Oceans of virtual ink have been spilled about the case of Jason Arday because it was the right story at the right time to grab the maximum attention. It happened in high summer, when apart from the interminable heat there wasn’t much else going on. It unfolded in stages, which kept people interested: first the accusations of plagiarism, then the piece-by-piece unravelling of Arday’s life story in the run-up to the publication of his now absurd-seeming memoir.
Above all, though, this was Cambridge. Had Arday been exposed while still a professor at Glasgow University it would have caused a fuss, but nothing on this scale. The contrast between the augustness of the institution and the very contemporary dynamics of Arday’s downfall is what gives the tale its piquancy.
Race, class, snobbery, wokery – somehow they’re all thrown into sharper relief when the setting is that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations, some of them now in tatters.
But what is really going on here is that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through the fantasies people have about Cambridge. That place doesn’t really exist any more. When news outlets want a generic picture of the university to illustrate their tales of collapsing standards, they usually pick King’s College Chapel or the Senate House – suitably imposing edifices to juxtapose with the squalid goings-on being exposed.
But those buildings are no more representative of the university these days than Arday was. A more accurate image would show one of the gleaming new campuses a little way out from the centre of town where the money and power increasingly reside: either the West Cambridge site, on which the new science and tech departments are housed, or the Biomedical Campus to the south of the city, where the university’s hospitals and research centres exist alongside the headquarters of AstraZeneca and, soon, a £400m R&D centre for GlaxoSmithKline, which is relocating from Stevenage.
Then there are the science parks incubating would-be world-beating start-ups clustered to the north of town. These places have shiny new railway stations – Cambridge North and, more recently, Cambridge South, which opened in June. They have lavishly funded new buildings, including the £58m Whittle Laboratory, which opened in July. This is where the action is.
Arday was professor of the sociology of education and a fellow of Jesus College. Those grand titles sound like they tick all the important boxes for status and significance. But that’s another illusion. People who work in Cambridge sometimes joke there are now three universities: science and tech to the north and west, biomedicine to the south and the old parts left in the middle.
This is “heritage” Cambridge, the bit tourists come to see. It contains most of the colleges and most of the social science and humanities departments. It’s not exactly a Potemkin university since a lot of very hard work still goes on behind the facade. But it can feel like it is primarily for show while the real business is being conducted somewhere else.
One prompt for the outrage about Arday’s appointment to a professorship is that the university seemed to treat it – and him – as window dressing, a way of parading its progressive credentials before the world. Self-evidently something went badly wrong in how this happened. But no one should conclude that it’s only at the woke edges that this sort of preoccupation with appearances is at play. After all, King’s College Chapel is now window dressing too.
I worked at Cambridge for nearly 30 years, ending up as a professor and head of the politics department. The university is organised into different schools, and politics is in the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, alongside other subjects including sociology and education. We would meet regularly to talk about the pressures we were under and the need to defend our disciplines. Occasionally, though, we would be joined by senior figures from other parts of the university – science, medicine, engineering – when wider issues were at stake, usually involving money.
I can still recall how baffled these people sometimes seemed not simply by our preoccupations but even by what it was we actually did. They were polite but unavoidably patronising. We were heritage Cambridge, useful for how the world saw us, but hard to take seriously on our own terms. When CP Snow wrote about the “Two Cultures” – initially in the New Statesman – at the end of the 1950s his complaint was that the arts and humanities people were so sure of their own importance that they hadn’t bothered to acquaint themselves with even the rudiments of scientific knowledge. He had no doubts about who was patronising whom. That is not the problem now. Academics in the social sciences and humanities can feel so unsure of their importance that they end up doing whatever they can to attract attention.
Even if it is sometimes short of cash, Cambridge is not short of wealth – partly thanks to the endowments of some of the colleges, and partly because of the money flowing in to the sciences. Its humanities departments are not subject to the sorts of pressures they might face elsewhere. There is no talk of mass redundancies or of closing down entire disciplines. Nevertheless, one way to get attention is to raise more money, especially for new professorships. Often, this money arrives before anyone has decided what the new professorships are for. Arday’s position was one of scores of new ones that have been created to generate a sense of purpose. It can seem incredible that tougher questions weren’t asked at the time of his appointment and they certainly should have been. Yet there are now so many panels frantically trying to fill so many of these roles that it can be hard to find enough qualified people to sit on them.
