The Patchwork Professor: A Case Study in Plagiarism, Authorship, and the Academic Death Penalty

“When I started writing academic papers, I had no idea what I was doing. I did not have a mentor and no-one ever showed me how to write. Everything I submitted got violently rejected. The peer review process was so cruel, it was almost funny, but I treated it as a learning experience and, perversely, began to enjoy it.” – Professor Jason Arday

Standing with the estimated 30,000 people in Trafalgar Square at the vigil for Professor Jason Arday, I felt like something of a charlatan myself, as I had largely bought into the picture being painted of him by supposedly reputable broadsheets and seemingly credible academics as “a liar and a fantasist and an academic fraud”. I was there nonetheless because 229 articles in 22 days smacked of persecution and, despite what some of my students may tell you, I do not believe plagiarism should be a capital crime punishable by death. In the days since that death, however, I have seen a slow and steady stream of increasingly convincing counterclaims, and the disproportionately hostile reactions these seem to engender, culminating for me in this response to an article presenting evidence for the seemingly inconsequential claims Arday made about his charity work and sporting achievements.

It was at this point that I decided it was time to suit up and dive down the rabbit hole. What I found did indeed leave me feeling suitably shamed.

Conducting my own analysis of the textual overlap at the heart of this scandal between his PhD thesis, Arday (2015), and its thematically related precursor, Zwozdiak-Myers (2009), I thought I recognised the pattern almost immediately; patchwriting is a developmental source-use practice familiar to those of us who teach academic writing, where someone inexperienced in the genre relies heavily on a model text for their wording, syntax, structure and sequencing of ideas. This is apparent right from the mapping:

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Comparison of Arday (2015, p.28) and Zwozdiak-Myers (2009, p.7).

This mimicry of Zwozdiak-Myers (2009), whom, it should be noted, he did cite when drawing upon her ideas rather than merely her language, is mostly confined to the introduction and literature review, where no obvious attempt to pass off her research as his own is apparent. And while this earlier work seems to have served as more than merely a writing exemplar, providing something of an analytical scaffold for how parts of the research were framed, organised and interpreted, the empirical core, including the data and substantive findings, appears to be Arday’s own. Such scaffolding should not, of course, have remained so conspicuous in a completed PhD thesis, leaving the work open, as it does, to quite reasonable accusations of plagiarism. But reports that Arday received severely depleted supervision during his doctorate, and his own account, long before the scandal broke, that he had no mentor and nobody showed him how to write academic papers are somewhat suggestive as to why this might have happened. So too is reporting both during and pre-scandal describing him as attempting to master his discipline through mimicry and reciting content verbatim. This may also go some way to explaining how the awarding university’s confidential, and thus admittedly opaque, academic-misconduct procedure, which had access to contextual evidence necessary for a full and fair investigation, recently concluded that the citation issues were the result of “honest and reasonable error” and that the overlap was “well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time”. And while that conclusion is certainly not beyond dispute, a generated similarity report, however striking, should not by itself overrule the official position, to which Cambridge University has, in accordance with standard practice, deferred: “Professor Arday’s PhD still stands.”

Accusations of plagiarism in Arday’s journal articles mostly relate to a small cluster of qualitative research reports dated from 2018 to 2022, a time when he was publishing profusely and rising rapidly through the academic ranks. The write-ups and analytical frameworks of the main empirical research strand of his output at this time show varying degrees of modelling on Memon et al. (2016), a relationship that was insufficiently acknowledged in Arday (2018), Arday, Belluigi & Thomas (2021) and Arday (2022a). Although these source-use problems were addressed in published corrections to the first and second papers, the revision of Arday (2018) introduced further unacknowledged changes that highlighted additional concerns. Most significant was the removal or reformulation of a number of participant quotes which in places had appeared to have been reconstructed using the earlier work’s data and even its analysis. A similar concern recurs in Arday (2022b), where quotes, which have not been quietly corrected in revision, closely match those attributed to participants in his own earlier study. Another unacknowledged change was the removal of elements from the reported methodology, specifically the use of NVivo and an independent second coder, leaving open the question of whether they had actually been followed. More mundane, though nonetheless persistent, inconsistencies in participant labelling, demographic details and aggregate sample arithmetic, which finally bring Arday & Jones (2022) into the mix, seem more indicative of poor research bookkeeping than outright fabrication. So, although much of the empirical core of this series of studies still appears independently derived, taken together the more substantial concerns suggest to me that his patchwriting, left uncorrected, had not only continued but begun to slip dangerously into academic misconduct, which the subsequent corrections failed fully to acknowledge or resolve. While vehemently denying fabricating research or deliberately plagiarising, Arday admitted shortcomings in his early academic writing and said it only really improved once he could afford a proofreader. It is notable that the issues diminish as he progresses, while the small selection of work examined outside this cluster, both before and since, including other qualitative empirical research, has raised little to no concern.

