Arday is a symptom, not a lone nutter

Doing DEI wars properly

Jason Arday is becoming become a tokenistic scalp against Woke which obscures the scale of the problem of DEI in Universities, and gives the right the impression that they are winning when they are continuing to lose. Arday is being presented as a crazed Walter Mitty type figure who could only have existed post George Floyd. In reality he is the symptom of the systematic anti-meritocratic policies which Britain has pursued in higher education since the 1960s. It is accepted across the political spectrum that Universities may discriminate in courses such as engineering in favour of women and against men.

One need only look at the 2005 Athena Swan charter, which predates the 2010 Equality Act, which has been signed by nearly all higher education bodies and ‘marks’ Universities on the basis of their gender equality to grasp that the assaults on Merit well predate Jason Arday deciding he would bluff his way into a Top Job at Jesus College.

Reform have been missing in action since the controversy began. They have tweeted about ‘Woke’ and how silly it is, Suella Braverman who is purportedly heading up education for the party had the following to say:

This suggests that Reform and the wider centre-right commentariat do not have a remote grasp of how pernicious ‘woke hiring’ is in academia, and the impact it is has at an undergraduate level. Oxbridge colleges have proudly discriminated on the basis of race, gender and educational background openly for years. They run scholarships (Stormzy) which are demarcated for ‘black UK students’. Across higher-education Universities not only tip the balance to help BME students in, they also try and ‘correct’ for the grade gap which they go on to attain whilst studying (‘closing the gap’).

We could go on and on but the key issue here is that the populist party of the day has not pounced upon the opportunity to politicise this issue properly. Suella Braverman should be on the airwaves saying that she will change equality legislation so that White academics who have had their careers hampered by anti-White discrimination can sue Oxbridge. She should be talking about how ‘outreach schemes’ to specific genders/races/social backgrounds will be ended, and how admissions quotas will be outlawed, or forcing Universities to conduct race-blind admissions tests (with the ‘remote interviews’ that Oxbridge now do having the camera turned off and the voice garbled by AI, if necessary).

This is bread and butter stuff. None of Reform’s voters like DEI, and even most moderate Tories/Lib Dems and Labour voters could be convinced by an argument resembling ‘the best man/woman for every job’. The ‘right’ in Britain is always at its most popular when it leans into the old liberal principles which still hold great emotional resonance with the average British voter, like free speech and ‘fair play’.

An American friend at a Top University told me recently that in his undergraduate year there are no White American Male students at all, that the only White Males who got in have some obscure international background which they can play up on DEI grounds. Oxbridge is not this bad. We are still a civilised country, and your ‘personal story’ matters much less here than does your UCAS results. With that said there has been a concerted push back against DEI in the second Trump Administration that provides us with interesting insights.

Much of the British commentariat seems to think that Cambridge has been dealt a deadly blow by the Arday affair. But in America we have seen similarly embarrassing scandals do next to nothing to damage institutional reputations. We have seen much of this play out already in Harvard. Claudine Gay got much further than Jason Arday, she got all the way to president of Harvard, she was also brought down in a media storm because of her plagiarism. MAGA influencers have been making noise about how Harvard discriminates against White men for well over a decade now. But all of that discourse has not changed the academic reputation of the institution, it is still a byword for ‘the best’, and students who work through it still enjoy the biggest premiums on their earnings (‘tech’ Universities like MIT notwithstanding).

It is psychologically comforting to believe that these institutions will suffer from reputational damage if they continue with their DEI practices, but the institutional prestige of Oxbridge/Harvard is not going to change in our shared lifetimes. People who graduate from these Universities will continue to filter into the most influential and important jobs. It is not simply enough to point and laugh as Woke seizes control of these organs and uses their credibility to sanctify their political projects. You cannot work your way around it by setting up ‘parallel institutions’ like the University of Buckingham. You will not stop the anti-meritocratic discrimination against white/male/posh in both undergraduate admissions and academic postings without personnel changes and redirection of anti-discrimination law.

The second lesson is that the rot in these organisations is so profound that threatening to mess around with their funding will not cow them into submission. Trump’s approach to fighting Harvard has been random acts of spite (like preventing them from hosting international students) as well as looking for books to ban. They have at times seemed far more motivated by cracking down on antisemitism on campus. His main tool for fighting. His only sustained effort on DEI has been launching lawsuits against Harvard for failing to comply with a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, and revoking research grants and federal funding, which was swiftly overturned by the courts.

Oxbridge colleges enjoy tremendous endowments. Trinity College in Cambridge as an example has an endowment worth over £2bn which generates an income of around £50m a year. If a Reform government comes to power they will not be able to rely on the threat of withdrawing funding to force the hands of these institutions. They will be forced to play a much more direct role in gripping the administrative bureaucracy and rooting out the poisonous DEI ideology.

So what is to be done? Reform accept that there are far too many Universities in Britain. This aligns nicely with the fact that hundreds, if not thousands of academics have been corrupted by the woke mind virus across the country. If hundreds of Universities must be shut as a matter of course, this also means that there will be intensive competition for the few academic postings which remain. Here is my suggestion: nationalise all of the Universities, shut 90% of them down and handpick the appointees to the few which remain for the top Oxbridge colleges.

It is not plausible for Reform to flood these bodies with their own appointees – they struggle enough with getting candidates who aren’t dodgy plumbers, and the Lords will need a good stuffing. It is plausible however that they can sift through the current incumbents in the higher education sector and reward those with whom they are ideologically aligned to / show merit elsewhere with positions. After decades of Jason Arday’s infesting these institutions I am sure that you will win a lot of loyalty through a thorough purging.

Reform has a problem with personnel in institutions because of the dominance of centre-left views in many of the professions. A policy of downsizing to get rid of the bad apples has applications in other domains, especially if Artificial Intelligence can obviate the need for more warm bodies.

Take the BBC as another example. I am in favour of total abolition, but it could be argued that maintaining control over the BBC App/push notifications could be an asset for a short period of time. If 99% of the BBC’s workforce was fired and the BBC became a room with five people managing the website it could be turned into an asset. This asset would also bedblock former BBC employees from creating their own ‘independent BBC’ which would no doubt became a cause celebre amongst international woke.

There are many more Arday’s out there in every meaningful institution in British public life. That means there are many, many more p45s for a pot bashing populist government to dish out.