BY STEPHEN PAX LEONARD
The Arday scandal is a chance to ‘restore’ academia in Britain
Following the tragic death of Jason Arday, the Prime Minister has called for a period of reflection. I agree. We need to reflect on how we can avoid such a tragedy happening again and how we can restore the intellectual rigour of academia in Britain. Instead of removing the systemic failures that enabled Arday to flourish, I fear instead the Left will probably try to make a martyr of him in the manner of Stephen Lawrence, bestowing a peerage on his wife or some other such absurdity. Don’t be surprised if a statue gets erected in his honour!
This is no longer about Arday. It is about how DEI policies and wokeism facilitated the degradation of higher education in Britain. Cambridge has taken a lot of flak, and rightly so. A university such as Cambridge is in fact full of DEI hires. There are even Heads of House who are DEI hires. Cambridge became authoritarian about ‘progressiveness’, and yet within their DEI fetish lie pockets of hypocrisy: Cambridge is the only university in the country that has two Colleges which are only for women. This anachronism remains a thorn in the flesh, but they won’t change it because women are still for some reason perceived to be ideologically disadvantaged. It is a thorn in the flesh because the students from Newnham and Murray Edwards Colleges (you won’t find much diversity there) are well below par. For years, I taught quite a number of them. Most of them would not be accepted at any co-ed Cambridge College and would struggle to compete with their peers at Bristol.
Thus far, the other universities where Arday was employed have got off scot-free. Durham appointed him as Associate Professor. Unable to resist the DEI allure, they are guilty of the same systemic failures. Ultimately, this tragic story would never have unfolded had Arday not been conferred a doctorate in the first place for what was ostensibly plagiarised work. I don’t see many questions being asked of Liverpool John Moores University and Arday’s PhD examiners. Why aren’t they being held to account?
With DEI in mind, I have been writing for years about how Britain’s universities have become little more than corrupt centres of migration. There are business schools that are part of reputable universities in Britain where ninety-five per cent of the students are from overseas – most of whom have a very poor grasp of English. One of the business schools I have in mind earns so much money, it subsidises the entire university. There is no financial incentive to give a student place to a Briton. They can earn three times as much from the Chinese and get to call themselves ‘diverse’.
What is more, the DEI industry has led to the regrettable bureaucratisation of our universities. My own alma mater, Oxford, tripled the number of administrators – the pillars of the diversity dictatorship – in the course of just ten years. You would attend a grant application meeting and the number of administrators (often failed academics who suddenly tripled their salaries) would outnumber the academics. These administrators spend their days filling out equality and diversity surveys, implementing gender equality charters produced by the Equality Challenge Unit, and asking themselves whether there are hidden or unacknowledged gender biases in their thinking. Various awards are given out to university departments for recruiting more women and minorities, and they get to call themselves ‘champions’. Oxford University was given a bronze award. Presumably, after recruiting Arday, Cambridge got gold.
The notion of identity was meant to be the heuristic to render our universities more meritocratic, but it has long since been weaponised. There are whole departments built on Critical Race Theory which posits that racism is ‘permanent’ in society and that all human relationships are predicated on an abuse of power. It doesn’t sound very ‘critical’ to me, but the sad thing is that these lies have become axiomatic in Britain. If our universities are little more than platforms for anti-racism activism, then intellectual integrity is inevitably sacrificed.
All this pseudo-research is founded on some victimology or other: ‘whiteness’ as symbolic capital and other such misconstrued tropes. We have let our universities be cloaked in a cynicism expressed through amorphous ideologies and misplaced prejudices. Women’s Studies, Post colonial Studies, Whiteness Studies – what kind of society are you going to build if you just educate people in victimhood? What troubles me with all these non-subjects is that they are based on an epistemological uniformity: you can’t excel in Women’s Studies if you are an anti-feminist; you can’t excel in post-colonial studies if think there were both pros and cons to colonialism and you can’t excel in whiteness studies if you think racism can be addressed. People cannot arrive at the truth unless they are able to express the untruth and have that criticised in public forums. By pursuing this nihilistic path, British higher education created closed minds at odds with the whole purpose of a university. This nihilistic path compels us to ‘decolonise knowledge’, but if we disown our ancestors, we might just end up academic orphans.
A restored higher education would stop framing questions through this postmodernist lens of power differentials, close down the relevant departments and return Humanities to its roots – philosophy, Classics, theology, language and literature etc. Academia cannot be restored until we confer PhDs only on students that have produced genuinely original research. There are far too many universities in Britain conferring PhDs. A restored higher education should limit it to no more than a dozen. If we were to make the PhD the gold standard again, then many of academia’s pathologies could be easily addressed. In addressing systemic biases, the DEI pathology has just created a whole set of new ones. The new ones, however, do not reward excellence, but instead virtue-signal and as we have seen create Shakespearean tragic paths for troubled conmen.
Stephen Pax Leonard is a writer, linguist, traveller. His book Noble Sentiments for an Exile and Other Writings has been published and is now available here.