Cambridge should have stood by Jason Arday

“We know. So what? We love him, he’s ours and we’re keeping him.”

That should have been the response when Arday’s qualifications and work came under fire. For unless the University establishment that took him on are extremely sloppy and unperceptive they would have known what they had.

You do not raise someone so far above his capacity and then open your hands and let him crash to the floor as they did. They may claim that recruitment is strictly on merit but politics plays a part, according to Dr Edward Skidelsky (“It’s time to stop the rot,” March 2024; “Cambridge urges recruiters to favour minority candidates,” June 2025.)

It also works negatively. In 2017 Nigel Biggar an Oxford professor of ethics was hounded out of his post because of a book he was about to publish based on six years of research, arguing that Britain’s imperial history needs to be reviewed in a balanced way rather than be wholly condemned. In November of that year he wrote an article in the Times entitled “Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history” (£). A week later he put online a description of his Ethics and Empire project.

A few days later Cambridge Professor (of postcolonial studies, within the Faculty of English) Priyamvada Gopal tweeted “OMG, this is serious shit … We need to SHUT THIS DOWN” and after Biggar’s Twitter history had been quarried for allegedly “misogynistic” and “homophobic tweets” he was eventually forced to resign.

One would have thought that academic questions should be considered on their own merits but “venganza” rules when somebody steps out of line; already Nathan Cofnas the researcher who exposed Professor Arday has been suspended by Ghent University and expects to be fired.

What is missing is “glasnost”, openness and transparency. Cambridge should not have blown hot and cold, protecting then abandoning Arday. They should have brazened it out, like the rotten and incompetent Marxist national government under which we now suffer. “We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come” as Hartley Shawcross told Parliament in 1946, so (in effect) what are you going to do about it?

As long as the label on the tin says what is inside there is no reason to complain. If you went to Sussex University in the 60s or 70s you would expect left-wing attitudes and activism and future employers would know what its graduates would be like. In 1975 a team from Manchester University (including David Aaronovitch) came onto “University Challenge” with the intention of attacking Oxbridge privilege and “destroying his [Bamber Gascoigne’s] baby” by answering all questions with “Karl Marx, Trotsky, Che Guevara” etc.

Now would have been the perfect time for Cambridge’s education faculty to say “we are the masters, suck it up, this is a post-truth world.” Instead they lost their nerve and flung their pet off the back of the troika.

The shame is theirs.