Propriety and Constitution

“Race realism” ought to be as unacceptable as sex nonrealism, and vice versa. But having appointed Nathan Cofnas in the full knowledge of his published views, and therefore inescapably because of them, Cambridge never sacked him. Rather, at the end of his Fellowship, it merely declined to invite him to keep up an informal, unpaid relationship. As long as someone had been paying, then it had had no objection to his view that while it would not be hybridisation for a German Shepherd to breed with a Pekingese, it would be for a German shepherd to breed with a Beijinger. Yet he was still so bitter that he set out to avenge himself, and in so doing to launch a “revolution” to remove black people from academia. Seconds after the death of Jason Arday, by means that many of those bewailing it would make lawful to assist, Cofnas gave an interview saying so. This alien held a United Kingdom visa, and probably still does. Keep all of that in mind as you read Professor David Runciman:

Oceans of virtual ink have been spilled about the case of Jason Arday because it was the right story at the right time to grab the maximum attention. It happened in high summer, when apart from the interminable heat there wasn’t much else going on. It unfolded in stages, which kept people interested: first the accusations of plagiarism, then the piece-by-piece unravelling of Arday’s life story in the run-up to the publication of his now absurd-seeming memoir.

Above all, though, this was Cambridge. Had Arday been exposed while still a professor at Glasgow University it would have caused a fuss, but nothing on this scale. The contrast between the augustness of the institution and the very contemporary dynamics of Arday’s downfall is what gives the tale its piquancy.

Race, class, snobbery, wokery – somehow they’re all thrown into sharper relief when the setting is that cloistered little world of ancient colleges and elite reputations, some of them now in tatters.

But what is really going on here is that the story of an apparent fantasist is being played out through the fantasies people have about Cambridge. That place doesn’t really exist any more. When news outlets want a generic picture of the university to illustrate their tales of collapsing standards, they usually pick King’s College Chapel or the Senate House – suitably imposing edifices to juxtapose with the squalid goings-on being exposed.

But those buildings are no more representative of the university these days than Arday was. A more accurate image would show one of the gleaming new campuses a little way out from the centre of town where the money and power increasingly reside: either the West Cambridge site, on which the new science and tech departments are housed, or the Biomedical Campus to the south of the city, where the university’s hospitals and research centres exist alongside the headquarters of AstraZeneca and, soon, a £400m R&D centre for GlaxoSmithKline, which is relocating from Stevenage.

Then there are the science parks incubating would-be world-beating start-ups clustered to the north of town. These places have shiny new railway stations – Cambridge North and, more recently, Cambridge South, which opened in June. They have lavishly funded new buildings, including the £58m Whittle Laboratory, which opened in July. This is where the action is.

Arday was professor of the sociology of education and a fellow of Jesus College. Those grand titles sound like they tick all the important boxes for status and significance. But that’s another illusion. People who work in Cambridge sometimes joke there are now three universities: science and tech to the north and west, biomedicine to the south and the old parts left in the middle.

This is “heritage” Cambridge, the bit tourists come to see. It contains most of the colleges and most of the social science and humanities departments. It’s not exactly a Potemkin university since a lot of very hard work still goes on behind the facade. But it can feel like it is primarily for show while the real business is being conducted somewhere else.

One prompt for the outrage about Arday’s appointment to a professorship is that the university seemed to treat it – and him – as window dressing, a way of parading its progressive credentials before the world. Self-evidently something went badly wrong in how this happened. But no one should conclude that it’s only at the woke edges that this sort of preoccupation with appearances is at play. After all, King’s College Chapel is now window dressing too.

I worked at Cambridge for nearly 30 years, ending up as a professor and head of the politics department. The university is organised into different schools, and politics is in the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences, alongside other subjects including sociology and education. We would meet regularly to talk about the pressures we were under and the need to defend our disciplines. Occasionally, though, we would be joined by senior figures from other parts of the university – science, medicine, engineering – when wider issues were at stake, usually involving money.

