Torrents of verbiage have cascaded from the pens of those who would have us believe that Jason Arday is the living, breathing proof that our universities are up the spout. We’ve heard rather less about the meaning of Dr Nathan Cofnas, the sleuth who helped unmask him. Which is a shame, because he is also fascinating in his own right.
Both the Arday and Cofnas stories are in some way about race. Arday, in the eyes of his accusers, is a serial fantasist whose appointment as a Cambridge professor demonstrates that DEI policies (promoting diversity, equality and inclusion) are rampantly out of control. Woke professors, in other words, were so blinded by his blackness that they didn’t spot the warning signs.
That wouldn't surprise Cofnas, who sincerely believes that if you were appointing people purely on merit, there would be virtually no black professors in Cambridge. “In a meritocracy,” he wrote, “Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.” He goes further: without wokeism “[b]lacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment”.
Both Arday and Cofnas have now left Cambridge, the former under a deluge of coverage from mainly right-wing commentators convinced he was a symbol of how wokeness has corrupted even the grandest universities.
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. But Cofnas, unlike Arday, was not used to pose broader questions about the calibre of academics who are offered juicy roles at this most prestigious of universities.
Cofnas has been banging on about what he calls “racial realism” for a few years now, and questions have certainly been raised about the quality of his thinking. A long, rambling blog post in October 2025 stirred student disquiet. But in 2019, he 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 legitimizes their harmful ideas.”
If these academics are right, then in 2022 Cambridge recruited someone who, two years earlier, had been accused of promoting “unintelligible, wrong-headed …nonsensical ideas”.
But, anyway, it seems that no one cares very much about that and there have been no calls for an independent inquiry into whether the Cofnas hiring tells us disturbing truths about Cambridge’s recruitment 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 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. Not very woke.
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 experience at Oxford 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 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) holds 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 his 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 tells us very little about Cambridge and its tolerance for nutty “race realists”, it may be that there is less than meets the eye in the parable of Professor Arday.
