Why we’re launching a private Arday inquiry

The Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF) has commissioned an independent investigation into Cambridge’s appointment of Dr Jason Arday as its youngest ever black professor, amid growing professional disquiet over his academic record, the circumstances of his appointment, the University’s handling of concerns raised about his scholarship and, more recently, the scope and direction of Cambridge’s own inquiry.

Among other matters, it will examine whether Arday’s scholarly output and academic standing met the standards ordinarily expected of a Cambridge professorship, and the extent to which the University exercised appropriate due diligence in assessing both. It will also consider what role, if any, was played in the appointment by institutional policies or considerations relating to equality, diversity and inclusion, including whether any positive action in recruitment was consistent with relevant provisions of equality law.

The investigation will be chaired by Professor Swaran Preet Singh, Lord Singh of Solihull, a former Commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission who previously led the independent investigation into allegations of discrimination within the Conservative Party. He will be joined by a distinguished panel comprising Harvard psychologist Professor Steven Pinker, UCL sociologist Professor Alice Sullivan, Cambridge historian Professor Robert Tombs and Labour peer Professor Maurice Glasman.

Investigative journalist Nick Wallis, whose work exposing the Post Office Horizon scandal included three BBC Panorama programmes and the book The Great Post Office Scandal, will lead the investigation with a dedicated research team.

It is perhaps something of a truism that academic status and career progression have for some time been organised around ever more granular distinctions of identity, with traditional ideas about equality of opportunity, merit as the arbiter of advancement and the disinterested pursuit of intellectual excellence increasingly denounced in the ideological crucible that the modern university has become, as the more zealous of the salaried vanguard set about engineering their own Year Zero.

But the Arday affair has brought into sharper relief — and in some respects intensified — the miasmatic atmosphere now pervading campuses up and down the country, in which academics feel unable openly to question institutional decisions or the increasingly prescriptive orthodoxies of progressive social-justice politics, with many who dare to speak up suffering professional detriment, as CAF knows all too well from its recent casework. 

Why another investigation?

But even so, why another investigation? After all, given that Cambridge is already conducting its own independent inquiry, why not simply allow the University to get on with it? 

The answer lies, at least in part, in the remarkable transformation in both the language and the priorities of Cambridge’s own investigation following Arday’s death.

When Cambridge first announced an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Arday’s appointment on 12 August, Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice left little doubt about the problem she thought warranted investigation. Acknowledging concerns “across the University and well beyond it” about this “damaging and difficult case”, she reached not for the language of welfare or support, but immediately invoked Cambridge’s centuries-old commitment to “the highest standards of academic excellence”. There was, she said, a need to “understand if there is more we could do when serious allegations are raised in relation to our own academic standards at Cambridge”. The investigation would also feed into a review of the process for appointing senior academics. His case, Prentice later added, was an “aberration”.

Within forty-eight hours events had, of course, taken a much darker turn. Arday was found dead, apparently by suicide.

By the time the University unveiled its revised independent review, both its architecture and its vocabulary had changed. There was still a promise to examine the institution’s “decision-making, policies and organisational processes”, but the inquiry would now proceed in two parts. One would continue the investigation Cambridge had already proposed, with an expert panel “including individuals with lived experience” looking at senior academic recruitment, research misconduct and the wider institutional processes surrounding Arday’s time at the University. But ahead of it came a new, expedited inquiry, led by former Chief Crown Prosecutor Nazir Afzal, into the “support, interventions and protections” available to Arday before his death.

And in Prentice’s accompanying statement, it wasn’t difficult to discern where the emphasis of the University’s most senior official now lay. Gone was Arday, the recruitment “aberration”. Gone, too, was the invocation of Cambridge’s “highest standards of academic excellence”. In their place came her description of the “appalling period of external criticism and focus” Arday had endured.

“Given the devastating outcome,” Prentice said, “we are all asking ourselves whether we could have and should have done more.”

There will no doubt be differing views on that “appalling period of external criticism and focus”. Some may feel that much of it consisted of perfectly legitimate questions about Arday’s qualifications, affiliations and academic conduct, including his use of harassment law to try to prevent questions being asked about allegations of plagiarism – matters which, given his senior position at a public university, were clearly of public interest.

Others will perhaps feel that the general tenor of the stories appearing in the days following his resignation recalled DBC Pierre’s grimly comic meditation on the suggestibility inherent to any form of public pile-on in Vernon God Little, in which the eponymous hero, wrongly suspected of involvement in a school massacre, flees Texas amid wall-to-wall rolling news coverage, prompting witnesses to queue up to identify him as the perpetrator of every murder committed in the state while he was on the run – including crimes committed simultaneously, with different weapons, at opposite ends of Texas.

But whatever one’s view of the criticism Arday received, is it really the Vice-Chancellor’s place to pronounce upon its character before the inquiry has established what happened? And what confidence can we have that the University will take seriously any findings or recommendations that challenge the interpretation of events its most senior official already appears to favour?