I can still recall how baffled these people sometimes seemed not simply by our preoccupations but even by what it was we actually did. They were polite but unavoidably patronising. We were heritage Cambridge, useful for how the world saw us, but hard to take seriously on our own terms. When CP Snow wrote about the “Two Cultures” – initially in the New Statesman – at the end of the 1950s his complaint was that the arts and humanities people were so sure of their own importance that they hadn’t bothered to acquaint themselves with even the rudiments of scientific knowledge. He had no doubts about who was patronising whom. That is not the problem now. Academics in the social sciences and humanities can feel so unsure of their importance that they end up doing whatever they can to attract attention.

Even if it is sometimes short of cash, Cambridge is not short of wealth – partly thanks to the endowments of some of the colleges, and partly because of the money flowing in to the sciences. Its humanities departments are not subject to the sorts of pressures they might face elsewhere. There is no talk of mass redundancies or of closing down entire disciplines. Nevertheless, one way to get attention is to raise more money, especially for new professorships. Often, this money arrives before anyone has decided what the new professorships are for. Arday’s position was one of scores of new ones that have been created to generate a sense of purpose. It can seem incredible that tougher questions weren’t asked at the time of his appointment and they certainly should have been. Yet there are now so many panels frantically trying to fill so many of these roles that it can be hard to find enough qualified people to sit on them.

The prevailing idea seems to be that a Cambridge professorship is sufficiently important that everyone involved should have given it their fullest attention, to the extent of checking all the further particulars. I’m afraid that’s another fantasy. Overworked people take shortcuts in Cambridge as they do everywhere else. And they prioritise what is important to them, which doesn’t always mean putting a premium on academic rigour.

When I ran the politics department I once called a meeting to remind my colleagues that because we studied politics we should be careful not to allow our own political views to become too visible if we wanted to be taken seriously. An academic discipline needs to be dispassionate, I suggested. The pushback was overwhelming, particularly from younger members of staff. Why, they wanted to know, should we do these poorly paid and frequently stressful jobs if we don’t get to use them to promote the things we think really matter?

I was conscious of how old-fashioned I sounded in trying to warn them against the dangers of grandstanding. I was also very aware that their need for ancillary compensations was driven by a real sense of hardship. A lot of the grunt work of teaching undergraduates in Cambridge is done by junior academics on short-term contracts with precarious career prospects. Meanwhile, the professors, especially the ones who have been tempted in on favourable terms to newly endowed chairs, often get off lightly. It is an increasingly unfair system, which is one way to ensure that it will be shot through with politics from top to bottom.

Professor Arday also seems to have neglected his teaching obligations, though in his case this may have been driven more by a sense of futility than of privilege. Some of his students claim they didn’t need supervising, which is hardly surprising from someone who must have known he had very little to teach them in academic terms. There are many extremely diligent and hard-working professors. Nonetheless, seen from the lower rungs of the pyramid, Arday is not the only one who looks like he was there just for show. And yet the lower rungs still get filled.

The fact is that it is not only onlookers who allow their fantasies about Cambridge to get the better of them. Whenever one of these poorly paid and precarious jobs gets advertised there are hundreds of applicants, most of whom believe it can’t be as bad as it appears from the outside once you get on the inside. In reality, it’s often worse.

My wife used to be a psychotherapist in Cambridge and she had a lot of stressed and miserable young academics as clients. She’s always remembered a line from one of them. “My mum loves telling everyone I’m a Cambridge don. But I’m the poor sod who has to do it.”

The use of Cambridge academic life for purposes other than purely academic ones does not only happen on the progressive side of the political divide. This is not simply a tale about wokery. Some right-wing commentators have linked the Arday scandal to an earlier example of left-wing bias getting in the way of intellectual standards when Jordan Peterson had a visiting fellowship to Cambridge rescinded in 2019 following a staff and student backlash. But what was someone like Peterson being brought to Cambridge for except as a way of generating attention?

It’s not as if he lacks a platform for anyone who wants to know his views on pretty much any subject under the sun. The academic who invited Peterson was James Orr, who works in the Faculty of Divinity. He is also, as of this spring, Reform’s head of policy. Orr is perhaps best known for his intellectual friendship with JD Vance and for the private chapel he has built in the grounds of his house outside Cambridge where he hosts like-minded thinkers for reflection and prayer. The chapel is constructed out of an old shipping container.

Cambridge has always had its secret right-wing cabals and networks, just as it’s always had its spies. But the point about them was that they used to be secret. The dons were sure enough of themselves that they played their political games in their cloistered rooms, confident that the corridors of power extended into Cambridge colleges. Not any more. So much of it now is just for show.

