Would ChatGPT have hired Jason A. K. Arday?

It’s Academic Integrity Day here on this blog… (see Plagiarist Claudine Gay getting paid $3.1 million/year after “resigning” from Harvard)

The smartest people in the Islamic Republic of the UK hired Jason A. K. Arday to hold a professorship at Cambridge University in 2023, which is a huge appointment (what we call “assistant professors” they call “mere lecturers”). He’s been in the news recently for Claudine Gay-style plagiarism combined with an unusual life story. From “Icarus in the Faculty Lounge” (The Atlantic):

According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time [2023], Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”

That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants [enrichers!]

Arday’s grad-school alma mater, Liverpool John Moores University, which first received direct complaints about the dissertation last fall, did its own investigation and cleared Arday of wrongdoing. “A confidential procedure was conducted,” the university told me in a statement. “Professor Arday’s PhD still stands.” But some of Arday’s other academic papers had potential problems too—and they seemed much worse than the mere borrowing of language. Quotes from structured interviews that Arday claimed to have performed closely resembled those used by other researchers; parts of some interview responses also reappeared across different studies under Arday’s name, attributed to different people. This duplication, if deliberate, would be something other than plagiarism—it would be academic fraud.

Might this be Donald Trump’s fault?

Some of the people who were going after Arday had a political agenda. Cofnas, the philosopher who put Arday’s dissertation through a plagiarism checker last month, argues for a “hereditarian revolution” based on the idea that innate differences in intelligence and other traits exist across racial groups. (He also claims that “the humanities and much of the social sciences have been slain on the altar of DEI.”)

Everyone loves an abuse survivor:

The doctors who assessed him as a toddler told his mother that “there’s no one in there” and that he was “no better than a vegetable.” Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.) As a boy, Arday rocked and hummed and banged his head until he bled; he slammed cupboard doors and smeared his feces on the walls. Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize.

Arday is nearly deaf in one ear; he’s dyslexic; he finds simple math befuddling; he has “marked difficulties” with memory, reading, and processing skills. As a teen, he was beaten so severely by a group of kids his age that he became an epileptic. To make his way through secondary school while—by his own account—illiterate, he needed ample help: support assistants who sat beside him in class and took notes on his behalf.

(What good are “notes” if a person is “illiterate” (unable to read)?)

By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter.

Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style.

As his dissertation deadline approached, Arday started having blurry vision; medical scans revealed a brain tumor. After it was removed, he had a ministroke and lost his short-term memory. “I’d worked on my thesis for over thirty months, and now I was reading it as if for the first time,” he writes. As one might expect, his thesis defense did not go smoothly. One examiner was suspicious of his work: “I am struggling to see that there is any original contribution here,” she said, according to the book. But Arday, who often likens himself to Rocky Balboa, managed to fight back, and in the end, he passed. (The memoir brings up the fictional boxer in about a dozen different contexts.)

(Note that Rocky is now a Florida resident (Journal of Popular Studies) and stopped paying taxes to Gavin Newsom in 2024)

More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”—delaying his attempt just long enough for a member of his family to rescue him. “In the end,” he writes, “my decision to listen to the Eagles likely saved my life.”

I reached out to the book’s fact-checker [at Simon & Schuster] to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. … the book’s release is still on track and that it has even been designated as an “Editors’ Pick” on Amazon

The Professor’s PhD thesis is available online. I downloaded it and asked ChatGPT to “evaluate the quality of research and writing”. Some excerpts from the full interaction:

The biggest problem is the sample and selection mechanism. There are only four intervention participants, selected from 46, and selection expressly included whether the candidates demonstrated characteristics that the researcher thought “resonated with the study’s aims and objectives” and a desire/capacity to improve their teaching. … More seriously, the researcher was a lecturer at the university attended by the subjects and already had relationships with them.

There is also no convincing counterfactual. There is:

no control/comparison group,
no random assignment,
only four highly selected subjects,
an intervention that the researcher helps facilitate,
and outcomes that are overwhelmingly based upon the subjects’ own narratives and perceptions.

The thesis itself eventually admits a crucial point: it cannot determine with certainty whether improved reflective practice would have occurred naturally rather than because of the peer-mentoring intervention.

Contribution to knowledge: This is probably the weakest part of the intellectual case for a PhD.

Writing quality: This is much easier to judge: the prose is substantially below the standard I would expect in the final, examined copy of a PhD thesis from a British university. The problems aren’t occasional typos. They’re pervasive. Even the title contains an erroneous apostrophe… Throughout the thesis there is a characteristic tendency to take a simple proposition and turn it into an elaborate nominalized construction. … Most problematic is the repeated use of inflated pseudo-technical expressions that obscure ordinary ideas.

The prose also affects the scholarship: This is more important than cosmetic proofreading. The convoluted language sometimes makes it difficult to determine exactly what proposition is being asserted and how strongly.

Should Arday have been given the big job at Cambridge?

Cambridge’s published criteria for its highest professorial level say that a Professor at Grade 12 should demonstrate: “outstanding achievement in research and research leadership assessed by reference to international levels of excellence”… Against that benchmark, Arday’s 2023 record looks unusually thin.

Cambridge’s February 2023 announcement … emphasizes his work on race … and, very explicitly, the importance of his appointment to Cambridge’s efforts to increase representation of people from disadvantaged and ethnic-minority backgrounds.

Asked to place Arday in a percentile of people in the same field, ChatGPT grudgingly estimates “somewhere around the 30th–50th percentile overall” (i.e., quite a few people with PhDs in education/sociology are far dumber than Dr. Arday!).

Here’s the Amazon page showing that this is, according to their experts in Seattle, among the world’s “Best Biographies & Memoirs”:

Throw out your Life of Johnson. It’s not among the “Best Biographies”.