When Dr. Jason Arday was appointed at Cambridge in 2023, the University celebrated him. He was thirty-seven, a tenured Professor of the Sociology of Education, the youngest Black person to hold a chair there in the institution’s history. Cambridge, ever eager to promote itself as a bastion of progress in a modern, multicultural world, celebrated Arday’s appointment. Of course, the celebrations also functioned as a sly marketing and recruitment tool. Despite the initial outpouring of excitement, Cambridge students and alumni of color could have predicted what came next.
Within three years, reactionary forces within the University—in coalition with the British media—conspired to hound him out.