The prevailing idea seems to be that a Cambridge professorship is sufficiently important that everyone involved should have given it their fullest attention, to the extent of checking all the further particulars. I’m afraid that’s another fantasy. Overworked people take shortcuts in Cambridge as they do everywhere else. And they prioritise what is important to them, which doesn’t always mean putting a premium on academic rigour.
When I ran the politics department I once called a meeting to remind my colleagues that because we studied politics we should be careful not to allow our own political views to become too visible if we wanted to be taken seriously. An academic discipline needs to be dispassionate, I suggested. The pushback was overwhelming, particularly from younger members of staff. Why, they wanted to know, should we do these poorly paid and frequently stressful jobs if we don’t get to use them to promote the things we think really matter?
I was conscious of how old-fashioned I sounded in trying to warn them against the dangers of grandstanding. I was also very aware that their need for ancillary compensations was driven by a real sense of hardship. A lot of the grunt work of teaching undergraduates in Cambridge is done by junior academics on short-term contracts with precarious career prospects. Meanwhile, the professors, especially the ones who have been tempted in on favourable terms to newly endowed chairs, often get off lightly. It is an increasingly unfair system, which is one way to ensure that it will be shot through with politics from top to bottom.
Professor Arday also seems to have neglected his teaching obligations, though in his case this may have been driven more by a sense of futility than of privilege. Some of his students claim they didn’t need supervising, which is hardly surprising from someone who must have known he had very little to teach them in academic terms. There are many extremely diligent and hard-working professors. Nonetheless, seen from the lower rungs of the pyramid, Arday is not the only one who looks like he was there just for show. And yet the lower rungs still get filled.
The fact is that it is not only onlookers who allow their fantasies about Cambridge to get the better of them. Whenever one of these poorly paid and precarious jobs gets advertised there are hundreds of applicants, most of whom believe it can’t be as bad as it appears from the outside once you get on the inside. In reality, it’s often worse.
My wife used to be a psychotherapist in Cambridge and she had a lot of stressed and miserable young academics as clients. She’s always remembered a line from one of them. “My mum loves telling everyone I’m a Cambridge don. But I’m the poor sod who has to do it.”
The use of Cambridge academic life for purposes other than purely academic ones does not only happen on the progressive side of the political divide. This is not simply a tale about wokery. Some right-wing commentators have linked the Arday scandal to an earlier example of left-wing bias getting in the way of intellectual standards when Jordan Peterson had a visiting fellowship to Cambridge rescinded in 2019 following a staff and student backlash. But what was someone like Peterson being brought to Cambridge for except as a way of generating attention?
It’s not as if he lacks a platform for anyone who wants to know his views on pretty much any subject under the sun. The academic who invited Peterson was James Orr, who works in the Faculty of Divinity. He is also, as of this spring, Reform ’s head of policy. Orr is perhaps best known for his intellectual friendship with JD Vance and for the private chapel he has built in the grounds of his house outside Cambridge where he hosts like-minded thinkers for reflection and prayer. The chapel is constructed out of an old shipping container.
Cambridge has always had its secret right-wing cabals and networks, just as it’s always had its spies. But the point about them was that they used to be secret. The dons were sure enough of themselves that they played their political games in their cloistered rooms, confident that the corridors of power extended into Cambridge colleges. Not any more. So much of it now is just for show.
Arday’s case is egregious on many levels. Perhaps the worst of it is the university’s original response to allegations of plagiarism, which it immediately denounced as a witch hunt. It is one thing to fail to spot evidence of academic misconduct, but it is something else entirely to fail to acknowledge it when it is pointed out to you. Still, though, this sorry tale is symptomatic of a wider university culture in which so many people fear for their futures and are uncertain of what their purpose is.
Anyone who thinks Cambridge should be immune from this by dint of its prestige and privilege is missing the point. So much of the prestige and privilege of Cambridge is now bound up in leveraging the university’s – and the town’s – advantages in tech and scientific research. Social science and humanities academics can argue as much as they like about how important their subjects are for critical thinking and human flourishing – but as the new technology marches on, it gets harder and harder to feel confident that these arguments will win out.
AI is helping scientists capture Nobel prizes and helping mathematicians solve puzzles that seemed beyond human reach. What is it doing for people who read and write books for a living except to make them worry whether they can trust anything that matters again, including the essays being written by their students? Grandstanding can sometimes feel like it’s all that’s left. The joke used to be that academic politics are so poisonous because the stakes are so low. Now, it’s more like the politics are so performative because the real stakes are being played out somewhere else entirely.
