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- [00:04]
A
Hello and welcome back to Unherd. Jason Arday is a professor of sociology and education at the University of Cambridge. He is the youngest ever black professor appointed by that institution. And he has a quite incredible backstory. He was apparently mute until the age of 11, autistic, only learned to read and write age 18, and somehow managed, alongside a whole load of other extraordinary details, to end up being a professor at Cambridge. In the last week or 10 days, much of his life story seems to have unravelled. The sometimes baroque details of his incredible feats in fundraising, sport and academia seem to be forced to falling apart. It's rapidly turning into a parable of our time. Kathleen Stock is a star columnist at Unherd. She wrote perhaps the definitive piece about Professor Jason Arday. She's actually taken the trouble to read his books and read some of his work. And she joins us now to explore this very, very strange case. Welcome to Unherd, Cath.
- [01:17]
B
Thank you. Nice to be here.
- [01:20]
A
Let's just lay out, first of all, who this guy is, because some people listening might not yet have heard of Jason Arday. It's been a story that's provoked a huge amount of excitement on social media and in some newspapers. But who is Jason Arday?
- [01:35]
B
He's a professor of the Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge. But he's also had a storied media career because of this incredible backstory that he comes with and that has been made full use of by the institutions that have employed him, which says that he was mute, I think, to the age of 11, that he didn't learn to read or write till he was in his late teens, that he always wanted to be an Oxbridge professor. One day he wrote on his wall, I'll be an Oxbridge professor. And. And lo and behold, he eventually was. And there are all sorts of other, as we'll get into, I'm sure there are all sorts of other colorful aspects of his alleged past that have accompanied his trajectory in academia. They have been absolutely made part and parcel of his story. So it is important to talk about those two.
- [02:32]
A
Yeah. So he's not just a random professor. He's kind of a star of the Cambridge firmament in that he was appointed in 2023. At that point, he was the youngest ever black professor at Cambridge. They made quite a song and dance about it. He has guest edited the Today program. He's been profiled by Good Morning America. People are lining up to praise his work. And obviously part of the excitement around him is this incredible backstory. And we're going to come onto that and this increasing sense that many of those details aren't really checking out, but this story really began with the plagiarism allegations and that's really the substantial beginning of this story. So tell us about those.
- [03:19]
B
Well, plagiarism allegations have been circulating for a couple of years. For instance, there's a professor emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjong called Dave Harris who has had allegations of plagiarism and detailed them on his website, on his personal website, since I think at least 2023. So if they've been in the public domain, and Harris, along with another professor called Martin Hammersley, who independently found some problems with his published output at the time, in 2023, they contacted Ade himself, Professor Hilary Cremin, who is the head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge. They also contacted our day's PhD supervisor that was at Liverpool, John Moore's. So basically they tried to draw this to the attention and, and they actually, and they contacted journal editors because they were saying, look, there are really weird things going on in these articles. There is repetition of data, there is apparent plagiarism, there are some terrible spelling mistakes, there's lots going on here. But basically they were data dismissed, shut down, accused of racism in some cases. And then a Times hire reporter called Jack Grove did a massively in depth bit of reporting or investigating into this story, came up with many, many of the details that are now in the public domain, but the Times higher editors did not want to publish it. You can draw your own conclusions about why. Now, in the last few weeks, Nathan Kofness, who is a. I think he's still a postdoctoral student, but he's at the University of Ghent in philosophy, who is known for his controversial views on race and iq.
- [05:00]
A
The university upheld a complaint against him. I think the statement he had said was something along the lines of in a true meritocracy, there would be zero black professors.
- [05:09]
B
He also said they'd be known for entertainment and sport. Black people would mostly be known for entertainment and sport.
