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.
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.
The obvious way to read this is as hypocrisy, and that bores me.
I want to argue instead that the people best positioned to describe a machine are the people inside it. Describing it well is one of the things the machine rewards. And a critique delivered from a stage, on a fee, to applause, is not a defence against the system being criticised. It is an output of that system.
Start with how good the diagnosis is.
Set aside who said it and read the 2020 passage as a description of a labour market. It identifies the product, which is the capacity to say things in a particular way. It identifies the currency, which is reputational and fiscal simultaneously. It notes that the currency is paid for performance rather than for outcome, which is why nothing changes and the payments continue. It observes that the validation loop is closed, since everyone in the room is being told they are excellent by people who are also being told they are excellent. It predicts the entry of people who are in it for the returns. And it names the moral hazard, which is that a man can keep drawing income from a problem he is not solving.
That is a better account of the political economy of academic diversity work than most of what has been published on the subject, including by its critics, who tend to reach for ideology when the answer is payment structures. It was given away in a podcast with a few hundred views.
He kept saying it. In December 2022 at Cambridge he told a room of biologists that decolonising had been franchised and packaged, that he had yet to meet anyone who could define it, that changing a reading list was hollow, that the interventions harmed the people delivering them, and that the victory belongs to the university while the failure belongs to them. In October 2025 at Oxford he described the self-cannibalisation and the vanity of academia, the jostling to be front and centre, and the fantasy of validation: wanting someone to say the paper is amazing, wanting the highest h-index. He said this is not everything.
So the diagnosis was a fixed position, held for five years, restated in every register.
Consider a keynote about the vanity of academia. That is a booking. It carries a fee or an honorarium. It generates an invitation to the next one. It ends with applause and a wine reception and a queue of people wanting a word. It produces a recording that a university puts on its channel with the speaker’s name and title. It is, in every measurable respect, an instance of the thing being described.
This is a general property of critique inside institutions. The person who stands up and says that this industry rewards people who say things well is being rewarded for saying that well. There is no position outside from which to deliver the observation. The sociology of knowledge has known this since Mannheim and has never done much with it, and the reason is that acknowledging it costs the critic his own standing.
A critique of a system, delivered from inside, functions as a demonstration of distance from that system. Everyone else is doing the shallow thing; I can see the deeper problem; therefore I am not one of them. The audience accepts it because the alternative is discourteous. And the speaker accepts it because he is the one person in the room who cannot check it.
The performance of exemption is how you stay exempt.
A hypocrite knows. Whatever else these eleven recordings show, they do not show a man who thought the critique applied to him. They show a man who kept sharpening it, deploying it against senior figures, and treating himself as the person who had noticed.
He said in 2020 that he wondered daily whether he would have entered this line of work knowing what he knew, and that he definitely would not have. He said in October 2025 that his belief in his own words was down to one per cent. Both statements are the statements of a man who thinks he is the exception rather than the specimen.
Does the accuracy of the diagnosis tell us anything about the diagnostician?
I think it does.
There is a version of this story in which the critique is the last honest thing about him, a residue of the PE teacher who came into academia in 2012 and was appalled. On that reading, the man in 2020 saw clearly and was later swallowed, and the 2025 lecture is the sound of somebody who knows exactly what has happened and cannot say it.
There is another version in which the critique is a competitive move. Naming the vanity of academia is a strong position to hold in a field where sincerity is the scarce good. Announcing that others profit from the plight establishes that you do not. Saying you have no online presence, that you never talk about your research, that your papers change nobody’s life and your actions do, that you would leave at forty, that you are not an expert and know nothing: each of these is a claim on the only status that field has left to award, which is the status of the person who is not in it for the status.
Both readings produce a man who says the true thing for five years and is shaped by the incentives anyway.
That is the finding. The critique was inert. It changed nothing about his trajectory, restrained nothing, and cost him nothing, because it was itself a form of participation. He named the machine from a stage the machine had built for him.
We tend to treat self-awareness as a partial defence. A man who can describe the corrupting pressures on him seems less likely to be corrupted by them, and we grant him credit accordingly. Every institution does this. Journalists trust the reporter who talks about the limits of reporting. Universities promote the academic who can name the perverse incentives of the REF. Audiences forgive the speaker who opens by saying he distrusts speakers.
