Exposed: How the Jason Arday scandal unravelled Cambridge | The Daily T

Cambridge University in crisis.The vice -chancellor is under pressure to resign and the Jason Arday scandal is just the tip of the iceberg.

They get into this course with this esteemed professor that's meant to be the best thing since sliced bread academically.And he comes and delivers some half -hearted lectures.She cites one girl who came up to her in the library and says, I just don't know what to write.I haven't got anything decent in my notes.These apparently clever people are letting down students at Roehampton.Imagine working that hard with all of your GCSEs and A -Levels to get to Cambridge, to then be confronted by somebody who has made up a lot of their own CV, allegedly plagiarised most of their own PhD, and isn't actually teaching you that well at all.

And you're paying, what is it, £9 ,250 a year for the privilege?Jacob.I came home last night and my husband turned around and said, now he's cancelled his book tour.I was like, what are you talking about?Jason Arday continues to dominate the thoughts of people in news, but also just people in the country.The world's shiniest academic, don't quite know what's going on with his skincare, but my goodness me, he glows.

Not so much now.And I'm wondering whether this whole House of Cards is really now in free fall because there aren't just implications for him and his future career.And I think there are some who will have sympathy.It's silly season.This guy has been the center of so many headlines.He probably just wants to disappear under a rock.

But the implications for Cambridge, this is starting to get really dicey for them.We've got a number of revelations that we need to discuss.First of all, that we've got now, according to Andrew Gilligan, now working for the Spectator.He's revealed that a woman who is working in the same faculty as Arday did, Farah Ahmed, was once a supporter of Hizb ut -Tahrir, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, a now banned terror group.

Well it's the danger of clever people, is that clever peoplecan be deeply deeply stupid and they seem to have drunk the DEI Kool -Aid and thought that any rogue who comes along and is diverse must be a genius and it is the most extraordinary inverted racism.

What I can't quite work out is this, and I think this is the public's problem, those of us who weren't lucky enough to be educated at Oxbridge, look upon these two institutions, sorry to mention your previous university, in this case, Oxford isn't actually at fault, but lumping them together, these are meant to be kind of esteemed seats of learning where you would expect the highest educational standards to be met.And the problem isn't it with with a case like this now, and the case of our day, is regardless of whether or not you think he ran marathons with a broken leg and raise millions for charity and all the rest of it.It's the It's that they haven't met the scholarly bar.This is the kind of stuff that you would associate with what the Tories like to describe as colleges which do Mickey Mouse courses.

Well, yes, and sociology is a bit of a Mickey Mouse subject.Well, is it?

My brother -in -law teaches it.

Well, I'm sorry about that, but it's not a rigorous subject in the same way that the classics are, or history is, or chemistry, or physics, or mathematics.

Some people could rightfully ask what the point of studying classics is, to be honest.

Well, it's a great understanding of how the past operated.All right.

Sociologists might argue it's a great way to understand how people operate today.

But I don't think it does that, because it seems to be just a selection of personal opinions and personal feelings.It seems to have wandered into the my truth, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex view of the world, which Arday was particularly strong at.It was his truth, therefore it was true.You've also got all this junk about decolonizing the curriculum, which means not teaching people facts and proper information, but being touchy -feely.which is all junk.And I can see how it happens.

I can see how it happens.Because I think our old image of Oxford and Cambridge is probably broadly true.Lord Biggar was writing about this today.Nigel Biggar, yes.The noble Lord.Thinking of Oxford and Cambridge dons sitting in smoke -filled rooms, puffing on their pipe with holes in their pullovers.

And then in comes some glamorous young creature who says, away with the pipes and away with the smoke.What we're going to do is Mickey Mouse.And they think, oh, yes, Mickey Mouse.Very serious Mickey Mouse.Very interesting.And he's clearly very clever.

We'd better make him a professor.Otherwise, we'll be out of touch, like all those people at the next door college who don't know what's going on, don't know which way is up.And they're sort of sucked into it because they're drawn by the fashion and they're basically unfashionable people who think this is where everybody's going.

