The More You Look, the Worse it Gets!

So, the Met Police, via its Sir Mark Rowley, has confirmed and admitted that the police dropped the ball, to use his phrase, when they investigated the journalist Jack Grove, just because he emailed Jason Arday with concerns about his work.But there is something that should make every single person watching this story unfold very angry.And it is not just because it's a juicy scandal or anything like that, although it is a bit of a scandal and, you know, it involves Cambridge, you know, one of the top universities in the world.But, moreover, because there is so much wrong in one story here.that if we don't call this out, and we don't take things like this seriously, we don't investigate them properly, and we don't actually follow it up, and if there are appropriate consequences on findings that they may or may not make, then, you know, I promise you we're going to end up with very much more of the same.More of these kind of stories, more of these outlandish claims, and more people who might have their work used without permission, without consent, without citation, and so on.

And that is just wrong.and we are supposed to respect and hold accountable the universities who issue these qualifications, degrees and so on.So with that I'm going to run through a few more bits of this story which you may not have heard of so that they're all in sort of one place for you to look at.Then I'm also going to run through another section of this PhD thesis just to show you how some of these side -by -side comparisons show in my view, that Liverpool John Moores University has a lot to answer here.Because they cannot realistically look at these side by side and say, yes, that's fine.Because that would otherwise give everybody a green light to do exactly what he's done here.

Now, I'll caveat, like I said before, I'm not drawing conclusions and findings of fact here.That is not my place.I can make observations.I can give you my opinions.And in my opinion, there is a case to be made.answer.

So first of all, the usual plug, if you're not subscribed, which about half of you are not, please do subscribe to the channel.That helps me to grow more than you know.I am ever grateful.Thank you so much.So I know this isn't breaking news.You've probably seen bits of it or all of it or whatever.

But this is the Cambridge or ex -Cambridge professor now, Jason Arday, because he's now resigned.So what I want to do is give you a few more bits of this story, why they sound so outrageous, why they are unbelievable or incredible in the true sense of the word.and white matters very much more than just one person here.This video is very much not a pile -on or anything of the sort.This is just taking a story for what it is and the most important bit for me that I want to start with to reiterate from yesterday is what is completely unacceptable in my view and that is reporting people to the police just because someone's asking questions.A journalist doing his job asking legitimate questions about a man's work reported to the police and ended up the subject of a police harassment investigation and told to stop contacting him.

This is just absolutely outrageous because if you think just for a moment that one man who reports someone to the police so readily you might then think well he would genuinely report other serious things that happened to him as well.So that is why this story becomes so interesting but that is also where this story starts to fall apart.Now, again, just as a caveat, Ade, apparently, even in his resignation letter, denies all wrongdoing and he says he was racially targeted.I don't accept that.Whilst some people might, unfortunately, seize upon that opportunity, I don't believe that that is right.They should not do that.

This should be entirely based on any facts analysis and what has actually happened.So, please don't do that in my comment section here.and don't do that generally.Most of you, I understand, won't do that.So that is not aimed at the majority of you here.But there we go.

As a quick aside, you might know that I'm a guy who likes things to just work, especially when it comes to my videos and my channel and my media here.I like it to just work.That's why I buy nice equipment.But I also like to be able to upload these things wherever I am.And so when I'm traveling or when I'm traveling around the UK, or especially when I'm abroad, I use a company called Saley, who sponsors my channel here to give me seamless data access wherever I am in the world.You don't need to wait for a SIM card to arrive in the post.

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I trust Salee when I'm traveling around to get my videos to you, and I think you should trust it too.So let's look at the police report first.And we know that he reported the journalist, but let's look at what he didn't report.So, let's put this quite bluntly.You know, two of the most serious things that this man says happened to him.He did not take to the police at the time.

But an email from the journalist, that got the full police report treatment.So, the number one bit of the story that he didn't report was the pig's head, apparently.He claims that there was a severed pig's head delivered to his parents' home, which is absolutely horrifying and abhorrent, if it were true.And what does he say that he did about that?Well, he said he threw it away and he only told the police about it several months later.And then he says the police investigated, that they traced it to a butcher who'd sold the whole hog that morning.

