‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ A.A. Milne said in 1939, ‘is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled to write about it.’ Four decades later, Tom Sharpe would prove him wrong about Cantabrigian reticence with Porterhouse Blue – his riotous satire of the conflict between an idealistic new master and the stuffed shirts of the senior common room. It’s a shame that Sharpe isn’t around to enjoy the Jason Arday scandal – a farce so absurd that even he may have dismissed it as being too silly.
When Arday was announced as Cambridge’s professor of sociology of education, he was lauded as the university’s youngest-ever black professor. His biography had a whiff of Hollywood. Arday had been diagnosed with a developmental disorder at the age of three. He was said to be mute until he was 11 and illiterate until he was 18. But he rose from two GCSEs in P.E. and textiles to complete a PhD, raise £5.5 million by running 30 marathons in 35 days – an achievement so stirring it inspired Andy Murray – and become, in the Guardian’s words, ‘a highly respected scholar of race, inequality and education’.
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Jason Arday quits Cambridge (finally)
