Jason Arday in 2024. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Jason Arday is dead. That seems one thing we might be sure of.

In recent weeks much has been said about the circumstances surrounding Arday’s death. The 41-year-old former Cambridge professor was found dead at his home in south London on August 14, nine days after resigning amid allegations of plagiarism, which he denied. Analyses have circulated blaming elite institutions and EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion—the Canadian terminology is used throughout this essay; DEI is more common in the United States), including Paul Tiyambe Zeleza on Substack. Others have blamed the avowed racist and eugenicist Nathan Cofnas, who exposed alleged plagiarism in Arday’s work. Still others have blamed the media, and finally, all of the above. Whatever the truth of Arday’s death, racisms of various sorts shaped the development of the Arday affair and contributed to his demise. It should also be clear that the university as an institution remains a significant player in what happened. The neoliberal university is a killing field. It kills in many ways. Arday’s death is a high-profile global symptom of its prolific killing. And sadly, any of us who work in its “mines” are parties to that killing. The net of complicity is wide and deep. If the Arday affair is to mean something more than his individual downfall, it should have those of us involved in the university confront once and for all the inequitable foundation of the university as an institution and its unequal distribution of resources.

The ongoing attempt by some to make the university a “woke” place of limited thought ruled by a radical left regime that also polices that limited thought is a fiction that has been explored by other contributors to this magazine. Nonetheless, it should suffice to say that recent thinly personal screeds against a woke university devoted to EDI (see The Atlantic) belie the fact that the university as institution remains a profoundly conservative place where its senior managers toe the line of whatever political flavour governments, businesses and wealthy donors desire. In recent years those senior managers have been fully in the camp of neoliberal austerity and fascism, and they loudly and proudly commit to it or quietly execute it at their institutions. The fiction of a woke university taken over by left cadres and EDI benefits its conservative establishment by concealing how it actually shapes all of our lives, even those of people who will never enter its gates. The battles over the humanities and humanistic social sciences obscure this more consequential—and deadly—work.

The university is not just in crisis; the university is the crisis. Two things can be true at the same time. That the university is under attack and that the university is complicit with the very terms of engagement that place it under attack should not be seen as a contradiction. It is the way of the university. That the university claims to be a place of democracy and meritocracy, but it is anything but, should not surprise anyone familiar with it as an institution. The university is a battlefield and sometimes gains are made and at other times those gains are rescinded. Multiple wars are being waged inside the university at this moment. The attack on the humanities and humanistic social sciences, the attacks on pro-Palestinian students, faculty and staff, the attacks on anyone who seeks to make the university live up to the democratic place it claims to be, the attempt to turn learning into subservience at the whim and in service of the powerful and the monied, the university intentionally unmaking itself by a devotion to AI, the university’s denial of its role in the shaping of society, most often not for the good of all—the university as institution is both in crisis and is the crisis for anyone who cares to take a careful and serious look at it.

I began my first tenure-track job in 1995. The university was in crisis before I began and it has remained in crisis all this time, some three decades later. It is also true that at the centre of the crises that embroil the university are the Black, Indigenous and non-white scholars, students, and employees. These people whom the modern university had mostly attempted to cast out, using its many colonial and imperial scholarly energies to make them lesser humans or none at all, have now entered the post-1960s university in numbers significant enough to question, challenge, and attempt to overthrow its way of being. Nonetheless the university has continued to hold sway by incorporating a few of them into the largesse of its project by knighting some as more deserving than the others and writing off others as mere troublemakers.

The profound impact of black studies, ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies and critical race theory has been the way in which these studies have exposed the racist, patriarchal, and heterosexist underpinnings of the university, made them available for research, and shown how colonial and imperial logics still drive the university’s overall ethos today. In the contemporary university anything with “studies” in its name is especially under attack because that is where the most significant intellectual challenge comes from. But truth be told, these programs........

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