Beyond Arday
DEI, meritocracy, and the class frictions British institutions won't audit
July through September has long been acerbically branded ‘silly season’. Parliament in recess, no major government announcements, judges go on holiday, school is out, but the British news rooms require content. This perhaps helps explain the sheer scale of coverage of the Jason Arday story. Indeed, but the time Arday resigned from his Cambridge professorship on August 5th, the story had long ceased being particularly about him.
Cambridge University had spent the preceding weeks undertaking a rear-guard action, insisting that questions about his academic record were tantamount to a “vile campaign”. For four months the Metropolitan police had quietly been investigating a Times journalist who had simply emailed Arday questions. His lawyers — Carter-Ruck do not come cheap and have something of a reputation themselves — suggested the reporter’s line of questioning had been “racially motivated”. But then Cambridge acceded to the inevitable and opened a formal investigation into Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments. Within a day the youngest black professor in Cambridge University’s history was gone with “immediate effect”, with the face-saving claim that the toll of the scrutiny had become “unsustainable”.
None of that resolves the argument, rather, it begins it.
Sonia Sodha, writing in the Times, called what happened at Cambridge an instance of “mushy groupthink” — an institution so anxious to demonstrate its anti-racist credentials that it waived the levels of scrutiny ones hopes it ordinarily applies to anyone else. She is drawing, deliberately, on a phrase with a specific pedigree: the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” coined for George W. Bush to describe the practice of asking less of people because of who they are. It is not a comfortable phrase, and it isn’t meant to be. Its use here is a direct claim: that Cambridge’s faculty, in their eagerness to be seen supporting a working-class, autistic, Black academic who had — on his own account — overcome extraordinary adversity, stopped checking whether the account was true.
Matthew Syed’s response also in the Times however is to argue that instead we ought to be looking at who’s doing the loudest shouting. “Establishment types hate DEI since it undermines meritocracy,” he wrote. “They’re less worried about the stitch-up that benefits them.” His point is not that Sodha is wrong about Cambridge. It’s that the outrage has arrived from a commentariat and professional class that has shown no comparable sense of urgency about facts such as only seven per cent of the country is privately educated, yet thirty-nine per cent of the top professional jobs are held by people who were privately educated. Or that two-thirds of senior judges attended a fee-paying school, and only eight per cent of people working in the creative industries come from working-class backgrounds. In business, just nine per cent of FTSE chairs went to a comprehensive. Let’s be clear here: none of that arithmetic is new, and all of it describes a distortion at least as large as anything DEI has produced.
The honest position is that both of them are describing something real, and that the argument between them is less interesting than what it’s obscuring.
Thesis
Unfortunately the silly-season maxxed out, overhyped coverage of the Jason Arday affair will be remembered, wrongly, as a referendum on diversity, equity and inclusion. Again to be clear, it is not. Rather, it is a referendum on institutional accountability — on what happens when a system, whatever its stated principles, is permitted to operate without audit.
Sonia Sodha is right that Cambridge extended Arday a credulity it would not have extended a white applicant with an equivalently improbable biography, and that this “soft bigotry of low expectations” is a real and corrosive phenomenon. Matthew Syed is also right that the outrage now consuming the commentariat is wildly selective: the same voices demanding a return to “meritocracy” have said remarkably little about a legal profession that is 39 per cent privately educated against a 7 per cent national base, or a judiciary two-thirds drawn from private schools, or a creative industry with an 8 per cent working-class intake. Both critiques are correct, both are incomplete, because they are each describing a different failure of the same underlying kind: a system that permits an entire category of unearned advantage. This matters whether said unearned advantage is being conferred by class network, cronyism, nepotism or by unaudited identity-based deference. What matters is that these processes operate below the level of scrutiny that we would normally expect to be attached. Arday's resignation is not evidence that DEI doesn't work, any more than the make-up of the senior judiciary is evidence that meritocracy doesn't work. These are in isolation too limited as both are evidence all too often we fail to subject policies, processes, initiatives to the sorts of conditions necessary — such as transparent and contestable ones — that would let anyone actually find out the truth.
