00:03:31.000And that was what the University of Cambridge brought him on to research and to teach, was about how racism functions in educational institutions and how it shapes educational experiences.
00:03:45.320This is something that these people don't think anybody should be paying attention to or funding.
00:03:51.420And it is also a person who they don't think should be a Cambridge University professor.
00:03:55.980Jason Arday was, I believe he's a son of immigrants.
00:04:00.140Yeah. And he grew up in Clapham, like working class, South London, one of a whole bunch of siblings and had kind of a circuitous route to academia through like professional schools.
00:04:14.120And my understanding was he was like an athlete and like a physical education teacher of various forms and found his way into the sociology of education through like teaching sports.
00:04:26.020and he was appointed to be a professor of sociology at Cambridge in 2023.
00:04:32.900I believe there's been fewer than 10 black full professors at Cambridge,
00:04:36.660which is fully a thousand-year-old institution, right?1.00
00:04:38.920Yeah, keep that in mind if people tell you that wokeness has taken over Cambridge1.00
00:04:42.280and that's why they hired this guy.0.96
00:04:44.380I don't know where wokeness would begin, but it would be after 10, I would think.
00:04:47.500So there was a sort of air of suspicion around this guy.
00:04:52.960He was targeted for like inquiry and scrutiny by some right-wing journalists and academics.
00:05:00.560There does seem to have been a bit of a there there, I got to say.
00:05:03.580Like this is not an episode that's going to try and posthumously exonerate just in our day from like all accusations of wrongdoing.
00:05:10.760I don't think that's really the point.
00:05:11.800But what happened was a former Cambridge University postdoctoral fellow and, like, really committed advocate of race science, an American guy named Nathan Kofnes, decided to sort of, like, revive this controversy after Arday had already been, like, investigated and cleared on these, like, previous plagiarism charges.
00:05:36.540And he revived it on his substack, where else?
00:05:39.780And what followed was a demonstration by the British media that was like animalistic and savage.
00:05:49.880And it was interesting to me that the guy who instigated this media feeding frenzy in the UK around Jason Arday was an American who's a white American.0.90
00:06:00.980He goes by the name Kofnas, C-O-F-N-A-S.
00:06:06.580Yeah, he changed his last name, which is interesting for a guy who just made a big fuss about how somebody else misrepresented their past.
00:06:13.540He's like working under a name that's not his.
00:06:16.100But Nathan Kofnesne Rob decided to start this feeding frenzy and he really imported some American racism into the British context and had the British take it up with, you know, the enthusiasm and zeal as if they were born to it.
00:06:30.660And the media scrutiny around Jason Arday and the rapidly congealed media consensus in the UK that this guy was a fraud and a lightweight and he never should have been appointed.0.61
00:06:46.140And he was a example of not only wokeness run amok, but really in Kofnus' terms of like the intellectual inferiority of black people writ large really reached a crescendo pitch.0.79
00:06:57.880It did not stop after Kofnes succeeded in enforcing our day to resign about two weeks ago.0.94
00:07:04.340And our day died evidently by suicide in London just a couple of days before we recorded this.0.65
00:07:10.060So they hounded this man literally to death.
00:07:13.260Yeah, I think it's important to note here that there's two things.
00:07:16.580There's the claim that this guy specifically didn't deserve the job he had.
00:07:21.380And I think people can make up their own minds.0.95
00:07:24.120We're going to try and lay out some of what came up in the reporting, but that's definitely a case one could make.
00:07:30.760I don't know if he should have been fired or whatever, but as you say, there's a there there.
00:07:34.420But it's remarkable and really troubling to what extent it always becomes a verdict not on maybe Cambridge is trying to whitewash its own racist past and doesn't really care how to do it, right?
00:07:50.140Didn't vet this person carefully enough, which is a question one could raise.0.60
00:07:54.120No, it became about the suitability of non-white Britons
00:07:58.800for being at a place like Cambridge or Oxford.0.56
00:08:01.660And it became about his type of research being somehow illegitimate.
00:08:32.420It's also a kind of a strange CV, some of which might be owed to the field, but it kind of mixes the memoiristic and just plain research papers.
00:08:43.640Yeah, he did a lot of what is sometimes termed autoethnography.
00:08:47.540That seemed to be his preferred methodology.
00:08:49.560I think that's fairly common in the sociology of education, and it's also, of course, something that like a sort of standpoint epistemology would recommend, that you don't sort of come into a classroom presuming to know better than everyone else, but rather you sort of put yourself in the position of the different actors in that space.
00:09:09.760That can both be a defense of him, but it also, I think, means that some of his more essayistic writing is a legitimate object for scrutiny of his academic record.
00:09:22.140They're a little hard to retrace because the journal that published his article
00:09:25.580ended up amending it and uploading an edited PDF, so it's a little hard to tell.
00:09:30.480Some of the stuff that I've identified in the contemporaneous discussions around this article
00:09:35.180is the stuff that you find when you run text through plagiarism software,
00:09:39.500which we've talked about before on this podcast.
00:09:43.500It's one of those things that tends to come up with positives.
00:09:46.220It's often a way of, as in the case of Claudine Gay, catching sort of canned language or, you know, someone who is not maybe the most natural writer and therefore falls back on received tropes and that kind of stuff.
00:10:02.380But some of the allegations, as far as I can tell, concerned statements made by subjects in a study.
00:10:08.800And this is where things get a little bit hairy.
00:10:11.440Because that's bad for a couple of reasons, as you can imagine, right?
00:10:14.360First off, it's hard to do inadvertently, right?
00:10:18.060Accidentally reusing a phrase that you've heard somewhere, like we've talked about it.
