How badly did the University of Cambridge — one of the world’s top academic institutions — want to hire a black man as a professor in 2023?
Very, very badly indeed.
There’s no other possible explanation for the strange, sad case of Jason Arday.
In February 2023, Cambridge appointed Arday as professor of sociology of education. He was 37, making him the youngest black professor in its history. Even in retrospect, it is hard to say who was more delusional, Arday or the people who hired him.
Arday’s academic qualifications began and ended with his waist-length dreadlocks; his “papers” mostly consisted of interviews with other black academics complaining about racism in higher education. Hs backstory ought to have raised more questions, He bragged of being unable to speak until he was 11 and read until he was 18. Somehow the geniuses at Cambridge spun this tale into a positive rather than evidence of a tendency to exaggerate, or a certain lack of, umm, intellectual heft.
Still, Arday appeared headed for a long and lucrative career as a purveyor of “antiracist” nonsense.
Only he couldn’t stop… saying stuff.
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