PU #253 - THE IMPACT OF JASON ARDAY - Re-Thinking Academia
Reading Jason Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, this week has been tough.
If you are not aware, Professor Arday was the Cambridge sociology of education professor who was hounded to death over the summer by accusations of plagiarism and academic misconduct. Accusations which were clearly racist at heart, and sadly part of a playbook of general hostility towards black academics Arday himself had spent much of his professional life writing about. He was a target, he was vulnerable, and his blood is on the hands of every journalist and academic who forced his resignation, and the universities that failed to protect him.
The memoir is a tough read for several reasons. First, because it is rare to hear about life in the classroom from the perspective of a non-verbal, non-reading, dyslexic, and autistic person and it really brought home to me, as a teacher, how difficult the standard classroom environment can be for so many students, and how unfit-for-purpose the one-size-fits-all approach of our education system can be, even with the meagre SEND support we can offer. (SEND support still, ultimately, has to get a child through a rigid education system intentionally not designed for their universal success). But the memoir is mostly tough to read because you can see, as a range of amazing teachers, friends, and family, support the young Arday’s educational journey, how the very things which unlocked words, language, and ideas to him as a young student are likely to be the very same things which lead him into an approach to academia which, under academia’s arcane and exclusionary rules about the nature of intellectual work, would make him an easy target for accusations of plagiarism later on down the line.
As I read about the ways in which friendly colleagues in his classes would share their notes with him when he couldn’t make his own, or verbally summarise books and papers he couldn’t read, I was touched by the innovative ways Arday was able to be educated and his celebration of the collective effort and will to get him through his schooling, which was praised within the book. The idea is beautiful — if I can’t take notes myself, someone else might do it for me and talk me through them. If I can’t write an essay by myself, maybe I can talk to you about my ideas and you can act as a scribe, shaping them for me to better articulate what I really want to say. The same way a ghost writer will work with a celebrity to turn their life into a book. The words are not “written” by the celebrity, but by their scribe, yet though not in the exact language used verbally by the celebrity, the words on the page communicate the truer message of what the non-writer wanted to say than they could ever have articulated if they had tried to write it themselves.
Students with special educational needs and/or disabilities in the classroom use a range of these sorts of methods to access the curriculum and produce work of their own every day: scribes to articulate a student’s thoughts in a more appropriate way for the format of a given assessment, or simply more quickly than they could by themselves, to meet the arbitrary time constraints of examination. Note-takers or immersive reading devices which can break down complicated texts or speeches into more digestible chunks of information to be processed. AI summaries of lengthy books to give their minds a better handle on the key points of otherwise overwhelming assigned reading, or simplified teacher notes which outline key ideas, vocabulary, or scholarship.
The idea is a simple one: if you cannot access the materials in one way — the standard, traditional way taught to the vast majority of neurotypical pupils — there are infinite alternative methods that can get you to the same end-point eventually. All different routes are equally valid.
I have personally embraced this idea in a course I have written, unique to my current school. A GCSE-equivalent Level 2 course in Philosophy. I have intentionally designed assessment in the course to play to my students’ diverse array of strengths, purposefully eschewing terminal written examination at the end of two years for four modular assessments after each distinct unit. Importantly, these unit assessments are not tests of memory and recall. They are intentionally practical assessments where students need to demonstrate skills of actually doing philosophy rather than simply the regurgitation of pre-taught scholarly arguments. They are tasks where scholarly understanding is seen through application, and the emphasis is on their own arguments, not simply those of learnt scholars. Although each assessment has a particular focus, students are also allowed, where possible, to choose the way in which they present their work so they can present it at their best. If a verbal presentation is assigned, they can perform the presentation live in front of the class, or they can pre-record it to video if they worry about speaking in front of an audience. No student should lose marks on their philosophy because of stage fright as a performer. And if they want, if speaking in general isn’t their thing, they can ask me to assess the script of the presentation rather than the verbal presentation itself.