00:10:22.320Like that's the fear of every writer, but it's also the reason we're afraid of it is because it's freaking easy.
00:10:27.580Once you've sat down with someone for two hours and transcribed their words, I don't quite see how someone else's discourse would slip into that, right?
00:10:36.520Wait, can you just tease out for me a little bit about like the exact nature of the accusation here?
00:10:41.480Or is it the notion that like, okay, he's attributing quotes to sources that he, you know, nominally did interviews with that actually come from other people's interviews with other sources?
00:10:53.780Like, as so often with these kinds of accusations, there is a likely scenario, but no one wants to spell it out because it could be any range of things.
00:11:03.240But what happens is that some of the phrases that this retired professor highlighted in this 2018 article about, I think, mostly black youth and their relationship to mental health professionals had appeared in another article.
00:11:19.220So it's not in someone else's data set, but in someone's article.
00:11:22.900It's not unimaginable, but it's not obvious to me how that would happen.
00:11:27.440Whereas something like a citation mistake or like some kind of canned phrasing in like a literature review section, which are also among the accusations, like that stuff is easy to imagine happening by accident.
00:11:38.040But you're saying that there's things in here that seem like, yeah, this was stolen work.
00:11:43.360So this kind of lifting would make the data useless, right?
00:11:47.640If people want to draw on his work, if my data is good, but I lift, as you say, a couple of paragraphs at the beginning about the historical circumstances of my data collection or whatever, that's not good.
00:13:06.220then were used to impugn the work of the field as a whole.
00:13:10.120So these poor folks who actually did go into trouble to interview young people and put that in their article now get to not only have been ripped off by another researcher, but they get told that like their field's not real, right, because of what he did.
00:13:26.640Yeah, you know, this is something I think a lot about in conservative thought is like the mistaking of a particular instance, like willful opportunistic mistaking of a particular instance for a general rule, right?
00:13:39.000These are people who, at least nominally, many on the right adhere to an understanding of the world in which collective identities and the large-scale forces of history have been granted far too much weight in our judgments.
00:13:54.700And what we need to really do is return to assessments of individual character and individual capacity and judge one another and ourselves on those terms rather than, you know, as products of history.
00:14:06.520That's not what they do with their enemies, right? What they do with their enemies is one bad sociology paper means all sociologists are, you know, charlatans and hacks. One black person who is making mistakes or telling lies means that all black people are necessarily stealing any good idea that they might seem to have, right?
00:14:28.740It means that any black person's accomplishment or prestige is somehow like false or stolen because all black people are characterized or like sort of tarred with the feather of this particular black person.0.99
00:14:41.700You know, they do this with like, you know, women like, oh, you want a woman to be president?0.99
00:14:46.740Well, what about Margaret Thatcher?0.98
00:14:54.200I think that does get resolved in the world view of somebody like Kofnus, who very much believes that races are biological realities that confer like a hierarchically organized series of intellectual gifts, right?0.99
00:15:08.900Nathan Kofnus does indeed believe that Jason Arday was stupid because he was black and was dishonest because he was black.1.00
00:15:14.680And then all black people are some version of stupid and dishonest, right?1.00
00:15:17.240He has like said as much on his sub stack.1.00
00:15:27.020And it's really interesting to think about, I mean, Kofnes, as you say, has been explicit about this.
00:15:31.600But even David Harris, the person who first brought attention to this particular article, frames it in really interesting ways.
00:15:37.780The Retraction Watch, which does a lot of this kind of, like, muckraking investigation of papers in academia, which has an interesting kind of political bent, although it's not sort of straightforwardly conservative.
00:16:28.040Yeah, which got published, challenged, and then republished with serious emendation that, as far as I can tell, having looked over the thing yesterday, really don't fix the issues that were first raised.
00:16:39.220But here's what Harris tells Retraction Watch, quote,
00:16:42.100Okay, so that's this guy just saying people who work on these bullshit inequality, like social justice warrior disciplines, can't hack it because they're my inferiors.0.89
00:17:03.100And that's why, you know, all of this work is bad.0.96
00:17:06.340This whole field is thereby tarred with the Jason Arday brush.
00:17:10.240Yeah, I also, like, it's funny, like, I think he means special issues, not special editions, but like, whatever, I guess we're just done with precision.
00:17:17.600As a member of the master race, he does not have to get his phrasing right.
00:17:22.520This kind of says that this work was never serious to begin with.
00:17:26.800And again, someone did talk to these young people and the findings are interesting, right?
00:17:31.860It's just that the person doesn't appear to have been our day, but rather Anjum Memon, Katie Taylor, Lisa Moibati, Josephine Sundin, Max Cooper, Thomas Scanlon, and Richard DeVisier.
00:17:42.980So the zooming out, like what does this guy mean, starts really early on.
00:17:47.760And that's where I think the sort of the media story here becomes far more important than whether or not this guy, quote unquote, deserved to have this job, what should have happened to him.
00:17:58.600It would have been for a university committee to decide before everyone decided to make him a stand-in for, yeah, for this, often devoted to activist issues like racial inequality.
00:18:10.660Yeah, no, they took this guy who was in a social science discipline that was considered woke, who was young, who was black, and they made him a symbol of all of the disturbed social hierarchies that they were trying to reaffirm, right?
00:18:26.420They made him into a symbol of racial justice struggles, gender justice struggles, disability justice struggles.0.58
00:18:33.780They made him into a symbol of all this shit that they find annoying and that they suspect, I think correctly, threatens their own status and their own monopoly on epistemic authority and, you know, power within these credentialing institutions.
00:18:50.060All right, folks, I think that's going to be it for the publicly accessible part of this episode.0.82