There was a dip after all the excitement of the Employment Tribunal. But, things are never dull in scandal-hit Cambridge University.
The average of the last week is ~ 3,000 visits a day, so at that rate, the chart will settle closer to 90,000 monthly visits by end of month. That is a figure well above the current monthly total of 38,000 visits shown on this figure.
With 11,400 views, the “Of Plagiarism and Cambridge University” is the most-read entry on the site, with the “The Office for Students Must Investigate” entry second.
Lots of interesting articles over the weekend
One of the best is this in the Observer By Kenan Malik
“The racism black academics face isn’t helped by leaping to Jason Arday’s defence”
Archived here
https://archive.is/Tzw2Q
There were so many articles, but please bring good ones to our attention.
Kenan Malik is sharp. His article is spot on besides one quite misleading comparison.
‘It is a story from which few emerge looking clean. Not Jason Arday… Nor the institutions that have exploited him to flaunt their supposed success in promoting diversity. Nor Arday’s defenders who, rather than look at the facts, have dismissed the allegations as “racist smears”.
Something might be said of the political emotion over the Arday case. It seems to have shifted. First there was defensiveness and denial at the Allegation stage, then anger and outrage at the Cover-Up and Lack of Due Diligence stage, and now there is sympathy and pity at the Resignation stage. The sympathy and pity is accompanying speculations of some kind of psychological disorder that causes delusions or fantasies to seem real.
All of these emotional distractions aside, the evidence shows plagiarism, data falsification and numerous preposterous statement of fact claims now proven false. No profession can survive or maintain public trust if star professors and top administrators are exempted from scrutiny and accountability. It remains unknown why Arday’s claims were not fact-checked in the hiring process. The question of who paid for Carter Ruck was not sufficiently answered. Neither is the question of whether Arday resigned or was paid off.
Arday was paid off — we’d guess between £ 500-750k. He knew too much. Of course he signed an NDA
Thank you 21percent.org
If paid between £500-750k plus the £1,000,000 book deal, Dr Arday fared better than Dr Calbert Graham, the students, academics and victims of plagiarism in many ways. He also fared better than the public who may never get answers about the university if there was NDA.
“he signed an NDA”
That is impossible! The website of the University says,
“The University does not use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or confidentiality clauses”
Right… 😉
Q Why appoint American from 3600 miles away as Vice Chancellor of Cambridge?
A She’s no understanding of what’s been going on & no established power base of her own
She’s dependent on senior leadership team – a prisoner of the people she is supposed to lead & hold to account
What we have witnessed is what happens whem the “senior leadership team” is left on autopilot for three years with no-one at the controls
Wait a second, turn the chart upside down. Isn’t that basically the flight trajectory of the university since Prentice took the controls?
Very good
Ha yeah from cruising altitude at 40,000 feet to the final nosedive that sounds about right
meters from the ground and HR are still squabbling in the cockpit trying to locate the “pull up” button
“Jason Arday taught me. Here’s what I learnt”
https://unherd.com/newsroom/jason-arday-taught-me-heres-what-i-learnt/
https://arthurbrooke.substack.com/p/cambridge-is-culpable-in-plagiarism
A 1st year student’s opinion piece on Arday that Varsity refused to publish
@Arty
Quite interesting, thank you very much indeed.
The Varsity published a few articles about O’Reilly. That’s how I learned of him. Their silence on Arday and his severe case is a contrast. I believe there was a personal element behind the O’Reilly case that doesn’t exist for Arday thankfully.
The Arday scandal has exposed the woeful state of central leadership at the University. The only talent they seem to possess is 100% ability to make the worst possible decision in every case.
But this failure of leadership is not confined to the Vice-Chancellor’s Office, Jesus College, the Faculty of Education or the Department of Sociology.
Imagine you are the Regius Professor of Medicine at Cambridge. One day, the head of your Cancer Research UK Oncology Division (“Professor Teflon”) tells you that a mid-career clinician has made allegations of research misconduct against another professor in the Division.
You have three options. Which would you choose?
OPTION A
Clear an hour in your diary. Invite Professor Teflon, the complainant and the accused into your office for tea and biscuits. Hear everyone out.
Within minutes it becomes obvious that the allegations are baseless—perhaps even malicious. You tell everyone to grow up, get back to work, and leave the matter there.
Problem solved in under an hour. Cost to the University: £1.50 for the biscuits.
OPTION B
Decide to steer well clear of the whole affair. Never meet the accused. Delegate everything to Professor Teflon, with HR and the University Research Office there to “advise and supervise”.
Congratulations. You have just piloted your department into HR Hell. Welcome to years of destruction engineered by the University’s incompetent and self-serving nomenklatura.
Before too long, one of your largest and most productive CRUK laboratories has disappeared. Two of your most highly cited professors have emigrated. Promising young researchers have been thrown out. The University is sending out threatening legal letters to silence critics, while paying a very expensive KC with expertise in promoting the Welsh language—but none in cancer research—to investigate what happened. For reasons known only to the University’s administrators, she is the ideal person for the job.
Cost to the University: at least £300,000 so far, with the bill still climbing. The wheels of destruction continue to turn.
OPTION C
Do everything in Option B. Then, while HR is turning your department into a bin fire, award a Professorial Chair to the individual whose allegations started the whole affair in the first place. Now you have a Professor with an h-index of 17 to replace the two professors you just lost (h index 161 and 176 respectively).
