Cambridge abandons plans to fully investigate its hiring of Jason Arday

• The University of Cambridge has dropped plans for a full investigation into hiring Jason Arday, focusing instead on whether the university supported him amid plagiarism and personal narrative accusations.
• Arday died after facing intense scrutiny and racist online attacks; the university's investigation now avoids questions about vetting and promotion of his biography.
• The narrowed inquiry has divided faculty, with some demanding full accountability while others criticise the university's prior public handling of Arday's case.

CAMBRIDGE – The University of Cambridge has abandoned plans to fully investigate its hiring of Jason Arday, the professor who became a lightning rod in the debate over diversity-and-inclusion efforts in higher education, following his abrupt death in August.

Instead, the university said, the inquiry will examine whether the school offered him sufficient support amid accusations that he plagiarised portions of his doctoral thesis and embellished his personal narrative. Arday may come up as part of a broader look at university hiring practices, but he will not be a focus.

That marks an abrupt shift from the plan announced this summer, when the school’s vice-chancellor, Deborah Prentice, promised a “thorough and transparent” investigation into Arday’s appointment.

Arday died in August amid intense scrutiny of his biography and a deluge of personal, sometimes racist, taunts online. His family said that the “campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason”.

The change in investigative focus means that Cambridge may never publicly address questions about how it vetted Arday for a senior teaching job and why it repeatedly downplayed concerns about his work and biography.

That has upset some professors, who are circulating a letter demanding full institutional accountability and an examination of how the university promoted Arday’s personal story, according to a draft seen by The New York Times.

Cambridge touted Arday as its youngest black professor ever after he was hired at the age of 37 in 2022. He had claimed he could not speak until the age of 11 or read until he was 18, a trajectory with no precedent in clinical literature.

Some faculty members said that by pushing him into the spotlight, the university distracted from its diversity record.

Of the 584 full professors at Cambridge who reported their race the year that Arday was hired, three were black.

A faculty letter this summer, before Arday’s death, criticised administrators for “crafting a media narrative focusing on his youth, his race, and his transformative potential”.

That narrative, which led to a high-profile memoir published by Simon & Schuster, is now outside the scope of the investigation.

For the most part, so are questions surrounding the hiring of Arday, an early-career scholar with a modest publication record, for a prestigious professorship in education.

Cambridge has appointed a respected former prosecutor to lead the review but has narrowed the scope.

The investigation is “not about the allegations made against Professor Arday or about his academic record”, the former prosecutor, Nazir Afzal, said recently. “It’s about his welfare, his care, his well-being.”

It will go “deep on a narrow question, rather than broad on all of them”, Afzal, who is also chancellor of the University of Manchester, noted in a post.

A second, broader inquiry by an expert panel may touch on Arday’s years at Cambridge but will not focus on him.

The second review “will consider the wider context of Professor Arday’s time at the University of Cambridge” by examining policies on hiring and academic misconduct, along with “the support available to academics who are subject to extraordinary public and media scrutiny”, a university description of the inquiry reads.

A university spokesperson declined to explain the change or answer questions about it.

The faculty is divided in the wake of Arday’s death.

While some criticise the narrowed scope of the investigation, others take issue with Cambridge’s reproval of the professor in the days before his death, pointing to the vice-chancellor’s description of his case, in a letter to staff, as an “aberration”.

The episode is adding to controversy around the elite institution, which starts its fall term next week.

A finance scandal in Britain’s right-wing Reform UK party has put scrutiny on Cambridge theologian James Orr, a former adviser to the party who has been the subject of student complaints, according to the Financial Times.

Cambridge has also lost a case brought by a professor who said he was targeted for being a whistleblower, in a ruling that singled out Prentice and human resources staff for criticism.

The university spokesperson said Cambridge was “looking into” the allegations against Orr and “looking hard at the judgment” and facts in the whistleblower case. THE NEW YORK TIMES

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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