Opinion | Why The 'Con Don' Arday Got Away With Fooling The Smart

Because affirmative action without proper safeguards and standards even afflicted a top university like Cambridge

Collective guilt about the past among an influential “privileged" minority in the West has led to some peculiar attempts to atone for past excesses and mistakes. One of the most bizarre in recent times has been the spectacular rise and fall of the youngest Black professor to be appointed by Cambridge University, Jason Arday, now 41. His trajectory highlighted the problems ailing Western society today: guilt, gullibility, and a phobia of being accused of phobias.

Arday’s “credentials" practically assured him of fair winds and following seas in whichever direction he set sail. He is not White, he is/was autistic—unable to speak until he was 11 and learning to read and write only at 18—and yet he completed a PhD by the age of 30. It was surely a coincidence that Cambridge appointed him to a professor’s post in 2023 when his post-doctoral research focused on race, inequality, and representation in higher education. Britain’s two oldest and most famous universities, Oxford and Cambridge, after centuries of being proud of their “elite" tags—indicating not only students from the “best" families but also the best minds—are now wringing their hands about their reputation. They had not only tried consciously to cut down the “nepo" elite component from the student body in the last few decades, but their admission and hiring policies had also changed in order to become more “diverse".

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