But anyone with a modicum of intellect, one would hope, would reject the idea that anyone that criticizes Professor Arday is ergo a racist.And as is the testimony of one student who was taught by Arday at Roehampton, who reveals that he accused her of quotes, white privilege, after she questioned the mark he gave her for a paper.She was averaging 75 % and he gave a 70%.And apparently these papers are marked blind.So you don't actually know whose paper you're marking.And she said, listen, I normally get about 5 % more.

So why have you marked me down?He then said, oh, you're now demonstrating white privilege to me.Anybody with a degree of education, one would hope, might question this sort of absolute hat stand.

What terrifies clever people the most?

Are they very clever people?

Not appearing clever.

Right.

And so somebody comes along with a bogus phrase like white privilege that nobody knows what it means, if it has any meaning, when some of the least well -off in this country are white working class boys.It's a bogus expression.But clever people don't want to admit they don't know something.So they say, oh, white privilege.Oh, yes, that's very unfortunate.He's got white privilege.

And therefore, they take mumbo jumbo seriously because they don't want to be exposed as being ignorant about a particular area of knowledge, whereas in fact the area of knowledge is humbug.

But isn't that extraordinary that actually undereducated white working class boys would have a better understanding of the ludicrous nature of white privilege than your average Cambridge Don.

Well, it's all the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, isn't it?That clever people don't wish to appear stupid in front of other clever people.And the clever people have bought into all this DEI nonsense.They don't want to say this just isn't true.It's wrong.

Some people, some clever people have questioned the DEI stuff.So There's an interesting link here, because David Starkey, who himself was extremely esteemed at Cambridge as a historian, but ended up being junked by the university and practically every other organisation he was ever associated with, because of the comment he made to Darren Grimes.And he was, I mean, ritualistically cancelled at the height of cancel culture.And in retrospect, comparatively to the Arday allegations, I mean, it was small fry, it was different, but because it was deemed racism, that's it, your entire career is over.He's just done a podcast with the chap who initially exposed the R Day plagiarism claims, who's called Nathan Kofnas.Now, Nathan Kofnas is a controversial figure, because

he himself was fired by Cambridge in 2024, because he suggested that if meritocracy did exist in academia, actually, there wouldn't be that many black professors.He was called racist for that.So the other problem we've got here is that academics, regardless of their motivations, and I don't know anything further about Nathan Kofnas, and some have said, you know, he's a white supremacist blogger.OK, fine.But you've got academics quoting actual academic research that's been configured by Harvard, which I think is pretty respected as an institution of academia.And even though that's what the figures say, anyone that quotes them is then described as a racist.

So how can you ever solve this problem if even bona fide academic research is debunked on the basis that it contains hurty words?

Well, it's been well established that Harvard has a racist admissions policy and it excludes Chinese, Indians and Jews because they do too well.

Right.Is that well established?

Yes, yes.It beats their quotas.So they've had to...Initially, they introduced things to help minorities, and they discovered that three minorities that I've just mentioned did too well, and therefore they had to refuse them places to keep their quota levels.

So positive discrimination.

So positive discrimination became discrimination.

Right.

And so it's very interesting how this turns on its head to go from positive discrimination to straightforward discrimination.And I think the issue is exactly the one you set out, that people get cancelled if they say the wrong thing.So not only do they appear not to understand this new and exciting subject about white privilege and decolonization, which makes them look thick, which they don't like to appear, but they lose their jobs because people running HR in universities aren't the cleverest professors.are they?They're people who could be running HR anyway.And they have applied all these rules that have come from the public sector, from the public sector quality duty, from all sorts of pressures that society has brought to bear to compensate for perceived errors of the past.

And so this leads to people shutting up, partly because they don't want to appear stupid, and partly because if they dare say anything, they then get cancelled.And this got completely ridiculous during the Black Lives Matter thing, when I was told not to say all lives matter, because that would in itself have been a racist thing to say.

