The academic life and death of Cambridge professor Jason Arday raise worrying questions on many levels. His alleged PhD plagiarism and embroidering of his CV have been the subject of an unprecedented campaign of vilification in the right-wing press. The Times/Sunday Times has written no fewer than 44 articles on the subject, The Telegraph 43, and the Daily Mail 24.
This is not to deny that there appear to be problems with Arday’s thesis, which appears to contain passages lifted from other works without proper acknowledgement. At best this is sloppy, and should have been picked up by the examiners of the thesis at Liverpool John Moores University in 2015. There are misdemeanours here. However, there have been other recent cases of plagiarism by Cambridge academics that have not led to the accused being attacked in the national media and forced to resign.
Part of a wider campaign
Whatever his personal failings, the campaign against Arday can be seen as part of a larger attack on the standing of universities, on academic expertise, and on DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, usually referred to as EDI – Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – in the UK) policies in general. The right wing, both in Britain and abroad, does not like higher education because those who go to university tend not to vote for right-wing parties. This they put down to indoctrination by ‘leftist’ and ‘woke’ academics, such as Arday, rather than the broader view of life created by mixing with other young people on campus.
The right wing is also suspicious of ‘experts’ who disagree with some of their more questionable crusades. One can recall here the assertion by Michael Gove during the Brexit campaign that, ‘the people of this country have had enough of experts’. The Trump administration’s attack on the medical science respecting vaccinations is part of this trend.
Assault on DEI
The assault on DEI should be seen as part of international right-wing attempts to use the issue to shore up support among white, working-class males. This group feels that its social standing as breadwinners and leaders of homogeneous communities is threatened by working women and ethnic minorities. Again, the latter also tend not to vote for right-wing parties. However, a broader question is whether this is a tactical ploy, or a more sinister return of discredited ideas from the past. Is DEI merely seen as jumping the queue, or are women and ethnic minorities simply seen as unqualified by their very nature for posts in universities or other walks of life?
Alarm bells
Alarm bells should start ringing when we discover that one of the first people to publicly accuse Arday of plagiarism and fabrication was Nathan Cofnas. Cofnas is an advocate of ‘hereditarianism’, the belief that heredity plays a central role in determining human personality and intelligence. He claims that some races are genetically less intelligent than others. As a Cambridge academic, he published a blog arguing that ‘Only hereditarianism stops the cycle of wokism’, and that DEI was anti-white and anti-male. After an outcry from students, Emmanuel College cut its ties with him. He subsequently left Cambridge when his fellowship ended.
In a recent video interview, Cofnas admitted that he saw the Arday case as a hook on which to build a ‘revolution’ against ‘wokeism’. He also jovially claimed that this would open opportunities for him to become ‘head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard’.
Racial classification
Race science is nothing new, and has its origins in strains of Enlightenment thought in the 18th century. The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, in his seminal Systema Naturae, published from 1735 onwards, attempted to place the entire natural world, including man (‘Homo’), in a vast classification system. He ascribed both physical attributes and characteristics to racial groups, such as:
“The Afer or Africanus: black, phlegmatic, relaxed; black, frizzled hair; silky skin, flat nose, tumid lips; females without shame; mammary glands give milk abundantly; crafty, sly, lazy, cunning, lustful, careless; anoints himself with grease; and governed by caprice.”
At least Linnaeus saw Africans as human. Other thinkers, such as Voltaire, saw them as a separate species. This helps to explain why those who signed the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 could see no contradiction between proclaiming the Rights of Man, including liberty, and keeping enslaved people. The latter were, at best, children, at worst not human beings at all.
The persistence of racial science
Despite the work of 20th-century anthropologists and geneticists, showing the relatively limited differences between racial groups, indeed the difficulty in identifying discrete races at all, racial science has continued to have advocates. Much of the present MAGA attack on threats to European ‘civilisation’, echoes Theodore Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy of 1920. Stoddard, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, followed this up in 1923 with The Revolt Against Civilization: the Menace of the Under-man, which influenced Nazi discussions of race in Germany. The horrors of Nazi racial science during the Second World War discredited its premises.
However, in 1994 Richard J. Heinstein and Charles Murray could still argue in their book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life that heredity helped determine class and racial inequalities. Cofnas’s blogs are an extension of these discredited arguments.
The ‘crusade’ against Arday was a nasty business. This is part of a wider campaign directed at Europe by the racist far right, backed by millions of dollars. It is up to us to prevent it having still more ghastly consequences.
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