Except there's one very important problem here.The Met Police say that, and I'm quoting here, that is categorically incorrect.They say that no investigation ever took place.So was that a fabricated story?And did he not report that to the police?Because this is a common tactic in court.

If someone's reported, let's say, incident B to the police, and, you know, we are saying incident B didn't happen, whereas we know that something else happened before and they didn't report that before, then, you know, why are they reporting B when they didn't report A?And so you put people to challenge on these things.So that is effectively exactly what we've got here.The second thing that he didn't report to the police was a masked man with a knife, who he claims that he confronted twice in his own faculty building, and that the second time the intruder pulled a knife.And, you know, Think about how serious this is.Someone turning up at your faculty building, harassing you, and the second time with a knife.

So an armed man with a knife threatening you at your workplace.Most people, most ordinary reasonable people, would call the police.But what did he do?He did not report that to the police at the time.So again, just lining this up, the pig's head, no police report, and when he did say that the police investigated it, the police say there was no police investigation.and an armed attacker, no police report.

And so none of those things were reported or investigated by the police.But a journalist asking questions, that he took to the police.Now the problem here is, which I hope you can see, is that the machinery that's supposed to protect true victims of crime has essentially been pointed at someone doing genuine journalism and not at real alleged crimes.And so, to me, that is completely unacceptable.It's a waste of police resources and that is where, really, I draw the line on these things.Those things are absolutely unacceptable.

There's lots of other bits and pieces.There's lots of claims that have been sort of refuted and underlying it all, the allegations of plagiarism.Now, again, I'm not making statements of fact here.These are the reports.These are the challenges.And they should be open to challenge.

So why was there all this scrutiny on him in the first place?Well, it was obviously because of his academic work.And that is the part really in the long term that probably matters.You know, a police report here and there about something that did or didn't happen is one thing.But something that lasts a lifetime, that gives you qualifications, that then gives you a job, that then makes you supposedly trustworthy as a qualified person in that field, and so his PhD thesis from 2015.Analysis has found, and I've done my own analysis using various AI tools, both ChatGPT and Claude, and I've analysed these, and there's a huge overlap with his thesis from 2015 and the published thesis of Paula Zwozdyk -Meyers from 2009.

I'm going to go through a bit of a side -by -side comparison in a moment to show you on screen where he's taken chunks or appears to have taken chunks from one paragraph or another and slotted them in somewhere else.I'll show you that in just a moment.But it appears that a lot of it has been taken from this paper from Paula Zwasdijk -Meyers in 2009.And above it all, as was pointed out by one of the critics,some of these passages that were copied across from paper to paper, included the copy editing mistakes.Now, you do not independently reproduce someone else's typos.

That just doesn't happen.That only happens one way.It doesn't happen in reverse.And it's not just the thesis either.There were journal papers that were corrected for exactly the same problems, one of which apparently containing quotes from his supposed interviewees that matched the quotes from someone else's study.So again, to put that into plain English, he says that he's done a study with participants and included quotes that were from someone else's study with their participants, which, again, just simply couldn't happen on any objective assessment unless it's been taken from one on the other.

So I'll show you a side by side in a moment.But as I said, I ran this through a couple of AIs to run these checks and Paulus Wasdijk -Meyers did the original work in her paper in 2009.And yet she is barely mentioned in this work of our days in 2015.So we're back to those papers in a moment.But the thing is, once you start pulling it a thread, it just doesn't stop.And collectively, it seems to form a pattern.

So there was also claims about books, which he repeatedly claimed to have written and published, one of them called Being Young, Black, and Male.and he said it was published by Palgrave.But Palgrave said that they accepted the proposal but they never published the book.Another claim was about his visiting professorships.He claimed to be a visiting professor at universities in Ohio, in Glasgow, and in South Africa.But all three universities, when asked, denied that he was a visiting professor at these universities.