- [05:15]
A
So he's sort of known for his, to put it mildly, controversial interest in the nexus between race and iq. So to many people, the fact that Nathan Kofnas was the person who found first resurfaced this story, confirmed their fears and prejudice that actually this was a kind of right wing racist attack, a smear campaign on a perfectly good professor. And as a result there was a very quick knee jerk defense of him. This thing called the Good Law Project, which Jolyan Maugham is involved in sort of produced a letter that lots of grandees have signed saying that this is an outrageous attack and nobody should defend it. So as it were, the kind of defense mechanism for Professor Arday was already activated, really, last week, beginning of last week. And since then there have been a few major milestones that have just gradually disassembled the case for Jason Arde, I'd say the first was your unheard piece that kind of blew the lid off the whole affair and you had actually spent time reading his work, unlike everyone else who had just read the Cough Nas piece. So tell us about that. I mean, that was a. That was a new dimension that I think really opened people's eyes to this. What's it like?
- [06:37]
B
It's terrible. It's terrible. So the plagiarism seems absolutely. The allegations seem unassailable to me and to anyone else who's neutral and looks at this. They would absolutely not be tolerated in a student, let alone someone at his level. But even if you left aside the plagiarism, which you shouldn't, but even if you did, there is no way that this person meets the standards of the professorial archetype, or even a lecturer archetype for that matter. It's really, really bad. So I've read a few journal articles. There's this really interesting disconnect between the journal articles and the books. So the journal articles, standard boilerplate critical race theory, full of cliches and familiar dogmatic phrases like, you know, hegemony of whiteness and all the other CRT phrases that pop up time and time again. And it's very trenchant, very militant. And then the books, he's got a book called Cool Britannia, which is about Brit pop and racism. I can just put it like that. It's an autoethnographic study of how he really, really fell in love with Oasis and Blur. But then he discovered that there was this dark racist undertone to the Britpot movement. And then he's got another book about neurodiversity that he co authored with a female academic called Chantal Lewis. Those books, they ramble, they veer unevenly between kind of chatty self help and academic buzzwords. The sentences collapse. You have to read sentences over and over again. And then you realize it's just like in search of a payoff of meaning that just doesn't come. They spend an awful lot of time on song lyrics, but not in an illuminating way, just in a gimmicky way. There's just so many weird things about Those books. And then the talks, which I've also watched a lot of, are even more bizarre. There's one in particular that I watched about Graceland, cultural appropriation in Graceland, Paul Simon's album. And it's really like he's watched a BBC documentary about Graceland and he's just regurgitating the talking points, that's really all. I mean, it really does seem like he's just quickly cribbed a few articles on Paul Simon's Graceland and is mentioning them. There's nothing academic about it. And as I say in the piece, at one point, he digresses to talk about Home and Away and Neighbours and how he love. So he says in many interviews that he loves watching Home and Away and Neighbors. And he's talking about how when he became a sociologist, he started seeing Home and Away and Neighbours through a sociological lens and started really realizing there was no indigenous people on Ramsey street and in Summer Bay, you know, and he's presenting this as if this is this incredible nugget of wisdom to impart to. This is a British Academy talk. So it's a very perplexing output given the hype about him. And then you realize that the hype is just entirely based on his backstory and his skin colour and his neurodiversity alleged. There is nothing else, there is no academic contribution this man ever made that explains his star quality in inverted commas. And you said he's a star, but he's not a star in any conventional sense. He's a star because of his story, and that is it.
- [09:59]
A
So his story is the kind of DEI perfect combo. It contains the fact that he is black. Black people are underrepresented in academia and that's nice to fix. He's young, relatively, and he's got this autism backstory, very extreme, some might say implausible, that he was completely mute until the age of 11 and didn't even learn to read and write until he was 18 and now suddenly, miraculously became a Cambridge professor. So there's a sort of overcoming adversity angle to it, giving hope to parents of autistic children everywhere that their non verbal child might one day become a university professor. Is there a dark side to this? I mean, is it just naive, kind of Emperor's new clothes DEI absurdity in the wake of 2020 and all of that intensity? Or is it nefarious?
