by Andrew Doyle
The real issue is not one appointment, but the culture that made it possible.
The Committee for Academic Freedom has announced an independent investigation into how it was that Jason Arday was hired as a professor at Cambridge University. This may seem an odd undertaking, given that Cambridge itself had already promised a full inquiry. Unfortunately, the university has since backtracked, now focusing primarily on whether there was a lack of support for Arday once the media coverage became so intense. This has left the task of establishing how Arday came to be appointed in the first place to outsiders.
It was inevitable that Cambridge would renege on its original plans. To investigate these circumstances properly would involve rigorous scrutiny of the rot that has developed within academia itself. By contrast, as an independent body, the Committee for Academic Freedom can afford to be refreshingly direct in setting out its objectives. It intends to examine:
(a) the circumstances in which Arday was appointed;
(b) whether the appointment, and the assessment of the academic record relevant to it, were consistent with the standards of academic excellence, merit, academic integrity, due diligence and procedural fairness properly to be expected in an appointment to a professorship at the University;
(c) the role, if any, played in the appointment by considerations relating to equality, diversity or representation, including whether any positive action in recruitment was taken and, if so, whether it was consistent with section 159 of the Equality Act 2010; and
(d) how the University considered and responded to concerns raised, whether within or outside the University.
This is a vital investigation. The activist capture of universities has led to a situation in which the production of knowledge and the pursuit of truth are considered subservient to the promotion of an ideological creed. Jason Arday was the highest-profile victim of this generalised lowering of standards for the benefit of the activist class, but there have been many others.
One may as well be blunt. Cambridge cannot credibly investigate the institutional culture that produced this failure, because it has itself been instrumental in creating it. Like most universities, Cambridge has invested so much in DEI – a toxic and demeaning orthodoxy that reduces human beings to mere representatives of particular group identities – that there is no conceivable scenario in which the university would admit that DEI is itself a major part of the problem.