Higher education destroyed Jason Arday to protect itself

The awful case of Jason Arday, who was found unresponsive at his home in Battersea on 14 August and later died, is now routinely described as tragic. That word carries its own connotations: a terrible end brought about by a combination of misfortune, malicious enemies and personal flaws. Liberal journalists are already trying to defend their profession by claiming legitimate public interest, focusing as much on their right to examine the minutiae of Arday’s doctoral thesis as on the allegedly racist and sexist writings of Nathan Cofnas, the academic who first made the allegations and has since been suspended by his university in Belgium.

The activities of the media have already been picked apart on this platform by Andy Walker. But with Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, published this week – a book Simon & Schuster chose to release despite the doubts raised about his credibility – his case deserves a second look. What if we focus instead on the institutions, structures and power dynamics in which Arday found himself enmeshed? What if we attempt to understand why he was such a target for racially motivated attacks in the first place? What would that suggest about the state of higher education in the UK and the place in it of those from ethnic minority and working-class backgrounds?

Higher education has long had to bear the burden of being seen as a fundamental structure for two major legitimising ideas of liberal capitalism – the myths of social mobility and of meritocracy. The Blair government’s focus on “education, education, education”, as he famously phrased his political priorities, was an articulation of economic and social change as inextricably tied together, simultaneously achievable through investment in more education for all. 

More education meant more growth meant greater advantage in global capitalism meant better standards of living for everyone who was part of the project. In higher education this was called the widening participation agenda. Of course, like all ‘New Labour’ reforms, it just scratched the surface of deep-seated inequalities, but even this was too much for those on the right.

Widening participation did lead to a much higher number of working-class and ethnic minority students attending university and there was even some acknowledgement from the Blair governments that one group it was particularly failing to change the playing field for was ethnic minority working-class school pupils. 

The 2006 DfES report, Exclusion of Black Pupils: Priority Review - Getting it. Getting it right, took a tentative step towards naming the structural racism built into the education system. However, this was something of a high point in their understanding of the issues involved rather than the start of addressing structural inequalities. Inevitably, the increased numbers of working-class and ethnic minority students coming into higher education went to less prestigious universities, received lower grades and came out at the other end with higher levels of debt and poorer chances of highly paid employment.

Upwards social mobility might happen at the individual level, but it is dependent upon the creation of the necessary employment opportunities in the wider economy and, generally speaking, most of us still end up at the same relative social status as we started out at as a child. 

Furthermore, as more of us get the chance to increase our educational outcomes, more and more effort is put into finely grading those outcomes, discriminating between subjects, between institutions, adding extra layers of ‘necessary’ or ‘useful’ achievement. The job seeker can have not just an A at A-level but a starred one, not just a degree, but one from a Russell Group university, not just a degree but a master’s degree etc, etc. 

In an education system based upon what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as treating a particular cultural starting point as “apparently a natural gift” although it “is only given to the children of the educated classes,” these forms of discrimination are all ways of keeping those that don’t fit out of the places they shouldn’t be in. Being one of those bodies that don’t fit was never comfortable, now it appears it can be fatal.

Today we live in a British society in which racism has roared back into prominence, becoming, rather than a social embarrassment niggling away at the liberal conscience of the likes of New Labour, a standard part of public discourse. In 2021, around a quarter of ethnic minority students reported experiencing some form of racial harassment, from staff as well as other students and a 2019 EHRC report found that universities were often poor or incompetent at handling complaints about such things. A contemporaneous investigation by the Guardian found a similar story of failure, suggesting that issues of racism were something universities were, at best, very bad at paying attention to and, at worst, did their best to ignore.

This situation was not something that black students and academics were ignoring, however, and the recent growth in research grounded in critical race theory and moves to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ brought to the fore both the past imperialist ties of some of the more august centres of learning and the subordinate place in higher education of ethnic minority students, staff and subjects that take issues of race and racism seriously. 

However, in keeping with its liberal view of itself, none of this would be noticeable to the outside observer. Take one look at any university website and you will see pictures suggesting a multicultural student utopia and the trumpeting of myriad policies to combat discrimination and promote equality. However, research suggests a reality where there is no meaningful racial awareness training, little investigation of racist incidents and, at best, token efforts to address issues relating to curricula or levels of representation from ethnic minorities in staffing generally, never mind at senior levels. Lest we forget, the statue of Cecil Rhodes is still in pride of place at Oriel College, Oxford.

It is in this context that Prof Arday then found himself positioned as a potential symbol of progressiveness, not just a black academic but one who had risen through the ranks to the position of professor and not just any professorship but one at Cambridge.  This wasn’t a sudden rise to fame, plucked from obscurity to fulfil some mythical diversity quota though. Arday completed a PhD, typically a piece of research expressed across somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 words, examined via a verbal cross-questioning, known as a viva voce, which can last a number of hours, and then took seven years to move from relatively lowly Leeds Beckett University to Warwick, Durham, Glasgow and finally Cambridge thanks to his publication record.

Why was he chosen as a target by the right? The answer, of course, is obvious and has nothing to do with supposed plagiarism. Higher education has become one of the key battlegrounds in the right’s ‘war on woke’ and its targets are all of the things that Arday embodied. His subject was sociology, he was from a working-class background, he’d attended state school, he’d started from a very humble academic background, studying for a BTEC at one point, to achieve the highest degree available, a PhD, which he’d done at a post-1992 university. 

It would be hard to invent a person that would infuriate right-wing columnists more. It was telling that, alongside the numerous articles targeting him in the Daily Telegraph, were others lamenting the slipping of academic standards, suggesting PhDs were no longer a sign of learning and declaring Britain was being “poisoned” by “stupid intellectuals”.  The right isn’t attacking the privileges enjoyed by institutions like Cambridge, what they really want is to stop them admitting people like Arday, never mind giving them jobs.

Arday’s main crime was to be a person in the ‘wrong’ place. He thought that as a black, working-class man he could enjoy a role teaching at a bastion of white, ruling class privilege and expect the support of his academic community when the backlash came. His awful end is a sign that the right will stop at little to beat back those who try to challenge deep-seated structures of power and privilege.

Jason Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, is published this week by Simon & Schuster.