Arday’s case is egregious on many levels. Perhaps the worst of it is the university’s original response to allegations of plagiarism, which it immediately denounced as a witch hunt. It is one thing to fail to spot evidence of academic misconduct, but it is something else entirely to fail to acknowledge it when it is pointed out to you. Still, though, this sorry tale is symptomatic of a wider university culture in which so many people fear for their futures and are uncertain of what their purpose is.

Anyone who thinks Cambridge should be immune from this by dint of its prestige and privilege is missing the point. So much of the prestige and privilege of Cambridge is now bound up in leveraging the university’s – and the town’s – advantages in tech and scientific research. Social science and humanities academics can argue as much as they like about how important their subjects are for critical thinking and human flourishing – but as the new technology marches on, it gets harder and harder to feel confident that these arguments will win out.

AI is helping scientists capture Nobel prizes and helping mathematicians solve puzzles that seemed beyond human reach. What is it doing for people who read and write books for a living except to make them worry whether they can trust anything that matters again, including the essays being written by their students? Grandstanding can sometimes feel like it’s all that’s left. The joke used to be that academic politics are so poisonous because the stakes are so low. Now, it’s more like the politics are so performative because the real stakes are being played out somewhere else entirely.

Peter Oborne is in the same position, so I am not suggesting a hard and fast rule, but it cannot escape remark that James Orr and Edward Dutton were both married to clergywomen. And while Reform UK had given responsibility for potential Honourable Members to Councillor Jaymey McIvor of the notoriously dishonourable member, what policies are being formulated by the saintly Dr Orr? After transporting convicts to El Salvador, imprisoning the executives of Vodafone (would they be transported to El Salvador?), and what could only be described as invading France, we have the abolition of Personal Independence Payment, the nature and purpose of which Robert Jenrick cannot begin to understand despite his having been in government when it was created, and the abolition of the health element of Universal Credit, which has already been halved for new claimants, people who, unlike those who were on PIP alone, are by definition too ill to work. That was the “compromise” that was despicably accepted by Labour MPs.

Nothing involving Jenrick should be taken seriously, and no one who talked about “suicidal empathy” should be allowed beyond the Lower Sixth, although there would be a lot of suicides if this empathy-free programme were ever implemented. There is no such condition as “mild depression” or “mild anxiety”. The paperwork lists every condition that you have, but that does not mean that the award is for, say, tennis elbow; indeed, PIP is not awarded for specific medical conditions at all, but for how they affected your life. Of course people who were awarded PIP years ago are still on it. Their legs have not grown back, have they? A business with more than five employees would have to take out an insurance policy to pay for any of them who were off sick for the first two years. A policy from whom? And people who would previously have had PIP or the UC health element would have to convince the council or the mayor that they had “verifiable additional costs” that those latter-day Poor Law Guardians would decide how to meet. On both counts, Blairism lives even after Keir Starmer. As Albert Toth writes:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been accused of an “assault on disabled people” by a charity chief after travel support he had received for 15 years was abruptly removed.

Kamran Mallick, chief executive of Disability Rights UK, said some of the funding he received through the department’s Access to Work scheme was pulled following a phone call in July.

Under the scheme, people with limiting health conditions can apply for a grant to fund practical support with their work, as well as manage their mental health.

It is designed to cover costs that employers are not expected to such as specialist equipment, support workers, travelling expenses and adaptations in the workplace.

But disability campaigners have warned that issues with Access to Work have seen applicants waiting longer for support, while existing recipients are increasingly having it stripped back or pulled altogether.

A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) in February found that processing times for the scheme rose from 28 days in 2020/21 to 109 days in November 2025, with fears this rise has continued.

Mr Mallick, 53, has been unable to walk since the age of three after contracting polio. He uses a wheelchair and has worked for disability rights campaign groups through several treatments and injuries.

His Access to Work enabled him to fund taxi journeys to and from his workplace alongside a support worker for 20 hours a week. He claims that the DWP told him that this support worker should instead also take on a role as his driver, a proposal Mr Mallick said is “not realistic”.

“I am left to absorb the cost of something entirely outside my control,” Mr Mallick writes.