- [10:59]
B
Do you think it's both? I mean, it's intensely mockable and sinister. I can't speak to his motives because I don't know him. I've watched a lot, and a lot of stuff that he's said, interviews, I just read evidence he gave to a Parliamentary select committee. He's on an NHS reference group, you know, I mean, he's pretty much everywhere. And I don't know what the hell he was saying to them, but, you know, I get the feeling this is a fantasist. That is my impression. And psychologists can tell us whether that's sinister, deliberate or. Or compulsive, I have no idea. But that's not the point. The point is that the British establishment, pretty much, you know, across the media, as well as the academic sector, fell for this because they wanted to believe it and they. They thought. And they thought it made them look good to be uplifting someone with this sort of heroic backstory. And they just shut their eyes to the obvious implausibilities that were built in from the start. I mean, one of the things he says is that he ran from Edinburgh to London 600 miles in six days. It's now been changed to 12 days, but Edinburgh to London is 400 miles. It's not even 600 miles. You know, you'd have to do it in zigzags. So there's just sort of really simple things that stood out a mile from the start and yet we didn't want to see them.
- [12:26]
A
I mean, let's go through some of those, because that's the bit we haven't yet spent time on. And these are the details that I think have made this story so sort of addictive. I mean, partly it's a really serious, shocking example of sort of DEI craziness that we've elevated someone who is pretty much obviously not capable of doing that job. But the whole additional flourish, which are these extraordinary claims he makes quite casually in interviews, he often hasn't written them, and perhaps he felt like interviews were not recorded or something, or that you would never be checked on the claims he made.
- [13:03]
B
He thought you would never be checked.
- [13:04]
A
But those are the ones that really seem to be unraveling rapidly day by day. So, as you say, there's the claim that he ran 600 miles in six days that has been adapted. I mean, had he run 600 miles in six days, it would make him one of the top 50 or 100 endurance athletes in. In history. So that would be really something to shout about. The charity work, the raising money for charity. He's talked about how he has always wanted to raise money for charity, and he's raised over £5 million for charity. And that's a claim he's made multiple times in multiple interviews. That again, seems to be unraveling. He now seems to say that it's part of a syndicate or a kind of corporate effort. And that depends how he calculate it. But again, that would just be an extraordinary number. I mean, Eddie Izzard ran the full length of the country and didn't raise £5 million, I don't think. And he's a sort of household name celebrity who was being filmed in his kind of challenges. What's the story on the charity front?
- [14:09]
B
He now says that he was in a syndicate with over 100 other people to raise these vast sums, but some of them have signed NDAs, so they can't say who they are, which is absolutely brilliant.
- [14:22]
A
That'd probably be the world's first case of signing an NDA to not get the credit having raised money for charity.
- [14:28]
B
Exactly. Astonishing. The change of description from 6, 600 miles in 6 days to 12 days is because he now says he took rests in between. And to be honest, in that sense, I've run 600 miles, six days because I've just taken a lot of rests in between. And, you know, so it's, it, it's just preposterous and funny. And also there's now claims coming out about water aid. So he's, he's made a lot of the fact he went to Africa to build wells for water aid and water aid have now said that they don't send people out. It's really important that this is community based work. So that looks dodgy as well.
