The press gleefully exploited Jason Arday to foster distrust towards academics, argues Oscar Peck.
As you are reading this article, Professor Jason Arday has now passed. But when I started writing it, he was still alive. Arday had been at the eye of a media maelstrom for the best part of a month until his untimely passing last August. A sociology professor at the University of Cambridge, and the youngest Black professor in the institution’s history, he stood accused of a series of serious misdeeds. These included plagiarising much of his PhD, fabricating his professional credentials, and making spurious claims regarding charity work he did.
However, no publication was more excited by the scandal than the Telegraph. The outlet posted at least 33 news items about Jason Arday in the space of a few weeks, including 19 in the space of approximately 48 hours from 6-8 August. For the Telegraph, the cause of the scandal could not have been clearer. Arday was the smoking gun of “the wider rot that DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] imposes on higher education”. He was “Cambridge’s Diversity Poster Boy”, appointed by “liberal nitwits” who were willing to sacrifice academic excellence at the altar of diversity, to the point that all vetting was jettisoned because of Arday’s skin colour. Ostensibly, “people who know nothing, and have very limited ability, are allowed to run everything” so that left-wing academics can feel virtuous for promoting people of colour. The obliteration of Arday’s character proved too much, and he passed away on 14 August, aged 41.
One can understand why people reading these claims would be outraged. On the surface, it does seem that the only reason someone with as much baggage as Arday would be appointed is that there was some kind of overriding motivation for doing so. Enter DEI policies, stage left.
But what does DEI really mean? UK universities use a number of means to encourage and widen participation for those who otherwise would not be able to take part in university life due to structural advantage; for students, this includes contextual admissions, where admission grade requirements are lowered for some students based on their background, and outreach, where universities provide advice to help disadvantaged students navigate the admissions process where their school may not. Who receives this assistance is decided based on a number of criteria, including whether or not they are eligible for free school meals, whether their school has a low grade attainment level – and far less frequently, what race the student is. Diversity initiatives for staff include ensuring all staff have clear career progression opportunities, and ensuring that members of oppressed groups can form networks to ensure representation.
These policies may seem superfluous or trite, but they are vital. Students of colour face far greater systemic obstacles. For example, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 53% of Bangladeshi households in the UK are in poverty. This is compared to 19% of white households. Children from poorer households are much less likely to be able to engage with education. Overcrowded housing negatively impacts both sleep levels and the space to be able to complete homework. Hunger suppresses concentration; study books, computers and private tutors are all far less accessible for poorer students. In other words, some people have to work a lot harder to get to the same place. Inclusive policies are about levelling the playing field in order to reduce social inequalities. So, while the Telegraph may bemoan the lack of “meritocracy” created by inclusivity, the truth is that inclusivity creates a stronger meritocracy and a greater pool of talent. There are just as many talented and creative people from disadvantaged backgrounds as there are from the marble-plated corridors of the elite private and public schools of the UK. Simply put, the Telegraph’s assertion that “people who know nothing, and have very limited ability, are allowed to run everything” is untrue.
If it were not for Arday being a Black man, the Telegraph would not have fixated on this story the way it had. Yes, what Arday did was dishonest, if the allegations are true. But the kind of foaming-at-the-mouth fury that the Telegraph has unleashed is entirely disproportionate. No other British academic in modern times has been given such a beating from the mainstream media, despite similar cases having emerged. Take, for example, Ros Holmes, the White St Andrews academic who was sacked on account of having accrued over 70 counts of plagiarism. Hardly a whisper. There is a very prevalent assumption that most academics who are people of colour are incompetent; they are kept around merely to check boxes on a DEI form. Black students are twice as likely to be accused of using AI to cheat than white students. Now, the Telegraph claims that “the tragedy of Jason Arday cannot be blamed on the press”. Had Cambridge University “nurtured his talents […] he would have been spared public shame”, posits Charles Moore, a columnist who had, just weeks ago, referred to Arday as “thick as mince”. Who were the ones imposing “public shame”?
What does the Telegraph have to gain from this coverage? Many academics, especially sociologists (of which Jason Arday was one), have sought to challenge power structures in society. In 2016, Conservative MP Michael Gove infamously quipped: “I think people in this country have had enough of experts”. This has particularly been the case in discourse around the climate crisis, where right-wing news outlets have denied the scientific consensus on the climate crisis and threatened vested interests that the owners of these outlets possess. For example, the parent company of the Telegraph, Axel Springer, is controlled by Mathias Doepfner, a man whose net worth sits at $2.8bn. I suspect that the current power structures in society suit Doepfner just fine, and it is in his interests to defend them from threats posed by academics who call for the redistribution of wealth. Journalists at publications like the Telegraph lack the knowledge and resources to be able to rebut these claims. By presenting these same academics as a mix of both liberal elites who are out of touch with the common man and underqualified “thick as mince” people of colour, these claims become discredited as naive fantasies, without the Telegraph ever having to engage with them. Instead of Arday being “Cambridge’s Diversity Poster Boy”, he had become the Telegraph’s anti-academia poster boy. And he paid the price.