“Driving and providing personal support are two distinct skill sets, and finding someone local enough, qualified enough, and willing to commit to a 20-hour role that also requires full-week availability is not realistic,” he added.

The issues have coincided with a rise in applications for the scheme, increasing from 76,100 in 2018/19 to 157,000 in 2024/25.

Over the same time period, spending on the programme has increased by 40 per cent, from £129 million to £320 million.

Despite reports of cutbacks, ministers have insisted that no changes have been made to the Access to Work policy. But campaigners say that pressure on the system means decision makers are reducing the generosity and length of the crucial support.

Around 66,000 Access to Work applications were waiting to be processed in March, according to a recent report from the Work & Pensions Committee.

Mr Mallick said: “It is infuriating to hear ministers insist on the importance of disabled people working, while the very support that makes that possible is quietly stripped away.

“What I went through ... is not an isolated glitch. It's part of a pattern that the evidence now shows clearly. A change in government has only accelerated these changes in the AtW scheme.”

The government has placed an emphasis on enabling more disabled people to work through initiatives such as Right to Try, which allows claimants to move into employment without the risk of immediately losing their benefits.

Last year, ministers were forced to row back on proposals to cut the Personal Independence Payment – Britain’s most-claimed health-related benefit – with disability minister Stephen Timms instead launching a review into the payment.

He is set to report his findings in the autumn, when it is expected that the new government will lay out further plans to change the welfare system.

A DWP spokesperson said: “We are sorry to hear about Mr Mallick’s negative experience and will consider his reconsideration request in due course.

“Access to Work is a lifeline, helping disabled people and people with health conditions to start and stay in work, but demand for the scheme has grown significantly in recent years. That’s why we’re working with disabled people and their organisations to improve it.

“No changes have been made to Access to Work policy, and we will announce any future changes prior to them being implemented.”

There are only 712,000 active job vacancies in the United Kingdom, the lowest in five years, and in any case PIP is an in-work benefit, paid to one in five people of working age in Clacton, where the absence of arrests in relation to Nigel Farage’s finances, while intended to avoid influencing the by-election, has in fact had exactly that effect. Farage has clearly lied about Essex Police, so might that be another count of misconduct to add to his running total? Fraser Nelson has the numbers: every Reform MP has a majority smaller than the number of constituents on PIP, while its top 20 target seats all have more PIP claimants than the majority over Reform in 2024.

In such areas and numerous others, including the entire North East based on the recent A-level results, the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools are to identify potential future NEETs so that the third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools could either pack them off to be sexually assaulted from the age of 16 in the tender care of the sacrosanct Ministry of Defence, or funnel them into a curriculum determined by “local employers” such as vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, carwashes, mini-marts, Turkish barbers, and American candy stores.

Not that all such establishments are necessarily questionable. Were all scrapyards, back in the day? The recent death of Eddie Richardson is a reminder that there has always been organised crime, including with extreme violence and not least involving drugs, and that it has always laundered money through certain types of business. The real objection to the ones that Andy Burnham was singling out is that the decline of the high street has brought them from the back street to the front street. As with the proposal to disperse asylum-seekers to the suburbs and the shires, the problem is that the emporia were now, as the migrants would be, visible to well-bred eyes. But even if they were not, then it would be another matter to want them to set the school curriculum in their localities. Even for the less academic, will the curriculum at Eton be set by the vape shops in Slough?

In the midst of all of this, France has shown the way by striking down the ban on social media for under-15s, even if one does understand the concern of the Macrons as they considered what their lives would have been like if there had been smartphones in the 1990s. The experiment in Australia has also failed. Should Britain learn the lessons, then those confined to their lane would still have at least some access to the deeper life of the wider world. Such advancement has already made it so much easier for Catholic teenagers to learn the Faith even while their schools taught nothing more than kindness to fluffy bunny rabbits, and taught it by having them colour in pictures of fluffy bunny rabbits all the way up to the age of 16.

Alongside the growing number of missionaries, especially from Africa, it is from that and from rather similar adult conversions that there springs the rising generation of priests. Last year, when Starmer advertised for a Director General of Propriety and Constitution, to oversee Standards and Ethics, then there were no applicants. Burnham is readvertising the position. If he meant what he said about the continuing importance of his Catholic background, then one of those priests would be appointed.