- [15:06]
A
I've got to add here some of the. His claims of being attacked or some of these stories of the terrible reception he got at Cambridge have also begun to unravel. And the Guardian has done some quite good work here. It's worth saying, I think, that the Guardian's coverage. We're not normally very nice about the Guardian unheard, but I would say that it really helped cement this story because they wrote a very long investigative piece about it. The piece began sounding like it was going to be a kind of condemnation of the attacks on Jason Arday. It led with this sense that alongside Claudine Gay, there was a kind of right wing movement against professors of color. And then gradually, as he went down the piece, the Guardian put more and more of their focus on some of his more outlandish claims. I just want to read one section for our audience which is around these attacks that he says he suffered while at Cambridge. So as well as scrutiny of his academic record and fundraising history, Arder claims to have been the victim of a campaign of physical abuse and intimidation. So racist emails, things like that. But here's where it gets interesting. In an interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion, Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it. The Guardian understands that after Ade reported the first intrusion to the university, CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It would have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty's security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident. The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion, and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Ade did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident, he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student. Less than two hours later, he did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building. So it's quite sort of categorical that, isn't it? It's cleverly done because I'm sure their lawyers have gone over it. At no stage do they overtly say that this was a lie because they don't want Cambridge University to sue them or whatever. But I think readers will draw their own conclusion that it seems like extraordinarily unlikely. There's even a separate story that I won't read about a claim he was sent or his family was sent a pig's head. And again, all of these baroque details that he's added about the police having found the butcher that had sold the whole hog to the perpetrator and everything, all of them fall apart on closer examination, just apparently didn't happen.
- [17:59]
B
It's worth noting as well, two things I just want to say. One is that the Guardian is making up for its elaborately deferential interview with him in 2023, where it repeats quite a lot of the claims that are now in dispute. But secondly, it is notable that this guy didn't call the police when there was allegedly a masked man marauding around a Cambridge college, trying to kill him or threaten him at least. But they. He did call the police on Dave Harris and he did call the police on Jack Grove. He's also. Or somebody has got Carter Rucker incredibly Aggressive law firm on the Times Higher. And there have been lawyers letters sent to try and dissuade publication. So that's a strange mismatch, isn't it? You think he would be quick to go to the police in that case? In the first case, I'd love to
- [18:47]
A
play two clips before we just try to work out the significance of all of this, because to me they were just completely eye popping. The first is of Cambridge academic Hilary Cremin, who is one of his colleagues in the sociology faculty.
- [19:02]
B
She's his boss. She's his boss.
- [19:03]
A
She's his boss. Talking to the BBC about his recent appointment.
- [19:09]
B
The board of electors on your interview day were absolutely unanimous. We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.
- [19:22]
A
What is Hilary Cremin thinking? She's been quiet on this topic since the details have emerged. But you obviously have been an academic. You have been around these people. We can only speculate. But what do you think is going through the mind of Hillary Cremen when she says you're the best in the world at what you do, when as you have just borne witness to the quality of his work is kind of indefensibly low?
- [19:49]
B
Well, you can only conclude that she's lost her critical faculties, if she ever had any. I'm sure she's a very nice lady, Hilary Cremin. I've looked at her. Her own research, it's in peace studies. I think she uses poetry and autoethnography in order to explore peace. I've seen the letters to Dave Harris that she sent. And at one point she offers Dave Harris an opportunity to go to Cambridge and engage in some restorative justice procedure with. With Ade himself, because Ade had accused him of racism. And Kremin was saying, we're sorry about that. This woman is. Is. I'm sure she's nice, but she's unfit, clearly unfit, I'm afraid, to uphold the standards of Cambridge University. She's completely forgotten, along with many, many, many of her colleagues. And it's not just at Cambridge either, have forgotten what an elite university is for. Its basic USP is to be academically exceptional and to demand the highest standards of intellectual rigor from the people that are lucky enough to be there. And if it doesn't do that, and it's now just a sort of care home for waifs and strays or a place where everyone's kind to each other, it shouldn't exist anymore. And I don't want to See that happen. I think Cambridge and Oxford could be jewels in our crown again. But at the moment, clearly they aren't.
- [21:14]
A
See, that's a really frightening idea because it's one thing to say that Jason Arday was an aberration and, and that a high quality rigorous institution made an exception in order to tick a box or in order to prove a point in the post blm years. That would be bad, but less bad, I think, than what you're suggesting, which is that the rot goes much broader and that that little moment with Hilary Cremin is indicative of the fact that this sort of sogginess where academic rigor has been replaced with sort of posturing and box ticking and frankly unacademic ways of thinking actually just goes very broad in these institutions. I mean, how bad do you think the problem is?
