A few years ago, I applied for a lecturer job in Cambridge. I didn’t get it, but at the time I certainly wanted it, for a number of reasons, some more sensible than others. The least sensible was a pure desire for bragging rights, not so much among academic peers as with the wider world. I knew that, if I could tell friends and acquaintances that “I teach at Cambridge”, they would reliably think “he must be very brilliant”. It was gratifying to fantasize about being seen in this way.
I am not at all proud of this, but that does not make it less true. Nor was this species of vanity a mere idiosyncrasy of mine. The whole world is encouraged to think of the landscape of universities as a sort of worldwide football league, with a handful of names (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard …) occupying the place of Barcelona, Manchester City, Bayern Munich. Students and lecturers at these universities are then imagined as a sort of academic equivalent of the Messis and Mbappés.
The whole world is encouraged to think of the landscape of universities as a sort of worldwide football league.
This talismanic value of a name like “Cambridge” is crucial to the bizarre, still unfolding Jason Arday saga. If one subtracts Cambridge from the story, it loses most of its bite.
Consider an alternative timeline where Jason Arday’s career remained within the type of institutions where he studied. The son of Ghanaian immigrants, raised in South London, and who—as he tells it—could not speak till he was eleven, and barely read and write till he was eighteen, goes on to obtain a BA in Education Studies and an MA in Education and Pedagogy at St Mary’s University Twickenham, and then a PhD in Education from Liverpool John Moores University. Following this, he gets a teaching job at the Education faculty of one of those two institutions, or some similar school.
Now all this would be extremely impressive for a man from a poor immigrant family, and who truly had the childhood learning difficulties of which Arday speaks. Nevertheless I doubt that such a story would have garnered much attention beyond local news. Nor would matters be much different even if Arday’s career had gone as far as the universities where he was working before Cambridge: Durham and Glasgow. These are prestigious, but they are not Cambridge: it took Cambridge and its Hogwarts aura for The Arday Story to become a potential media bonanza.
It took Cambridge and its Hogwarts aura for The Arday Story to become a potential media bonanza.
That is true of the fairy-tale version, but also of the scandalous alternative that is now coming to light. Plagiarism by a Jason Arday who taught in the Education Faculty St Mary’s, Twickenham or of Liverpool John Moores would be of interest only to zealous academic reformers, and anti-DEI-obsessives. Even plagiarism by an Arday based at Durham or Glasgow would have remained a fairly minor story. But he was at Cambridge.
In short, the Arday story emerges at the intersection of two myths. One is that of the triumphant struggle for equality by the poor and disfavoured: the autistic black boy who made it against all the odds, and is now building a fairer world. The other is that of the immutable, sacred inequality of the university hierarchy: he made it to Cambridge.
But there is a rank hypocrisy in the attempt to reconcile these two myths. If there is truly a good in spreading university education to a wide swathe of society, then the presence or absence of poorer students at Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard is almost an irrelevance. These universities will only ever educate a handful of the world’s students, and most of those will always be from privileged backgrounds of some sort. The education of students with the least privilege will remain in the hands of institutions like St Mary’s, Twickenham or Liverpool John Moores. Establishment celebration of Arday as a Cambridge professor and Cambridge’s own ill-fated self-congratulation at hiring him are indicative of how thin the social commitment is to any true equality in university education.
Arday’s failings are evidence of serious problems at the non-prestigious institutions that educated him, evidence that the poorer students whom those universities are meant to serve are, at least sometimes, being short-changed. That is a hard problem to fix, not least because it would involve a lot more consideration of who is truly benefited by university education. Much easier to congratulate Cambridge when Arday’s story still held, and to cackle at Cambridge now that it is falling apart. Cambridge, after all, is what matters.