Then there's the charity claims.He claims to have raised firstly just said millions and then up to five and a half million for dozens of charities.But when pressed on it, he admitted that he hadn't personally raised it, but he didpart of a syndicate of around 100 people whom he couldn't name because of non -disclosure agreements.Which again, on the face of it, I find incredible in the real sense of the word, in that I don't think that it's credible that a hundred people together as a syndicate raising five and a half million pounds for charity would all want to have signed an NDA and remain anonymous.It's possible, but I just don't think that that's the case.

If someone raises money for a charity, I don't think there's anything wrong with him being named.Certainly not a hundred of them, but maybe that did happen.Maybe it didn't.I just, I don't find it credible, but that's my personal opinion here.And he claims to have raised all this money largely through feats of ultra distance running that would have put him among the world's most elite runners.He said that he'd run 30 marathons in 35 days, 9 of them with a broken leg.

He said he'd run 300 miles in 3 days and 600 miles in 6 days.Now, Damien Hall, one of Britain's foremost ultra -distance runners, expressed surprise, telling the papers that he'd never heard of Professor Arday, and it seems odd that there appears to be no evidence of the 300 -mile and the 600 -mile runs, and Arday later claimed that the 600 -mile run was actually accomplished in 12 days, not six.And the claim that really rocked the headlines was where he claimed to have appeared as a child on the TV series Seven Up, where the series started in 1964, and yet he was born in 1985, placing the TV series some 21 years before he was born.So any one of these claims by itself might just be a bit of a blip, a bit of an embellishment, and you might be forgiven for that.But all of them together becomes a pattern.And yet, just to be clear, Arday denies any wrongdoing in his resignation letter.

He says he'll be back to work at some point, and there's more work to be done.to do and there's no apology for anything, there's no clarification of anything, certainly no admission of liability from what I can see in that statement.But the problem is here, bare denials do not make all of this go away.They don't make the police reports about the journalist right.They don't explain the lack of police reports for the other incidents.They don't explain why he claimed to have been a professor at these three universities a visiting professor when he wasn't and they don't explain anything else as well.

But what they really don't explain is the similarities between his work in 2015 and the work from Paula Zwozdyak -Meyers in 2009.And that is the bit that I have to admit makes me quite frustrated, because for myself and the countless other students who've put blood, sweat and tears, so much time and energy and devotion, so much so that it almost breaks you as a person until you break through at the end, whether it's into a degree thesis, a master's thesis, or a PhD thesis.And most people who've done that, they know it inside out.You know, we've done that, and For anyone that's done that and genuinely put their work into it, it is really quite insulting for somebody then to take someone else's work and drop it into theirs and then pass it off as a brand new piece.I'm not saying that that has happened here.I'm just saying that's what it appears to have happened from the comparison side by side.

And it will be for the university to look at it.But that brings me to the next point that should really worry you, should frustrate you, and frankly, should make a lot of people angry.And that is that all of these institutions knew about all of this, they knew about the complaints, they knew about the concerns, and they just essentially protected him and said, nothing to see here, there's nothing to investigate.Until the public outcry and the backlash, and so Cambridge eventually folded and said, we doneed to look at this.But bear in mind that Cambridge was warned about this thesis from the moment that he was appointed.

and yet they sat on it.When it eventually broke, their first response wasn't, we will investigate it.It was to call the whole thing a vile smear campaign.They refused to look at it.They argued that the PhD predated his time at Cambridge.They pushed it back to Liverpool John Moores University, and they said, we've conducted this private investigation and his PhD stands.

Well, again, as I said in my video yesterday, with great respect, they need to take another look, because If they look at it the way I look at it, now I'm no expert at academic misconduct here, and I'm not drawing conclusions here, but it very much looks to me, as a barrister, like there is a case to answer.because there is far too much similarity between the two, at least in certain chapters and certain parts of this thesis, that they really do need to look at it.So let's dive into those papers now, and I'll give you an example of what I'm looking at here.Because this whole thing is really critically important.Because we absolutely need to be able to trust these universities if they're handing out degrees and jobs and research and everything else, we need to be able to trust them.Let me show you the comparison with those papers right now.

Okay, so looking at these papers side by side, just to explain what I've done, first of all, I've run this through Claude and I've asked it to highlight in green where it's been paraphrased or appears to have been paraphrased.Purple is where the ideas seem to have been used.in the second paper by Arday.And orange, as best as the AI could do, is where it's been verbatim copied from one paper to the other.And important to note that the paper on the right -hand side is that of Paula Zwasdijk -Meyers and this one over hereis our day's paper.

So this is chapter two that I'm comparing and looking first of all at these bits that appear to have been paraphrased.So beginning with this bit here Paula says the purpose of this chapter is to examine what key characteristics theorists practitioners and researchers within education and initial teacher education associate with reflective practice.And then similarly in our day's paper on the left hand side here It says, importantly, the purpose of this chapter is to examine the key characteristics that practitioners, theorists, commentators and researchers within education, initial teacher education, align with reflective practice.So clearly a paraphrase of the same thing here.Now, if we scroll up on Pauler's on the right hand side here, you can see this bit here that begins with reflective practice.Reflective practice is widely acknowledged as an essential component in the professional development of student teachers, etc.

And you can see on the same page we're looking at earlier on our day's work, that same passage has been rephrased.Reflective practice been widely considered as an integral component in the professional development of student teachers and professional educators, etc.So those two bits here clearly paraphrased over here.Now, The over past decades bit, this just looks like the introductory paragraph up here on Arday's work.Won't look too much at that.But then scrolling up on Arday's work, you can see this section here, which is a verbatim copy of bits of it, where he says, however, an exploration of conceptual and theoretical underpinnings of these terms reveals a number of variations.

And you can see in Paula's work, it is identical word for word.for that bit there.But jumping down to this section here gets really interesting.This is section 2 .6 in Arday's work but 2 .5 in Paula's work and you can see even the subtitles themselves are exactly the same.In Paula's work, reflective practice underpins the development of forms of knowledge that serve particular interests.And that is exactly the same in Arday's work.

Now, again, the purple bits is where the idea has been apparently used.So Paula says different kinds of interests can be served, ethical, moral, personal, social ones.And again, here Arday appears to have rephrased it as such perspectives can be considered through ethical, moral and social constructs.So the same idea just rephrased here.But a closer rephrase is this section here.Student teachers, for example, concerned to find ways to challenge all pupils within a mixed ability setting.

And again here, student teachers, for example, who concern themselves with diagnosing ways to challenge pupils within a mixed ability setting.Again, these things appear to have been just slightly rephrased.Scrolling down a little bit, you can see what appears to be verbatim copying here, beginning with the Habermas model suggests reflective practice is hierarchical.Knowledge must initially be developed by instrumental or interpretive means, etc.This, you can see, has been used here by Arday, word for word the same.Then there's a bit in the middle here that appears that the idea has been slightly changed from this middle section here.

But then we go back to the word although, which again picks up from Paula's work here, although the fundamental mode of inquiry for the social sciences, interpretation, etc., that is picked up again in Arday's work over here.And then the green bits are more paraphrasing.This reflective form of reasoning has resonance with critical theory that emerges from the process of critique and evaluation.And again, just lightly paraphrased by Ardé, it appears on this section here.And then again the idea with this Abomass bit here and then the green bit again just appears to be light rephrasing here.So if we just scroll through you can see all of the bits that appear to have either been rephrased or verbatim copied like this and the Lots of this section, about 35 % according to AI has been sort of lifted or borrowed or rephrased from that text there.

So again, I'm not drawing conclusions here.I'm just observing that this appears to be very, very similar in many respects.

So there's the comparison.Like I said, drawing no conclusions, making no statements of fact, all my opinion, just reporting on what I see and what other people have said and seen.And you can make up your own minds.And I invite you to look at all the evidence and draw your own conclusions.But I strongly recommend that Liverpool, John Moores University, look at this again and with clear eyes.And maybe they appoint an independent third party to do it for them if they don't want to do it themselves.

But it really does need looking at.So with that, leave me your thoughts and comments politely and respectfully please.This is not a pylon.And as always, thank you for watching.