Episode 150 [PATREON EXCLUSIVE] -- The Politics of Plagiarism Hunting, Part 2

Thanks for this thoughtful response to an extremely upsetting situation. One thing I think was underestimated is the impact of Jason Array's autism and the phenomenon of autistic masking. It seems to me that, as you eluded to in the episode, Jason Arday was playing the game of academic prestige which incentivises certain behaviours and can lead to self-agrandisement, likely learned from imitating colleagues. But as so often happens to autistic people, just when you think you've learned the rules and are playing the game on their terms you go a little bit too far (because you have failed to pick up on all those invisible lines and subclauses that everyone else seems to take as a given) and the blowback, when it inevitably comes, can be catastrophic for your personal life or career. It's almost as if you pay double for unintentionally exposing the fact that the game was rigged in the first place. And, as another listener mentioned, the UK is also caught in a anti-neurodiversity fervour right now and this certainly played into the media frenzy. On a slightly unrelated note, as someone with a close friend who got into extreme running while we were in college together. She went from 5K park runs, to marathons, to iron man competitions within the space of a couple of years. The last time I saw her she had just run a 100 mile race (four marathons) in a day! I know from listening to her that the extreme running circuit is very intense and addictive, and runners are always pushing themselves to greater extremes of distance within reduced time spans. The last thing I will say that goes back to autism, is that he apparently had a hairline fracture while doing the six marathons in six days, and while this sounds kind of implausible, it bears noting he was immersed in this world of extreme running which, as my friend noted, actually destroys your body, so extreme physical discomfort is normal, and also autistic people often experience pain very differently to allistic people, particularly if you are in a state of hyper-focus which is likely given the goal he had in mind.

Thank you for this! I largely avoided coverage of this case, because it seemed so odious from the start, regardless of what Arday may or may not have done, but as always, you treated it levelly and with respect. Can I also say: I was at Cambridge for 5 years (Master & PhD) and was privy to some absolutely hair-raising stories about current and soon-to-be appointed faculty. And, like, *this* is the one that sparked a national "scandal"?!

It's been 'interesting' to see 'sex realists' like Maya Forstater sign the letter in support of Cofnas because 'freedom of speech'. These people are concerned with some sort of moral injury to themselves and their 'ideas' when they are inflicting actual, material damage to those they target, in this case death. And it's all treated like it a plain field.

This all reminds me of what Jason Stanley says about the moral logic of us/them politics: "'They' are criminals, 'we' make mistakes."

Omg Jack Osborn was doing paranormal investigations for a minute. Guess the ghosts cancelled his ass.

This was such a great episode at parsing out the legit critiques and the conflation of those critiques with all the garbage of racism and classism and the absolutely immoral reporting. Thank you so much!! It’s helped me articulate what I felt in my gut but couldn’t put into words when family members brought it up.

Irish listener here, loved the shout out!

ig I'm a little confused. if Jason arday was ultimately cleared of plagiarism charges, why are we saying there was "there there" and assuming these allegations are correct?

Famous/Charismatic == money and attention. (I'm with Moira on the fame matters and with Adrian about it's cynical.) I'm in the middle of Arday's memoir now. He reads the audiobooks. He sounds like kind person. In addition to all the racism, It was known that he was autistic and (I didn't realize) dyslexic too. And right now, there is shit ton of hostility toward ADHDer and Autistic folks by the eugenicists too. (maybe a bit different between the US and the UK). And a lot of "that was a lie" is from people who have a very narrow sense of autistic people as a group. Nonspeaking doesn't means doesn't understand language. It might but many folks who can't reliably use mouth words understand language and can communicate through other modalities (like AAC). There are many of us who are in higher ed. And some of us really struggled as kids and some of use still do.

I used to ghost write papers in literary studies when I was really broke in college until the agency's new plagiarism program said my work was 80% plagiarised and they refused to pay me until I brought it under 10% (what the program had flagged was: quotes from the book or other sources (cited), the title of the book, characters' names, and a variety of prepositions and conjunctions ☠️ critical thinking skills are dead)

250 articles written about Arday in the British press vs. 110 for Mandelson's Epstein emails. Fuck these people indeed. It's 2026 and my happy place is Enraged Articulate Moira.

I guess I'd say that academics in my field are indeed normally hired on their stories. It's just that the story tends to be "both my parents are tenured full professors" or "I am the 'funny-looking but smart' one in an old- money family" or "I have three Ivy degrees and the first two were legacy admits." Class, whiteness, and in a highly feminized field some extremely particular gender performances. And just like white racism in general imputes its own violence and lies to BIPOC, so white racism in academia imputes its own absurd disregard for intellectual values to BIPOC scholars. I mean, motherfucking CAMBRIDGE. A millennium of being well-fed useful idiots for aristocracy and empire, but Arday is the fake, Arday is the dissembler, Arday is the liar. Jfc.