Yes.Well, if you said something like, well, no, I just don't think we should be taking the knee, and I'm a bit concerned about BLM because I think it It's a communist organisation.It's a communist organisation, later revealed to be mismanaging funds, that wants to defund the police.And do you know what?I'm quite keen on the police because I quite like them catching criminals and things.And then someone turns around and says, you're a racist and a bigot.

I mean, you can't really win that argument.But who else is fuelling these flames?Lawyers.also very well -educated people.I'd imagine some of the people that constructed this letter from Carter Ruck to the Times Higher Educational Supplement reporter, Jack Groves, who initially wanted to report Arday's deficiencies, let's say in his citations in his dissertation.Well, that letter by Carter Ruck to basically scare the journalist off from publishing what he had found.

And let's bear in mind, he was working on this for months.Clearly, there were rumours bubbling to the surface that Arday might not be quite what he seemed.And Arday, as is his right, consulted a media lawyer, Carter Ruck, We do have a nickname for that company in this newsroom.

Private Eye used to.

Indeed.We all did.And it's not a word you would ever use, let's be perfectly honest.

That's quite true.

Anyway, he's beenapart.So Dan Needle, who's a tax lawyer, but he also kind of is a pseudo journalist, because he does lots of things on X kind of revealing deficiencies in paperwork, let's put it that way to simplify it, has basically said, well, this letter from Carter Ruck itself contains a number of inaccuracies, including the allegation that the only reason that Jason was pursuing the story is because he was a racist, that actually was being racially motivated.This was a racially motivated attack on a professor.Now, the THE came back and said, well, No, of course not.We're just trying to find out whether a professor that has been heavily pushed by Cambridge, heavily pushed by the BBC.

By the way, I appeared on Question Time with Jason Arday.I remember meeting him backstage, as you do when you have those sandwiches and a drink.He was there, Stella Creasy was there.It was a right old fun time for me. I actually took my daughter along.He was very pleasant to my daughter, very nice chap.Came out with this whole, I was non -verbal till 18, but now I've got a PhD.

And at the time, I thought, well, God, I remember saying to my eldest, this is what an extraordinary chap.I mean, there was a degree of incredulity, but he looked so sweet.And as he himself said, I just thought you'd believe me. I mean, I did believe him.Why wouldn't I?But Dan Needle has made the point that we've now got people at Carter Rock and others, sort of, they're exercising lawfare on behalf of those who want to point and shout at anybody who says, is Jason Arday quite what it seems, and follow up with racist ambiguity.I mean, the whole world's gone mad here.

Carter Rock is one of the law firms that gives the law a bad name.It is the great enemy of freedom of speech.It has represented some of the most unpleasant people to try and shut down stories by bullying the press.Its modus operandi is to bully and to outspend.It has been a malign force on public discourse in this country since peopleCarter Ruck himself was alive.

It is a bad way of carrying out politics.freedom of speech in this country, and our laws need to change so that lawyers like Carter Rugg do not have a business.It's been a disastrous consequence of the Human Rights Act that has elevated privacy to a right which never previously existed.And members of parliament never voted for a privacy law because they wouldn't dare, because everyone would have thought it was politicians covering up for themselves.And now you find that newspapers, other media outlets can't report things because they get these sorts of letters.It's quite interesting, the letter you read out, because I wonder whether that in itself contains a libel.

Well, it might do, yes.And whether accusing somebody of being racist seems to me to be a libel.So I hope that the journalist, the Times Higher Education Supplement, will consider seeing Carter Ruck?

Well, you'd love to think so.But of course, the Times Higher Educational Supplement is no longer Murdoch -owned.This is why they sat on these allegations for months.They were put off by Carter Ruck.Then they thought, can we really take this on?We don't have the budget to fight a legal case.

I didn't realise that.

That's right.So this is the other reason.I think if it was Murdoch -owned and they put all of the welly of his money behind, they'd have gone ahead with it.They actually spiked the story, as it's known in the trade.until they could build up more evidence.But I mean, this letter is comprehensive.