- [22:04]
B
I think it's bad. And I think the emphasis, the newspaper's emphasis is on DEI understanding that as an issue of race focus. But I actually think the issue is more about neurodiversity and inverted commas and how that ideas about neurodiversity have undermined academic standards. That's been going on for a while. And as I say in my piece, there's this expectation when you're a marker at a university now that. So you get your essays, you get your exams in, you get the scripts. If they even get physical scripts anymore, I don't know about that, but they will have a sticker on them. At least a third of students when I was working in universities had a diagnosis of something or other. They would have a sticker on them. And now you would have to give reasonable adjustments. And this was always very vague about what the limits of reasonable adjustments were. But it was my understanding and those of my colleagues that we were supposed to look past certain problems that were things that would otherwise be massive problems. In an essay or an exam, if the person had a sticker that said they had a condition, that meant that that was more likely. We were supposed to disregard spelling mistakes, disregard grammatical solecisms, disregard problems with structure. But of course, especially in the humanities actually where I was, those things are the only thing there is. Structure is thinking. And you're teaching clear thinking, you're assessing clear thinking. And if the thinking isn't clear, then according to old ideas, outdated ideas, you shouldn't be there or you should fail. That doesn't happen anymore. So this is all part of a downstream of the university's massive expansion. As soon as they took in almost everybody, then they could no longer insist on the standards, and especially when they were making almost everyone pay, they could no longer insist on these elite standards. The standards would have to come down. And they did. So there are many strands here, but that is definitely the case that generally speaking, intellectual unfitness to be at university is now treated as a problem to be mitigated by lecturers.
- [24:06]
A
Let me just read a extract from your unheard essay, which really stuck with me after it. You said lecturers are now routinely expected to make adjustments to their ordinary critical approach as soon as someone has a diagnosis, to ignore spelling mistakes, mentally rearrange sentences without critical comment. Try not to mine paragraphs that go on for days or seem utterly arbitrary in their shape. As a marker, you're supposed to look beneath the jumble of words and find the true scholar lurking shyly within. You're speaking as someone who had to do this. And it's just, I think it's so important to explain to people it's not an unkindness. Sometimes this kind of anti DEI movement is accused of being unkind, whilst it's deeply unkind to trash institutions and put people who shouldn't be in academic settings in that place. I think the. Whatever Jason Arday is experiencing now, the universe has not been kind to Jason Arday to put him through this. So will you try and explain to our audience why it's not kind to try to make adjustments for people's inadequacies in certain disciplines if this is the result?
- [25:20]
B
I think that the academics that have used ADE and used his story basically to get certain kinds of points, to get branding for their university, to make themselves feel good as good people. Tm, you know, they have not been kind to our day. And now he is being exposed to ridicule, partly by me. But, you know, what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to all go along with this forever? So we can't? And basically they put him in this position of vulnerability. They knew, at some level, they knew that he was not up to it. They couldn't cite a single intellectual contribution he had made. The whole thing was about representation and symbolic power. And now, of course, the backlash will happen and they did this. So that's not kind. And it's also not kind to, as you say, the parents of mute children or children with developmental delay or global delay who have been pinning their hopes on a story like our day. And it wasn't. I don't think it was true, personally speaking.
- [26:14]
A
But if I just could add, Kath, it's not kind to qualified professors and academics who could have got this job?
- [26:21]
B
Oh yeah, exactly.
- [26:22]
A
Nor is it kind to the pupils who, who, as you say in your piece, instead of getting a world class education, which is what they're paying for, are getting weird soundbites about Oasis and Blur and whether they're racist or not. This is incredibly deleterious to the whole education process.
