John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
The sad, and ultimately tragic, story of the appointment, resignation and death of Dr Jason Arday is a complex tale of ignorance, negligence, incompetence, ideology and deceit involving at least five universities – Cambridge, Glasgow, Durham, Roehampton and Liverpool John Moores, as well as Jesus College, Cambridge, where he allegedly told graduate students that they were so outstanding that they did not require supervision.
The truth may well have been that he was not capable of providing it.
Professor Sir Simon Baron Cohen – who himself should be in sackcloth for describing autism as “the extreme male brain” – said, rightly, that Dr Arday’s autism should have led to “reasonable adjustments” at all stages.
Such adjustments might include additional checks on referencing sources, accurate use of them, and issues such as spelling and punctuation. They do not extend to passing a thesis with obvious errors – the supervisors should have known about the original thesis – ignoring failure to carry out teaching duties, or rigging a “Board of Election” with people sympathetic to views expressed outside supervised research, including a rant against “Whiteness” that would cost an ordinary person £41 even to read on the internet.
How long would a rant against “blackness” last, even in an impartial rather than biased context?
Taken together, the activities of these institutions, with those who awarded Dr Arday honorary degrees, and Dr Arday’s subsequent publications, set up and alternative to the truth, which Cambridge was forced to ditch after it became unsustainable. Chancellor Chris Smith, a former Labour minister, put the blame on a “racist feeding frenzy” by the press, but its sustained attention would not have been necessary had Cambridge not attempted a cover up in the first place. Professor Priyamvada Gopal, a genuine academic whose intervention ended the university’s attempts to minimise the issues, is an improbable racist. Cambridge, she said, “should not be marking its own homework.” Its announcement of inquiries that would end that situation, on Monday of last week, appears to have been what tipped Dr Arday over the edge.
In the meantime, the Woke and its alternative truth continue to advance, and Andrew Gilligan’s exposure of the latest addition of the Cambridge Education Faculty, Farah Ahmed https://spectator.com/article/the-problems-with-the-faculty-of-education-go-beyond-jason-arday/, a Muslim fundamentalist opposed to the whole concept of Western education, takes us further back still, to the beginnings of science and the enlightenment. An exhibition at the King’s Library of the British Museum tells the story. Factual discoveries, beginning with Galileo’s use of the telescope to identify the movement of Jupiter’s moons, and so prove that the sun did not revolve around the earth, put him in conflict with the Catholic church, which silenced him under threat of torture. As the evidence continued to mount, through scientific experiment, exploration, geology and the discovery of dinosaur bones, literal belief in Christian scriptures accommodated itself to science, culminating in Pope John Paul II’s admission that evolution was “more than a theory.”
Scriptural authority still prevails in Islam, and in this context, Ahmed’s concerns make perfect sense. Universities are founded on critical thinking, which is summed up in the Royal Society’s motto, Nullius in Verba – take no-one’s word. Add this to Arday’s obsession with the woke idea of white privilege, and Professor Hilary Cremin’s idea of “rewilding” education, and we get to the root of the conflict between Cambridge’s education faculty and the remainder of the university. As the vice-chancellor said, Cambridge has, “for centuries” been founded on the basis of academic excellence. Arday, Ahmed and Professor Cremin are, in their different ways, opposed to this, and hence to the principles of the university, and indeed of all western universities.
The outcome of all of this is still in the balance. A Roehampton student has described how Dr Arday dismissed her request for an explanation of a slightly lower grade than she expected as “white privilege”, and he claimed to have been an external examiner for 35 doctorates. Academic activism puts politics before truth. It is anti-intellectual, anti-educational and anti-social. The Left turned Michael Gove into an Aunt Sally for exposing it, and it is still in place.
But in the meantime, yet another ray of hope from Katharine Birbalsingh and her colleagues at Michaela.
Their sixth formers achieved an astonishing average of 3 As across all of their A levels this year, and its GCSE results have smashed all records, as well as the progressive theories that continue to dominate university departments of education. If people are really interested in ensuring fair opportunities for all pupils in our society, including those of minority ethnic heritage, this is where they should look.
