To a certain breed of British journalist, the Jason Arday story was irresistible catnip. He seemed to be the living, breathing proof that wokery was destroying our most august universities. Time for a pile-on. And now Professor Arday is no longer living or breathing. Death by a thousand headlines. Time to move on.
It was, in Fleet Street terms, exhilarating fun while it lasted. Torrents of verbiage cascaded from the pens of those who couldn’t believe their luck. A young academic who’d been given a prestigious Cambridge professorship turned out to be a probable plagiarist and something of a fabulist. And he was black!
There you are. In a single person you had the proof that our higher education system is biased towards minorities. His chequered life and writings conclusively exposed a two-tier system of promotion in higher education. Arday had been the poster boy for DEI… and now he was proof that academia is a conspiracy against the public. To one Telegraph columnist, he was “a symptom of Labour’s war on academic excellence” (though his questionable appointment happened under Rishi Sunak). Arday was, as the headline on a Spectator column by Toby Young—a Conservative peer—sniggered, “the gift that keeps giving.”
Among those apparently enjoying a good laugh was Dr Nathan Cofnas, the sleuth who claimed the credit for unmasking Arday. Five days ago, he shared an at times gleeful YouTube conversation with David Starkey, the TV historian whose own Cambridge career had come to a shuddering halt six years ago when he pronounced that slavery was not genocide because of the survival of “so many damn blacks”.
It was a meeting of discarded souls. Cofnas related at some length how he had himself lost his role at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, earlier this year after publishing a long, rambling blog post in which he opined that Harvard would have virtually no Black professors if they were appointed purely on merit. Black people are, genetically speaking, too stupid, apparently.
“The reason we are both grinning is that we are enjoying vengeance,” chortled Starkey at the top of the programme. “Good. honest, straightforward, and Christian vengeance … we can rejoice together.” Cofnas pronounced that “Sophocles himself could not have come up with a more appropriate person to break this story than me.”
You may think that Dr Cofnas’s own troubled history is every bit as intriguing as Professor Arday’s. How on earth did Cambridge give this oddball “racial realist”—whose own work had been comprehensively trashed by more senior colleagues two years previously—a plum role as a junior research fellow?
But no one was very interested in that question. Fleet Street in full pursuit can only manage one narrative at a time. And this one was surely about woke professors so blinded by an academic’s blackness that they didn’t spot the warning signs. It could only be because DEI policies (promoting diversity, equality and inclusion) were rampantly out of control.
This was certainly Cofnas’s own take on Arday’s appointment—“just another DEI hire,” he told Starkey dismissively.
“In a meritocracy,” he wrote in February 2024, “Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.” He went further: without wokeism “[b]lacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.” Quite the statement.
Cofnas had his association with Emmanuel College terminated—“they kicked me out!” he protested. A few people tried to turn it into a free speech on campus issue. Virtually no one defended his work or his views. But Cofnas, unlike Arday, was not used as a case history to illustrate broader questions about the calibre of academics who are offered juicy roles at this most prestigious of universities.
Cofnas had been banging on about what he calls “racial realism” for a few years, and questions had certainly been raised about the quality of his own thinking. In 2019, he had published a long paper in the journal Philosophical Psychology which was roundly denounced by nine tenured professors, who compared his ideas to anti-vaxxers, creationists and climate change deniers. It was “lamentable when these ideas seep into academic journals, where they certainly do not belong”, they wrote.
The academics added: “Although we cannot know for a fact whether Cofnas’s contribution was inspired by ulterior ideological motives, it is undeniable that his article can reasonably be read as pandering to proponents of scientific racism. These strands of society obviously enjoy it when scholarly forums publish work that in some way legitimises their harmful ideas.”
If these academics are to be believed, then, Cambridge recruited someone who, two years earlier, had been accused of promoting “unintelligible, wrong-headed …nonsensical ideas”.
But, anyway, it seems that no one cared very much about that and there were no calls for an independent inquiry into whether the Cofnas appointment tells us disturbing truths about Cambridge’s hiring processes.
Different story with Arday. The cases are, of course, not directly comparable. Cofnas’s role was much more junior, and there is no claim that he plagiarised or fabricated material. But it is striking how many commentators immediately leapt on the Arday “scandal” which Cofnas claimed to expose as symbolic of so much that is wrong with woke institutions that sign up to DEI policies.
The question is whether there is any evidence to support the proposition. If Cambridge is, indeed, now a citadel of wokery, you’d expect the appointments and admissions data to show a pattern. But it’s hard to find.
Last year, just 75 of Cambridge’s 6,180 academics identified as black, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. Apart from Arday, there were just five black professors, or 0.4 per cent of Cambridge’s rank of professors. You could almost say that Cambridge is just the sort of university that Dr Cofnas admires: one which employs virtually zero per cent of black professors. So, not very woke at all.
Nor does it appear that these supposedly achingly liberal academics are throwing open the doors to admit black students. The latest five-year figures for the university show that 542 places went to students identifying as black—about 4.6 per cent. Private schools continue to be disproportionately successful in winning places. Last year 27.5 per cent of places went to pupils from independent schools. They had a success rate of 21 per cent compared with 15.5 per cent from comprehensives.
I stared at the tables for a long time trying to sniff out wokery, but the data defeated me.
My own experience at the other place—as the head of an Oxford college—was that, while colleagues were keen to make modest changes to allow for the context of an applicant’s background, they were overall extremely wary of anything at all that could be interpreted as “lowering standards”.
There was a particular paranoia about what one might call Marlborough Man—a name I coined after speaking to a fellow college head who had just read an irate letter in the Times protesting at the failure of his Marlborough College-educated son (fees currently £64k a year) even to get an interview at Oxford despite stellar exam grades.
“You see, we have to tread carefully,” said my cautious colleague. “It’s only a matter of time before the system is judicially reviewed. Its ability to behave sufficiently consistently across the piste will be exposed.”
The unspoken Marlborough factor will also be at work at Cambridge: the anticipation that a litigious rejectee (or his parents) might hold the system up to challenge on the grounds that Old Marlburians—and not black or working-class white pupils—are the ones being discriminated against.
Something clearly went badly wrong with the appointment of Arday. Multiple investigations have been launched into Arday’s claims, his background, his research—and into why Cambridge not only appointed him, but also defended him when doubts were raised.
But, just as the parallel story of Dr Cofnas probably tells us very little about Cambridge and its tolerance for obsessive “race realists”, it may be that there was less than meets the eye in the parable of Professor Arday.
But maybe his death can offer us lessons in not rushing to glib judgements; in not joining the unthinking pack; and—above all—in keeping a sense of proportion and plain humanity.