- [26:39]
B
Absolutely. There are so many losers. The losers we don't see, which is so often the case because when you insist on the symbolic power of one person, everyone else falls, becomes invisible around them. The real people that suffered as a result of this, the real people whose work was stolen and the real people who didn't get the jobs that he got, and the students, the real students that he has, I imagine, abysmally supervised, if at all, along the way. Those are all losers. The people have bothered to come to his talks and wasted their time listening to him. They are losers too. But what I also want to say is that kindness is not the only value. Kindness is one value. But universities are not there to be kind. That was not their point. They were there to exemplify other values like academic brilliance, innovation, wit, cleverness, you know, that's all they were for. And they've just lost sight completely of those sorts of goals in this bizarre rush to be other things that they are not even suited to be. You know, the average academic is not very kind, I have to say, even if, even when they're trying to, you know, they're not that good at it. They're not caring people, so they get it wrong.
- [27:50]
A
I'm going to play one last clip, which is Jason Arday giving an interview to Channel four, Krishna Guru Murphy. He was asked, if you could change the world, how would you change it? And this was his answer. I would take a thread and a needle and I'd interweave love into our society.
- [28:13]
B
That's what I would do.
- [28:14]
A
I think the absence of love in our society is absolutely palpable. I feel like the empathy we have
- [28:19]
B
for one another, the tolerance that we
- [28:21]
A
have for it's completely eroded, you know, and there is so much anger in society. There's so much anger in society. And I often think, what would one replace that with? Because also that anger has become inflicted. You know, we're not kind of driven towards one goal, we're kind of turning on one another. And so for me, the thing that I would do, if I could change
- [28:45]
B
the world, I would have the world
- [28:49]
A
and I'd have it spinning on this
- [28:50]
B
axis of love that's better than an axis of evil.
- [28:55]
A
I mean, the thing that, that reminds me of, I've got to say, is the Miss Universe or Miss World competitions. It's this sort of joke that crops up in movies periodically that the answer is always world peace. How would you want to change the world? World peace and everyone. APPLAUSE it's very similar to that as an answer. I mean, obviously love is good and we are happy to have more love in the world. I would implore that. But it is just an astoundingly kind of unsophisticated and unacademic answer to give on tv.
- [29:26]
B
So one thing I think has been under underexplored here is the profound disconnect between our days. Journal Persona. You'd have to get deep in the weeds to see this. But the journal Persona and the Persona you've just mentioned. So when he's plagiarizing, basically, or when he's writing journal articles, he's Mr. Critical Race Theory. He is hard as nails. He is in a kind of Neo Marxist tradition. He is calling out whiteness, he is calling out structural and institutional racism. He is saying that it kills people. You know, it is all very, one might say, quite angry and even full of hate, one might say, in a sort of suppressed way, because that is the idiom of Critical Race Theory. It's to like, say, we're not, you know, we're not going to put up with bullshit anymore, we're going to tell it like it is. And then you get this comic disconnect with the talks and the books where he's like, I want to teach the world to sing. You know, I want love and world peace. I've, as I say, I've just been reading these evidence to a select committee. He says he thinks it would be a good idea. He's in the House of Lords and he's saying it'd be a good idea to give every young person 5 to 10,000 pounds to start their own businesses. And the Lords will say, oh, what a wonderful idea. You know, that is not so. This is kind of neoliberal, Ardi. This is a business friendly rde, a man who is absolutely traditional in his sort of soggy liberalism about love and capitalism. And there's that bloke and then there's the other bloke. And the fact that his colleagues didn't seem to notice, or pretended they didn't notice, this big disconnect between these two Persona is quite amusing to me.
