Here's C&P of the article:
The fall of Jason Arday
Pratinav Anil
14 August 2026
New Statesman
It is some irony that in a Protestant country which professes to have no truck with saints, we remain stubbornly hagiographical in temperament, elevating exemplary figures and saddling them with a symbolic freight, only to recoil when they crumble under it. This habit of mind, and its inevitable flare-ups, reveals something fundamental about the contemporary state of the country. And this includes the Jason Arday affair, which is so much more than the story of a fallen academic – or, as Arday once referred to himself, of a modern “Icarus”. It is, in a more interesting sense, an English story: a parable of our national institutions and national temperament, our credulity and our cruelty.
Arday’s own biography, as it was narrated in interviews and now in his new memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, due to come out this month, functioned for a time as a fable of self-cultivation. Born into a Ghanaian family in a council house in 1980s Clapham, he describes a childhood shaped by autism. He recalls going years without speaking, not learning to read until his late teens, and being treated by doctors who regarded his prospects with profound pessimism.
What follows takes us on to the familiar ground of the classic Bildung, a tradition running from Victorian self-help manuals to such modern descendants as Tara Westover’s Educated, in which preliminary hardship gives on to great things. Arday’s first education came courtesy of his mother, Giff, a woman of unusual theoretical seriousness who proved decisive in his intellectual formation. Before he could read, he tells us, she filled the family home with the writings of Angela Davis, bell hooks and Audre Lorde, reciting their aphorisms in a sort of household liturgy. Although the written word remained beyond his grasp, the rudiments of a sociological imagination had already begun to take shape.
Having left school with two GCSEs, in physical education and textiles, Arday entered higher education conspicuously late before eventually completing a doctorate in education at Liverpool John Moores University. His thesis, “An Exploration of Peer-Mentoring Among Student Teachers to Inform Reflective Practice Within the Context of Action Research”, was a desultory, workaday work, which argued that reciprocal mentoring among trainee teachers fostered more reflective professional practice than traditional hierarchical models. Put differently, peers often prove better teachers than superiors. Curiously, the memoir is taken up almost entirely with the struggle to obtain a PhD, with the thesis itself being given short shrift. One of its many scenes of studied poignancy recounts the young Arday, aged 18, asking his mentor, the sports lecturer Sandro Sandri, the childlike question, “What’s a PhD?”
From there, Arday’s public life expanded into what might now be called a portfolio career. Traditional scholarship was accompanied by an ever-growing catalogue of civic endeavours: charity fundraising through endurance running, educational advocacy, work with the campaign group the Black Curriculum, an appearance as an Olympic torchbearer, and a dependable presence on the radio and literary festival circuit. The memoir pushes the mythopoeic narrative even further, recounting a violent assault in early adulthood, a brain tumour during his doctoral studies and charitable work installing water pumps in Brazilian favelas.
It was on the strength of this accumulated biography, rather than his scholarship stricto sensu, that Arday, aged 37, was appointed professor of sociology of education at Cambridge in 2023, becoming the youngest black professor in the university’s history. Beyond the ivory tower, his profile continued to rise. His agent secured an advance of “1.4 million” – whether sterling or dollars remains oddly unclear – for his memoir after a ferociously contested pre-empt. By then, Arday – black, autistic, working class, the son of immigrants – was something of a totemic figure. His life seemed proof that, given enough determination and enlightened institutional support, even the hardest start could be overcome.
Thereafter, it all unravelled. The early questions concerned plagiarism in his doctoral thesis. They soon spread to his published work, replete with disputed quotations and “impossible” participant data. His curriculum vitae fell victim next. Visiting professorships at Glasgow and Ohio State University, not to mention an honorary appointment at Durham, were challenged by the institutions concerned. Later, it transpired that his Palgrave monograph, Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, which kept turning up on lists of his publications, was in fact never published. His lofty brags about marathon feats and charity millions were toned down. WaterAiddisputed his claim that he had installed water points overseas on its behalf. Taken together, these revelations chipped away at Arday’s carefully crafted image as a late-blooming philanthropist public intellectual. Not long afterwards, he resigned from Cambridge.
The hard right, long convinced that enforced diversity was ruining higher education, could barely hide its satisfaction. The story was energetically taken up by the tabloid press in a strikingly anachronistic display of its power to name and shame. Here, seemingly, was the perfect allegory of national decline: one of the two ancient citadels of British learning had lowered its drawbridge to a jumped-up intruder who turned out to be an imposter. For conservatives, the affair confirmed what they had been saying all along: that universities had disingenuously come to treat lived experience as a kind of epistemic authority in its own right, often at the expense of more mundane measures of scholarly standing. It was no accident that the first person to bring Arday’s academic record to wider public attention was the eugenically inclined philosopher Nathan Cofnas, who sets great store by what he calls “race realism”.
A rather pretzelled defence was mounted by some progressives, though to little avail. One version held that Arday was an interloper, and that the establishment had finally closed ranks to keep him, and his sort, out. The UK, on this account, remains a peculiarly closed society, its elite institutions guarded by invisible sentries of pedigree. But this does not quite ring true. As Perry Anderson observed in the pages of the New Left Review some 60 years ago, Britain’s governing class has, in fact, proved remarkably adept at incorporating outsiders. Indeed, few national elites have proved so porous; all the better to entrench itself through multiple historical periods.
Time and again, Britain has preferred absorption to exclusion. The story is familiar enough: from the émigrés of Mitteleuropa, who found a place at the heart of British intellectual and cultural life in the mid-century – Nikolaus Pevsner, Friedrich Hayek, Lucian Freud – to the ease with which individual black and brown Britons have risen to the highest levels of politics, from Rishi Sunak and Nadhim Zahawi to Kwasi Kwarteng. Arday’s ascent likewise sits awkwardly beside the popular image of impenetrable institutions. His progress through higher education was extraordinarily rapid. Publishers, broadcasters, universities and agents competed for his attention. Far from being put off by his unconventional background, they were drawn to it.