250 articles?! I shouldn't be surprised. I have been interested in and kept up with English history and pop culture more than most Americans. They are oddly fascinating to me in their ability to remain so entrenched in their class hierarchy garbage. All I can say in my over 2 decades of horrified fascination is that we got our racism from somewhere. I learned a lot by monitoring Harry and Meghan in the British media. No matter how much more superior they feel than us for outlawing the slave trade and slavery before us, we inherited it from them as colonies. It was easier for them to move toward abolition since they had already lost the US colonies that were economically dependent upon it. Especially since they still held firm to the class system which excuses the exploitation of underclasses.

One thing I don't feel like I have, but should, amid all this discourse, is a sense of what Arday's work actually consisted in, the quality of it, and how it related to the literature in his sub-field. Yes, Cofnas et al. are degenerate racists, but was Arday a good scholar? I don't know after listening to this

The Brits, never not at it

I appreciate Adrian pushing back against Moira's cynicism about hiring academics based on stories. Even if it happens, it shouldn't

Thanks for this episode! I’ve just completed my BA in sociology (any Reedies in these comments?) and I’ve had to read a lot of sociolgy papers for classes and for my thesis. My perception of autoethnography is that it is not very common. I’ve never had to read any for a class and I’ve stumbled upon an article here and there when doing literature search. To me it seems like autoethnography pops up in new subfields/ topics, which it did a few times when I was trying to get a grasp on the current qualitative literature on nonbinary people.

How is Kat Tenbarge an influencer? She's a journalist

I feel kinda bad about saying this when the subject matter of this episode is so bleak and enraging, but finding out that Adrian can quote the ballads of P.J. McCall off the dome (and I *think* being able to identify by how he says Teach Sagard that it's Christy Moore's version he knows best) is absolutely worth the price of a Patreon sub. Delightful.

Aargh, the instant reaction to the marathons, with folks just assuming it was an absurd lie. Yet when Suzy Eddie Izzard did 27 marathons in 27 days, folks just said, “Wow!” Izzard was 54 when she did that (2016), Jason Ardway was less than half that age when he did his 30 marathons in 35 days (2010). I had remembered when Izzard ran the Mandela marathons. I found the info on Izzard, Ardway, and on dozens of multi-marathon events (777, 50 states, 25 countries…). It took only minutes. Izzard has done other marathon challenges, including her first: 43 in 51 days. My high school journalism teacher would have had me squinting through microfiche 50 years ago, but, with the world at their fingertips, today’s journalists can’t bother to check such things?!

It’s so galling that they attacked Jason Arday for a lack of academic integrity while praising/supporting/following after a professional racist whose research is completely bunk. But of course, he doesn’t need actual research—he has whiteness. This all feels tied into who has claims to the truth/reality

It's genuinely disturbing how there seems to be a pipeline from the ravings of a crank on a blog (granted, on a blog platform funded by nazis) to *all* of the British press. like. who the fuck was following cofnas's substack in the first place?? and then i think about the TERF island of it all.

This whole thing is horrific. Fuck everyone who signed the letter defending Nathan Confas, though I did see someone point out that it's a convenient list of "people to never engage with under any circumstances"

To Moira, I think my cat really enjoyed your voice, and he’s looking at me all upset now that the episode is over.

Thank you for making this episode, I was hopen you would do it when I saw Die Zeit (online) actually interviewed Cofnas and gave him a platform yesterday (no I didn't read it, it made me physically sick to see the headline)

Absolutely “fuck these people”. I think it was Caroline Cadwallader who called it a ‘digital lynching’. So upsetting.

I haven’t listened to this yet! But thank you for this guys! I may listen in a while as this is quite sad for be atm, as a black woman from the UK who works in academia (ish) it has truly been sad to see what’s unravelled as a result of the witch hunt which has been carried out by the media in the UK. Yes there were lies but the fact I kept getting telegraph ads destroying Jason Ardays character every few hours on all my social media’s coupled with every front page being his picture I knew it had been increased to wild proportions. The fact ppl believed and amplified a white supremacist and eugenicist just makes me even angrier! I worry for my black and brown colleagues and professors who will likely be targeted even more because of this :(

I was thinking of the first episode you guys made the whole week after this happened

Thank you for handling this issue. I am a cambridge alumna and even worked for the university (as a librarian not academic) and have been reeling about the news ever since his death. I was aware of plagiarism at Cambridge through Dr William O'Reilly, who I nearly did a PhD with, and since the start of the Arday news cycle I have been trying to point out the hypocrisy. When I matriculated 10 years ago at Cambridge the fact that I was Welsh was considered a diversity win as there were still more Eton boys than welsh folks my year, and there were even fewer black students. Cambridge is far from woke