The proof that Cambridge’s Jason Arday inquiry will be a whitewash

Cambridge University’s “independent inquiry” into the events around Jason Arday appears already to have decided what its outcome will be. We can say this for a few reasons. The first is a small, but critical, difference between two statements about the inquiry made by the university on Friday. One was a message to students and staff from the Vice-Chancellor, Deborah Prentice. This said that the second part of the inquiry would include a “broader review… of the support available to academics who are subjected to excessive public and media scrutiny.”

It just won’t do. And if Deborah Prentice thinks it will, she just won’t do, either Cambridge has thus determined, before the inquiry has even started, that the problem was that media scrutiny of Arday was “excessive.” In other words, it has already adopted the Jolyon Maugham / Simon Woolley/ race activist analysis of the tragedy. Tellingly, Prentice, or someone around her, appears to have realised that that wouldn’t do for the public version of the same statement, sent to the press and published on the university’s website the same day.

In this version, “excessive” has been replaced with “extraordinary.” The second problem with the inquiry is what it avoids addressing directly. There’s going to be a general look at “the wider context of Professor Arday’s time at the University, including the recruitment of senior academic staff, mentoring and support arrangements [and] the University’s response to allegations of research misconduct.” But there is no specific promise to look at how Arday himself was appointed; how his CV and record were scrutinised; why, even if thought genuine, they were thought sufficient; whether better responses to the early complaints about his work could have prevented the tragedy; and whether the people who gave Arday a job he could not do, and who promoted him (and allowed him to promote himself) as an ideal he could not sustain, bear any responsibility.

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The words “during the period prior to his death” helpfully rule out the entire three years before the crisis when the university could have avoided it happening in the first place by behaving like a normal employer (treating Arday as a person, not a symbol; exercising greater rigour in recruiting; responding properly to complaints.) This part of the inquiry, by the way, will be led by the former crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal, who it’s hard to see as having an open mind.

He’s on record as saying, among many other things, that “diversity and inclusion doesn’t cause disasters, the lack of diversity and inclusion does” and that “being ‘woke’ is not an insult… Woke people created the NHS & stood up to the Nazis. Being woke is simply wanting others to be treated as you yourself would want to be treated.” In the end, Cambridge’s international reputation rests on honesty. A university is nothing if it doesn’t believe in truthful inquiry.

But this inquiry is obviously and fundamentally dishonest – in its pretence of investigation versus its reality of predetermination; in its sly alteration of its statement to conceal that predetermination; in its careful avoidance of central issues. It will further damage the university’s standing. It just won’t do. And if Deborah Prentice thinks it will, she just won’t do, either.