So it is that we finally come to the rather contentious hodgepodge of concerns that can perhaps best be classified as inflated biographical claims. Most serious are those relating to academic posts and achievements, comprising widely circulated professional biographies inaccurately representing genuine academic affiliations as Visiting or Honorary Professorships, ambiguous biographical and third-party listings of a book then in preparation but ultimately never published, and a single off-the-cuff reference to an unsubstantiated qualification that was never repeated elsewhere. Similar, though generally weaker, concerns relate to his charity work, comprising community activities that have proved difficult to independently corroborate rather than demonstrably false, descriptions of overseas aid work whose apparent contradiction turns largely on the interpretation of a common preposition, and disputes hinging on his choice of pronouns when relating his fundraising total. His sporting achievements fare little better as a source of scandal, comprising a couple of relatively modest claims that were misrepresented in a summary of a video interview, some reasonably well-supported feats that critics appear not to have seriously checked, and another dispute that seems largely to turn on whether rest days should have been included when reporting its duration. Finally, concerns relating to his medical history comprise attempts to question his disability on the basis of muddled recollections from childhood acquaintances, an inability to verify procedures whose records are, of course, confidential, and critics somehow mistaking a reference to a community support programme for a major ITV series of the same name. There are, of course, certain dubious claims that are not so easily dismissed, particularly those arising once the controversy had taken what Arday described as a “profound toll,” and I have undoubtedly missed some doozies in the torrent, but given what we now know about his deteriorating mental health and their irrelevance to his academic work, I'll leave it here for now.

Despite only having gotten to Professor Arday through a patchwork analysis of his weakest works and contested claims, I can still say that what I have found is an ambitious, though ultimately unprepared, academic who wanted to change the world for the better. That’s not to say he couldn’t have done better: taking responsibility for the errors in his early papers, rather than radically rewriting them without explanation, for a start. He was, however, clearly failed by a depleted doctoral supervision team and an awarding institution that left him seemingly insufficiently equipped for the early-career research expected of him; by journal editors who published that research without adequate review; by academic employers that rocketed him up through the ranks before he was entirely ready; and by colleagues and the press that failed to perform due diligence before widely publicising any and all concerns. After all, as Howard (1995) argues in her seminal paper on patchwriting, from which I craftily cribbed the subtitle of this post, not all plagiarism is worthy of the academic death penalty; sometimes, as it appears to be in this case, it is instead indicative of a researcher in need of greater support. And as an exemplar of just how slim some of the evidence was that helped erode the support Arday might reasonably have expected from those around him, I’d like to present this excerpt from the bio of the commenter in the introduction who shamed me and maintained that lies are lies.

Now let me be clear: I have no real reason to doubt any of the claims being made in this clumsy biographical snippet, but I can tell you that I have been unable to independently verify many of them, which, if I understand correctly from the Arday case, means they merit the same treatment in the national press. And while I would like to conclude from this that such great and unfortunate things could happen to any of us, I strongly suspect that that is not true. For while I have no idea how big a part EDI played in Arday’s meteoric rise, I’m pretty sure I know how significant it was in his catastrophic fall.

Reference List:

Arday, J.A.K., 2015. An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research. PhD thesis. Liverpool John Moores University. doi:10.24377/LJMU.T.00004552.

Arday, J., 2018. Understanding mental health: What are the issues for Black and Ethnic Minority students at university? Social Sciences, 7(10), 196. doi:10.3390/socsci7100196.

Arday, J., 2022a. ‘More to prove and more to lose’: race, racism and precarious employment in higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43(4), pp.513–533. doi:10.1080/01425692.2022.2074375.

Arday, J., 2022b. No one can see me cry: understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic staff in higher education. Higher Education, 83(1), pp.79–102. doi:10.1007/s10734-020-00636-w.

Arday, J., Belluigi, D.Z. and Thomas, D., 2021. Attempting to break the chain: reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 53(3), pp.298–313. doi:10.1080/00131857.2020.1773257.

Arday, J. and Jones, C., 2022. Same storm, different boats: the impact of COVID-19 on Black students and academic staff in UK and US higher education. Higher Education. Published online 25 October 2022. doi:10.1007/s10734-022-00939-0.

Howard, R.M., 1995. Plagiarisms, authorships, and the academic death penalty. College English, 57(7), pp.788–806. doi:10.58680/ce19959094.

Memon, A., Taylor, K., Mohebati, L.M., Sundin, J., Cooper, M., Scanlon, T. and de Visser, R., 2016. Perceived barriers to accessing mental health services among Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities: a qualitative study in Southeast England. BMJ Open, 6(11), e012337. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-012337.

Zwozdiak-Myers, P., 2009. An analysis of the concept reflective practice and an investigation into the development of student teachers’ reflective practice within the context of action research. PhD thesis. Brunel University.