Helen Lewis in The Atlantic on the Arday matter:
For some of Arday’s supporters, acknowledging that any of the media scrutiny was justified has become tantamount to siding with his “killers.” He is instead a martyr—the victim of a “lynching”—and the inconvenient fact of his fabulism must be tidied away from the virtual shrine. This is an emotional position rather than a rational one, and its very indefensibility makes it a greater demonstration of tribal loyalty. Insisting that the academic was completely innocent, in the face of all the evidence, sends a strong social signal that you hate the right-wing media and care about racism.
The central question in this dispute is whether the treatment of Arday—the subject of more than 200 articles in print this year, according to CNN, and hundreds more online—was proportionate. The smaller his alleged offenses, the more easily one can argue that the media hounded him to death. And so Arday has been recast as a small-time plagiarist; academics have lined up to argue that, You know, even that isn’t a very big deal. The “meaning of plagiarism does not cover mere overlap of sentences,” the academic Jason Stanley asserted in a blog post that also bizarrely noted that he hadn’t paid much attention to the story because he had been on vacation in Europe. Stanley’s blithe dismissal will be news to students who are told the exact opposite early in their courses.
Well. Sure, students are told not to “overlap” their sentences, but the nobility that teaches those students live by a different set of rules. It’s like Downton Abbey but with diplomas at the end.
Keeping a narrow focus on the doctoral thesis is helpful to the pro-Arday side. He also faced a far more serious charge of academic fraud—that he lifted interviewees’ quotations from a 2016 paper in BMJ Open and inserted them into the mouths of people he had supposedly spoken with in his own research, implying outright fabrication of interviews that never occurred. After Cambridge was made aware of this accusation in 2023 by other academics, the journal Social Sciences took an Arday paper offline and then uploaded it again with the offending quotations excised and other direct quotes edited. (Another paper of his in a different journal was also subsequently corrected.) Arday essentially admitted to the misattribution by agreeing to the amendments, although he had earlier told the researcher who raised the issue that questioning him was “bullying and harassment.”
You know, people like Jolyon Maugham display outrage that Arday was exposed doing this stuff, but how about some outrage for the people he did it to?
One of the biggest promoters of the revisionist narrative is the Good Law Project, a nonprofit chiefly known in Britain for its patchy record of challenging legal decisions… The Good Law Project intervened on Arday’s behalf early in the news cycle, describing the initial coverage as a “malicious” witch hunt based on “fake accusations of plagiarism.” It mustered an open letter in his defense.
But how did the Good Good Awesome Law Project know the accusations were fake?
Spoiler: it didn’t.
What followed was a classic Streisand effect: The newspapers defended themselves by seeking further corroboration of Arday’s fabulism. As the allegations mounted, various signatories disappeared from the letter, indicating that they found the evidence concerning. By August 8, Maugham was distancing himself, saying that his decision to “carry—a deliberately neutral verb—an open letter in support of Dr Arday” relied on Cambridge’s judgment. He stated that he had not personally evaluated Arday’s broader trustworthiness…
After Arday’s death, though, Maugham also offered a new statement, in which he had in fact been closely involved with the letter, and furthermore had intervened in the hope of dissuading the left-wing Guardian from publishing its own damning exposé of Arday. The stated rationale was that the academic was vulnerable, that the right was already attacking him, and that Arday believed (without offering any evidence) that the Guardian reporter Lanre Bakare had a beef with him.
Evidence shmevidence. Are you going to say Jolyon Maugham doesn’t know what he’s talking about? ARE you???
A second reason that the story still resonates is that Arday’s death—the version of it in which he is a complete innocent, hounded by feral, racist journalists—is now being used for political purposes in Britain. The Good Law Project and its allies have demanded the resignation of Cambridge’s vice-chancellor for failing to support Arday; the defenestration of various journalists who covered the story or edited the newspapers in which it appeared; and a public inquiry into Arday’s death, with the desired outcome being tighter restrictions on what the press can publish. Groups affiliated with Amnesty UK have even endorsed “Arday’s Law,” whereby the number of news articles on any person would be capped. This proposal is nonsensical. Do activists really believe that, if The New York Times has used up the entire press’s monthly Trump-scandal quota, everyone else should fall silent?
Well when you put it that way…
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