Photograph Source: Southdevonian – Public Domain
The outlines of the career and tragic suicide of Jason Arday, a distinguished professor at the University of Cambridge, have been much publicized. These headline-grabbing accounts are not, of course, intended to delve into the deeper and more complex considerations underlying this tragedy. Such considerations may become apparent with the passage of time, awaiting the day when the current media hysteria surrounding Arday has dissipated, as it inevitably will.
This media torrent converges on a simple theme. Arday, it is said, took alleged advantage of the “woke” provisions afforded by DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)– enshrined in the conventional wisdom of British higher education– and was promoted repeatedly at a rate seemingly beyond his or anyone else’s abilities.
After completing a PhD at Liverpool John Moores University in 2015 while suffering from a brain tumour (Arday claimed the tumour hindered the completion of his doctorate because it caused memory loss before its removal); Arday became senior lecturer at Roehampton university in 2018 (where he taught physical education); before moving to become associate professor at Durham (from 2019 to 2022); prior to becoming professor at the University of Glasgow in 2022. Arday taught the sociology of education at both Durham and Glasgow. In 2023, he was appointed to a Cambridge distinguished chair.
Arday also said he ran 600 miles in 6 days and that he had raised £5.5m/$7.5m for charity. He later amended these claims, saying the 600 miles was run in 12 days, and that the money raised for charity was by a group to which he belonged but could not name for legal reasons. He also claimed to have visiting professorships at institutions which said they had no record of him.
The ostensible shortcuts and improbabilities behind this spectacularly rapid ascent up the rungs of academia were soon fastened on and exploited by the rightwing opponents of DEI. The UK’s rightwing media gloated openly at Arday’s growing confusion and suffering as his career and life started to unravel in the face of their onslaught. For these DEI opponents, Arday, the poster child of DEI, brought this disaster upon himself and therefore deserved what was coming to him. Arday was after all living proof for such people that UK higher education was a two-tier scam biased intrinsically against white people.
An instructive case of this rightwing outpouring of malice and virulence is provided by Toby Young, a Tory peer and an associate editor at the rightwing magazine The Spectator who, among other rightwing causes, espouses “progressive eugenics”, that is, genetically engineered intelligence. In an article in his magazine, Young described Arday as the “the gift that keeps on giving”, and pilloried him mercilessly, depicting him as a comic fabulation devised by Sacha Baron Cohen (of Borat fame). Young then had to mention Sacha’s cousin Sir Simon Baron Cohen, a distinguished developmental psychologist and director of Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre, a friend and supporter of Arday, who accused Arday’s attackers of being racists (which many of them were).
Toby Young is an interesting fellow, puffed-up with vanity, and who, like many lightweights living in his father’s shadow, has been desperate to be taken seriously all his life. Toby was offered an undergraduate place at Brasenose College, Oxford, contingent on obtaining A-level grades of BBB, this being a generous offer, since most Oxbridge offers require one or more A grades. He got grades of BBC, thereby falling short, so his father, the renowned sociologist Michael Young (Labour peer, co-founder of the Open University, who coined the term “meritocracy”, etc) got on the phone to the college head, and after the call his son entered Brasenose. Anyone entitled to sing “Oh I get by with a little help from my friends” to enter an Oxbridge college should at least have the decency to refrain from criticism of Arday. (Disclosure: I failed to enter an Oxford college despite going on to get A-level grades of AABB. Apparently I failed the entrance interview, but was never told why. However, that is another story.) For Toby Young’s very helpful daddy, see here.
Jason Arday seems to have been something of a fabulist, who was plunged into an academic system that has been a bastion of white privilege for centuries. Eager to shed this image of always having an open-door-welcome for whites of a certain class, British universities were anxious to accommodate a non-standard academic like Jason Arday. But it did Arday no favours in giving him the equivalent of an open-door-welcome. A vigilante rightwing media always on the lookout for any perceived signs of “discrimination” against whites, hunted Arday down pitilessly soon after he got his job at Cambridge. Even his death has not stopped them—the “culture war” that destroyed Arday is never-ending for diehard racists.
Cambridge has promised an inquiry into the tragic circumstances surrounding Arday. It has pledged to involve individuals outside Cambridge in this inquiry. This is the least it can do. As Simon During has pointed out, neoliberal universities (i.e. 100% of them in the West, apart from a few religious institutions more concerned with doctrinal orthodoxy than publicity and public visibility) tend to highlight a scholar’s “impact” while possibly discounting the value of carefully researched academic work— the ubiquitous citation indexes are designed precisely to measure “impact”. “Impact” is thought to provide “deliverable outcomes” for the university’s PR and marketing office, and most of us know what that entails. It is a reasonable supposition to think this is what happened with Cambridge and Arday, but I hope, almost certainly in vain, that Cambridge’s inquiry will encompass a critique of the neoliberal university.
In the longer term, Britain will have to deal with a palpable resurgence of hostility towards non-white academics, as the pervasive “culture wars” continue, and Jason Arday’s sad case will be used as an alibi justifying this hostility and the conduct of its accompanying culture warriors.
