The downfall of Professor Jason Arday is a morality tale for our times – Susan Dalgety

Not so Professor Jason Arday, the disgraced academic who resigned from his prestigious post at Cambridge University this week, following controversy over his CV and doubts about his work’s originality.

His story is remarkable. His parents came from Ghana to London in the 1980s, and raised four sons in a council flat. He claims he was diagnosed with autism at three, was unable to speak until he was 11 and functionally illiterate until 18.

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Arday’s big break

Yet despite these challenges, he was determined to be a university professor. Only four years after he learned to read and write, he secured his first degree and a higher education post as a PE lecturer. He studied sociology on his own at night, before completing several postgraduate degrees, including a PhD, which helped him secure a senior lecturer’s post at Durham University.

His diligence paid off and in 2021, aged only 36, he became one of the youngest professors in Britain when he was appointed a professor of sociology of education at the University of Glasgow. Not Cambridge, which has been the focus of attention this week, but Glasgow, one of Scotland’s ancient universities where some of the world’s greatest thinkers, including economist Adam Smith and philosopher Frances Hutcheson, were taught.

It was Glasgow that gave Arday his entry into the rarefied world of senior academia. It seems they were so charmed by his charisma that it ignored the quality of his work and his improbable CV. Who knows, if Glasgow University had not been seduced by his back story, it is very possible Arday would never have made it to Cambridge.

Professor Ian Pace of City St George’s, University of London has just submitted a freedom of information request looking for more detail about Arday’s appointment to Glasgow University, but I think I know why one of Scotland’s leading universities gave Arday the status he craved.

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Identity politics and celebrity culture

Our society, and those charged with shaping it have become so obsessed by identity politics and personal narratives, celebrity even, that they ignore material reality in favour of vibes. Successive vice-chancellors, First Ministers and leading charities have created a culture where facts no longer matter, truth is subjective, and the emperor can wear what clothes he likes, as long as they are ‘progressive’.

It is this suspension of critical thinking that led to MSPs, including government ministers and the wannabe leader of Scottish Labour, Monica Lennon, to rise to their feet in homage to trans activists following the passage of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in 2022.

Without embarrassment, elected representatives who claimed they were appalled by male violence against women, applauded biological men like Jack (aka Beth) Douglas, who, it is alleged, had previously posted violent images on social media threatening to beat up women who didn’t believe that humans could change sex.

It was this same warped dogma that led to nurse Sandie Peggie being suspended from a job she loved because she refused to share a changing room with a man who ‘identified’ as female. It resulted in Professor Kathleen Stock being hounded out of a successful academic career, and poet Jenny Lindsay, now a Scotsman columnist, being ostracised by Scotland’s arts community, forcing her to leave her beloved Edinburgh.

And it led directly to the grotesque spectacle of the Scottish Government funding a charity that supports men ‘breastfeeding’ babies.

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‘Best in the world’

In a revealing BBC clip soon after Arday’s appointment in 2023, the head of Cambridge’s School of Education Professor Hilary Cremin, swoons over him, telling him he is the “best in the world” in terms of his research. He patently was not, but maybe the university don was beguiled by her new protégé’s tales of overcoming adversity.

I wager that appointing Arday to a senior role made Cremin feel like a social justice warrior, a good person fighting populism and the far-right through the medium of Arday. Just as those MSPs who lionised men who had threatened violence against women believed they were on the side of progress.

Arday’s story is a morality tale for our confused and confusing times, where even the most prestigious places of learning have traded rigorous research rooted in evidence for outlandish claims of “lived experience”, and politicians feel able to dismiss the majority of the electorate as bigots for raising legitimate concerns. Little wonder public trust in our institutions is at a low ebb, as an OECD survey showed only a few weeks ago.

Arday’s downfall is also a very personal story. Even the most burnished of egos would take time to recover from the level of public humiliation he has suffered this week. His academic career is in tatters, but with a reported £1.4 million fee for his memoir, published later this month, he won’t be signing up for Universal Credit any time soon. I won’t be surprised if he uses this period of his ‘lived experience’ to start a new career as a media personality.

We can only hope it will make those in charge of our public institutions, whether in academia or parliament, stop and think about what kind of society they have helped create. Progress does not come this way. The truth, no matter how boring and vanilla, really does matter. And it is neither right wing nor bigoted to say so.