The words nobody actually disagrees with
Before going further, it’s healthy to take a moment to reflect on what precisely diversity, equity, and inclusion actually mean. Let’s be specific for clarity, since those arguing about the Arday case are generally not arguing about definitions. Diverity means having people from different backgrounds in a group. Equity means giving people targeted support to ensure starting points are levelled, as opposed to giving everyone identical treatment regardless of starting point. This is about ensuring systems are fair. Inclusion means that people, once present, are actually heard. Stated like that, the concepts command something close to universal assent — nobody serious wants a monoculture, nobody serious thinks identical treatment of unequal starting points produces fairness, and nobody serious wants to include people in name only. The argument, then, was never really about these three words. It is about the instruments built in their name. Which levers get pulled, who pulls them, and — critically — who checks afterward whether they worked.
That last clause is where the entire debate ought to actually live, and it is worth grounding in evidence rather than op-ed instinct. The instrument question has been studied, repeatedly, across jurisdictions, by many academics that have tried genuinely different approaches.
What the comparative evidence actually shows
I propose to focus on three specific studies to explore an aspect of where this debate ought to live: ‘affirmative action’, or as the UK terms it ‘positive discrimination’. This is a tangible, specific policy about how organisations and institutions across countries seek to implement equity.
There are three separate bodies of research I’ll explore — on India’s caste-based reservation system, on the United States’ race-conscious admissions model before Students for Fair Admissions, and on the UK’s near-total absence of formal affirmative action.
These all converge on a finding that should reframe the entire Arday argument. It isn’t that quotas fail and holistic consideration succeeds, or vice versa. It’s that every model studied, regardless of its mechanism, tends to funnel its benefits toward people who were already closer to the front of the queue within the target group. I’ll begin with ‘Equity initiatives for sustainable development: A comparative study of affirmative action in the USA and India’ by authors Neeraj Pant, and Alka Sharma
This comparative study found that India’s reservation system (hard quota allocations for specific groups, for example the much discriminated ‘untouchables’ caste) has been shown to disproportionately benefit the “creamy layer” of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes rather than the most disadvantaged within them, with literacy and wage gaps persisting even among degree holders from those categories. The same elite-capture pattern shows up in the American data, where affirmative action grew the Black middle class without meaningfully closing the broader Black-white wealth gap or improving intergenerational mobility.
According to ‘The Role of Positive Discrimination Policies in Fostering Social Inclusion and Development’ by Shweta Singh, in an India only study, the reservations (quota) system has measurably improved education access, public-sector representation, and political voice for Scheduled Casts /Scheduled Tribes / Other Backward Classes communities. However, Singh found the gains are uneven: a "glass ceiling" persists in senior administrative roles; private-sector employment (where reservations don't apply) remains a major gap; and "elite capture" — benefits concentrating among already-better-off members of marginalized groups — is a recurring theme, echoing Pant & Sharma's “creamy layer” point.
Interestingly, if we look at ‘Advantages and Disadvantages of Affirmative Action Policies on Education and Admissions Rate in the UK and US’ by Zoynal Ahmed, Yoko Lam, Hooi Wan Foon and Stella Winter we find something similar. In this comparative study, the same pattern, differently dressed, shows up in the UK’s own numbers: aggregate entry-rate statistics suggest ethnic minorities are now, on average, admitted to university at rates equal to or higher than white applicants, while Oxford’s own admissions data — 76.4 per cent of a recent cohort was white — shows that whatever is happening at the aggregate level, it is not reaching the most selective institutions in anything like the same proportion.
This is the finding that should have anchored the Arday debate from the start, and almost nobody has reached for it: elite capture is not a side effect of badly designed diversity policy. It is close to the default outcome of diversity policy, of any structural design, in any country that has tried it. Which means the interesting question was never “does DEI work” — it demonstrably does something, in all three systems, for some people — but “which people, and who is checking.”
Three different failures, not one
Arday, and the wider row it has triggered, are being treated as a single phenomenon: DEI gone wrong. That flattens three genuinely distinct failure modes that deserve separate names, because the fix for each is different.
Scrutiny suppression. This is Sodha’s point, and it is specific to cases like Arday’s: an institution relaxes the ordinary standard of verification for a particular individual because of who they are, not despite it. Cambridge’s initial defence of Arday as the target of a “vile campaign,” the Met’s four-month diversion of resources into investigating a journalist who had simply asked him questions, a faculty head telling him on camera that the university was “so lucky to have you” — none of this is a resourcing question or a quota question. It is a straightforward failure to apply the checks that exist to be applied.
