This Substack is meant as a video-based companion to the article I published Friday with The Washington Free Beacon about the organizing meeting on Tuesday of the UCU Solidarity Movement, an activist caucus within the British University and College Union, to respond to the crisis over the recent death of the former Cambridge professor Jason Arday. I obtained a recording of the nearly two-hour Zoom meeting of several dozen activist-minded British academics.
The central thrust of the meeting was that these academics, who were predominantly white, but who also included a substantial cohort of South Asians, was that there was a racist right-wing conspiracy to hound black academics out of their jobs in the United Kingdom. This notion was short on specifics.
The only person they clearly identified as behind this conspiracy was Nathan Cofnas, the American academic and “race realist” who on Friday was suspended from Ghent University in Belgium after his July 21 exposé about Arday’s alleged academic misconduct started a chain reaction—including an explosion of scathing press coverage, Cambridge launching an investigation into Arday, and his subsequent resignation—that ultimately saw Arday found dead in London on August 14. But this theory was evidently grounded in the belief that the same forces that heavily scrutinized black academics in the United States, and which pushed Claudine Gay out of her Harvard presidency over plagiarism charges, was perilously crossing the Atlantic.
Sean Wallis, a principal research fellow in English at University College London, said at the meeting that the goal in this conspiracy was to make cynical and bad-faith use plagiarism-detection software. He said that “it’s leveraging existing algorithmic tools, and of course you could do it in a targeted way. You target black colleagues because politically that is what they want to do. They want to hound out our black brothers and sisters, and I think we have to recognize the nature of what’s going on right now.”
Led by Wallis, who is a major UCU organizer (and who, on Oct. 7, 2023, retweeted an approving post about the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023), the group sought to lay the groundwork for an action plan that could leap to the defense of any black academics who were targeted in Britain with accusations of academic misconduct.
As I wrote for the Free Beacon:
Wallis…said, “I am convinced that’s already happening”—in Britain—”because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”
“Jason is not the only person who is being targeted right now,” Wallis said, claiming that a purported Substacker had put an unnamed academic’s thesis through plagiarism-detection software. This, Wallis said, evidently “found some overlap with some other PhD’s, which had been written a few years previously.”
I covered the following section about Wallis’ effort to redefine plagiarism to exclude “textual overlap” in this Substack. Here’s that compilation reel again:
Lyes Kahouadji, a chemical engineering researcher at Imperial College London, was among those at the meeting who falsely asserted that Arday had been cleared of all accusations of plagiarism. Liverpool John Moores University did investigate Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis and, despite substantial textual overlap between the thesis and the work of another scholar, they cleared him of the charges in March. However, an Aug. 5 investigation in The Times found considerable evidence that Arday had committed plagiarism and data theft in multiple papers he published while at multiple other universities. The members of the UCU meeting seemed overwhelmingly unaware of this.
Eva Hartmann, a university associate professor in Cambridge’s education department, where Arday held his prestigious professorship, was especially eager to hear Wallis shift the focus of the definition plagiarism away from textual overlap and toward the stealing of ideas (as if this would exonerate Arday, who was accused of that too). She gave Wallis an enthusiastic thumbs up when he did that.
As I wrote for the Free Beacon:
Hartmann…decried that Arday “was cleared from the plagiarism by his degree-awarding institution.” And yet, she said, “there was nothing from the academic profession saying, ‘Stop there. This is an academic judgment, and this is what needs to stand.’”
Hartmann was the only academic named in this report who responded to a request for comment. She said the quotes of her from the meeting that the Free Beacon ran by her via email were “inaccurate and completely taken out of context.” The union group, she said, “discussed the methods” that plagiarism-detection software “uses when we talked about text comparison.” She added, “I encourage you to look for facts, not opinions.”
One of the only other names that the meeting heard uttered as a clear racial antagonist was James Orr. As I wrote for the Free Beacon:
At least one of the meeting’s attendees envisioned a counteroffensive against James Orr, who is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge and the head of policy for Reform UK. Orr has been accused of racism, including for expressing negative attitudes toward Palestinians.
Talat Ahmed, a senior lecturer in South Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, said if she were a student at Cambridge, she would want “a mass student insurgent campaign to get rid of that racist fucker from my institution.”
Megan Povey spoke to the elusiveness of racism within the academy, and yet a kind of “I know it when I see it” smell test.
As I wrote for the Free Beacon:
The meeting’s attendees also argued that Arday was egregiously held to a higher standard because of his race. Megan Povey, a professor of food physics at the University of Leeds, said that, by comparison, "you see these white academics getting away with murder, literally."
Povey, who is transgender, further drew a parallel to the darkening climate surrounding trans issues in Britain. "You know the right is going for trans because it’s a wedge issue," Povey said. "They’re trying to pull back gains that have been made over the years by Black Lives Matter and so on."
Wallis offered a scathing assessment of people who believe in race science, comparing them to flat earthers.
Wallis was especially keen to lambast right-leaning Telegraph and the more centrist Times as culpable of targeting Arday with harassing coverage. But he admitted that he did not read either publication. This could perhaps explain why he and others in the meeting seemed unaware of the accusations against Arday that were more serious than mere textual overlap.
Wallis wondered aloud why in the world the British press even considered Arday a news story. It was one only because they said so, he said.
I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, NBC News, The Free Press, UnHerd and The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardianand The Nation, among many others. Follow me on X: @benryanwriter. Visit my website: benryan.net