Very well informed — probably not the next scandal to break, or even the one after that, but it’s in the queue.
Might the KC be: https://oldsquare.co.uk/people/betsan-criddle-kc/
Be very interesting to know the University’s annual spend on KCs, no?
Your figures are almost certainly too low. The cases brought by Evans have likely seen well over a million in legal costs for both sides thus far, with damages, probably going to total more like two million. The CRUK case could easily be another million. The High Court / C4P saga last year must have cost a similar boatload, who can say. The cases brought by Foa are probably a similar figure and likely to end up like the Evans total, then all the other ongoing cases from POLIS and other departments are adding more millions to the bill. Throw in student class actions and you can add those in to the pile at a similar or larger magnitude. Then there is the question of whether the university contracted Carter-Ruck and/or is supporting him over police investigations. Of course, the university doesn’t publish these figures in the accounts, so we can only speculate, but what we do know is that annual administrative spend is now £1.2bn, a 50% increase, of which 6m alone was given out in 2024-25 in severance awards and probably also climbing fast.
At any rate it is a huge figure, and as you say, with good management, these could all have cost £1.50 in tea and biscuits.
If they wanted to quell such speculation all they have to do is include the figure in the annual accounts. Why don’t they?
@Feepayer
Sharp.
The KC was, indeed, Betsan Criddle, and given the length of time her ‘review’ took, I cannot believe that it cost only £300k. The accused’s legal bill was enormous (and still climbing).
The University have just lost the Whistleblowing Tribunal.
Given they used celebrity barrister Akua Reindorf for a 4 week Employment Tribunal, the bill for matters in Astronomy must be approaching half a million.
“Imagine you are the Regius Professor of Medicine at Cambridge. One day, the head of your Cancer Research UK Oncology Division (“Professor Teflon”) tells you that a mid-career clinician has made allegations of research misconduct against another professor in the Division.”
It depends if the the mid-career clinician raised concerns formally or informally. They should have raised these concerns informally initially as suggested in the relevant policy.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/procedure-for-the-handling-of-an-allegation-of-research-misconduct-20260212.pdf
If that was the case, option A could be appropriate, with or without biscuits. If the the mid-career clinician raised concerns formally, then an “investigation” would be needed. But even this option has multiple stages whereas an initial screen may dismiss the complaint for lack of evidence.
This being said, the University does not follow their policies. They use it to justify their practices whenever possible, but when they want, they do the opposite of what is stated, and if you raise concerns about it, they will ignore you at best.
One question is, what did the mid-career clinician have that the other senior academics accused of misconduct did not have?
Another question is, wasn’t Professor Richard Gilbertson the head of a Cancer Research UK Oncology Division and now the Master of Gonville & Caius College following the retirement of Professor Pippa Rogerson?
Clear that the dam is about to break & flood the University
The Astronomy and Arday scandals are out there.
The press are hunting like wolves for more scandals
I fear the press surely already have all the scandals. It does rather seem as if they are simply waiting for each story to enter a lull, before they immediately hit with the next one, and keep the narrative going.
After all if that has been the pattern of the last six months, why would we expect it to stop?
Seems like “the beatings will continue until morale improves”
Interesting that the monthly visitor total is now exactly the same as the student and staff headcount for the whole university. Perhaps you should give up the pretense and rename this blog “The Real Cambridge Reporter”? I imagine those who don’t follow along here are now in the minority, not least of all since Varsity has vacated the scene.
“Britain’s intellectual elites have never looked so cowardly”
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/britains-intellectual-elites-never-looked-cowardly-4686530
“Cambridge’s response so far keeps skirting the scale of the problem, because it fails the basic test of crisis management: namely, to get ahead of unwelcome events and form a robust and transparent plan to deal with them, rather than seek excuses and end up in a miasma of competing and contradictory messages.
The Vice Chancellor Deborah Prentice arrived from Princeton to polish up Cambridge’s international appeal (good luck with that right now) and is responsible for its administration, which looks erratic in this case. And where is the affable Lord (Chris) Smith – the Chancellor and ex-Labour minister, whose role description is “to ensure University officers duly perform their duties”? What are the two waiting for? Rightly, academics across the political spectrum are now saying that this reflects a failure of leadership and want an independent inquiry.
The response from Sonita Alleyne, the master at Jesus College (where Arday was, until his resignation, a fellow), is still bemoaning, “a very difficult time for Professor Arday and his family”, adding, “We hope that they are now afforded peace and privacy”. If you seek that, publishing a memoir is hardly the best way to go about it.
Arday is entitled to “take time to heal”, though there is little sign of self-awareness in his resignation statement beyond self-pity and an aggrieved sense that this mess is the fault of others. People make mistakes; circumstances can be muddy but mitigating.
Yet dismissing serious discrepancies because they damage a convenient set of beliefs is the opposite of honesty. It feeds the suspicions of those who really do not care about more opportunity for the under-served – and it ends, as tall stories often do, in a falling house of cards to the detriment and shame of all who looked the other way when the story didn’t suit them.”
It’s surely right publishing a memoir won’t ensure peace and privacy.
An amazing cast of characters:
Prof Smallman
Prof Drinkalot
Prof Teflon
Prof Viciouswoman