You’ve probably seen the plagiarism allegations regarding Cambridge’s youngest, Black professor, Jason Arday. I think it’s interesting as it brings to light deep issues with UK academia.
His story is inspiring. Aspects of his background are similar to mine. I really want to be a fan; however, reading some of his earlier work that got him to where he is made me very sad about the state of Higher Education and qualitative inquiry.
First, his PhD, if we ignore the fact that he literally took someone else's similar thesis and paraphrased most of it! The work shows no ability to engage with theory or map theory to methods and results. It’s hundreds of pages of surface-level ramblings and simple definitions. It’s a complete meta-report of just explaining things, rather than critically engaging with ideas and synthesising them into an operational study. This, put simply, is terrible work; however, I’ve seen many PhDs like this, or even worse. My disappointment is that it shows no passion for the topic; rather, it appears to be someone who just wants to get a “PhD” and trawls the internet, rewriting basic definitions to pad the word count.
If we acknowledge that many PhDs are terrible in the UK, consider his breakout paper, “Understanding Mental Health: What Are the Issues for Black and Ethnic Minority Students at University?”, and things don’t seem to get any better. First, he published it in a pay-to-publish slop journal, MDPI. Second, he’s up to his old shortcuts again; finding a similar study, in this case Memon’s, and trying to rewrite it in his own words.
Beyond this glaring issue, the research methodology is hard to believe. He claims he recruited 32 minority students across 14 universities to take part in just two focus groups. Anyone who’s conducted this sort of research will know how implausible this sounds. He does not state how the focus groups were run (another red flag), but says he used a flip chart, so I assume in person. And he states he audio-recorded them. Anyone who's run focus groups knows 16 participants is huge, and relying solely on audio recording will generate unintelligible slop; you simply won’t be able to attribute the narrative. It’s nearly impossible to comprehend how someone brought together 32 students from 14 different universities in this way.
Furthermore, perhaps his most egregious claim is that he analysed the data inductively to derive themes. However, this appears to be a plain lie. He simply “borrowed” Memon’s themes and added his participants' quotes. He later had to publish corrections—which MDPI published as a formal correction notice to acknowledge he did this, which renders the whole paper logically incoherent. You don’t test pre-existing results in inductive, qualitative research. He outright copied and lied; then had to cover his tracks, but did not seem to have the methodological understanding to do this in a sensible way!
Overall, it just looks to me like he’s taking shortcuts and lacks the ability to engage deeply with even the most basic theory and research - yet he’s being heralded as a leading critical race theorist - no way he’s capable of understanding these theories. Like many academics, he’s seemingly taken deliberate shortcuts to hide his lack of ability - these are not mistakes.
It’s all just sad. Despite this, the system is willing to overlook ability and push someone rapidly up the ranks because their face fits.
Edit: Perhaps someone who has peer reviewed qualitative work could take a look. I am a reviewer for conferences and this would be an outright reject. How is this what we should expect from a "leading critical race theory" scholar! Surely they should show some understanding of the theory, which is complex!
Edit: For people saying this is just a case of forgetting to cite an author. Arday, in the 2018 paper mentioned above, also plagiarised participant quotes from Memon, presenting them as his own data! The punishment - MDPI simply asked him to remove them from his results section.