Simon Jackson🎗

This is going to be in my third article - but I am too outraged to wait to tell you. 😡 Jason Arday was never trained as a sociologist. Jason Arday has no degree, no Master’s and no PhD in Sociology. None. Zero. His entire formal academic training is in Education and Physical Education: BA in Education Studies and Physical Education MA in Education and Pedagogy A second Master’s in Education PhD in Education — specifically on peer-mentoring among student teachers training to become PE teachers That is a doctorate in physical-education teacher training. It is not sociology. It contains no sociological theory, no sociological methods, and no sustained engagement with the core literature of the discipline. Yet within a few years the same man was: Appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham Put in front of students teaching modules called Sociology of Education and Societies in Transition Then made Professor of the Sociology of Education at Glasgow Then made Professor of the Sociology of Education at Cambridge Students were paying close to ten thousand pounds a year. Some of that money was buying teaching and supervision from a man whose highest qualification in the subject he was employed to profess was nothing. He had never studied sociology as an undergraduate, never taken a Master’s in it, and never written a doctoral thesis in it. The word “Sociology” appeared only in the job title. Institutions simply accepted the re-description. A PE-and-education academic was re-labelled a sociologist and students were charged elite university fees to be taught by him. That is not an academic career progression. That is a category error that successive universities chose not to notice. My mind has been blown by this revelation. No wonder his students report him leaning on desks talking about celebrities and inequality! He appears to have known absolutely nothing about the subject he was teaching!