- [31:08]
A
Is that disconnect not kind of intrinsic also? Because we talked a moment ago about kindness and Whether it's kind or not, I mean, that's the sort of, it is a double edged sword because a lot of the people involved in this way of thinking do think that they are on the side of the angels, you know, that we are on the side of softness and love and acceptance and inclusivity. And then it very quickly turns very nasty because in order to try to enforce that unnatural kind of way of being on everybody and try to put people who shouldn't be in certain positions in those positions, you end up really being very nasty to a lot of people. And you know, your own experience at university is relevant here because it was part of that same movement, wasn't it? This is when you were famously attacked for supposedly transphobic views and all the rest of it some time ago and eventually had to leave and were not at all defended by the faculty and by the university in the way that apparently they are doing for Jason Arday. The two sides that you're describing to Jason Arde's rhetoric are intrinsic to this movement.
- [32:20]
B
Yes. Although it's unusual to find them in the same person. Yes. I mean I, you, you introduced me as professor at the beginning and I didn't correct you, but I'm not professor anymore, obviously, and I don't use that, that term anymore to describe myself to self identify as a professor precisely because of the abominable hypocrisy of a lot of people in the university sector. And I just can't bear it any longer. But to meet your point, I think wherever you get some kind of, I don't know, catastrophe or scandal in the academic sector these days, there's two elements. One is the trenchant radical element, usually associated with an identity that is protected and thought of as a kind of pet identity there, whether it's trans identity or ethnic identities, black and brown identities, I mean, I don't call them identities, but you know, they would. Then you've got these really intensely nice, intensely kind intent people who hate conflict, who want to do peace studies, who want everyone to be nice to each other, sort of, kind of trying to manage that situation and they end up deferring to the nastiness, the hatred, the radicalness, and telling the more moderate people that they should really like change their behaviour. That's just always the way it goes. So, you know, Dave Harris is not a racist, Martin Hammersley is not a racist. When they raise these problems, they are treated as the problem because these very nice people are frightened of the radical element which Arday intermittently embodies. But I also think that our day's personality that comes across in his talks, he's intensely personable, he flatters constantly, he's always telling the audience how wonderful they are. If he's talking to an interviewer, he will pay these very, very elaborate compliments. He's a charming man and I think that has worked its magic on some susceptibly naive people too. They have just thought, gosh, what a nice man and he seems to like me.
- [34:19]
A
So you don't think we should blame Jason Arday then? Or do you?
- [34:24]
B
I can't say, I mean, he looks like he might have a problem, to be honest, but on the other hand, this is the sort of dark humour of it all is that he seems to have never met anyone that questioned his story. I don't know what happened in his early life, but as soon as he got into the academic world it seems like no one has questioned him. So he, why would he, you know, you said earlier he doesn't seem, he seems to just make things up on the spot, why wouldn't he? When nobody ever says hang on a minute, and it gets such brilliant effects for him and his rise has been meteoric. So in a sense I think he looks like he's been created by the naivety of white liberal middle class academics who just want his story to be true, they really want it. So to that extent I do feel a bit sorry for him, but I feel much, much sorrier for the people, the real people that have lost out because he won.
- [35:21]
A
Show me the incentives, I'll show you the behaviour we have as a culture created these very perverse incentives by willing on these fairy tale stories. Of course there will be people who will fill them. You know, Jason Arde happened to be very successful at it. I'm sure 10% of the population would have taken Jason Arday's job if they were encouraged towards it. Who knows what percentage. But you know, perhaps he was a chancer, perhaps lots of people are chances and you know, if you give people enough rope they will, you know, take it.
- [35:57]
B
A chancer is a loose term anyway. I mean, who knows what makes chances tick? But the fact that his lies or distortions are just so outlandish suggests that he hasn't ever been pushed to try and think of something plausible because no one's ever asked him. The irony of all this is that university academics go on a lot about social construction, but they never notice their own contribution to the genre. You know, the things that they socially construct in the world, the types of people that come into the world because academics made the conditions of possibility. They just don't see it.
