Jason Arday

The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge has said the university has ‘lessons to learn from the Jason Arday tragedy’. Well, you can make words mean what you want – the ancient Greeks invented the word tragôidia and it meant ‘goat-song’ – but is ‘tragic’ really the word for Arday? Tragedies reworked the fate of great ancient heroes, whose death was of high significance and meaning to the watching audience. Such dramas were typically characterised by a number of markers. They could include prophecies, warnings, ignorance of the true state of affairs (generating irony), over-confidence accompanied by self-delusion and understanding too late to avoid disaster.

Daniel Defoe observed that plague victims “never perceiv’d that they were infected” until they discovered the “tokens” on their skin. By that point, “nothing could follow but certain Death”. Something similar might be said of Britain’s universities. In recent days, the Jason Arday affair has captured the world’s attention because of its absurdity. But the humiliation of Cambridge is not an early sign of infection. It is just a particularly visible bubo. At one level, Arday’s fall reveals how, even in the most elite universities, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) dogma has warped intellectual standards to the point of madness.

Home Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister, began a tour of the United Kingdom, making small announcements. But on the matter of the early release of the killers of PC Andrew Harper, he said he was ‘increasingly confident’ that work to increase space in prisons would ‘prevent their early release altogether’. All 50 chief constables in the United Kingdom urged him to prevent it. Probation officers voted in favour of strike action over the early release scheme. Trains in the north-west of England were disrupted for two days after a 90-second power failure in Manchester affected a Network Rail operations centre and signalling. More regions were declared to be in drought, encompassing 45 million people, of whom 27 million are restricted in their use of water.

The Music Man, The Sting, Catch Me If You Can: movies and theater have a rich tradition of stories about imposters who manage to fool a lot of people. The literary branch includes the Duke and the Dauphin in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Herman Melville’s riverboat epic, The Confidence-Man. Indeed, tricksters are found almost everywhere stories are told. Native Americans have their tales of Coyote. Ananse, the spider, a key figure in West African and African-American folklore. We admire the cleverness of such cozeners, at least in fiction. Their victims often get what they deserve. The DEI agenda, as long as it prevails, will ensure a long line of Jason Arday fabulists And this may be the case with Jason Arday too.

Diverse academia Jason Arday was heralded as Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor when appointed professor of sociology of education in 2023. How many ethnic-minority staff are there at UK universities? – In 2024/25 there were 244,755 academic staff working in British universities. Of these, 26% were recorded as being of ethnic minority. In the same year, 16% of the UK population identified as ethnic minority. – Of 23,900 professors, 14% were ethnic minority. – Between 2023/24 and 2024/25 the number of professors of ethnic minority increased by 4%, while the number of professors who are white rose by 1%. – While HESA statistics subdivide ethnic minorities into ‘black’ and other groups, they are only listed in bands to the closest five.

The Jason Arday affair has been a great revealer. On the one hand, it is a glorious romp that has brought much-needed mirth to Britain. On the other, the exposure of Professor Arday isn’t really about the guileless Arday himself, but the establishment that elevated him. It has served up a moment of unavoidable clarity in which the nonsense of progressivism stands exposed like the imperial scrotum. Arday himself can hardly be blamed for this scandal. Like Puff the magic dragon, he is notable only for the effect he had on others It is a perfect storm. We have a fantasist in an environment where, for political and social status reasons, everyone takes his claims at face value, or pretends that they do because to express doubt would be to invite unwanted attention.

I’ve never met Professor Jason Arday. I don’t know whether he has genuinely run 600 miles in six days. I also genuinely don’t know the truth about the remarkable similarities between parts of his doctoral thesis at Liverpool John Moores, which helped propel him rocket-like up the academic greasy pole to a chair at Cambridge, and passages in a dissertation written six years earlier by someone at Brunel. From the parts of Arday’s output I have seen, I have found some fairly thin gruel It is undoubtedly possible that this is nothing more than an honest, if rather careless, omission to acknowledge earlier work: academics are, after all, proverbially absent-minded, and writing theses is stressful.