The story of Jason Arday is so brilliantly illuminating of the rottenness of our Establishment that it seems – literally – fabulous. He seems to be almost too fantastic a figure for conventional fiction; rather, he is a character from fables of old – an archetype exposing the sins and hypocrisy of our times, a modern Till Eulenspiegel or Robin Goodfellow. In Arday’s frictionless ascent to academic eminence from a background of apparent disadvantage we see apparently elite institutions eagerly suspending their critical faculties in order to virtue-signal on race, disability and hardship.

By studying Arday’s biography we can begin to understand just how in hock to progressive guilt our top universities are – and how damaging this is for real scholarship.

The story Arday has told about his life seems perfectly attuned to appeal to scholars pursuing research in two of the most fashionable areas of current university activity: neurodiversity and institutional racism. Arday purportedly could not speak until he was 11 and could not read until he was 18. Yet he overcame those disabilities and, of course, ubiquitous racial prejudice, to leverage an educational studies and physical education degree from the former teacher training college in Twickenham which calls itself St Mary’s University, into a professorial chair at Cambridge by the age of 37.

Arday’s ascent is a stunning indictment not just of the incuriosity of Cambridge but its corruption

Arday’s ascent is a stunning indictment not just of the incuriosity of Cambridge but its corruption

His stunning academic achievements were accompanied by claims of marathon running successes that would test the greatest ultra runners and charity fundraising that would make Bob Geldof feel inadequate, all achieved in the face of vicious racial persecution which would not have been out of place in 19th-century Alabama.

Each of his claims – the 30 marathons, the millions raised for good causes, the violent persecution – has been comprehensively debunked. But still he pushes back against his critics. His defence seems to be that in academia, no one looks that closely. ‘Could I have ever guessed that somebody would literally comb through every single word I’ve ever said?’ he asked the Times. When a Guardian journalist tried to verify his claims – that he’d been threatened by knife-wielding lunatics, had bananas, bullets and a severed pig’s head sent to his home address – and found no evidence, he told the journalist: ‘I thought you’d just believe me.’

That’s because Arday’s entire career has been an exercise in being believed, even though the whole point of academia is to question, test and criticise. Arday’s ascent is a stunning indictment not just of the incuriosity of Cambridge but its corruption. It seems that no one has ever checked his academic CV, the papers he’s put out for publication (and their corrections) or the data he has used. Sociology rewards what it calls ‘reflexive accounts’. Put simply, this is the act of evaluating one’s own experiences or biases. In other words, just believing someone about the........

© The Spectator