Woke privilege still reigns at Cambridge University

Picture a professor at the University of Cambridge, and an august scholar who has spent decades in a library or a laboratory comes to mind. To achieve this feat aged just 37 would be remarkable. To do so despite being born to immigrant parents and having grown up on a council estate, being diagnosed with autism and unable to speak until the age of 11, and unable to read or write until the age of 18, would be incredible. Yet this is the story of Jason Arday.

Arday was awarded a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. This set him up for a stellar academic career. He became senior lecturer at Roehampton in 2018, associate professor at Durham the following year, professor at Glasgow University in 2021 and, just two years later, professor of sociology in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge – making him the university’s youngest-ever black professor. Alongside his phenomenal academic success, Arday also claims to be a world-class long-distance runner who once ran 30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in six days.

Arday’s accomplishments are now being called into question. Specifically, he stands accused of plagiarising his PhD thesis, which seems to contain significant overlaps with a dissertation submitted to Brunel University by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Whole passages appear to be reproduced with only minimal editing. Arday’s subsequent journal articles follow a similar pattern and publishers have been forced to add numerous ‘corrections to clarify citation sources’. Meanwhile, his feats of athletic prowess have also been removed or amended from the websites of two universities where he has been awarded honorary doctorates.

Yet, as well as Arday being in the firing line, his challengers are also under attack and accused of racism. When questions first began to be asked of Arday’s work, Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, the director of Cambridge’s autism research centre, called on colleagues to sign an ‘anti-racism letter’ in his defence. More recently, a spokesman for the university said Arday had been the victim of a ‘vile campaign to undermine his credibility’.

But this is not the only problem with Arday’s work. As philosopher Nathan Cofnas notes on his Substack, even those of Arday’s papers that have no hint of plagiarism are hardly substantial. Most are either autobiographical or based on ‘semi-structured’ interviews generated from ‘convenience sampling’ and analysed through personal reflection. In other words, Arday writes about his own experiences of racism and microaggressions, and chats to his friends and colleagues who arrive at similar conclusions. And as the Telegraph reveals, even the title of Arday’s thesis contains a punctuation error.

There’s an irony here. Arday’s work aims to expose racism within the academy. Yet at every turn, he has been flattered, published and promoted, less because of his intellectual output and more for the colour of his skin. He has been consistently held to low standards. This is not to say there is no racism within higher education, but it is these lower expectations – not inadvertent microaggressions – that expose the racial thinking of those running today’s universities.

It seems that Arday is a plaything of the woke managerial class who run Britain’s universities. His professorship enabled Cambridge to proclaim its anti-racist credentials just months after the Black Lives Matter protests swept the globe. His use to Cambridge was made explicit in a statement issued by the university at the time of his appointment. Arday will ‘contribute significantly’, staff and students were told, ‘to addressing the under-representation of people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds: especially those from black, Asian, and other minority-ethnic communities’. In other words, his skin colour was more important than his research.

Now that Arday is under fire, no one is prepared to admit they might have made a mistake. People so wanted to believe they had found a poster boy for the Black Lives Matter-era anti-racist university that they refused to ask even the most basic questions. The same holds true in the publishing industry. Arday’s autobiography, Great and Unfortunate Things, is set to be published next month. Whether it hints at his apparent debt to the work of others remains to be seen.

Challenging Arday’s story casts doubt on the diversity, equity and inclusion practices that now lie at the heart of our institutions. Many people have a vested interest in slandering his critics as racist, but, for them, Arday is merely a vessel for signalling their own virtue.

Although he has gained from the system, it is worth remembering that Arday did not invent diversity-centred hiring practices – he did not determine the philistine nature of what passes for educational research, and neither did he single-handedly shift the focus of entire institutions away from teaching, research or publishing high-quality books towards promoting woke ideology.

Arday needs to be held to account should the plagiarism allegations be proven true. But he is also a victim of his own story. He has spent much of his adult life being told that society is racist and that, within academia in particular, the odds are stacked against him – and that he is a supremely talented individual who deserves to be celebrated. The fawning over Jason Arday reveals the extent to which woke thinking has destroyed our institutions from within.