The Jason Arday Fiasco Reminds Me of Penny Prophit – the Professor of Nursing Who Resigned When it Was Discovered She Faked Her PhD

The curious case of Professor Jason Arday, who is alleged to be a fantasist, blatant liar and plagiarist, has been prominent in the headlines and on social media lately. Arday convinced the University of Cambridge to appoint him as its youngest black professor despite some outrageous claims regarding physical feats that would be impossible for mere mortals and claims regarding his academic record that cannot be verified. As well as being black he claims to be neurodiverse. As soon as the university announced that it was going to investigate his claims, he resigned. But his case does raise questions about how common the extensive falsification of CVs alongside extravagant claims about oneself is in academia and what other claims people make to shore up their allegedly stellar reputations.

It may not be all that common, but I can think of at least one famous case which I experienced at first hand.

One day in 1992 I was walking across the concourse in George Square, in the heart of the University of Edinburgh, when our professor of nursing – a colleague in my department – was coming in the opposite direction. I greeted her and, to my astonishment, she burst into tears. I asked what was wrong and she told me she had just come from the principal’s office where she said she had been summarily “dismissed”. Knowing nothing of what was to be revealed, I sympathised and walked on to my own appointment.

Thus, I became the first person to know that Professor Penny Prophit had been dismissed from her chair. By the next morning, the whole world knew. The events surrounding Penny Prophit’s dismissal were all over the media including national television, the mainstream press and on BBC radio. When I was driving up The Mound later that week and listening to The News Quiz (BBC Radio 4 was still listenable in those days) one of the questions to the panel was “Which penny made a profit?” This was a clear reference to Penny Prophit’s dismissal and the panellists got it immediately. It was then I realised that this was a huge story, one that severely embarrassed the University of Edinburgh and the Nursing Studies Department.

A bad habit

The bald facts about Penny Prophit and her dismissal were that she was discovered to be a fraud. She arrived to take up her post at the university dressed in a nun’s habit. She referred to herself as Sister Penny Prophit and claimed to be a Franciscan nun. She immediately courted controversy by being photographed in a local pub, resplendent in her white habit, drinking a pint of beer with some of the nursing students.

As a Roman Catholic myself, I doubted the veracity of her claim to be a Franciscan nun. She was always dressed in a white habit and, while some Franciscan orders of nuns do wear white, the order to which she purportedly belonged – the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady – wear a dark brown tunic, a white cord (cincture) tied at the waist and a black veil. Neither I nor any of my Catholic friends and colleagues ever saw her darken the door of a Catholic church in Edinburgh.

Her fraud was related to the varying claim that she held a PhD degree from either Leuven University in Belgium or the Catholic University of America. These variable claims led one colleague to have suspicions so great that, accompanied by a local professor of medicine and a distinguished author, she did a tour of places with which Prophit had allegedly been associated.

Nun the wiser

No record of a PhD awarded by any university existed and other aspects of her academic history appeared to be a tissue of lies. The facts – or lack thereof – were presented to then principal Sir (now Lord) Stuart Sutherland and the rest became history, beginning with my encounter in the university campus on that day in 1992. To be precise, and for the record, Prophit resigned from her post after the events became public and an investigation began. Clearly, the university had offered her the opportunity to resign in favour of a lengthy and contested process of dismissal.

The investigation which ensued was into financial irregularities involving the award of large research grants from the Scottish Office. Prophit had a negligible record of academic publications and her one book on psychiatric nursing did not contain a single reference to any other academic work. Where many struggled to obtain grants from the Scottish Office – the Chief Scientist’s Office to be precise – Prophit raked in hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of grants with little academic record and few, if any, substantial outputs from the grants. The fact that Prophit lived in an allegedly lesbian relationship with Dr Margaret Clark, nursing adviser to the chief nursing officer and the chief scientist’s office was raised. Margaret Clark was successfully defended by the Scottish Office.