The credit is unearned. Insight into a system is evidence about the quality of somebody’s attention, and nothing else. It says he watched carefully. It does not say he acted differently, because acting differently costs something and noticing costs nothing, and the two capacities are unrelated.
The test is never what a man says about the pressures on him. It is what he did when a pressure arrived.
By that standard, the record here is checkable and the answer is available. In 2020 he said there comes a point where you cannot keep profiting from something that is not changing, and that you vacate the space. In 2020 he said he would go at forty and hand the charge on. The forty came. The Cambridge chair came, and the memoir, and the honorary degrees, and the plenaries, and the speaking agency, and the book series.
He did not vacate.
The Jason Arday videos I surveyed today show that the man produced, five years early, an accurate account of a set of incentives, named the exact point at which a decent person would leave, and then arrived at that point and did the ordinary thing.
In February 2024 he sat on a podcast and said that when Black scholars produce work, the response is to police and trivialise it as not empirical, not rigorous, theoretically flawed. In September 2025, on an American podcast, he said what was happening to Black academics who put their heads above the parapet was almost like a modern-day lynching. In April 2026 at the British Sociological Association he delivered a plenary on the playbook used to bring down Black academics through citation errors and textual overlaps.
Each of those is a general claim about a real phenomenon. Each was made by a man about whom, by September 2025, a specific dossier existed.
So the same analytic gift that produced the 2020 diagnosis produced the frame that would later absorb his own case. He could see the machine from inside. He could see, ahead of almost everyone, what the coming attack on race scholarship would look like and how it would be conducted. And that clarity, applied to his own situation, did not produce caution. It produced a ready-made interpretation waiting for the facts to arrive.
The capacity to describe a system is a capacity to describe. It arms nothing. It restrains nothing. Held long enough by a man under pressure, it becomes a way of not looking, because a man who has spent five years explaining how institutions deceive themselves has a great many places to put a difficult fact.
He was right about the machine. He was standing in it the whole time, at a lectern, being paid.
Notes
Every quotation and paraphrase comes from a recording available in full on Youtube.
The 2020 diagnosis
“Decolonising HE: Doing the ‘work’ as a person of colour,” MA Education Consultancy, published April 3, 2020, with Jo Shah, Zainab Khan and Meena Kumari-Wolfenden. The transactional relationships, the disconnect between what senior academics say and do, the gig economy, race as big business, the fine line between doing your best and exploiting the narrative, the observation that academia is people telling people how good they are, and the plan to leave at forty when his daughter turned eighteen, all fall between roughly 22:00 and 29:00 and again between 1:05:51 and 1:13:10. The same recording contains the passage in which he says he has profited from the labour of women of colour and was complicit in standing by, which is the most creditable thing he says in any of these recordings and belongs in any fair account.
The critique restated
“Jason Arday – Things Can Only Get Better,” Society for Experimental Biology, published January 9, 2023, recorded at Cambridge in December 2022. Decolonising as a franchised term, the failure of anyone to define it, the harm to those delivering the interventions, and the line about the victory belonging to the university and the failure belonging to them.
“EDB Lecture: This Is A Low: Advice For Difficult Times,” Department of Education, University of Oxford, October 30, 2025. Self-cannibalisation, the vanity of academia, and the passage on validation and the h-index, from roughly 22:08 to 27:30. The same lecture contains the closing remark that the one thing that would kill him is somebody saying that what he says and what he does are two different things.
The frame, before the event
“S1/E1 Delayna Spencer, Meredith Clark & Jason Arday: Social Science for Social Justice?“, Surviving Society, February 26, 2024, at roughly 31:36, on the policing and trivialisation of Black scholars’ work as not empirical, not rigorous, theoretically flawed.
“Pushing back Against the Zeitgeist,” Next Pivot Point, September 22, 2025, at roughly 16:42, on the modern-day lynching of academics who are publicly discredited.
The British Sociological Association plenary of April 2026, “Wanted Dead or Alive: The Playbook,” is reported by Lanre Bakare, The Guardian, August 1, 2026.
