The row over Jason Arday, Cambridge’s “youngest black professor”, raises serious concerns about the corrosive role Diversity, Equality & Inclusion (DEI) has come to play in institutions, businesses and society at large. Jason Arday’s elastic relationship with the truth has been the subject of much discussion in recent days, but it has also spawned more serious concerns about DEI’s role in our society.
Cambridge hailed Arday as its “youngest black professor” in 2023, an appointment made on the basis of academic credentials whose authenticity has now been called into question.
This has prompted two DEI-related reactions. The first has been to accuse anyone criticising Arday of racism. The Good Law Project is amongst those characterising his plight as a “right-wing smear campaign”.
Criticising academics because they are black is racist, but criticising their work when they are black is rational in the sense that it would be irrational to insist that racial identity should preclude anyone from criticism.
In fact, suggesting that Arday’s colour should insulate him from the same scrutiny that would invariably descend had his embellishments been orchestrated by a white colleague, is in itself, a form of discrimination.
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The second reaction has been to claim that Arday only acquired his position as a result of DEI. There is no evidence to substantiate this, but the suspicion alone proves DEI’s lethal ability to delegitimise even genuine minority achievement.
Policy Exchange has compiled a wealth of research that bluntly demonstrates the noxious impact DEI has had on British society at large. The think tank’s report suggested that DEI could be at the root of supposed ‘2-tier policing’.
The report exposed that in just the last six years, police forces in England and Wales have spent over £630m on the very DEI policies that likely led to the appalling police mishandling of the Henry Nowak incident prior to his death.
This debilitating influence is present in the business community too, with DEI policies imposing an estimated annual cost of up to £10bn on UK businesses, a burden that affects companies like those in the bank tax crackdown efforts.
DEI’s perpetuation of the myth that ethnic minorities can only succeed if the white majority is forcibly excluded from professional pathways, is a serious threat to social cohesion. By reducing ethnic minorities to a vulnerable, homogenous bloc, it also potentially smothers the very diversity progressives claim to covet.
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Lord Sewell, author of the 2021 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, has written that the “unholy alliance between ideological administrators, activist academics and radical student unions” means that “it should be no surprise that, in both the USA and the UK, some of the worst expressions of antisemitism… should have come from our universities – institutions steeped in this warped identity politics of DEI”.
DEI’s original core intentions – to achieve equality throughout society by advancing the prospects of under-represented groups – were good ones.
The imposition of DEI has invariably led to a grossly distortive effect where it has perversely become a tool for discrimination, exclusion and inequality – legalised discrimination against the majority to legitimise their exclusion and thereby nationalise social inequality.
Ike Ijeh, head of housing, architecture and urban space at Policy Exchange, notes, DEI has become the toxic hallmark of a society that has given up fighting inequality in favour of the progressive dopamine rush of finding it instead.
They believe that if there is to be any hope for social cohesion in Britain, DEI must be entirely expunged. Human nature ensures that plagiarism will always haunt academia, but institutions like Cambridge would be well advised to adopt a recruitment strategy based on merit rather than melanin.