… writes one of the best Jason Arday considerations.
The story … raised questions … about academic standards in the humanities, regarding both Arday’s education (Liverpool John Moores, which awarded his doctorate, confirmed that he had received just one in-person supervision while writing his PhD, which was later found to have substantial signs of plagiarism) and the education he provided to his own students.
…. Arday’s self-mythologising was not harmless. He hurt the academics whose work he plagiarised. He hurt the discipline he belonged to. He hurt the early career lecturers who were competing with him for jobs, but couldn’t match his fantastical legend. He hurt the families of non-verbal children who believed the story of his unprecedented late acquisition of language, and either blamed themselves for lacking the patience and love of Arday’s mother, or blamed their children for their failure to blossom.
… Being at the centre of a media storm is isolating and horrible. Arday had lost his job, lost his credibility, and even those he might have banked on as supporters were abandoning him: The Guardian’s Afua Hirsch wrote a column that was probably more brutal than anything from The Telegraph or The Spectator, which accused Arday of gulling his defenders and exploiting his autism as a cover for his actions. Ostracism is deeply destructive. I don’t think that Arday’s life was beyond redemption (if the Winns could survive The Salt Path, he could survive this), but I can understand why he might have believed it was.
… I do not regret writing about Arday, but I am sorry for him and for all of us that he was ever put in a position where he was somebody I would have cause to write about. If the plagiarism in his PhD had been dealt with at the time; if Cambridge had vetted his work; if his publisher had factchecked his manuscript and done him the kindness of rejecting it; if the allegations of his academic malpractice had been dealt with openly in the specialist press, rather than hushed up until they became a legitimate scandal — then maybe Arday would have been spared the punishing glare of a public life.