John Bald is a former Ofsted inspector. He is Vice-President of the Conservative Education Society.
The sad, and ultimately tragic, story of the appointment, resignation and death of Dr Jason Arday is a complex tale of ignorance, negligence, incompetence, ideology and deceit involving at least five universities – Cambridge, Glasgow, Durham, Roehampton and Liverpool John Moores, as well as Jesus College, Cambridge, where he allegedly told graduate students that they were so outstanding that they did not require supervision.
The truth may well have been that he was not capable of providing it.
Professor Sir Simon Baron Cohen – who himself should be in sackcloth for describing autism as “the extreme male brain” – said, rightly, that Dr Arday’s autism should have led to “reasonable adjustments” at all stages.
Such adjustments might include additional checks on referencing sources, accurate use of them, and issues such as spelling and punctuation. They do not extend to passing a thesis with obvious errors – the supervisors should have known about the original thesis – ignoring failure to carry out teaching duties, or rigging a “Board of Election” with people sympathetic to views expressed outside supervised research, including a rant against “Whiteness” that would cost an ordinary person £41 even to read on the internet.
How long would a rant against “blackness” last, even in an impartial rather than biased context?
Taken together, the activities of these institutions, with those who awarded Dr Arday honorary degrees, and Dr Arday’s subsequent publications, set up and alternative to the truth, which Cambridge was forced to ditch after it became unsustainable. Chancellor Chris Smith, a former Labour minister, put the blame on a “racist feeding frenzy” by the press, but its sustained attention would not have been necessary had Cambridge not attempted a cover up in the first place. Professor Priyamvada Gopal, a genuine academic whose intervention ended the university’s attempts to minimise the issues, is an improbable racist. Cambridge, she said, “should not be marking its own homework.” Its announcement of inquiries that would end that situation, on Monday of last week, appears to have been what tipped Dr Arday over the edge.
In the meantime, the Woke and its alternative truth continue to advance, and Andrew Gilligan’s exposure of the latest addition of the Cambridge Education Faculty, Farah Ahmed https://spectator.com/article/the-problems-with-the-faculty-of-education-go-beyond-jason-arday/, a Muslim fundamentalist opposed to the whole concept of Western education, takes us further back still, to the beginnings of science and the enlightenment. An exhibition at the King’s Library of the British Museum tells the story. Factual discoveries, beginning with Galileo’s use of the telescope to identify the movement of Jupiter’s moons, and so prove that the sun did not revolve around the earth, put him in conflict with the Catholic church, which silenced him under threat of torture. As the evidence continued to mount, through scientific experiment, exploration, geology and the discovery of dinosaur bones, literal belief in Christian scriptures accommodated itself to science, culminating in Pope John Paul II’s admission that evolution was “more than a theory.”
Scriptural authority still prevails in Islam, and in this context, Ahmed’s concerns make perfect sense. Universities are founded on critical thinking, which is summed up in the Royal Society’s motto, Nullius in Verba – take no-one’s word. Add this to Arday’s obsession with the woke idea of white privilege, and Professor Hilary Cremin’s idea of “rewilding” education, and we get to the root of the conflict between Cambridge’s education faculty and the remainder of the university. As the vice-chancellor said, Cambridge has, “for centuries” been founded on the basis of academic excellence. Arday, Ahmed and Professor Cremin are, in their different ways, opposed to this, and hence to the principles of the university, and indeed of all western universities.
The outcome of all of this is still in the balance. A Roehampton student has described how Dr Arday dismissed her request for an explanation of a slightly lower grade than she expected as “white privilege”, and he claimed to have been an external examiner for 35 doctorates. Academic activism puts politics before truth. It is anti-intellectual, anti-educational and anti-social. The Left turned Michael Gove into an Aunt Sally for exposing it, and it is still in place.
But in the meantime, yet another ray of hope from Katharine Birbalsingh and her colleagues at Michaela.
Their sixth formers achieved an astonishing average of 3 As across all of their A levels this year, and its GCSE results have smashed all records, as well as the progressive theories that continue to dominate university departments of education. If people are really interested in ensuring fair opportunities for all pupils in our society, including those of minority ethnic heritage, this is where they should look.