Cambridge’s own terms of reference threaten to place some of the most contentious issues beyond the reach of its investigation altogether

Quite apart from this apparent attempt to triangulate the University’s position against the mood of whichever segment of its payroll feels most aggrieved at any given moment, there is a more fundamental problem. Cambridge’s own terms of reference threaten to place some of the most contentious issues beyond the reach of its investigation altogether.

Consider recruitment. Few are the Cambridge dons who, behind closed doors and among trusted colleagues, would regard the University’s decision to examine its appointment practices as anything other than timely. Why, then, does the investigation telescope the problem, confining its scrutiny to “senior academic roles”, when the same uncomfortable questions about merit-based recruitment in an age of positive action arise in appointments to early-career postdoctoral positions just as surely as professorial chairs?

What CAF’s independent investigation ultimately establishes about Arday’s appointment remains to be seen. But as to the wider question of how universities recruit, a large part of the problem is surely that statutory equality duties have slowly become entangled with a very different, theoretically laden and politically contested conception of equity.

It’s not that the old lexicon — fair access, equal opportunity, widening participation — isn’t still proudly emblazoned on all the dials and controls of the institution’s glossy EDI machinery. It’s just that, somewhere down in the engine room, a new, more radical set of objectives has begun skulking about, their motive force pulling the whole enterprise away from unfashionably colour-blind ideals like “identifying the intellectually strongest candidate for the post” and towards the altogether darker moral universe of critical-race politics, with its vituperative fixation on inherited guilt, grievance and a forever delayed moment of redemptive justice.

On paper, Cambridge’s position could hardly be clearer. Its Recruitment Policy says recruitment decisions should be based on merit, “ensuring that the best candidate is selected”. Its Equal Opportunities Policy also provides that entry into employment “will be determined only by personal merit” and by criteria related to the particular post.

Yet its Diverse Recruitment Framework tells rather a different story, advising departments to “try to ensure” that more than one candidate from “under-represented groups” reaches interview, and even suggesting re-advertising where a longlist “is not diverse” — for example where it is all white or male.

Before interviews, panels are told to “reflect” on their equality and diversity commitments and “their own biases”. After choosing a preferred candidate, they are invited to consider whether “implicit bias” affected the decision. The University’s Race Equality Charter action plan, meanwhile, complains that online EDI training is “often seen as overly legalistic” and calls for a greater “focus on race”. A revealing, perhaps inadvertent, admission: does “overly legalistic” simply mean too technical, or might it imply that equality law, with its fuddy-duddy egalitarianism in which all protected characteristics stand on the same statutory footing, is too feeble a framework for the account of race the new training would like to advance?

Then there’s the data. Recruiters were to be given access to racial-diversity statistics for longlists, without which they apparently couldn’t “react if the longlist is not diverse”. What “react” means is never made clear. But read alongside the Framework’s suggestion to re-advertise insufficiently diverse longlists, the implication is plain enough: demographic composition has become a trigger for intervention in recruitment. One stated success measure was for longlists in 80% of Cambridge institutions to meet University diversity benchmarks, while the Framework itself was to be “embedded into HR recruitment guidance”.

Nor were professorial appointments left untouched. The action plan aimed to “increase diversity at professorship level by appointing more BAME staff to professorial roles”. Proposed measures included reviewing each stage of the appointment process to “mitigate bias”, requiring internal panel members to complete EDI and implicit-bias training, and changing the racial composition of the panels themselves, with a target that 25% of Boards of Electors should include at least two BAME members.

To be sure, much of this is, as written, perfectly lawful. Sections 158 and 159 of the Equality Act 2010 permit proportionate positive action where disadvantage or under-representation is reasonably believed to exist and, in tightly defined circumstances, allow a protected characteristic to count when choosing between candidates who are as qualified as one another.

Contra the worst excesses of the Culture Wars, there’s nothing inherently inimical to merit about removing barriers that stop talented people from disadvantaged or under-represented backgrounds competing for academic posts. One of the privileges of my otherwise entirely undistinguished academic career was lecturing first-generation students from some of the country’s poorest backgrounds, many of whom — highly intelligent but, as is so often the way when your single parent lacks the pound coins needed to feed the prepayment electricity meter during the winter months, short on Bourdieusian cultural capital — had themselves been given a hand up into higher education through widening-participation measures.

But if identifying and addressing present disadvantage so that a candidate’s merit can become apparent in the here and now is one thing, quite another is asking a recruitment process to take account of, and somehow redress, the accumulated weight of historical injustice supposedly inherited not just by an individual candidate qua candidate, but by the racial group for which that candidate is apparently taken to stand as a representative.

