DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Arday’s students think Cambridge failed them. Now they want their grades reviewed.
Cambridge University could be forced to review the grades given to students of Jason Arday after graduates unhappy with their results said they were considering legal action.
A number of Mr Arday’s former students have complained that they received lower grades than expected after “inadequate” supervision by the professor. In one case, a student who asked to change supervisor was accused of being racist.
Separately, Prof Deborah Prentice, the university’s vice-chancellor, is facing demands to refund the tuition fees of students who were taught by Mr Arday after they were “deceived about the nature of their education”.
A mass refund or large-scale retrospective grade changes would be unprecedented in the university’s 800-year history.
Prof Prentice is also facing criticism for failing to grip the crisis engulfing the university, which has damaged its reputation on the international stage. The academics have accused the £507,000-a-year leader of the university of “inaction”, having made no public comments since The Telegraph first reported on the plagiarism row around Mr Arday a fortnight ago. He has now resigned.
It has also emerged that when Cambridge was sent fresh evidence of Mr Arday’s alleged plagiarism last year – having first been alerted to it in 2023 – the “responsible person” allocated to the case was Prof Hilary Cremin, the head of Mr Arday’s faculty who had told him he was “the best in the world” when he was hired.
As a Mister E. Blair wrote of Airstrip One, “It was always the women…who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy:”
How do you edit a book like that and not realize you’re now co-authoring (or as now seems much more likely, authoring) a title by one of the biggest poseurs in the world?
Related: Icarus in the Faculty Lounge.
I reached out to Arday’s editors—Dawn Davis in the United States, and Kris Doyle, who is publishing the book with Simon & Schuster UK—to ask them why the three-month coma and the shaman woman hadn’t made the cut in the published version of the book, and to find out what they thought of other inconsistencies in Arday’s story and the allegations of misconduct in his academic work. Neither of them chose to answer any questions.
I also tried to reach Eve Claxton, who co-wrote the book with Arday and whom he describes in the acknowledgments as “one of the most important people I have ever met in my life,” by phone and text. She did not respond.
Arday’s book agent, Jennifer Gates, the one who described his life story as “near mythic,” did not respond to multiple emails. A spokesperson for Simon & Schuster would say only that the company “is proceeding with publication” next week.
Exit quote:
There’s a moment near the end of Great and Unfortunate Things when Arday’s confidence begins to waver. He’s filling out his application for the professorship at Cambridge, and just then, as he draws to the brink of destiny, doubts begin to fill his mind. “What if I have completely overestimated my capabilities?” he writes. “What if my story ends up being a cautionary tale like Icarus about flying too close to the sun?”
What if.
Heh, indeed, to coin an Insta-phrase.
UPDATE: Raymond Shaw Jason Arday is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life:
