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Jason Arday’s PhD Supervisor Recycled a Coauthored Chapter Into His Own Thesis and His Book The man who oversaw Jason Arday’s doctorate now runs student experience at the university that cleared it, I report. His own PhD reused 2,000 words of a three-author chapter, unquoted and mostly uncited. Amid the recent imbroglio over Jason Arday’s alleged plagiarism, academic fraud and serial fabulism, a quiet question has gone unanswered: Who were his academic advisors? And how did they neither catch on to, nor ultimately prevent, the evident flaws in his 2015 PhD thesis and other published scholarship? During the weeks leading up to Dr. Arday’s resignation from his Cambridge University professorship and ultimate death in August, a source pointed me toward his thesis advisor at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), Philip Vickerman. In particular, my source said, I should examine whether there was textual overlap between Dr. Vickerman’s own PhD thesis at Leeds University and other published work. I found plenty. Dr. Vickerman’s 2004 thesis contains 37 clusters, comprising 2,010 words, that are identical to a book chapter, published in 2003, that he coauthored with two other people. None of the recycled passages in the thesis are in quotation marks and 30 of them bear no citation. All 37 passages wound up, at least in part, in a 2007 book Dr. Vickerman published as an individual author. Thirty-six of those passages are largely intact. Just four cite the 2003 book chapter.