I’ve already written about what the Jason Arday story says about journalism; this post will be about what it says about universities. If you missed the previous posts, you can catch up here and here. In brief, I’m afraid that this scandal will change nothing directly within higher education, though it may wake more people up to the fact that radical change is needed.
Almost all the calls for scrutiny are directed towards the media, which did its job, rather than Cambridge University or its education department, which didn’t. A petition calling for a public inquiry into the media’s role in Arday’s death set up by the Good Law Project has already passed 150,000 signatures. Meanwhile the independent inquiry promised by Cambridge University in September is getting off the ground, but it’s so unserious it’s hard to believe.
Its stated purpose is to “examine the support, interventions and protections available to Professor Jason Arday”, not to investigate how someone whose CV was so thin and whose work was under suspicion of plagiarism was appointed to a professorial chair in one of the world’s most prestigious universities. Meanwhile Nathan Cofnas, who broke the story of Arday’s plagiarism, is not only suspended from his short-term, insecure post-doctoral position at Ghent University in Belgium, he’s under criminal investigation.
Whatever you think about Cofnas’s work, it should surely be obvious that nothing he said came anywhere near to any reasonable threshold for prosecution. I don’t think I coined this expression, but searching doesn’t turn up anyone else having done so: the contrast between the canonisation of Arday and the vilification of Cofnas is a stark example of what we might call the Iron Law of Whistleblowing, namely that the whistleblower ends up being investigated while whatever they are reporting is ignored.
