One of the chief suspects in the recent tragic case of Jason Arday is ‘DEI’ – the acronym standing for ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’. The idea behind this is to ‘promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented, marginalized, or subjected to discrimination based on identity or disability’ (Wikipedia). The effect is meant to be to compensate for these disadvantages, for example when assessing or hiring people, by judging them by different – usually ‘lower’ – standards than the more ‘privileged’.

It’s originally an American thing, as I understand; and is currently the focus of attention – and of contention – over there, in the context of the so-called ‘culture wars’; where it is regarded by the Right as typically ‘woke’, and is blamed for Jason Arday’s meteoric rise to his professorship at Cambridge. (‘Professor’ of course being a rarer and more prestigious title there than it is at American universities.) Cambridge – so the story goes – was anxious to appoint a black candidate, out of guilt for 800 years of perceived racial prejudice against non-white academics and students; and then Arday came along. Although clearly less formally qualified at this level than most other possible choices, he fitted the ‘DEI’ requirements like a glove. (See below.) The Cambridge Education Faculty (which appointed him) preened itself for being so progressive. Arday himself basked in the fame and glory of having come this far, from just about as unlikely beginnings as it is possible to imagine; spelled out in a memoir published posthumously just last week. (I’ve not been able to secure a copy of it online yet – a Stockholm bookstore has promised me a hard copy by the end of the week; but here’s Amazon’s summary of it:

‘When Jason Arday was thirty-seven years old, everything changed. He made international news by becoming the youngest Black professor in the almost thousand-year history of the University of Cambridge. But that remarkable achievement is only part of his great and unfortunate tale. 

‘He grew up in a council house in south London with his parents and two brothers. Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three, he spent much of his non-verbal childhood navigating a system that struggled to understand him. Doctors and teachers believed there was ‘no one in there’. But Jason’s mother, Giff, refused to accept the limits others placed on her son. 

‘With the faith of his family and the support of a handful of extraordinary friends and mentors, Jason slowly found his voice. He spoke his first word at eleven, learned to read and write at eighteen, and discovered a passion for education and helping others that would transform his life. Along the way there were improbable triumphs and heartbreaking setbacks, tears of joy and moments so painful that laughter was the only option, and more than one occasion when everything seemed poised to fall apart.

‘Great and Unfortunate Things is an unforgettable book about resilience and love – and the transformative power of someone who believes in you when the world does not.’)

New and controversial as DEI may possibly be in America, in UK academia we’ve had something like it for very many years. As an ‘Admissions Officer’ in one of the universities I taught at, and as a ‘Leftie’, I was well aware of the disadvantage that boys and girls from deprived areas suffered under in trying to get into higher education, and made allowances for it. My faith in them was generally borne out by their academic results at the end of their university careers; often surpassing those of closely-tutored Public (private) school candidates with better ‘A’-levels. So I was practising a kind of DEI. Before that, as a student myself at Cambridge I had been shocked at the positive advantages bestowed on my Public school contemporaries, some of whom were as thick as (let us say) two short Boris Johnsons. When as a Fellow of my college I tried to interest our Senior Tutor in trawling different – State Grammar School – waters, I was met with the reply: ‘Sorry, Bernard; we don’t want this sort of boy here.’ I resigned my Fellowship shortly afterwards.

Have things at Cambridge improved since then? I think they must have done. My old college has admitted girls for more than twenty years now, for example; and probably more ‘black’ boys than it did in my day. ‘Girls’ were the main ‘DEI’ issue then. Decades before that, it had been Catholics, Nonconformists and Jews. All of these ultimately won their battles for ‘Inclusion’, which no-one would deny to them today. But I’m sure that there must be a lot more to do. And ‘DEI’, in one form or another, could be a means of achieving this.

The problem in Jason Arday’s case, of course, was the ease with which he and his sponsors exploited DEI to their own advantage, so overriding the scholarly values that should be the rock solid foundation of any academic reputation. I don’t blame him alone. His sponsors and examiners, initially at Liverpool John Moores University (where he did his PhD), and then at the other universities that employed him, culminating in the Faculty of Education at Cambridge, should have gathered, somewhere along the line, that he was a plagiariser and a fantasist – his CV is frankly ludicrous  – and stopped him in his tracks. The result of their not doing so is the immense damage that has been done to the reputations of all the universities that have taught and employed him; culminating in my beloved alma mater, and its Faculty of Education in particular. (But then ‘Education’ as an academic discipline never did have much kudos there, as I remember from sixty years ago.)

I just hope that higher education in general won’t be smeared by this. You can almost hear the ‘anti-expertise’ Right (Michael Gove?) and ‘Friends of the poorly educated’ (Donald Trump) sharpening their knives.