As to how many academics sitting on recruitment panels actually internalise these wider assumptions, we can only speculate. Some will no doubt already be sympathetic, primed by their own intellectual commitments to see academic judgement as serving the wider normative project now writ large in university codes and policies — challenging “white privilege”, “decolonising” the academy and remedying “structural racism” in curricula or research. Others may simply be too cowed by campus culture to push back.

Either way, once immersed in the same ethos — the systems, the training, the specialist staff networks — how could they fail to acquire a sense of which candidates, arguments and intellectual dispositions their institutions want them to favour?

But perhaps this all seems a little abstract. So consider Professor Anoop Nayak of Newcastle University, one of the nine members of the Board of Electors that appointed Arday. For Nayak, racial inequality in academia is reproduced not merely through discrimination or unequal access, but through apparently neutral institutions, disciplinary structures and systems of knowledge themselves. In a recent paper, he describes the under-representation of minority students and academics in geography as part of the discipline’s “implacable whiteness”, argues that its overwhelmingly white disciplinary establishment affects what forms of knowledge are treated as central or peripheral, and approvingly cites the ring-fencing of funded doctoral places for “suitable… Black and minoritised candidates”, concluding that “for change to happen such action is necessary”. The article’s conclusion extends this project to “student recruitment and diversity” and, interestingly enough, “the practices of staff hires and career progression”. If academics are “serious about decolonizing”, Nayak writes, then “some unsettling questions are needed” in precisely these areas as institutions “lay claim to global elitism”.

You don’t have to be Ibram X. Kendi to see that, within Nayak’s framework, the bounded statutory conception of equality — in which individual assessment and appointment on merit remain, and proportionate positive action is the exception rather than the rule — might start to look laughably insufficient. The appointing institution, its standards and policies, even its conception of what counts as valuable knowledge, are themselves products of those same historically racialised structures that the decolonial project seeks to dismantle. Simply applying inherited criteria consistently, treating candidates identically regardless of race and selecting the conventionally strongest candidate after widening the applicant pool is not at all progressive. In fact, it’s positively regressive, since it leaves the hypothesised underlying racialised power structure perfectly intact.

No doubt Nayak wouldn’t put it quite like this himself, but one reading of his body of work is that the question is no longer simply how to get BAME academics into the game, but whether the rules of the game, the criteria by which the referee judges performance, and even the resulting score are themselves racially loaded — and whether race-conscious correction is needed to level the playing field.

It’s not necessarily that “merit” no longer matters for advocates of equity, simply that the traditional understanding of merit is no longer sovereign, and has itself become an object of suspicion — since the criteria by which it is recognised are opened to challenge as products of inherited racial norms.

Present-day judgements of merit will, of course, sometimes point in the same direction as structural redress. Indeed, part of what made Arday such a compelling candidate in the first place was that, outside the ranks of the most die-hard racists, the CV of a young black man from a difficult background really could have been every bit as impressive as it appeared. But comparative merit and the perceived demands of structural redress need not always coincide. And where they don’t, well… something has to give.

Cambridge’s recruitment rules already hint at the “something” that might have to give, littered as they are with mechanisms enabling recruiters to “react” to the demographic composition of longlists, diversity benchmarks and an explicit objective of increasing BAME professorial appointments.

That is already a different conceptual world from simply removing unlawful barriers, widening access and then appointing the strongest person. But scholars such as Nayak — and Professor Michalinos Zembylas, who also sat on the Board of Electors and writes within a similarly radical intellectual tradition — bring another source of pressure to bear, supplying a theoretical framework through which familiar institutional terms acquire meanings quite different from those contemplated by equality law.

None of this tells us how Arday was assessed, or why he emerged from the shortlist as Cambridge’s preferred candidate

None of this tells us how Arday was assessed, or why he emerged from the shortlist as Cambridge’s preferred candidate. Whether Part Two of the University’s own review will even venture into this territory remains to be seen. So let us hope that CAF’s independent investigation hears from enough witnesses, examines enough documentary evidence and gets sufficiently far behind the University’s formal procedures to confront the question: when demographic objectives, EDI training and the theoretically informed academic judgement of individual electors all meet inside Cambridge’s recruitment machinery, which conception is actually turning the gears – statutory equality, or the politically freighted logic of equity?

And this, surely, is no more than devotees of equity – who for so long have hidden their reparative light under the statutory bushel – could themselves wish for: an opportunity, finally, to proclaim publicly the differential value they attach to particular forms of intersectionally striated “lived experience”, and to bask in the thunderous applause of progressive colleagues who, having hitherto cheered them on without quite understanding what was being proposed, have finally grasped the implications for their own career prospects and are, naturally, beside themselves with delight.

Perhaps even better, the next generation of brilliantly gifted scholars applying to Cambridge might finally have some idea, before the shortlisting panel begins its first sift, quite how much weight their academic achievements are likely to carry compared with their other, less cerebral attributes.

You can contact the independent investigation via its website here.