Here is an extract from the “methods” section of a 2022 article in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, on ‘Race, racism and precarious employment in higher education’:
“The study involved 10 UK-based universities, including Russell Group and post-92 institutions. Convenience sampling was used to recruit participants, which was facilitated through networks and recommendations among staff of colour working within the sector. The recruited participants were staff of colour (N = 18) aged between 27 and 52 years, who were in a range of academic (n = 13, 72%) and professional services (n = 5, 28%) roles”.
In plain English, this means that the group on whom the author undertook research was made up of eighteen university employees, whom he recruited through his personal connections.
These eighteen souls were asked the following questions:
- What has/have been your experience(s) of working on precarious contracts?
- What role has race/racism played in your experience(s) of working on precarious contracts?
- What has been the impact of precarious work on your career progression and trajectory?
- What other impacts (if any) of precarious work have you experienced?
- What differences (if any) have you experienced compared to your white counterparts?
A sample answer:
“Being on temporary contracts is one of the best ways of keeping us Black people in the academy on the plantation. We have to work, but we don’t have as many rights. (P8, Black male, academic)”.
As that quote suggests, the thrust of the article—explicitly guided by critical race theory—is that precarious university employment is, for employees “of colour”, a manifestation of racism.
Now precarious university employment is known colloquially as “adjunct hell” for good reason: it is often highly exploitative, so that few who have engaged in it have not felt like serfs. Nor—as the world, and even UK academia, is a big place—can one rule out that the common indignities are sometimes supplemented by racism. However universities are by and large equal opportunities exploiters, and their administrative commitment to “diversity” makes talk of the “plantation” extremely overblown. Moreover, and crucially, it is impossible to draw serious general conclusions, of the sort the article proposes (despite a caveat that “the findings in the current study are not generalisable”), from a questionnaire put to eighteen people, recruited at the author’s whim, and asked leading questions. As a piece of research, this article has almost no value whatsoever.
As a piece of research, this article from the British Journal of Sociology of Education has almost no value whatsoever.
Now I have only skimmed the article: it is far too dull to read in its entirety. But its author is a very interesting man indeed: one Jason Arday, Professor of the Sociology of Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, and currently at the center of an academic and media firestorm.
Arday’s story, as he tells it, is fabulous, in several senses of the term. The youngest black professor in the UK could not, due to some form of autism, speak until he was eleven, or read and write till he was eighteen. He has accomplished extraordinary athletic feats, in distance-running, football and snooker. He has raised millions for charity through his running. He finished his thesis when recovering from a brain tumour. He has survived terrifying racist attacks. Word is still awaited on whether he can juggle blindfold and invented fish.
Arday is now in trouble because he has irrefutably been shown to have committed plagiarism and data fraud in his doctoral thesis and published work. His personal story is also gradually unravelling. Scores of people around Arday must have long known he was a wrong’un, but, in a sign of the times, it has taken semi-professional racist Nathan Cofnas to break the story (more hearteningly, the Guardian has now published its own damning report).
How representative is Jason Arday’s work of the overall quality of scholarship in the discipline of Education?
Arday’s success, and the fawning credulity with which his tall tales were embraced by such institutions as the BBC, raise ugly questions, the answers to most of which are only too obvious. But one question that will get relatively little airtime, because it does not fit neatly into the DEI wars, is that raised by Arday’s above-cited article (and also by Stephen Vainker): how representative is Arday’s work of the overall quality of scholarship in the discipline of Education?
Hilary Cremin, who is Arday’s boss as head of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, has stated to him in front of the BBC’s cameras that he is “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do”. This is surely the hyperbole of a publicist and patroness, and the British Journal of Sociology of Education appears to be a rather low-profile publication in the field. Still Arday was appointed to a major Education job in one of the world’s most famous universities: DEI incentives notwithstanding, it is not plausible that his research is vastly inferior to the standard in the field.
I know of no evidence that Arday’s 2022 article involves fraud or plagiarism. But the horror here is that, if it does, that will scarcely render it more worthless than if its production was all above-board. Can anything of substance be learnt from this article, except that the discipline of Education is in bad trouble, if it smiles on the publication of this sort of material?
Universities’ Education faculties claim to have formed an expertise that allows them to guide teachers, from kindergarten through to doctoral supervision, in their own practice. In many cases, this claim is bolstered by regulatory structures, whereby various teaching jobs require qualifications conferred by the Education faculties. This is a scenario ripe for abuse, both because would-be teachers and lecturers may have to take Education courses whether they value them or not, and because essential competence in teaching can never be imparted from such courses: that can only be learnt through practice and through study of the subject matter one is teaching. Yet as long as its courses are mandatory, de iure or de facto, an Education faculty will not fail necessarily merely because its teaching and research are hollow and lazy.
Of course, it does not follow that all work done in Education faculties is hollow or lazy. But where structures exist to enable that sort of work, some will inevitably take advantage. Jason Arday is clearly a sort of con man, and like every successful con man, he has shown a fine instinct for locating a soft target.
