University of Cambridge academics have demanded that the Jason Arday review considers the university’s culpability in promoting him as “a success story”. The Telegraph has the story.
In a letter to Chris Smith, Cambridge’s Chancellor, more than 40 academics said the decision to make the late professor “highly visible, presenting his race, age, disability and personal biography as part of a major institutional ‘success’ story”, was directly connected to the “racialised, ableist and disproportionate hounding” he received.
Arday, 41, who had been the university’s professor of sociology of education, was found dead in August after facing intense scrutiny in a highly public plagiarism row.
Last month, Cambridge launched an independent review into its decision-making, policies and organisational processes in the period leading up to his death.
Arday made international headlines in 2023 when he became the youngest black professor in Cambridge’s history at the age of 37.
The university’s faculty of education published a 1,500-word press release on its website, heralding his “remarkable” journey in overcoming illiteracy in his late teens and the barriers that neurodivergent black people faced in academia.
Cambridge also invited the BBC to film Arday meeting the head of faculty days before he took up his post.
In July, Arday was publicly accused of copying parts of his PhD thesis from another student. Cambridge initially dismissed the accusations as “a vile campaign to undermine his credibility”, but further questions about elements of his life story and achievements emerged.
In August, the university announced it had launched an investigation into Arday, prompting him to resign hours later, citing the “unrelenting level of public scrutiny”.
Days later, he was found dead at an address in Battersea, south London. An inquest heard that he had been found unresponsive by family members. His family said he had been subjected to a “campaign of sustained abuse” for more than three years since accepting his Cambridge role.
In the letter, first reported by the Guardian, more than 40 professors, associate professors and fellows criticised the independent review commissioned by Cambridge following Arday’s death as inadequate.
They said the review “must establish who authorised and directed the university’s public promotion of Professor Arday” as well as “what assessment was made of the risks that accompanied it”.
“The painful events of recent months, including the racialised, ableist and disproportionate hounding of Professor Arday, are clearly connected to the ways in which the university chose to make him highly visible, presenting his race, age, disability and personal biography as part of a major institutional ‘success’ story,” the letter said.
“The extent of the university’s emphasis on personal biography itself requires examination, not least because aspects of that biography subsequently became a focus of hostile media coverage and online hounding.
“The consequences of that public visibility, and the university’s response as the hostility around Professor Arday escalated, therefore require careful examination”.
Worth reading in full.
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Cambridge, while marking their own homework, will duck and weave better than Ali in his prime. But there’s no escaping the fact that Arday was given a post he was completely unfit for so the university could say “Look at how we’re promoting this black man. Aren’t we good“. An exercise in race-based self-aggrandisement
That’s quite a spin they’ve put on that story.
So the problem it turns out is the university’s excessive promotion of Arday and how it resulted in his being hounded. Not his lying, not the university’s mendacity, not the attempt to cover up the fact that he was completely unqualified, not the misguided appointment. None of that. The problem was the over-publicity.
These people honestly make me puke. They are weasels, trying to weasel their way around this, deep down knowing DEI is a problem but wanting to squirm their way past it and twist it around so that the culprits are those who made too much of a deal of him.
Weasels.
Think you’re being unduly harsh on mustelids
But he was so shiny. What could possibly go wrong….wait…
Shiny, yes, in more than one way.
Actually, why does his face look so artificially shiny?
Admittedly, we can’t help what face nature gives us but I have never seen a face like that.
It’s bizarrely waxy and unreal and makes his stare exceptionally piercing.
the racialised, ableist and disproportionate hounding of Professor Arday
Oh please. Serial fraudster, and those who promoted him who probably knew that, or suspected and chose not to dig further, get found out but we have to find someone else to blame.
But… was the ‘hounding’ disproportionate? I expect it is a media process many celebrities count as a cost of their visibility, rightly or wrongly.
He reported the people investigating him to the police who then investigated the investigators. His lawyers accused the investigators of racism.
It’s the ruling elite that decides what is proportionate and disproportionate.
Just ask Lucy Connolly.