The Jason Arday scandal

Absolutely this.

The Jason Arday affair is symptomatic of a much, much bigger global issue in academia than than the Cambridge spy business.

I remember this being said to me daily when I studied History in the 1980s. I think it’ll be a sad day when subjects like history, literature, philosophy, drama, music, art etc are dropped in favour of 100% hard science.

This man is just pathetic. And has done a massive disservice to capable and professional black and autistic academics.

Agree. I cringe for them every time I hear someone say it’s only worth studying hard sciences.

When the university sector shrinks massively to focus only on ‘hard sciences’ there will be an enormous economic impact, but nobody will see it coming because nobody will be learning and researching Economics anymore 🫠

This is the problem with DEI. It's all about superficial tick boxes, where the easiest and laziest route is the one taken. It does nothing about the structural systems that cause inequality. It's all show for statistics and to make people feel good about themselves.

I agree with a lot of this but there are convincing arguments that class is increasingly important in America, and maybe more so than race.

William Julius Wilson (former president of the American Sociological Association, himself black) was arguing this back in 1980s, and I think his book is still pretty relevant now.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo13375516.html

It's arguable that the rise of wokeness in America, especially around stuff like critical race theory, was much more tied to class than race. Stuff like 'defund the police' was opposed by huge numbers of black people- they wanted better police, not no police.

https://reason.com/2024/05/14/black-people-overwhelmingly-want-to-maintain-or-increase-police-presence-they-also-want-better-police/

The opportunities for black academics and research and teaching around black subjects have mushroomed in recent years; the pipeline of appropriately qualified academics for these often quite specific fields is not nearly as voluminous per post as the pipeline in other more established fields. There is room for opportunism among academics who are perhaps not ideally qualified for the posts that wish to recruit.

Yes. I 100% agree. But we will be living in an Orwellian dystopian wasteland as well.

I think it happens every time society creeps rightwards. A society that knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

I completely agree about the humanities and their value. I think the problem really is treating the social sciences as sciences when they're not, and then treating conclusions reached by people doing the research as being based on scientific reasoning and methods.

But that doesn't affect the importance of the humanities in any way.

Well, obviously not, as JA's appointment was a bit of stunt casting designed to draw attention away from the fact that the rest of the university faculty is overwhelmingly populated by middle-aged white blokes ...

The fact that no-one bothered to check his bona fides beforehand shows he was diversity window-dressing and reflects badly on everyone involved.

Middle aged white blokes who deserve to be there. They've, you know, done the work that gets rewarded by being employed by Cambridge.

Cambridge was the alma mater of at least 5 of the top spies to have betrayed this country 60+ years ago and they survived that.

@JudgeJ yes indeed. And knowingly sent their own countrymen to their death.
There is a recently published book that goes into their treachery resulting in deaths and torture of people who trusted them - Stalin's Apostles: The Cambridge Five and the Making of the Soviet Empire (2026) by Antonia Senior.
Before that they got off lightly, because they were, you know, idealists and left wing and after all the Soviet Union was anti fascist and made sure everyone had jobs and houses and meant well……(even if Stalin murdered and starved millions of their citizens).
Had they spied for fascists it would’ve have been a different story.

You don’t really know that though…

Yeah, there are plenty of respected black academics who could work at Cambridge, but the university bureaucracy wanted a quick fix and someone they could parade as evidence of their sincerity and righteousness (for example the current president of Wolfson college is a black woman who is very highly respected in her field)

I work in a field where women are massively underrepresented, but I would hate this kind of appointment being made- it's frankly insulting and leads to bias against the very people the bureaucracy claim to be helping.

Which is absolutely as it should be! Do the work, get the accolades.

According to Julie Bindel she knows of at least 2 female academics from disadvantaged backgrounds who were passed over for this guy.

DEI/WOKE is almost dead thank God.

Have you seen the videos of the idiotic middle aged white women fawning over him (can't decide if their is some Freudian shit going on)

Watch some of the recording of him utterly embarrassing, any idiot could see he's a fraud.

he was a student and president elect of the union attending a Q&A not a formal debate (where casual clothes are acceptable) but don’t let that stop you dragging something totally irrelevant in

What did trinity have to do with it; thought he was a fellow of Jesus?

For anyone arguing in favour of him read some of the actual shit that they believed, even my elderly parents in their 80's would not have fallen for it 😂

Utter rot has set in at most of our Universities Cambridge leading the way!

DEI hire

IME older people are less vulnerable to woke comms than younger people. There comes a point in life when you've accumulated quite a lot of experience ;)

...the rest of the university faculty is overwhelmingly populated by middle-aged white blokes ...

Simply not true.

You can't always tell from the names, and not everybody has photos, but the first SIXTEEN of the people in the education faculty listed below appeared to me to be women:
https://faculty.educ.cam.ac.uk/about-us/our-people

And a good number of them are definitely not white.