It seems grimly fitting that the Jason Arday affair would take place during the hottest summer on record. In the same way that our parks and lawns have been burned dry across months of unrelenting sunshine, revealing ancient garden outlines, Tudor outbuildings and other traces of a past that had never truly gone away, the revelation that Professor Arday may have been guilty of plagiarism has inspired an onslaught of fury online and in sections of the media which has turned back the clock on race relations.
What we know is that one individual, who is black, may have deceived his academic peers, university colleagues and students. But in large parts of the media, these allegations have already been presented as damning evidence of a DEI culture which is destroying our universities, denying opportunity to white people and defrauding the public. Given the extraordinary nature of the claims made about Professor Arday, how did one man’s alleged wrongdoing become conclusive evidence of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of higher education?
To return to the metaphor, Jason Arday is merely the ignition source. It’s right that any academic accused of misconduct should be properly and promptly investigated, and that their race – or gender, sexual orientation, religion, or seniority – should offer no protection against that scrutiny. But the moment this story caught fire at the end of July, it became clear that the media landscape was primed for a huge conflagration. Since at least the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, much of the UK press (and conservative media around the world) has been obsessed with DEI and the narrative that white people are being discriminated against on every front by a liberal elite which prizes diversity over fairness.
Commentators have been looking for any scrap of evidence that “woke” has taken over every institution – from the BBC to the NHS to Whitehall to our universities – and virtually no politician has pushed back against the narrative. The Arday story could hardly fail to set everything on fire, because this arid climate of racial animus has burned dry any genuine curiosity or understanding about diversity in the UK, still less any collective pride that our institutions may have begun to resemble just a little more closely the nation they serve. Instead we have a firestorm of racist and racist-adjacent commentary which not only passes judgement on Professor Arday’s apparent wrongdoing, but implicitly challenges the credentials and standing of every black and brown person who has supposedly benefited from the culture which awarded Arday his chair at Cambridge.
Clearly, right-wing media and politicians have done the most to create this racial tinderbox. But my university has a share of the blame, which is why I (along with 90 of my fellow academics) have written to the Vice-Chancellor demanding a full investigation into this affair. We want to know if there were red flags in the appointments process, and we’re concerned at reports that the Faculty of Education may have been alerted to potential academic misconduct within months of Professor Arday’s appointment. We know from other public cases – involving white academics – that investigations into academic misconduct take far too long and can produce murky outcomes. Since a university’s reputation depends on the integrity of its researchers, teachers and scholarship, we’re calling for a root-and-branch overhaul of the processes around academic misconduct precisely to avoid another episode like this one.
And then there’s the extraordinary contrast between the university’s public relations blitzkrieg back in 2023 when Professor Arday’s appointment was announced, and the silence of university leaders since the allegations broke more than two weeks ago. One reason Professor Arday’s resignation has been front-page news around the world is that the university put him on the front pages when he was appointed three years ago. We need to know whether the university considered the risks of this, and assessed the potential harm not just to Professor Arday but to black and brown academics more generally of foregrounding racial achievement over research excellence.
As the commentator Jason Okundaye wrote last week, “Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot.” In the past fortnight, as people like Nathan Cofnas – a man who said under a true meritocracy black people would “disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment” – have been triumphantly touring the studios to say “I told you so” about Cambridge’s corruption by DEI, not a single figure from the university’s senior leadership has got behind a microphone to defend our researchers of colour and to reject the racist narrative that the Arday case is the tip of the iceberg. They may not have had the power to put out the fire, but they could at least have tried.
An irony in all of this is that it’s actually the UK university sector which is on fire. Thanks to more than 15 years of disastrous policy from successive governments, our world-leading universities have been starved of funding and subjected to waves of cost-cutting and thousands of redundancies. Given the insistence of both Conservative and Labour governments on including foreign students in the migration figures, and the obsession of all politicians with immigration, universities are finding it ever harder to recruit foreign students – despite the fact that our universities are among Britain’s greatest exports. In a different timeline, our media and politicians would be scrambling to support one of the few sectors in which Britain actually leads the world, and we’d be debating how to ensure that our brilliant universities could continue to sharpen young minds, support local communities and promote the UK in every corner of the globe. But alas this summer, as the Arday affair shows no sign of burning itself out, waiting for newspapers to cover that larger crisis in higher education is like waiting for rain to fall.
[Further reading: Who’s to blame for Jason Arday?]
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Subscribe here to commentThe police need to investigate Arday for fraud.
As for Cambridge and the other institutions he worked at, either (i) they didn’t do their due diligence into his CV, or (ii) they did and knew his claims were lies but hired him anyway, because they wanted to promote diversity.
Either way, the people involved in appointing him need to be fired. In the second case they should also face direct criminal liability themselves.
The Arday scandal has exposed how rotten the Sociology of Education department is at Cambridge. His appointment was not a mysterious vetting mistake, the whole department has obviously gone off into lala land, and if there ever is a serious investigation into his “academic” path it will expose very similar failings in all the institutions he entered.
In my opinion if you come from a humble background and do well at school and university you tend to hold back on going on about your relative success. Those from a middle class background may be frustrated about their qualifications whereas to someone from the working class it is a major success. I went to the University of Bath 1975-79 from a lower working class background and was delighted to be there but for many of my fellow students Bath was not what they really aspired to….they wanted to be at Oxbridge or a redbrick! Today Bath is a top university and has an enviable employment record but it is and never was in the Cambridge league although it has an equivalent employment record for its graduates. This is what troubles me about the current scandal in the Fens. Now anyone from a poor background will think I will need a stellar cv to even get an interview at Cambridge or anywhere for that matter. I am sure that is not the case but something went badly wrong at the interview and selection stage in this saga. The people doing the interviewing and selecting wanted to believe what they were seeing was true and they did not ask some very simple questions. We all get fooled but the trick is not to make the same mistake again so I hope lessons will be learned although human nature being what it is…….!
‘My University ‘? Cambridge creating Pharmageddon.
This fiddling while Rome burns is about Life, the Universe and Everything. Protected species in the animal kingdom but having consciousness counts for nothing when the NHS Lumps us all together for drug research on a Biomedical campus. DNA is presumed to be locked into our identity like letters in Brighton Rock. Bizarre that Archbishops are called primates and don’t have to explain to their own congregation the rationale for radically changed policy whilst also being established.
Wasn’t the difference between man and the animals that men had souls? Back to the 19th c and Darwin (Cambridge). Adapt to survive what? No internet in 13th c universities.