Another task is set where a “philosophical response” can be presented as an essay, a documentary, a piece of creative art, or any other reasonable method of communication the student feels can allow them to meet the criteria. Importantly, the course is designed in such a way that I want them to meet the criteria. I want them to succeed. It is not written (as a GCSE course must be) to ensure that some pass but others fail. It is not written to sort and rank the students into best to worst. It is written to ensure that any able philosopher who does their best will be credited for that ability and effort.
I had noticed over my many years of teaching that so many great and able student philosophers who were excellent thinkers and brilliant verbally, were being put off studying GCSE Religious Studies or A-level philosophy because the focus on essay-writing and memorisation in those courses was something they knew they were weak at. Dyslexic students, especially, were put off studying RS or Philosophy. Every year my department was losing out on potential philosophers all because the system was set up to silence their best expression of philosophy and dictated that they fit their ideas into a mode of articulation they struggled with. And it made me wonder how many other great philosophers across the country we have all failed to nurture because of this sort of academic obstacle.
I have been delighted, therefore, to see such students flourishing within our new philosophy course, and producing high-level argument and synthesis of scholarly ideas in ways they never would have been able to were we to have insisted on the standard assessment approach of memory-based written exercises found in most GCSEs.
But what has this got to do with the tragic death of Professor Arday this summer?
At the time of the witch-hunt against him, I largely ignored the stories, because I could see the familiar and depressing theme emerging without needing to know all the details: another black individual was having their credentials and integrity questioned within an earned position of institutional authority because white colleagues (and white society in general) continues to struggle with the idea of racial equality. This happens over and over again, either organically, because of biases both conscious and subconscious within institutions and their members, or, more sinisterly, because of concerted and well-organised far-right, white supremacist campaigns to intentionally undo such progress in public life. I wasn’t interested in seeing another name dragged through the mud and career ruined by vultures in the media. But since his death, and after reading his memoir, I finally looked back this week at the actual accusations that had been made against his work. It was even more devastating to see that the supposed “academic misconduct” Arday had been accused of, which led to the end of his life, were all instances of allegedly copying passages from one source into his own work, without citation. Essentially passing off someone else’s work as his own.
Historically and unthinkingly, that has always been the very definition of plagiarism to me. Or at least sloppy scholarship. I was nine years old when I did it myself for the first, and last, time. A junior school project on the history of television and I had diligently gone to the library to do my research and then proceeded to copy out pages and pages of the books I’d borrowed to explain to my teacher the various ways in which the TV changed the world. When I was asked to speak to my teacher after school a few days later, along with my parents, it was the day I learned that such copying was actually a terrible thing called “plagiarism”. I had “stolen” someone else’s work and was meant to, instead, put the ideas I read about in the books into my own words. Or, if I was going to use another writer’s words, quote them, and attribute them clearly as a source.
Ever since that humiliating afternoon I have made sure never to pass someone else’s work off as my own. As a teacher, I have described such a thing to my students as one of the worse academic crimes imaginable. But after reading Arday’s memoir, I am now starting to question this inherited assumption I received from my teacher in Year 5. After all, I speak often to students (and fellow philosophy teachers) about the gatekeeping ways that women and people of colour have historically been excluded from academia, with works of philosophy not presented in the traditional ways demanded by the university often dismissed as lacking supposed rigour or validity despite the force of their alternatively presented arguments. Arguments in novels, pamphlets, speeches, and song. Thinking now about ableism, and the ways an education system already built for differentiated and unequal outcomes merely so that a future workforce can be ranked for different jobs and incomes in an economic system built on inequality and exploitation can make life doubly difficult for SEND students facing additional obstacles within this inherently flawed system, I suddenly realised that the norms around sources and citations actually have little to do with the worth of an argument. Worse — they might actively form obstacles to those, like Arday, who have based all previous learning on a more communal and collaborative model of shared resourcing.
I am not saying that Jason Arday did plagiarise work in his writing. But I am saying that if he did, we have to recognise that the so-called wrongness of doing so might not be immediately apparent to someone who has come through their education differently to the standard higher education academic. If, for example, a Teaching Assistant can give me a set of notes which articulate what I am trying to say better than I can myself, and I can then call those notes my own, drawing from them in assignments and other work, why can the same not be true about an idea expressed perfectly within an academic journal? If scholar X has already said it, or done the research for me, why can’t I take from that in the same way I was always able to claim ownership of the words of an academic “scribe” who wrote my essays for me?