It's three pages long.It's using pretty robust language.So Needle points out very correctly that this is a slap letter.That's a strategic lawsuit against public participation.Now, newspapers like The Telegraph, helped by peers like Baroness Stuhl and others, have tried to fight against slaps.As somebody who did a law degree and is now a journalist, I absolutely believe in people's rights to defend themselves against inaccuracies in newspapers, defamatory statements, invective and all the rest of it.

Of course, people must have a right to reply.Actually, you don't have a right to defend yourself against invective.Mere rudery.is a defence.Mere abuse is a defence in a libel action.

Mild abuse, but you could action invective.If I literally just unleashed on you and said, I'm not going to do it now, but if I said the most terrible things about you that weren't in conjunction with anything that you'd said and done, you could have a legal claim against me.

Yeah, but you are allowed mere abuse.

You are.Some mere abuse, yeah.I mean, mere abuse between friends is fine.

But I think that the old laws worked, that you could sue for inaccuracy and the onus of proof was on the publisher.Yes, justification, you had to prove what you were writing is true.But now you can get into trouble if you print things that are true and that's the real problem with the way the law has changed.

Carter -Ruck turns around and says, oh, by the way, these plagiarism claims are the subject of an internal Cambridge investigation, but that's confidential, therefore you can't report it.

Well, that's where you get in.

Absolute hat stand.Of course you can report that the university is carrying out an investigation to one of its key professors.

But that's where you get into privacy laws.And that's where we've gone wrong because people say that this is private and therefore the subject of an inquiry has a reasonable expectation of privacy and therefore it's unreasonable to print it.

But is this now possibly threatening the job of the vice -chancellor, Deborah Prentiss?

She caught in the vice.

Very good, Jacob.

That's why you're so well -educated.It gets better, because perhaps she's not so good at her job.She is a Prentiss doing it.

Oh, honestly.And to think you didn't even study English language.

I did not.

Because there's some more allegations that have come to light.I think, point one, problematic that you promoted Professor Arday despite all of these concerns being raised, I think, for quite some time.Problem two, Cambridge has just lost this whistleblowing tribunal.So basically, it's rather involved, but there's a row that a professor tried to suppress a whistleblower from raising concerns about misogyny and other matters in the department.And students are now rightly turning around and going, well, what's the point of any DEI if you yourself are repressing people who are trying to expose wrongdoing?Point two.

Point three, we now got this lady who supports a well, did once support a banned terrorist group in the same faculty as our day.That's problematic.This woman, let's not forget, apprentice, prentice, is on half a million a year.

It's nice money if you can get it.

But where's the vicarious responsibility for any of this?And I quote, actually, the woman who was taught by Arday at Roehampton.And I think this is the killer line in her piece.The whole piece is interesting because she says he was sort of like coming into four hour lectures, only teaching for one hour, putting his feet on the desk, talking about Beyonce and just matters of utter irrelevance.

But she makes this point.But you're only saying this because you've got white privilege.

Well, that's right.Also, I'm a racist.So I just don't think he's good enough because of the color of his skin.I mean, when can we just assess people and say, I don't care what colour you are.Are you good enough or aren't you?Yes.

Please have the job if you're good enough.If you're not, can you let someone else get the job?

Absolutely.Appointments should be on marriage.

This is what she writes, which I think is, this is the nub of this issue.And I know you and Tim touched on this last week.Some serious soul searching must surely follow from all the academics who enabled him to climb the academic ladder.Did they really help this young man, or were they only thinking of their own reputations?They might also spare a thought for all his students, because that's the other thing here, right?She makes the point that about three quarters of her course at Roehampton were people of colour.

Some of them were young black women for whom university is notThey were the first to encounter it in their entire family.No one in their family had gone to university.They're the first.They get into this course with this esteemed professor that's meant to be the best thing since sliced bread academically.And he comes and delivers some half -hearted lectures.

