The Black Professor

[Justin Passing]

I think the Lawrence ranting has a lot that's valid. Arday was used egregiously. Those at the universities should have known and behaved better, yes.

Arday was a complex individual but he would have known he was a fake, lining himself up to derision and ridicule. Weaponising the race card for any criticism of his behaviour whatsoever isn't forgivable on any "mental illness" grounds. As someone said above, "the worst sort of racism". He knew what he was doing and he knew he was emotionally frail, he was bright enough to work that out.
An academic who denies copying what was obviously copied, especially to the extent he did, has to go. He should have simply gone a while ago, simply disappearing so people forgot about him.
I'm not surprised he did away with himself, he boxed himself into a corner.
Maybe I'm cynical but I wouldn't be surprised if he left a note saying "Look what you made me do". But I wouldn't have it. He was responsible for letting himself get where he was. No sympathy for him here, only to his folks, for what he did to them.

 

[Odds]

the problem with any form of research is there is a risk of unintentional plagiarism. You read 100s of articles, books etc. have discussions, and formulate opinions, and then write your own work up, and some of what you say is obviously influenced by what you have studied - that is the whole point really. With AI tools now, it is probably easier to determine when somebody's work might have been influenced by anothers, and without reference.

If the same level of scrutiny was applied to every research paper ever written, similar patterns would probably emerge.

The Telegraph reported that analysis had found more than 100 passages in his PhD were similar to another thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a student at Brunel University of London, published six years previously. An earlier investigation by Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded his PhD in 2015, did not uphold the charges of plagiarism but said they were probably caused by “honest and reasonable error”.

Arday told the Guardian last week: “There have been multiple thorough investigations across several institutions as a result of the allegations, and immense scrutiny, including with an academic misconduct panel who concluded that there was no plagiarism or academic misconduct.”

I wonder, then, how a sustained campaign over three years was justified after the initial conclusion by JMU. It reminds me of the case made against Ed Sheeran over one of his songs and his defence was so much music is listened to these days it's almost impossible to not hear elements of other tunes in some of them.