The story of Jason Arday is so brilliantly illuminating of the rottenness of our Establishment that it seems – literally – fabulous. He seems to be almost too fantastic a figure for conventional fiction; rather, he is a character from fables of old – an archetype exposing the sins and hypocrisy of our times, a modern Till Eulenspiegel or Robin Goodfellow. In Arday’s frictionless ascent to academic eminence from a background of apparent disadvantage we see apparently elite institutions eagerly suspending their critical faculties in order to virtue-signal on race, disability and hardship.
By studying Arday’s biography we can begin to understand just how in hock to progressive guilt our top universities are – and how damaging this is for real scholarship.
The story Arday has told about his life seems perfectly attuned to appeal to scholars pursuing research in two of the most fashionable areas of current university activity: neurodiversity and institutional racism. Arday purportedly could not speak until he was 11 and could not read until he was 18. Yet he overcame those disabilities and, of course, ubiquitous racial prejudice, to leverage an educational studies and physical education degree from the former teacher training college in Twickenham which calls itself St Mary’s University, into a professorial chair at Cambridge by the age of 37.