She cites one girl who came up to her in the library and says, I just don't know what to write.I haven't got anything decent in my notes.These apparently clever people are letting down students at Roehampton.Imagine working that hard with all of your GCSEs and A -levels to get to Cambridge, to then be confronted by somebody who has made up a lot of their own CV, allegedly plagiarised most of their own PhD, and isn't actually teaching you that well at all.And you're paying, what is it, £9 ,250 a year for the privilege.

Well, I think at Cambridge, certainly at Oxford, it's slightly different.You're meant to do a lot of the work for yourself, and that's part of the Oxford experience.It's lesser teaching establishment in that way, as it would be at a school, than a self -motivated, you get on with it, and you go to the library, and you look things up, and the lecturers give you pointers rather than classes.Having said that, you are letting down students if the person marking their exams doesn't have the knowledge to mark their exams.And that seems to me an absolute failing.And even if they've got a qualification, they will have to ask whether that qualification is worth anything if he was the man doing the marking, because what did he know about it?

So I think it's a big problem.And it's where Cambridge has behaved so badly, because It wanted a poster boy.It wanted somebody it could say, look, we've got a black professor.Aren't we good at DEI?We've ticked that box.And he's a remarkable man.

And he runs marathons in half an hour, et cetera.And that lets down the students, the whole sense of academic excellence at Cambridge.It'll probably harm its funding, because people think, well, why should I give money to Cambridge?Cambridge when it can't run its affairs properly?

Therefore, Prentice has to consider her position.

Well, I don't know.I'm always reluctant to say people should resign on the first instance.But come on, Jacob.I seem to remember, hold on, I seem to remember she took over from somebody worse who was killing off free speech in Cambridge.Yes.And they had a great row of free speech.

She came in and has done some good work, I think, to put that right.And I think Cambridge is clearly a basket case.Well, let's also look at this evidence.

Students told Cambridge to decolonise before Jason Arday was hired.A letter signed by 152 students in the university's Faculty of Education in 2020 called on the department to make systemic changes to its hiring practices.That open letter said that the hiring processes must be decolonised in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd.It was sent to Professor Susan Robertson.On her retirement two years later, Arday was hired.Now again, it's for the Vice -Chancellor and the senior figures in this university to look upon little mini student protests, little grown -up children tantrums about Black Lives Matter and throwing statues in rivers and all that, and say, hang on a minute, Hang on.

Sorry, kids.I mean, they're the kids here.I know they're grown up.They're young adults, but kids, take a breath.The grown -ups are in charge of this.We're not just going to knee -jerk on the back of George Floyd and employ people simply because of the colour of their skin, because that in itself is racist.

You're absolutely right.That's the point of Dons.They're there to run the show and to ignore childish protests.And this again comes back to using peculiar language that doesn't mean anything.And people don't want to admit they don't know what it means or they think it's meaningless.So what is decolonising the curriculum?

What does that mean as a term?Yes.And how do your employment practices decolonise anything?Decolonisation is Princess Margaret going out, a band playing, the flag coming down, you leave and they elect a government which a week later turns into a dictatorship.That's what decolonisation was.We did it.

We did it rather well actually.We did it rather elegantly, more elegantly than any other country.But you know what?

You could decolonise.Your wardrobe?It's a bit too British Empire for me, this double -breasted suit thing.

Well, I have got a safari suit, which is very colonial.

If you decolonise your wardrobe, you would appear on the next Daily Tee in leisure wear.

But this is broadly leisure wear.

It's not broadly leisure wear.

It is.

It's a buttoned -up suit with tie.

And what?

Because you're not wearing a waistcoat and you haven't got a pocket watch.

It's a 20 -year -old suit, so it's very much an August suit.

Fair enough.If you're a fan of The Daily T, why not become a Telegraph subscriber?You'll be able to read more from our colleagues, including the journalists featured on this podcast.Plus, don't miss the latest opinion pieces from me and Tim.Join us today and explore everything the Telegraph has to offer.