A second progressive refrain holds that people from minority backgrounds are picked over endlessly, and that Arday was subjected to this treatment in its most extreme form. This, too, is hard to square with what actually transpired. Arday’s frictionless rise suggests that very few of his claims, academic or otherwise, were ever seriously questioned. Quite remarkably, they were accepted at face value until the very end. Again and again, the scepticism you might expect from academics simply failed to emerge. If there is a lesson here, it is that British institutions can be oddly naive when the story in front of them is one they badly want to believe.
A more persuasive response came from within Cambridge itself. Priyamvada Gopal and a number of Arday’s colleagues shifted attention away from his lies and fantasies towards the institution that had raised him up. They called for an independent inquiry into how a scholar at such an early stage of his career had ended up in one of Cambridge’s most prestigious chairs, and questioned why the university had been so keen to hold up his appointment as proof of its own broad-mindedness. They also saw something that Arday’s board of electors apparently did not: that the inevitable backlash would fall upon black academics tout court; that they would be left carrying the can for an institutional failure not of their making. Nor would the damage stop there. It would spread to Britain’s already battered universities, which are already struggling with job cuts, shaky finances and growing public distrust.
The deeper failure, undoubtedly, lies in the transmutation of the modern university into that curious hybrid: part research institution, part property developer, part international corporation, part media brand. It speaks the language of metrics, rankings and, above all, “impact”. The successful academic is now unmoored from the anchoritic ideal of old. They are, by turns, a broadcaster, event organiser and inveterate email correspondent – and, in Arday’s case, a fundraiser, campaigner and moral exemplar besides. The old compact between teachers and students has given way to an altogether more ramshackle affair of sprawling bureaucracies, speculative property portfolios, ever-expanding managerial hierarchies and a small caste of superstar academics whose public personas often matter rather more than their scholarly oeuvres.
Technological change has played a part. The professor of journalism Jeff Jarvis has argued that the age of print created what he calls, after Lars Ole Sauerberg, the “Gutenberg parenthesis”: a civilisation in which intellectual authority was conferred through institutions devoted to publication, criticism and the gradual accumulation of reputation. The university was among the chief custodians of those conventions. Our post-print age rewards rather different qualities. Universities have come to compete for personalities as much as ideas. Their staff lists now include broadcasters, public intellectuals and actors alongside career scholars – for example, Angelina Jolie at the LSE, Brian Cox at Manchester and Alice Roberts at Birmingham. Celebrity trumps authority. The Arday affair, then, is a singularly vivid symptom of a wider cultural transformation.
Two more developments have enabled the Arday scandal. The first is the uncritical importation of American intellectual fashions into British institutional life. Diversity, equity and inclusion programmes have arrived together with assumptions about race that sit uneasily with recent British history. This is not to deny the persistence of racism. Britain has never been innocent of it. But neither has it been America. Race has undoubtedly mattered here; but class has counted for more. These days, the median hourly pay gap between black and white workers in Britain is about 6 per cent, compared with roughly 22 per cent in the US. Young black Britons are likewise substantially more likely than their white British peers to enter higher education and, on average, outlive them.
The Arday affair illustrates the perils of ignoring these British peculiarities. In an institutional culture anxious to advertise its emancipated worldview, routine scepticism can easily come to be mistaken for racial prejudice. The upshot is a paternalistic impulse that sits uncomfortably close to what George W Bush once called “the soft bigotry of low expectations”. The human rights lawyer Jacqueline McKenzie’s well-intentioned intervention – “Not sure many of us can write a PhD even with copied paragraphs” – captured the problem perfectly. To be sure, undertaking a doctorate might be a difficult enterprise for some people. Scholarly sprezzatura is unevenly distributed. But the question at hand is whether the ordinary standards of scholarship should apply to everyone without fear or favour. To say otherwise is to mistake solidarity with condescension.
A second, related shift has been the retreat of the left. As organised labour declined and the unions lost their clout, identity politics moved into the space they left behind. The aim was no longer to close the gap between classes, let alone do away with class altogether. Instead, Britain learned to celebrate the exceptional stories of those few who had managed to escape the circumstances of their birth. The exceptional life, after a fashion, became a political programme. As the commentator Ash Sarkar argues in her 2025 book Minority Rule, the language of collective solidarity gradually gave way to an exhausting contest over symbolic injury, an Olympics of victimhood in which representation came to matter more than material politics. Institutions found it easier to put different faces in their prospectuses and professorial chairs than to tackle the harder questions of wealth and educational inequality. Arday’s appointment, therefore, came to mean far more than an ordinarily academic appointment. It was made to stand for race and autism, social mobility and reparative justice.
This is where the real injustice lies. Outstanding black British scholars, whose achievements need no embellishment, will now have to work under a cloud of suspicion they did nothing to create. At the same time, the conservative iconoclasm unleashed by the Arday affair risks doing wider damage to British universities, which remain one of the country’s great sources of soft power and export earnings. For generations, our universities have punched well above the UK’s shrinking geopolitical weight, drawing ambitious minds from around the world. Whether they can keep doing so will depend on their willingness to defend time-honoured standards.
What’s more, the fallout will not stop at the university gates. Every perfectly avoidable institutional failure gives fresh ammunition to those who already distrust higher education in particular and public institutions in general. Rather as the Cambridge Five became a permanent byword for the fallibility of the British establishment, the Arday affair seems destined to outlive the particulars of the case. It will be remembered not simply as an academic scandal but as an emblem of the defining neuroses of our age.
Pratinav Anil is a historian at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947-77 (Penguin)