David Runciman is an honorary professor of politics at the University of Cambridge
[Further reading: Jason Arday is Cambridge’s problem]
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This article appears in the 12 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Very British Scandal
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Subscribe here to commentCharacteristically brilliant from David. In a long and twisting saga with much already said – which I think still hasn’t fully played out, at the time of writing – he’s brought some context that was missing. This is very much a flailing, unconfident Humanities story, and not just one about elite virtue-signalling laziness, though I think it is that as well.
The story turns into one two things: a saddening story about him, and an angering story about his academic bosses:
– The extent of Arday’s self-delusion has become the most gripping part of what’s being gradually revealed over the week or so of this unravelling. What’s become apparent is that this is someone who seems, to use the euphemism, away with the fairies. He needs proper help and taking care of; you worry about what someone like that might do when their illusion collapses.
– on Cambridge, the story has gone from sheer bafflement at how someone so lacking could bluff their way to the top (or as David points out, the appearance of the top), to anger at how people trading on meticulous eye for detail and intellectual brilliance appear to operate without either of those things. Worse, when prodded to belatedly do their duty here, they snarl back defensively and accuse the rest of us of bad faith.
Self awareness is very important when choosing your higher education subject and location. One of the biggest problems the UK has is that Oxbridge is singled out as the ultimate university experience and everywhere else is second best or not worth the bother at all. It was like that in 1975 when I went to the university of Bath to study biochemistry…….the local GP said he didn’t even know Bath had a university let alone taught degrees in biochemistry! Damned my faint praise. Young people should get the best education they can in the most appropriate place and like their subject. Science or humanities is always going to be a topic to discuss. My favourite subjects at school were history and chemistry so I chose biochemistry because I thought studying science better placed at getting me a job. It was my working class background talking. A middle class person my have chosen differently. My advice is to do yourself a big fat, favour and be self aware. Today the University of Bath is right up there with the best of them. Oxbridge too, definitely needs to be more self aware.
“The prevailing idea seems to be that a Cambridge professorship is sufficiently important that everyone involved should have given it their fullest attention, to the extent of checking all the further particulars. I’m afraid that’s another fantasy. Overworked people take shortcuts in Cambridge as they do everywhere else. And they prioritise what is important to them, which doesn’t always mean putting a premium on academic rigour.”
Early career academics might be dispirited by this; interviews for low-level, poorly-paid one year positions – including those with a teaching focus where pedagogy may in fact be just as important to the role – often involve some intense grilling on research. In a buyer’s market with the unprecedented competition for academic work which exists today, even those who can prove and demonstrate research excellence to interview panels are used to not making the cut. With far more senior appointments being made on the basis of what might be comparatively flimsy research – or separate priorities entirely – there is every reason for early career academics to be particularly frustrated with this whole affair.
Pathetic excuses. Arday is the logical outcome of virtue signalling and DEI. And, it didn’t happen yesterday. And, it is widespread among US universities, large corporations and local, state and federal governments and their contractors despite a Supreme Court ruling and Constitution to the contrary. The esteemed Duke University just last week led the way.
The Professor had plenty of examples. We had a second generation Kenyan President elected twice whose previous occupation was community organizer and nine month Senator who now owns a thousand feet of ocean frontage in Oahu and Cape Cod and a mansion in DC. He was Editor of the Harvard Law review, but never wrote an article.
Why not Professor Arday?
I see the pig-ignorant American has joined the conversation.
Great piece and yes sadly it is over for the Humanists and has been for a while but nobody can deny it now. They had a good run since the Reformation though. Once the audience for scholarship in the humanities became everyone it was always going to eventually come under increasing scrutiny. The Internet, social media, AI and so on are the printing press 2.0. The old gatekeepers from the humanities have lost their authority. It can only be done for the love of the game now, nobody in the real world takes this stuff seriously. I’ll always hold the discipline in my heart but I’m not under any illusions. I do wonder whether the redemption will come as it turns full circle. That is the humanities becoming only a luxury pursuit as it is increasingly not worth paying for an education in. Access to information now being what it is, both good and bad.
I just joined The New Statesman. Having recently subscribed to The Spectator, I felt I should have a little balance, and I’m glad I did. David Runciman’s article is nothing else if not balanced, and I found it to be a fresh look at a very sorry saga.
I am afraid that we haven’t heard the last of this by a long shot. It only remains to be seen whether or not anyone wants to dig any further and if so, what horrors will be unearthed.
King’s College is now only window dressing ?
Only if you regard Christianity as now only window dressing.
A difficult thing to do at Cambridge, which wouldn’t exist – or attract scientific research and investment – if it weren’t for Christianity.