by Ian Paul, Psephizo
It is hard to say anything original about the tragic affair of Jason Arday, his appointment as a professor in Cambridge, the challenges made to his academic and personal claims, his resignation, and his tragic death by suicide. At the centre of all this is a human being, and someone who has now left wife, children, and friends bereft. If you are someone who prays, pause for a minute to pray for his family and those deeply grieving over his death.
But we need also to remember that compassion and understanding are not opposed, but need each other—in this case as in all others. I keep returning to the words of Dom Hélder Câmara, the liberation theologian and Catholic prelate who worked with the poor in Brazil under its dictatorship in the 1960s to 80s. “When I help the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor are poor, they call me a communist.” To understand is a key part of compassion, since it makes us attend to the issues that have caused harm and need to be addressed.
Lots of questions have been thrown out around the Arday case, and I can only address the key ones here. The first claim was “He was subjected to disproportionate scrutiny about his academic plagiarism.” As someone who has been engaged in academic work at undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate level, I can assure you that this is not the case. Plagiarism is the number one, “unforgivable sin” in academic work, for two reasons. First, it claims that you know and understand things that you do not. And secondly, it robs others of credit for their work. Academia is a strange mix of competition and collaboration—competition because there are limited numbers of jobs (especially in my field of biblical studies) and the jobs (in theory) go to the best qualified, and collaboration because all academic work builds on the previous work of others.
For the last ten years, when I have been marking undergraduate and graduate work, all essays have first been put through plagiarism detection software. In a batch of essays, there will always be one or two where are some serious questions that need to be explored, and this involves going to the sources, comparing with the essay in question, and looking at the way the work has been presented. A ‘first offence’ needs help and training, so that students know how properly to give credit for citing the work of others. In graduate work there is less tolerance. But at postgraduate, PhD level, there must be zero tolerance, since a key criterion for a PhD is that the candidate has made an original contribution to knowledge.