Elite capture. This is the pattern the comparative research reveals: resources and opportunities nominally aimed at the most disadvantaged within a target category are disproportionately claimed by those already best positioned to claim them. It is not corrupt in any individual sense — nobody in the “creamy layer” is doing anything wrong by applying — but it means the policy, measured against its own stated purpose, is underperforming. This is a design and audit failure, not a scrutiny failure.
Activist capture. The third failure is different again, and it is the one Syed’s framing tends to miss because it isn’t about class privilege at all: it is what happens when the operationalisation of DEI principles is handed to people holding strong, largely unchallenged prior ideological convictions, inside institutions with weak internal mechanisms for contesting them. This is a big theme in my book Scotland Undone: Nationalism, Dogma, and Decline in the Devolution era’.
In it I explored how NHS Fife supplies the clearest recent case study of activist capture. The health board’s equality and human rights officer, Isla Bumba, gave evidence during the Sandie Peggie employment tribunal that formed part of what Peggie’s counsel, Naomi Cunningham KC, characterised in closing submissions as an organisation “in the grip of delusion” on the question of gender self-identification. This proved a framing the tribunal itself substantially vindicated when it found NHS Fife had harassed Peggie on several counts, even as it dismissed her claims against her colleague personally. The failure there was not that the health board wanted inclusive policy. It was that the policy’s content was set by few actors, and largely insulated from internal challenge. These factors conspired to produce legal liability the board is still paying for. That is a governance failure, and it would remain a governance failure whatever the underlying policy content had been.
If we conflate these three examples, Arday, the caste “creamy layer,” NHS Fife, as three data points in a story called “DEI doesn’t work” is deeply unhelpful. If we do that, then it lets each side of the current row talk past the other. Sodha’s critique answers the first failure and says nothing about the second or third. Syed’s answers the third obliquely, by pointing at an entirely separate and much older failure — class-based gatekeeping — that isn’t a DEI failure at all, but the reason so many people are primed to distrust the sincerity of anyone now demanding “meritocracy.”
Closing
What unites all of this — Cambridge’s initial defence of Arday, the judiciary’s unbroken class profile, NHS Fife’s institutional capture, the creamy layer in Indian reservations — is not ideology. It is the absence of a mechanism, in any of these institutions, that would surface the problem before it became a scandal.
Eviatar Zerubavel’s work on the sociology of denial describes exactly this pattern: organisations do not usually fail to know things: they collectively agree, tacitly, not to look. Cambridge’s faculty did not fail to notice the gaps in Arday’s biography; multiple people, on the record, chose not to press the obvious issues. Cambridge’s Professor Hilary Cremin, head of Cambridge’s faculty of education, is blind to elephant in the room. Glasgow University when it first appointed him a professor aged 35 opted not to hear any elephant. Liverpool John Moores University which awarded Arday his PhD insists it cannot speak to the elephant.
Equally, the legal profession does not fail to notice its own intake statistics; it has simply never made them a matter of internal consequence. And believe me, if they ever did there would quickly be a reckoning about the overall competency of a fair few ‘honourable’ bewigged Lords of Justice. Also, NHS Fife did not fail to notice that its policy was generating complaints; rather it treated the complainer as the problem to be managed rather than the signal to be acted on.
The honest response to the Arday affair is not to pick a side between Sodha and Syed. It is to notice that neither meritocracy nor DEI, as currently practised in British institutions, has ever been subjected to the kind of open, contestable audit that would let anyone find out whether it is actually doing what it claims. Until that changes, every fresh scandal — whichever direction it points in — will simply confirm whichever story people already believed. And the culture war distractions will go on — fleet street will be pleased, silly season comes around ever year after all.
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Dean M Thomson is currently a lecturer with Beijing Normal - Baptist University (BNBU), formerly known as Beijing Normal - Hong Kong Baptist University, United International College (UIC). 37 years old, he is preparing to begin his PhD study
My new book ‘Scotland Undone: Nationalism, Dogma, and Decline in the Devolution Era’ is on Amazon available here