The scandal surrounding Professor Jason Arday is probably the most excruciatingly embarrassing episode Cambridge University has ever experienced. Especially because it is not so much about Jason Arday as it is about Cambridge. Arday’s spectacular rise – and even more spectacular fall – has become emblematic of the decadence that has spread through some of the West’s finest universities.
We are living through a period reminiscent of the fin de siècle around 1900: an old and highly developed civilisation still stands with its institutions, wealth, prestige and imposing façades intact, while the understanding of the norms and principles that created them is eroding from within, driven by an accelerating erosion of standards – a decadence in which we live off our inheritance by selling off the family silver.
The West’s elite universities have become some of the clearest manifestations of this decadence. Not because they have stopped talking about values – quite the contrary. But because they have increasingly allowed new moral ideals of inclusion, representation and equality to displace the principles that created their own greatness: merit, academic excellence, the pursuit of truth and uncompromising intellectual selection.
In other words, elite universities have abandoned part of their own raison d’être – academic discrimination – because its results do not conform to their idea of what a just university ought to look like. All social and ethnic groups are expected to be equally represented at the highest academic levels; when they are not, the explanation must be structural oppression and discrimination. And so, in our time, structural discrimination is fought by dismantling the academic discrimination on which the quality of the university depends.
A Story That Was Almost Too Good
When Cambridge appointed the 37-year-old Jason Arday Professor of Sociology of Education in 2023, it was not merely Arday the academic whom the university promoted. It was the story of Arday.
He was said to be the youngest Black professor ever appointed at Cambridge. He had grown up in modest circumstances in London, had been diagnosed with autism at the age of three and, according to Cambridge, had been unable to speak until the age of 11 or to read and write until he was 18.
And now he was a professor at one of the world’s finest universities.
But the story got better still. Official biographies credited Arday with almost superhuman feats: 30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in 12 days – or, in other versions, just six – while he was also said to have helped raise more than £5.5 million for charity.
The problem was that, under closer scrutiny, more and more of this extraordinary story began to unravel.
Serious questions have since been raised about Arday’s academic work, his CV and a number of his personal claims. Universities have disputed parts of his account, his athletic and charitable achievements have come under scrutiny, and The Times has raised questions about data used in his research. Although Arday rejects allegations of academic misconduct, the affair has, for now, culminated in his resignation from his post.
But once again, the most interesting thing about the case is not Jason Arday.
It is Cambridge.
For whatever the ultimate truth of the individual claims, one question remains: How could an institution whose raison d’être is critical thinking, verification and intellectual scepticism become so captivated by an extraordinary story that its increasingly extraordinary nature apparently failed to trigger precisely the scepticism that ought to be the university’s professional reflex?
The More Improbable, the Better
Normally, a simple epistemic principle applies: the more improbable a claim, the stronger the evidence required to support it. The Arday affair, however, appears to turn that principle on its head. The more improbable his story became, the better it became as a progressive narrative.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, the story of a gifted Black man from a modest background who, through talent and hard work, became a professor at Cambridge would have been spectacular enough – and, moreover, a perfect meritocratic story. But when representation has served as moral currency for decades, it loses its progressive potency.
The dose must be increased.
What was progressive yesterday becomes commonplace today and inadequate tomorrow. Not merely Black. Not merely disadvantaged. Not merely disabled. The story must become ever more exceptional, and decadence thereby becomes self-reinforcing.
And then the paradox emerges: the more improbable the story becomes, the more sceptical the university ought to become. Yet the more improbable the story becomes, the more attractive it becomes as a progressive myth.
It is the triumph of wishful thinking over academic discrimination.
A meritocracy is at once extremely discriminatory and, as a matter of principle, indifferent to identity. It does not ask who you are, but what you can do – and it must therefore also be prepared to accept the outcome of its own selection process.
But this development is larger than woke politics and DEI. It is also part of a broader feminisation of our societies and, consequently, our institutions, in which the centre of gravity has shifted away from impersonal principles, competition and hierarchies based on achievement towards feelings, inclusion, representation and the individual’s personal story.
At an elite university, however, the impersonal principle must be sovereign. Your story may be heartbreaking, your struggle admirable and your rise inspiring. But is your research good enough?
If the answer is no, the rest is irrelevant.
It is precisely the impersonality of meritocracy that makes it fair. Skin colour, sex, social background and personal history should not count against you. But neither should they count in your favour.
Arday, however, became not merely a professor but a symbol: his identity, his autism, his social ascent and his almost miraculous story made him the personification of the narrative of inclusion that Cambridge wanted to tell. And this is precisely where the danger arises. For if the institution itself wants the story so badly that its improbability no longer functions as a warning signal, moral wishful thinking has begun to impair its capacity for judgement.
Cambridge was supposed to find the best. Instead, it found the best story.
The West’s elite universities have, of course, never been pure meritocracies. Oxford and Cambridge were shaped by class, sex and connections; American universities, among other things, by race, money and so-called legacy admissions. But past discrimination according to the wrong criteria is no argument for new wrong criteria. Progress consisted precisely in removing skin colour, sex, class and connections from the scales so that ability could carry greater weight.
The goal was not a university that did not discriminate, but a university that discriminated correctly.
When the Family Silver Runs Out
And this brings us back to the fin de siècle.
Cambridge, Oxford and the American Ivy League universities live on an enormous stock of institutional capital, accumulated over generations through academic standards, competition, selection and achievement. Today’s university leaders inherited that capital. They did not create it.
That is precisely what makes institutional decadence so dangerous: an institution can live for a long time on the prestige accumulated by previous generations while simultaneously undermining the standards that created it. But institutional capital can be depleted. You can live off the family silver for a long time.
You just cannot do it forever.
And the consequences extend far beyond the universities’ own prestige. A complex society needs elites of competence: outstanding researchers, doctors, lawyers, engineers and thinkers – and institutions capable of identifying, educating and testing them.
That is the civilisational function of the elite university.
When a degree or a CV bears the name Cambridge, there is an implicit promise: the eye of the needle is narrow here. Standards have been exacting. Discrimination has taken place.
If that promise loses its value, we also lose confidence in the institutions entrusted with carrying out intellectual selection on civilisation’s behalf.
And if our finest institutions are no longer willing to select the finest, who will?