As with Jason Arday, Prophit’s claims were not confined to her CV and, being fair to Professor Arday, he does hold a PhD degree. Prophit claimed to have been a concert pianist and, indeed, the open top of a grand piano could be seen in the window of her apartment (shared with Dr Clark) in the opulent Bruntsfield area of Edinburgh. But like her persistent absence from Catholic churches in Edinburgh, nobody ever heard her play the piano or found any record of her concert playing days.

My encounters with Prophit were few and very far between. She was mainly conspicuous by her absence and did a prodigious amount of travelling at the expense of the university. One colleague recounted to me how she explained how to double-claim travel reimbursement by claiming both from the university and from any organisation that had invited you to travel to visit them. Another colleague once spotted her in Terminal 1 at London Heathrow negotiating her way successfully to the front of the security screening queue.

Close encounters

I joined Edinburgh in 1989 and my first encounter with Prophit was in a staff meeting at which she made a rare appearance. She was extolling the virtues of the newly developed field of systematic reviewing and meta-analysis to which the Scottish Office was willing to allocate funds. I had read an article in the Economist that morning which explained how meta-analysis worked and warned about the dangers of publication bias, whereby studies with no or zero effect tend not to be included: the so-called ‘bottom drawer’ phenomenon. I shared this knowledge, expecting some discussion about the merits of meta-analysis. Instead Prophit turned to me and said, simply and clearly, “Roger, I have spoken”.

My blood runs cold at the memory but on that occasion my blood ran hot and, on the verge of exploding, I suggested that this was no way to dismiss a valid point. Prophit completely ignored me, I persisted and only stopped when I saw a colleague, the late Kath Melia, indicating to me to ‘zip it’. I did, but after the meeting Kath stormed into my office and asked me, “Are you fucking stupid or what?” It transpired that nobody questioned the Professor as her reaction was to start taking it out on other staff, including the secretarial staff. As far as I could ascertain, the woman was a full-blown psychopath and I avoided her like the plague for most of the rest of her time at Edinburgh. I did, briefly, supervise a PhD student with her and, unaware of the allegations surrounding her own lack of a PhD, distinctly got the impression that she did not know what she was talking about. Said student ultimately withdrew.

Prophit ultimately resigned and was never seen again in the university, although her resignation only took effect in 1993. She remained in the area, living in a cottage in nearby Haddington. The fact that the cottage was called ‘Aslan Cottage’ perhaps suggests that she expected to rise again. She certainly rose against the BBC and took it court for defamation over The News Quiz item. She prevented access to all records related to her in the United States and threatened legal action against anyone who published anything related to her case. This, effectively, silenced her critics in perpetuity. Many involved with the case of the fraudulent nursing nun at the time are long deceased, although the person who exposed her is still with us. It came to light that she was not asked for evidence of her qualifications at the time of her appointment. The professor of nursing at the time of her appointment and in retirement at the time of Prophit’s resignation, the late Annie Altschul, took full responsibility.

The candle goes out

Her most famous ‘trick’ – and nobody knows how she pulled it off – occurred during her single annual lecture to undergraduate nursing students at Edinburgh. She began the lecture by lighting a candle and at the conclusion of the lecture, as she was ending, the candle would go out, to the astonishment of the students. Her own candle expired in 2021 and her obituary in the Baton Rouge newspaper the Advocate perpetuates the myths that she was a Franciscan nun and held a doctorate. It mentions that she “served” at the University of Edinburgh but says nothing about the circumstances of her departure. She briefly resurfaced as a teacher at a Catholic nursing school in the United States, also not mentioned in the obituary.

The allegations surrounding Arday and the established deceptions in the Prophit case are separated by more than 30 years, but they point to the same institutional weakness. An impressive personal narrative, repeated with sufficient confidence and reinforced by claims of prestigious appointments, can discourage people from asking elementary questions. Once the reputation has been conferred, colleagues become reluctant to challenge it and institutions are understandably reluctant to admit that they failed to check. The lesson is not that academia is populated by frauds, but that exceptional claims require ordinary verification before appointments are made, grants are awarded and myths acquire the protective authority of fact.

Dr Roger Watson is Professor of Nursing at Saint Francis University, Hong Kong. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.