Cambridge’s rot goes far deeper than one plagiarist professor

Cambridge University says it will now “review” how it appoints senior academics. Forgive the scepticism, but a review is what an institution announces when it wants to look like it is doing something without actually doing anything.

The trigger was the resignation of Jason Arday, hailed on his 2023 appointment as Cambridge’s youngest-ever Black professor, who quit this week after The Telegraph exposed that more than 180 passages in his PhD thesis were identical or near-identical to another student’s work, and that he had invented a book that was never published.

Students had been complaining for years that he barely supervised them. None of it seems to have troubled the nine-strong appointment panel, six of whom had publicly declared their enthusiasm for diversity initiatives, some in fairly radical terms.

This was not an isolated failure of judgement. It was the entirely predictable result of a university that has spent years prioritising identity and ideology over merit, and that now finds itself unable to explain why.

Cambridge’s own 2019 diversity target committed it to beating the national benchmark for black and ethnic-minority professors. When the sociology of education post was advertised, the job listing itself flagged that women, black and ethnic-minority candidates, and disabled candidates were “under-represented” and, by implication, welcome.

Mr Arday, by his own account autistic and dyslexic as well as black, ticked two of the three boxes going in. A source with knowledge of the process has told The Telegraph that rival candidates believed the university was merely going through the motions, because Mr Arday was already the preferred hire. When Prof Hilary Cremin, head of the education faculty, was asked in 2023 whether Mr Arday’s appointment was tokenistic, her answer was not a rebuttal on the merits. It was, in essence, that the university was fortunate to have secured him.

That is not how a serious university talks about its most rigorous scholarly appointment process. It is how an organisation talks when it has already decided the outcome it wants and is looking for cover.

Arday is not an isolated case. A month before the scandal broke, Cambridge conferred an honorary doctorate in law on Prof Philippe Sands KC, the barrister who spent more than a decade as lead counsel for Mauritius in its campaign to strip Britain of the Chagos Islands. Prof Sands and his legal team were paid roughly £8 million for work that helped force through a deal under which Britain would pay Mauritius £35 billion to lease back the Diego Garcia military base for 99 years, and he once likened British administration of the islands to Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

Nigel Farage called the honour “a reward for treachery.” Priti Patel said Sands had worked against Britain’s national interests for years, calling him undeserving of the recognition. Mark Francois, rather more drily, observed that Cambridge had at least stopped short of giving him a doctorate in public finance. Cambridge’s defence was that the ceremony simply recognised achievement across law, politics, medicine, science, the arts and music, as though honouring the architect of a £35 billion territorial giveaway sits naturally alongside honouring a concert pianist.

It is worth noting, too, that Sands was a founding member of Matrix Chambers, the same set where Sir Keir Starmer and the Attorney General, Lord Hermer, both built their careers, a reminder of how tightly the legal, political and academic establishment that champions this agenda is interwoven.

Then there is the Balfour portrait. In March 2024, activists from Palestine Action, a group since proscribed as a terrorist organisation, sprayed red paint over and knifed to shreds a 1914 portrait of the former prime minister Arthur Balfour, hanging in Trinity College. Cambridgeshire Police closed their investigation last year without a single arrest, despite the vandal having been caught on camera. It took the Great British PAC, a campaign group, to keep the pressure on, writing to Trinity’s master and to the local police and crime commissioner and warning that it was exploring a private prosecution. As the group’s universities director, Jake Reed, put it, silence should not be allowed to be the final word on an attack on British heritage. It took an outside campaign, not the university itself, to say so with any conviction.

None of this means diversity in academia is inherently a bad thing. But when a university sets numerical race targets, advertises jobs by listing the protected characteristics it wants applicants to have, waves through a plagiarised thesis and an invented book, hands its highest honour to the lawyer who helped give away sovereign British territory, and can only respond to vandalism of its own heritage when shamed into it by outside campaigners, the word “review” starts to look less like contrition and more like damage control.

Cambridge dons are now demanding an independent inquiry and a rule change to allow retrospective investigation of academic misconduct. Good. But the deeper question the university’s leadership seems determined to avoid is simpler: did Cambridge stop asking whether its appointments and honours were the best, and start asking only whether they looked right to the people making the decisions?

By Jack Lions