To say it straight away: The Arday case is so complex that no one can seriously identify a single culprit for the tragic death of the resigned Cambridge professor. There is Jason Arday himself, who built his rise to fame on lies and reported those who found out about him to the police. There is the University of Cambridge, which placed him in a post for which he was unqualified and long ignored warnings. And there are parts of the British media that continued to target Arday with several articles a day even after he had long since resigned.
However, hanging over all responsibilities is the question of what role Arday's identity as a black man played in the matter. It is only this question that turns the story of an impostor, the failure of a university and the campaign of some newspapers into an issue that concerns an entire society, and no longer just in Great Britain. And the case actually provides an example of how diversity policy has risen, what is wrong with it and why it should change.
Cambridge was keen to increase the proportion of blacks
It started with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Elite Anglo-Saxon universities, where progressive students meet old traditions, were particularly affected. Statues were toppled, flags were raised, speakers were canceled and petitions were signed.
This was also the case at the Faculty of Education in Cambridge, from which 152 students and alumni wrote an open letter calling for changed recruitment practices and a greater presence of non-white scientists. At that time, only 0.4 percent of Cambridge professors were black, compared to four percent of the general British population. University representatives said at every opportunity that they wanted to change this as soon as possible. Cambridge had already decided on an action plan in 2019 to increase the proportion of non-white professors.
Like most university positions at the time, the professorship for educational sociology was advertised at the end of 2022 with a few additions that had little to do with academic qualifications and a lot to do with the university's diversity goals. The advertisement text, which the Telegraph found, initially emphasizes that applications from people from all population groups are welcome. It is then suggestively added that some groups are currently underrepresented: women, people with a black, Asian or ethnic minority background (BAME) and people with disabilities (working-class children apparently not). An “essential” selection criterion is also the ability to promote “equality, diversity and inclusion” within the faculty.
The non-disciplinary specifics of the advertisement may have narrowed down the group of applicants and brought Arday a little closer to the professorship. However, they alone do not explain why Cambridge chose a candidate for such a prestigious chair who only had an extremely modest list of publications and had never supervised a doctoral student to the end. Even if the faculty had wanted to hire a non-white at all costs, which is not certain, there would undoubtedly have been more qualified applicants than Arday. The New York Times reports, citing members of the appointment committee, that in addition to Arday, the final selection included two non-white female scientists with more numerous and better publications.
Arday represented Cambridge's diversity efforts
The suspicion is that the university primarily wanted to adorn itself with Arday's extraordinary biography. This included not only his upbringing as the child of Ghanaian immigrants in a London council estate, but also his illiteracy in his late youth and heroic deeds that have been questioned in recent weeks, such as completing 30 marathons in 35 days or raising £5 million in donations for charitable causes.
It is this story that the faculty communiqué told. It is this story that has been eagerly picked up in television reports and newspaper profiles. “Man who only learned to read at 18 becomes youngest black Cambridge professor ever,” read one typical headline.
Arday's story rarely stood alone. This wasn't just about a unique super talent. Instead, the university presented the appointment of someone who was disadvantaged in many ways at every opportunity as evidence of its own diversity efforts. Arday's experiences would highlight "the challenges that many underrepresented groups" face in education, said the dean of studies on the occasion of the appointment. Cambridge now wants to address this underrepresentation and Arday will make a significant contribution to this.
Whether Arday was supposed to do this through his research or his mere identity remained unclear. In general, his scientific work was rarely mentioned in all the reports about his person and appointment. Maybe that's why no one took a closer look at what Arday had actually written for a long time. If his research did find space, it was also about diversity goals: “My work focuses primarily on how we can open doors to more people from disadvantaged backgrounds and democratize higher education,” the newly appointed professor is quoted as saying by the faculty.
Diversity policy has politicized the case
With this identity-driven portrayal of Arday – and its ready inclusion in the media – the crucial mistake was made. It was one thing to give members of structurally disadvantaged groups selective advantages in the selection process in order to create equal opportunities: This could be seen as an attempt to create the best conditions for a fair academic evaluation. It was something different to present a successful candidate from such a group primarily as a group representative. Who can then avoid the impression that he was primarily hired as a group representative?
From now on, Arday's case was inextricably linked to discussions about the advancement of minorities. That's why it was Nathan Cofnas, a self-proclaimed "race realist" and eugenicist, who made the plagiarism allegations against Arday public a few weeks ago and wanted to demonstrate the correctness of his thesis that blacks actually have no place in such prominent positions (he was suspended from Ghent University on Thursday). That's why there were immediate protests from prominent politicians, scientists and university representatives who wanted to see nothing but a racist "smear campaign" behind the accusations. That's why, when the allegations became substantiated, criticism from the right was directed against diversity efforts as a whole.
For this reason, however, the attempt to blame racism for the generalization of the case in the first place fails, according to the motto: With white scientists we talk about individuals, with black scientists we always talk about all black people. Because it wasn't right-wing media and influencers first, it was the university that, with his willing cooperation, made Arday the representative of his group and a symbol of its own diversity efforts. When such a symbol is overthrown, it is only natural that the system in which it gained its meaning will also be questioned. It was diversity policy that politicized the Arday case in the first place.
Conversely, does this mean, as some people, not only on the far right, now believe, that all we have to do is eliminate equality measures and meritocracy would be re-established? The problems to which diversity policy should respond remain. Universities and society as a whole lose talent because like likes to associate with like and elites reproduce themselves consciously or unconsciously. Anyone who cares about meritocratic standards shouldn't care.
But the answer to this cannot be to emphasize identity characteristics even more under different circumstances and to turn the latent preference for whites into a manifest preference for blacks. The support of disadvantaged people must not lead to them being reduced to their disadvantage. Here it is important to find a new balance after the double furor of the Woken and the Antiwoken. Otherwise, the fall of an individual will lead to the division of society, in which the individual can only be crushed.