- [36:35]
A
Final thought, what do we hope comes out of this? Do you think? It feels like this story has really caught people's imagination because of its weirdness and because these extraordinary details keep coming out, but obviously has revealed something very rotten or confirmed our worst suspicions about something very rotten in the state of academia. What should be the good thing that comes out of this? A return to rigour, a kind of. I guess I'm just making up suggestions here, but some kind of new incentive for faculties and universities to see. Okay, we, we now have a new incentive which is to avoid a Jason R. Day when I'm now hiring the next professor. Let's make sure that they're actually up to the job, because otherwise we could find ourselves in the position Cambridge found themselves in. Is that what we should hope for?
- [37:30]
B
Well, yes, wouldn't we? But I mean, to that end, the Guardian intervention is significant because these people only ever read the Guardian and the BBC if they read that. So, you know, all the things our side of the fence says make no difference. But if, if the worry is you might be ridiculed by the Guardian, then that might make a difference. But one thing I would like to see in an ideal world is the racism of those who enabled our day highlighted. And I say that absolutely deliberately. And it's ironic that the people that are talking about our day are being called racist. And it seems to me that it's completely racist. And he is the sort of reductio ad absurdum of their approach. To have such incredibly low expectations for a person simply because they are a different ethnicity. And to think that to see them as a walking good news story and that's all they are and not care about the other stuff, it's just. It's just massively insulting and patronizing to the clever, brilliant black people in public life who are, you know, this is just awful. So there's that and then the whole stuff about neurodiversity. It. Something needs to change. And that can be tied into lots of public conversations going on the moment about PIP payments. People coming out of university convinced all the more that they have this disability that needs special accommodation because universities help them think that way all the way through grade inflation. How employers can no longer really distinguish the brilliant students from the less brilliant ones because they've all got the same kind of high degrees. You know, there's just so much wrong with the university's attitude towards cleverness as a desirable feature in the best of their students. It's really kind of almost verboten to say it these days. You know, you're not really supposed to think that the clever students are the ones you really want to teach. That conversation has to happen. And he can be a good conduit, his case, his salutary case can be a good conduit into that discussion.
- [39:32]
A
So specifically that means a rolling back of the sense that special accommodations can ever be made for bad thinking. Basically like it makes total sense to say if someone is blind, make special efforts to make sure they can attend university. You know, if someone has one leg, make sure to offer them a room on the ground floor and provide wheelchairs or whatever. I think to go out of your way and make special efforts for people with disabilities is a good idea. So the sort of term of the idea in DEI is fine, but as usual it's been driven to these crazy excesses partly by academics. And so now it needs to stop at your quality of thinking. That needs to be a red line.
- [40:19]
B
Absolutely. That's. So what is a university for? That would be help if people could remember that we don't really want them to be there to do social justice or to right social wrongs or, you know, whatever the other things people think we should be doing. We want them to take a relatively small part of the population, the people that are able to do this, that look promising and we want to train their minds to rigorously so that they come out the other end much more clear thinkers perhaps having made a genuine contribution to knowledge. And that's basically all we want from universities or it's all we should want. I should say, incidentally, it's not about autism. I would say like huge proportions of the most brilliant minds at universities are autistic. So that's a sort of distraction. It's about not being able to say to students, sorry, university isn't the best place for you. And that again is a national conversation that we're having at the moment. But universities need to be able to say, sorry, you're not going to thrive here. This isn't the best place for you. Of course to do that they would have to say no to their money. And no university can afford to do that at the moment. So there's a big joined up conversation here to be had.
- [41:22]
A
Well, let's hope we have it. Kathleen Stock. I won't call you professor, although I still consider you that way, if I may. Thank you so much.
- [41:32]
B
Pleasure.
- [41:33]
A
That was Kathleen Stock, star columnist at Unherd and also someone who has seen the university system up close, because she was a professional at the University of Sussex for a long time and had a very strange and unpleasant experience with that institution. So she's seen the weirdness of modern academia up close. I thought that was absolutely fascinating. Thanks to her and thanks to you. This was unheard.
- [42:05]
B
Of.