When our (correct) practice of help for someone, is to help them articulate themselves better using someone else’s expertise, there needs to be an understanding that it might be far more difficult for such a person to differentiate between “stealing” someone else’s work (plagiarism) and simply “using” it. Perhaps something equivalent to the fair-use distinction in American copyright law? But also, it might also be worth asking why these standards of citation and referencing are deemed so essential within academic work in the first place? After all — is not a good argument a good argument regardless of the names of all the thinkers who provided its building blocks?
Despite wanting there to be some lofty answer to why academic referencing is so important, all I can think of right now when I consider the reasons we have it is ego, gatekeeping, and careerism. Essentially: I don’t want you using my words and ideas without crediting me because I want the credit. And why do I want the credit? Because we live in an individualist, dog-eat-dog world, and that credit is currency in a precarious career based on individualism and where there are only a limited number of positions. Having my name cited more than yours makes it more likely that I get the next job or promotion. Also, my hard work needs to be recognised or else people who currently employ me won’t know that I have worked so hard, and may choose to end my employment!
Gatekeeping I will come to, but if we take ego, gatekeeping, and career out of things, does it really matter if you were the first one to say something if I later use your idea as a jumping off point for my own ideas without citing you?
It is perhaps different if all I do is repeat your idea and say that it is my own. I guess if I am adding nothing to it and not building from your suggestion, I really am just parroting your words and passing them off as mine. But if your ideas are part of what lead me to my own, you don’t actually need to credit and kudos for this unless it matters to you either for your ego, or for your job. After all, in any normally referenced piece of academic research there are always going to be loads of people whose influence and ideas go uncredited. The conversations we had with friends, family members, students, colleagues, where ideas were gestated, born, road-tested and tweaked. The books, movies, songs, plays, and television shows that planted little seeds in our heads without our even knowing. The stray thought half-heard from a podcast or radio interview. A story on the news and the words of a journalist whose name you didn’t pick up. Smith and Jones (2026) may have written the classic academic source to which you attribute a definitive reference, but it was just as likely to be some unattributed friend or co-worker who really set you off on thinking about all this. As always the South African idea of Ubuntu is instructive here: I am because we are.
I am not necessarily saying the current system of academic referencing is terrible, or even wrong (for the purposes it is put in place for). But I am saying that citing all your sources is not actually essential to the quality of an argument in itself, and is more of a professional norm designed to prop up and perpetuate the closed shop of academia and keep out certain unwanted elements from academic writing. Both of these things (especially the idea that there are “unwanted elements”) have been historically exclusionary against women and people of colour, but now I am starting to see that this sort of gatekeeping also excludes against those with learning difficulties too. Not just in the obvious way — where general expectations of what a “good” piece of academic writing must look like, and which prior qualifications you are expected to hold before you are allowed to even have your work considered, form barriers to entry for those who struggled in schools that failed to meet their educational needs — but in the scenario which might well have been that of the late Professor Arday: where practices which enabled someone to overcome academic obstacles in the classroom potentially set them up to fail later in life once they try to use those same techniques within an academic career.
Giving credit where credit is due is an idea that only makes sense in a world where credit is currency and that currency is limited. This is not the only world that is possible. And every time we fail to see the contingency of our current norms and arrangements, especially where they exclude people or fail to properly serve our needs, we fail to see the opportunity to make the world a better place.
In the wake of reading Jason Arday’s memoir, I will continue to think about obstacles to learning faced by SEND students each day, and the obstacles in academia that continue to exist for people of colour, but I shall also rethink my inherited views about “academic misconduct” and plagiarism, and consider what academia might look like if what was focused on were the quality of the arguments, the data, and the public understanding of its published research, from a wide range of diverse and different voices, and not merely on ensuring an endless stream of barely-read publications that tick a box in a research-exercise and cite the right names in the preferred house-style so that each named academic’s (and your own) professional “impact” can be properly measured by those who hold the university’s purse-strings.
Author: DaN McKee
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