theorists think the GOP ran a background check on George Santos, saw his completely fabricated life story, and said, 'Hey waitaminnut, he's a Republican. Let's hide the lies and put him in Congress'?" Or is it just that that doesn't work well for the narrative they are trying to construct?

I think its normal to run background checks on people when hiring people for sensitive positions.

Using Copyleaks in combination with ChatGPT would make the background check a trivial operation.

ChatGPT says this

"What software did Cofnas use to bust Arday"

It was Copyleaks.

Nathan Cofnas says explicitly in his original 21 July 2026 investigation:

> “I ran Arday’s 2015 PhD dissertation through the plagiarism-detection program Copyleaks.”



Copyleaks then identified substantial textual overlap, particularly with Paula Zwozdiak-Myers's 2009 Brunel University PhD thesis. Cofnas manually examined the matches and published side-by-side comparisons; his original article presented 36 instances involving verbatim copying, close paraphrasing and stylistic alterations.

So this wasn't some bespoke forensic technique. He essentially obtained Arday's thesis, put it through commercially available plagiarism-detection software, and investigated the matches it returned.

That is one of the striking aspects of the affair: the tool was readily available, meaning this was a check that Cambridge—or previous institutions—could in principle have performed themselves.

[Copyleaks](https://copyleaks.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) is the software in question.

 

[Toni]

I corrected my text. Bilbys link is irrelevant

You correction is hand waved wishful thinking.

The narrative of this story is that an intelligent man conned his way into Cambridge University. The claim that universities check for plagiarized publications among top candidates remains unsupported.

Let's think about the logistics of this. If universities actually did routine plagiarism checks on top candidates, the process would have to be automated. Manually cross-referencing a candidate's entire body of work against every other book and paper in existence is impracticable.

So, presuming they use a standard software tool to scan submissions, this DEI conspiracy theory requires us to believe one of two nonsensical things. Either the hiring staff said, "Hey waitaminnut, this guy is Black—let's bypass all our standard scans," OR the hiring staff ran the scans, looked at the plagiarized results, and actively conspired to say, "Hey waitaminnut, this guy is Black—let's bury this report and pretend it never happened." It's really quite absurd.

Makes you wonder—do these same conspiracy theorists think the GOP ran a background check on George Santos, saw his completely fabricated life story, and said, 'Hey waitaminnut, he's a Republican. Let's hide the lies and put him in Congress'?" Or is it just that that doesn't work well for the narrative they are trying to construct?

I think its normal to run background checks on people when hiring people for sensitive positions.

Using Copyleaks in combination with ChatGPT would make the background check a trivial operation.

ChatGPT says this

"What software did Cofnas use to bust Arday"

It was Copyleaks.

Nathan Cofnas says explicitly in his original 21 July 2026 investigation:

> “I ran Arday’s 2015 PhD dissertation through the plagiarism-detection program Copyleaks.”



Copyleaks then identified substantial textual overlap, particularly with Paula Zwozdiak-Myers's 2009 Brunel University PhD thesis. Cofnas manually examined the matches and published side-by-side comparisons; his original article presented 36 instances involving verbatim copying, close paraphrasing and stylistic alterations.

So this wasn't some bespoke forensic technique. He essentially obtained Arday's thesis, put it through commercially available plagiarism-detection software, and investigated the matches it returned.

That is one of the striking aspects of the affair: the tool was readily available, meaning this was a check that Cambridge—or previous institutions—could in principle have performed themselves.

[Copyleaks](https://copyleaks.com/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) is the software in question.

Again, this is not a standard screening process for candidates for professorial positions.

What motivated Nathan Cofnas to run the pair through a plagiarism detecting program?

 

[laughing dog]

I corrected my text. Bilbys link is irrelevant

You correction is hand waved wishful thinking.

ok, then. Back it up with anything of substance. Bilby couldn't. Maybe you can?

Unlike you, bilby provided a link.

The article is paywalled.

According to google Arday's case is unique. Me and Bilby have access to the same Intrrnet. You too.

Yes, there are examples of professors making the mistakes.

But there are no other examples of Cambridge professors comitting systematic fraud.

Those doing doctoral thesis and students is a different level. But the standards are the same. Zero tolerance for fraud. And rare.

I don't see the point trying to pretend this is nornal, as if lessening Arday's culpability. You're not doing Arday, Cambridge, blacks, autists or any other minority any favours.

I never said any of this was normal.

Yours and Bilby's accusations are very serious. Not to be overly dramatic, but faith in the honesty of our universities is the foundation of the modern world... pray even civilisation itself.

I made no accusation. I asked for evidence that universities check for plagiarism in the publications for top candidates. From my 40+ years in university academia, I never saw nor heard of such checking.

What I said waa that it easy to do. Cofnas said he busted him by using standard university software.

Its remarkable they didn't run it on Arday, I think.

I realize focusing is hard for you. Bring easy for it to do is not evidence that Cambridge did it.