The Jason Arday Story (8-9-26)

In April 2020, two weeks into the first lockdown, an assistant professor at Durham sat on a video call with two other academics of colour and described the business he worked in at 1:08:20. He said that when you rise a little, relationships turn transactional, and people deal with you because they want something. He said the biggest disappointment of his career was not any racism he had encountered but the gap between what prominent academics said about equality and what they did. He said academia had become a gig economy, and that you learn very quickly how powerful it is to be able to say things in a particular way, and how large the reputational and fiscal rewards are for saying them well. He said race was big business across every institution in society and that a lot of people were profiting from that plight. He said there comes a point where you cannot keep profiting from something if nothing is changing, and that when it comes you vacate the space. He said anyone can occupy a platform and be antagonistic, and tell white people what they need to do, and that the people doing it should get their own house in order first. He said it is easy to say things and hard to put them into action. He said academia is people telling people how good they are, matched by people telling them how good they are, so that nobody ever engages in honesty. He said many people in the sector are bereft of morals and ethics. He said there is a fine line between doing the best you can and exploiting the narrative. And he said he would be out by forty. His daughter would turn eighteen in five years, and that would be the time to step aside for a generation with new energy, because if you stay too long you either accept the system or it beats you down. Jason Arday turned forty in 2025. That year he was a professor at Cambridge with a memoir contract, a Princeton book, a Sage book series, and a speaking schedule that took him from Oxford colleges to a funeral directors’ convention in New Orleans. https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=199647 Jason Arday: ‘Things Can Only Get Better’, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=199606 1:08:30 "Here's how I exposed Jason Arday and Cambridge" | David Starkey Talks to Nathan Cofnas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C27UXFdz0sA 1:10:00 Nathan Cofnas: The Auditor at the Border, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=184775