A wider research project

Ah yes, the old “if someone says your research looks shady, call the police” gambit.

Cambridge University’s embattled “academic superstar”, Professor Jason Arday, reported a fellow academic to the police after being challenged over apparent inconsistencies, errors and possible plagiarism in his work – raising troubling questions about the use of harassment law as a shield against awkward scholarly scrutiny in an increasingly litigious, low-trust society.

Troubling questions indeed. We heretics who don’t subscribe to trans ideology are well familiar with such questions.

The academic was Dr David Harris, Professor Emeritus at Plymouth Marjon University and one of the first scholars to raise concerns about Arday’s doctoral thesis and several subsequent peer-reviewed publications on race, inequality and education, including his treatment of concepts such as structural racism, whiteness, decolonisation and racial microaggressions.

Concepts which may possibly be more trendy than conceptual.

It was not Harris’s first encounter with institutional hostility arising from his scrutiny of critical theory and related intellectual traditions, including Critical Legal Studies, Black Studies and strands of Marxist and Frankfurt School thought. Last year, Marjon revoked the emeritus title he had held since retiring in 2011 after he published a monograph critically examining the body of ideas now commonly described as critical race theory. Internal emails later obtained through a Subject Access Request showed senior administrators describing his research as “controversial” and suggesting that the University should “probably sever ties” with him. Following an intervention by CAF, however, the University reversed its decision and restored the title earlier this year.

Daaaamn. That’s blatant. “This guy doesn’t subscribe to the trendy branch of scholarship therefore we’d better wash our hands of him.” Hello senior admins: isn’t the criterion supposed to be scholarship as opposed to controversy?

Harris’s opening email to Arday, sent on 4 May 2023, was almost absurdly polite: unmistakably scholarly, but also courteous and measured. He explained that he was reviewing Arday’s work as part of a wider research project and attached a detailed document setting out concerns about what he described as “puzzling similarities” in the reported data, repeated passages and possible failures of attribution. The covering email concluded simply: “I would welcome any response.”

When none came, Harris sent a brief follow-up a week later.

Arday replied that same day but did not address the substance of Harris’s concerns. Instead, he recast Harris’s intervention as little more than pettifogging criticism of spelling and grammar, and as evidence of a failure to appreciate the structural racism and ableism which, in his view, such scrutiny helped to perpetuate.

You know…I’m sorry to say it but the truth is, “ableism” is a rock bottom necessity in academia, and in quite a few other professions as well. In fact that’s what makes them professions: you have to know some stuff. You have to know quite a lot of stuff. You also have to understand the stuff you know. Those are indeed barriers to the professions, and they do screen out people who can’t afford years of higher education. The ableism is still essential though.

Ardy berated Harris for asking his questions.

“Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism,” Arday added, “you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes.”

Harris was, he said, “a monument to the fact we live in a society where grammar is valued above equity”. He ended with the warning: “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

Harris nevertheless replied, prefacing his remarks with an expression of admiration for Arday as someone who had overcome considerable personal and professional adversity, before returning to the academic issues and correcting what he regarded as an inaccurate and damaging account of his own disciplinary history.

What followed is now a matter of public record. Arday contacted the Metropolitan Police to lodge a complaint of harassment against Harris. Because Harris is based in Plymouth, the matter was referred to Devon and Cornwall Police, which declined to pursue it.

Gosh. Doesn’t that sound familiar. “Officer, officer, that woman over there doesn’t believe that men can be women!!”

As an organisation that defends academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law, CAF takes no view on the ultimate merits of the allegations concerning Arday’s work. We are, however, deeply concerned by what appears, on the evidence available to us, to have been an attempt to use the criminal law to suppress legitimate scholarly scrutiny.

And that, I think, is quite obviously the product of “trans activism”. I think the trans activists have created a giant precedent for calling the cops on people who dispute a trendy ideology.

In taking no further action, Devon and Cornwall Police got the decision right. But as the recent cases of Maxie Allen, Darren Brady, Julian Foulkes, Kellie-Jay Keen, Markus Meechan, Jennifer Swayne, and David Wootton demonstrate, police forces have not always covered themselves in glory when deciding whether lawful but contentious expression warrants arrest or investigation under broadly framed communication offences.

Indeed they have not.